Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

I think I should write down a small entry about "what-I've-learned-this-semester" and to "explain-what-I'm-doing-by-not-painting."

Sometime last year, I started a project based on my personal identity and the exploration of role reversal and parenthood. I took a large number of old family slide photographs of myself as a child and digitally added myself as an adult. The work was supposed to play on the ideas of becoming a parent and reflections of my own limitations in preparing for such a major shift in my life. Although my wife and I could talk about it, we don't have pre-knowledge of what our children will be like: we only know ourselves. After I had gotten knee deep into this project, my professor at the time decided that I needed to put together a "working installation" of the project as it would appear to a gallery; a "mock-up." Although I went through with this presentation on one hellish weekend, I was incensed to be forced into a presentation that I didn't think truly related to the project I was working on. In fact, it was only a hollow shell to fit my project into an object-oriented view of the art world - one which feeds on aesthetics and not conceptual gains.

So I was bitter. But I didn't know why at the time.

Also, for the past year, it had come to my attention that most of my projects weren't based on objects or installations or locations or anything "aesthetic" but based on social circumstances and the interaction of social networks. It wasn't the first time I had worked in this fashion. While studying psychology, I wanted to create social experiments to study and research, but not in the ways which the IRB approved or which statistics were important. After taking Dr. Brent Slife's class on critical issues in the social sciences, I really began to question the nature and importance of using the scientific method in research. Qualitative research was much more interesting to me than quantitatively defining things which were non-quantitive. When Jamin Hall discussed with me the Knights of the North Park project, I viewed it as an art experience: not the video as a project, but documentation of the project. The project wasn't an object: it was a social experiment.

I never had definitions for these things until graduate school in the CADRE program. That's going to be the only praise I hand out, because I'm not much of a suck-up. At least, I try not to be a groupie, but it's so dang hard not to be a Joel Slayton groupie. Despite that point, I want to focus in on collaboration and non-object oriented art.

I'm sick of painting. I'm not sick of myself painting, I rather enjoy it: too much so, in fact. Painting is a guilty self-indulgent pleasure. It is selfish of me to sit in a studio working my heart out on a painting while my wife slaves away at a programming job to make ends meet. I have begun to think to myself that I am a grown man and I still do not have a market for painting. I came to graduate school to change that.

I consider myself a pretty intelligent person. I always was able to easily get good grades. In fact, I wish I was more challenged in school because it never taught me to work hard. I was always lazy and still got high marks. Not my fault my parents gave me good genes. But why did I choose art as a profession? There was a time when I was manical enough to believe that I was worth the attention. I'm sure, somwhere inside, I still am that manical. Now that I have a family, I realize that the selfishness that comes with object oriented art is ludicrous. And I'm so tired of listening to other artists talking about how great my work is while I'm not selling my work. What's the point of doing great things if you can't be great or at least support your family?

I think I'm getting off topic here. Let me clear some things up. The average artist has a stereotype: they are self-indulgent, they are hard working, they are terrible selfish, they are isolated and they are narcissistic. I only want to be one of these. Any guesses as to which? The problem is that since abstract expressionism (heck, go back to impressionists and cubists) these stereotypes have been the norm due to a relationship between the artist and the isolated studio space. Artists isolate themselves from the rest of the world despite their duty as "purveyors of culture" to interface with society. They have all completely lost touch with the world they are meant to be in touch with. Which is where collaboration comes in.

It's good and it gets me out of that white box where I don't learn anything. This isn't why I want to work with other people, but this is a retrospective explanation.