Collage (From the French: coller, to stick) represents, to me, what college art classes were all about... an assemblage of mixed media forms and images stuck together on one surface to create a whole. It just smacks of chaos and noise, a gaudy display of over blown intellectualized ordinary elements that, separately, on their own, don't matter much, but once you over lap them and stick them together as part of one thing, they suddenly have meaning.  Someone will look at this assemblage and ask, "what does it mean? is it art? what is the artist trying to convey to her audience?" etc.

While growing up I was told that art was only meant to be something nice; that an artist's role in the world was just simply to make pretty pictures.  As a child you're considered talented if you can draw the human figure realistically, and within porportion, without training.  But when you grow up and still can draw something well, it's no longer considered a big performance, oh hell no, you gotta earn a lot of money drawing something well to be considered a true success story.  College art classes are the special kind of hell a young artist puts themself through, a sort of trial period or artist's boot camp, to see how long you can last after taking as much criticism as possible from your peers and professionals.  For me getting through those critiques was like going through endless auditions and I was constantly stuck with people I couldn't stand or who couldn't stand me so there was this struggle, this bitter "being stuck together to somehow be whole" thing going on when all I wanted to do was get it all over with so I could go back to work.  There would be more bickering going on in class than in a Jerry Springer show, but the worst thing was the bitching went on in silence, behind your back.  You think maybe people are just being jealous, but really it was all about who got the most attention and approval.  Needless to say, I hated that part of the college art experience, however what I loved about it was being given the opportunity to experiment and test it on my friends.

It was the only time in my life where I could push boundaries, too.  When other students were content to just follow the instructions, I was only content to see how much I could get away with doing only what I wanted to and somehow make it fit into what the professor wanted.  When you enter art school, you're told that art is all about communication.  You're not an artist to create beauty, you're an artist to convey to the world new ideas and concepts -- but not all of those are meant to be genius.  Yet you are led to believe that everyone in class has merit and you want to respect them and not step on any toes, but there were times I just wanted to rip into some trite piece of work because for me looking at it and having to critique it was a waste of my time.  You also have to take into consideration that your fellow students are more prone to talk truthfully behind your back amongst themselves, but when it came to critique time, everyone in class is afraid to say anything negative about anyone else's work and this dancing around, being fake, and trying to award laurels where they aren't due was useless.  And I always felt like the one bitch who had the nerve to say what I thought.  I always thought that if you can't tell someone that their work not only doesn't move you, but that it sucks, how are you going to tell the world what you really think about anything?

The above collage was one I completed in the winter of 1993 as part of yet another stupid assignment.  I really did not want to do a collage.  All I wanted to do was draw.  I always felt that mixed media was just not my thing.  Let someone else be genius at that!  But then I began to think of how my personal life could be related to a collage.  My first thoughts were of the kind of relationships I had with men.

Ever since I discovered the opposite sex attractive, I wished to be loved as much as I loved.  Yet in loving someone there were times when I had to abandon my own ambitions and plans to please the one I loved.  At other times my object of affection didn't care for me at all, yet this would not stop me in my pursuit of gaining, at the very least, their respect.  But how could they respect me when all I did was do what they wanted?  Worse yet, whenever I would finally date the man I loved, my idea of the perfect relationship ended with being bossed around and controlled.  Even worse was when friends would only see me as part of a couple and not an individual.  It seemed like as soon as I was someone's girlfriend, I was attached to that man as if owned.  It was never about whether or not I defined his existence but that he was supposed to define mine.  I grew greatly disillusioned with the very idea of marriage, yet I still wanted it so badly.  Was the type of relationship I dreamed of even possible?

So I assembled things that symbolically represented my frustrations with love.  The main image is myself trying to pull a pale, ghostly man toward me.  As I grasp him, he begins to fade away, and as he fades, he pushes me away as if in disgust at my longing for him, or that he simply can't be bothered with me.  Above us we are framed by a vintage 1930's garter belt -- one worn by a bride or by a Lady of the Night -- it was once bright orange, but has faded over the years and had lost its elasticity.  Underneath it I wrote "GO AWAY ! but don't leave..." to express how longing for the ideal lover over working toward something more practical and enduring was cutting into my self esteem.  Interspersed throughout this piece are drops of candle wax, ripped pieces of lace and chiffon as if stolen from some old maid's boudoir, sequins and gold paint splashed like blood stains congealed on paper, and more handwritten notes scribbled out of torment: "with you this is how I punish myself -- He came to me as a dream I could not -- Oh give me a man who has ink stains on his fingers and lilacs breathing --"

Whatever was I thinking?  I titled it "Deeper Dissection" -- the deeper I fell in love, the deeper I cut myself away from reality, that I was living in a collapsable ghost world, and my ideal lover was nothing more than a whisp of smoke than anything truly substantial.  Clearly my dreams of love weren't working for me.  Already at the age of 22 I was discovering that perhaps becoming someone's housewife was not an ideal existence and that I needed to stop hurting myself over men who could not love me back.  But that's just it, isn't it?  The more someone doesn't want you, the more there is a dread desire to win them over.  And even if I won them over, they could turn on me, entrap me, make me into someone only they wanted me to be.  Instead of dreaming all the time about an insubstantial lover, perhaps longing for someone more down-to-earth, a man with "ink stains on his fingers" would be more ideal.  Yet I was also fed up with the "nice guy" theory out there that men use as a way to beat themselves up over not getting the women they want.  "Oh, she doesn't go for me because I'm a nice guy," doesn't cut it.  Most supposedly "nice guys" are artificial.  They present a nice package, but in reality they are just as psycho and screwed up as the rest of us.

In 1993, I was in a relationship that was going nowhere.  It was get married or get out of the house time and I was sick of my man making decisions for me.  I hated the way he felt he was obligated to help me.  I didn't want him to do that.  I wanted him to be my partner not some Mr. Fix-it.  In our life together, we discovered we wanted different things in life, and the more he assumed I wanted what he wanted, the more I grew to resent him.  I found that love wasn't enough to get married on.  I came to the conclusion that the most important thing in life is to marry the right person for you.  To marry someone out of desparation or loneliness or even out of obligation is unhealthy.  If you're going to join your life lawfully with someone else, you better make damn sure it's what you really want and that you're not just doing what society expects out of a couple.  I also realized over the years that I really hated being part of a couple.  I enjoy being on my own, defining my own existence, being an individual unburdened by the obligations of being a mate.  When I was part of a couple, I always had to make phone calls, check in with my boyfriend, make plans, buy condoms, meet the family, be judged by my appearance, and make compromises.  I couldn't just do whatever I wanted to do when I wanted to do it.  I always had to bring someone else into consideration and it wasn't always equal.

I almost forgot that I had this shit figured out when I was 22.  I almost forgot that I did this collage until after reading underground1986's blog about how she hated her college collage project.  I dug out my collage and got all retrospective.  My work has matured considerably since 1993, but the ideas I concieved during that time in my life have remained the same.

Perhaps art isn't just about making something pretty or conveying an idea.  Perhaps it's more about discovering who you really are inside, learning about what you believe, and coming up with ways to mark a point in the journey you're undergoing to become the woman you really want to be.  Taking that into consideration, I really want to go back to college and, armed with what I know about myself now, prepare to delve deeper into myself to discover powers hidden underneath my insecurities...