Short version for now, later to be elaborated upon:
Family and financial troubles kept me waiting tables and bartending, attending part time at Georgia State University for literature and media studies. I always had an intense interest in art, but something about the atmosphere of the local art school had me hesitant to dive in. Maybe it was the cost of tuition, maybe it was the cliquish, microscopically modulated fashion of the students. Who knows? But as a young man it seemed unseemly to fraternize with such types. For most of my twenties, I haunted the peripheral zones of atlanta’s art scenes, my orbits moving in and out of those that involved the academy and those that did not. I noticed that the art students were unfailingly influenced as much by the local “untrained” artists and musicians as they were by what they were learning in art school.

I continued to educate myself, using the local art school’s library, etc., and working slowly to get a bachelor’s in literature. Hanging out in the art campus was never as stimulating as being around the diversity of the state U, except for the extensive library at the art school. I began an “autodicacts” club, an intergenerational group of artists, musicians, druggies, peripheral types who were either too poor or too crazy to be a part of such an exclusive club as the art school. THIS was the best experience of my life. Granted, it was tough to create one’s own academic discipline, but the wealth of information and affect i received from my peers was a completely transforming time for me. I noticed that the impassioned, anarchic, sometimes inarticulate but always stimulating conversations about art that took place in clubs, bars, warehouses, living rooms, anywhere the informal Audodidacts’ Club decided to meet were infinitely more rewarding than the art school classes i sneaked into.

I was amazed at the fact that my experiences in the art school always seemed like I was witnessing an act of utter stereotypicality. It always felt hyperreal, like the first time you go to NYC and you see all these places that have been in films, and yet you can’t remember the film, you only experience a sort of deja vu.

Witnessing and participating in an art school studio with a group of students making videos for class projects had me mortified…I felt so out of place seeing people constructing things that were so dictated. I had just spent days with some friends making videos, with no intention of presenting them as art or for profit, not even as any sort of excersize. We spontaneously decided to make a set of videos, nothing more, and stayed up all night and all day filming and editing, all for fun. During my session with the students, they were making sets of videos the concepts for which were written down for them by their professors (”show a group with kinetic energy”, “show a group of self absorbed individuals”, etc.). After assisting with a few, I proposed to depart from the literal and make a sort of meta-interpretation which would underscore the authoritarian nature of the excersize by having the video consist of the girls dressed as secretaries transcribing the demands as dicated by the boys, or vice versa. Two of them loved it, the rest just didn’t get it. They actually said things like “I don’t want to criticize X (the teacher), I like him. And besides, I know he wouldn’t like that.” They couldn’t understand the aesthetic gesture of subverting the form given to them in order to question it or make it more interesting, and they were juniors. I had, to this point, held the academy in highest regard, and felt like a sort of failure for not going to art school. My ideas of art school as a utopian space were wounded.

I constantly monitored myself for hints of rationalization, analyzing my motives for trying to stay outside the system. I was not trying simply to be against the academy, I was trying to help bring into being some sort of alternative to market-driven art education. But it was more of an instinct than an intention. The group of friends that constituted the Autodidacts never attempted to organize a show of their own work, or even to enter into official dialogue with the art school. It seemed like we had a great secret, and we wanted to keep it to ourselves. But we maintained a presence, and were both scorned and addressed in nearly equal measure. The shows we did organize were never publicized, and were almost always spontaneous, held in bars and homes, in abandoned lots and train cars. I must remind you, this is all expressed now through the lens of hindsight. These sentiments were never overtly expressed by the group, but were implied by it’s actions.

The quick point is, I began to realize I was living a life of constant becoming, in that I was surrounded by such a multiplicity of types of people interested in art and random experiences across the wide spectrum of human being. This is of course right when i started to understand more deeply the thoughts of figures like the Situationists, and other types of theory that the art school students were aware of but almost always unable to provide interesting conversations about, or embody in their work. I felt like I was living with and/or becoming these texts and concepts, and they were simply reading them.

My ideas about art and what constitite art have constantly been reinvigorated by the real world, and even though the academy is part of that, I am beginning to believe that art is rarely taught there. I think it’s sort of a second category, a new category that is a bridge between art and the market, but it’s not art in the historical sense. Much like the above mentioned Virilio, I’m not simply a disenfranchised artist spouting apocalyptic visions . It interests me more than it troubles me most of the time. I don’t even think of myself as an artist, but as someone participating in a subfrequency of art’s stream, an inaudible frequency that disturbs the others and changes the sound of the wave. I can already begin to hear mine and similar other’s influence.

More on this later, but now i find myself in New York City, refusing to work anything but a low level subsistence job, and refusing gallery offers. I am working on conceptual practices that are long term, not involving but criticizing the art institutions while shying away from publicity. While some find my objects, interventions, and conceptual works cliche-ridden, others have been interested in their unique approach to institutional critique and approach to production.

Reboot America.

In fact it would be really interesting to hear the story of their art education from anyone who wants to write, regardless of what art school they did or didn’t go to. I’ve added a “my education” category for it.
Mine couldn’t be more different, I’ll post it in a few days.