This epic farce of academia, artists, and marriage has me laughing out loud and craving fried bovine.
An impending flood threatens the Midwest art school where Nina Lanning is an administrator—as if she doesn’t have enough to deal with. Her husband has invited a foreign exchange student to stay for the summer. Her boss reads romance novels on the clock, and most of Nina’s energy goes to thwarting a disgraced professor’s attempts to fry bacon in the School of Visual Arts.
How does Nina end up sailing away on a Viking ship with a camera-happy graduate student, a band of distressed faculty, and a Jackson Pollock? The adventure begins with a whiff of bacon.
This modern comedy-of-errors explores disillusionment, and the line artists walk between commercialism and expression.
Nina’s disillusionment with the School of Visual Arts (the same place that nurtures her as an undergraduate who believes “art [is] a worthwhile pursuit”) begins long before the flood, before Gary-the-Chinese-exchange-student, before Roberta’s compulsive reading, before the scent of frying pork fat sends spasms of rage through her body. Once upon a time Nina believes in creative disobedience, in taking a stand with art. She believes in Don Dunbar, a tenured professor at the School of Visual Arts and self-declared “edgy New York City artist-provocateur.” She believes strategically arranged, frozen road-kill carcasses, and a man’s three-piece suit made entirely out of unwashed clam shells is “sacred work, done in a scared place. Capital-A Art.”
Perhaps Nina begins her descent from starry-eyed art-major to frustrated art-school administrator with the realization that Don Dunbar’s “pretension to exceptionalism” is actually “artspeak proselytization.” Perhaps sooner. Nina’s MFA exhibition, a garden made from origami-flowers constructed from fashion magazines, is, by Nina’s assessment, “proficient but somehow meager as well.” Nina doesn’t feel like an artist, a creator. All the beauty, all the meaning in her piece is a projection created by the person looking at her work.
Nina has a gift for administration. The challenges are manageable, the resolutions available. Nina ends up on the wrong side, “playing by the establishment’s rules instead of resisting them,” inventing her own.
On the first day of sculpture class Suzanne (Nina’s teacher and mentor turned friend) tells her students the world is replete with artists struggling.
“If you are the absolute best and you work the hardest, and if you don’t bail out and take a job as a mortgage banker or a high school counselor or a florist, then maybe, maybe you’ll get to be an artist/babysitter, and still, even then, nobody is going to pay attention to you or your work or your scholarship awards or your portfolio and, sure as shit, nobody is going to give you money for any of it. Except the babysitting. For that, you’ll get eight dollars an hour.”
Artists walk the line between selling-out and not selling, between challenging the establishment and taking the establishment’s bread. The world is full of artists, but only a small, 1 percent, find monetary success. Creative fields require non-creative jobs to pay the bills. Eating and paying rent are important, but the fear of creative types is that life will get in the way—paying the bills will become more important than the emotional currency of art. In the end what is most important, a job or creative integrity?
Dicharry is laugh-so-loud-the-whole-bus-looks-at-you funny. This is a smart, astute observation of creative life in a technological world, of being afraid to fail and so failing to try. Dicharry’s writing is intelligent, provocative, and modern. Her characters are fresh—caricatures of people I recognize from my own liberal-arts education. Nina Landing elevates fucking up to a highly readable art-form.
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