Giving It Another Thought : UCI Graduate Students Pursue Idea-Based Projects Laced by Intellectual Questioning

In today’s unsettled art climate, it’s easy to imagine artists pursuing a master’s degree as self-obsessed young hotshots anxiously courting instructors who could help them get a solo show at a famous gallery.

The reality couldn’t be more different at UC Irvine, where students in the two-year M.F.A. program pursue idea-based projects that are remote from the splashy efforts likely to produce an “art star,” as well as from the more traditional training provided by Cal State Fullerton’s program, which produces many commercial artists.

The UCI program underwent a major philosophical revamping seven years ago, with the appointment of Catherine Lord--former dean of the School of Art at California School of the Arts in Valencia--as department head.

She has since assembled a culturally diverse group of instructors whose lives and work are devoted to radical critiques of the political status quo, and who foster a climate of intellectual questioning said to be unique among the UC graduate studio art programs. (Stephen Barker is now the department’s rotating chairman.)

The nine students who started the program last fall range in age from mid-20s to 40s and have unusually diverse backgrounds, including journalism, experimental filmmaking and a 15-year career in performance-based art. Rather than signing on specifically as painters or sculptors, they are encouraged to work in various media.

What unites them is an appreciation for the program’s concentration on conceptual rather than formalist approaches and the faculty’s interests in issues relating to gender and sexuality.

Only one of the five students interviewed for this piece was willing to single out specific mentors on the faculty, despite a roster that includes such critically esteemed younger artists as painters Judie Bamber and Steve Criqui, sculptor Daniel Martinez and photographer Catherine Opie.

One student said the faculty seemed disinclined to provide a nurturing environment. In this climate, the student said, a question about how to proceed with a piece is apt to be coolly bounced back by an instructor (“Well, how would you do it?”).

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But if the faculty doesn’t offer the warm fuzzies, fellow students do; everyone interviewed remarked on the pleasure of working within a diverse but hugely supportive community of their peers.

“I’m very happy to hear that they don’t [single out specific] faculty members [for praise],” says Martinez, who views the UCI program as unique among art schools in Southern California. “What has happened at UCI is, it’s not a top-down educational hierarchy. It’s pedagogy that moves way from [the notion of] a mentor or expert or master who is a wise sage. This is a more horizontal educational model. Education is about the exchange of information.”

Gay students cite the presence of students and faculty in the studio art program who share their sexual orientation as key factors in their choice of school. (One woman student noted that at her previous grad school--San Francisco State--she was the only gay student in a 30-member program.)

The students hold a weekly critique session among themselves to talk about work that grapples with big-ticket themes about identity, cultural influence and political structure. In this atmosphere, the making of art is more akin to laboratory experiments than to the standard goal of producing aesthetic objects destined for galleries and living rooms.

Although the students--who live on campus or as far away as Los Angeles--try to keep abreast of work shown in L.A. galleries, Orange County generally strikes them as an alien territory. As one student said, “I’m not sure there is any art scene I can connect with here.”

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Another frustration for the politically radical art students--who have discussed such possible community involvement as teaching art in the schools--is that the conservative county “isn’t ready for” genuine dialogue.

Still, UCI provides an oasis for these students, one of whom praises it as “a safe space to talk about stuff that pushes borders and limits . . . a place that [seems likely to] nurture me the most and make me censor myself the least.”

JEANNIE SIMS AND KEVIN JENKINS

Jeannie Sims, 29, and Kevin Jenkins, 32--friends who met in the Bay Area--applied to UC Irvine’s graduate studio art program specifically as a collaborating duo, although they also work separately.

Collaborating is “a way of being taken more seriously,” said Sims. “Sort of like strength in numbers.” She views it as a “survival mechanism,” too, a way of “keeping each other inspired.”

“Jeannie and I spend a lot of time together talking and hanging out,” Jenkins said. “That’s really the most valuable part of what I’m doing down here. . . . A lot of stuff that brought us together had to with looking at [images of] family.”

Jenkins said that, as gay artists, their work frequently involves “doing [work] about having a lineage that isn’t necessarily biological.”

“Being queer and also not knowing my biological family has given me this different lens,” said Sims, who was adopted as an infant.

She is working on a piece that involves establishing the irreverent histories of invented heroines with photographs and fake documents. The piece is about “feeling like history isn’t working for me,” she said. “I read all 12 women’s biographies in the [school] library when I was 10, so I need some more.”

“Trace,” a grid of laser prints Jenkins showed in February at a grad student exhibition at the campus art gallery, contains images of pairs or groups of identical children--some posing in costumes, some seemingly involved in athletic competitions or magically defying gravity--traced from photos downloaded from the Internet and placed into a blank space, minus their original context.

“A lot of it had to do with growing up in the ‘70s and being inundated with these childhood shows that had to do with aliens and children who have these bizarre powers,” Jenkins said. “Part of it is about identity stuff, about looking back at growing up queer--subverting things from television into your own imagination.”

Sims, who attended the New School for Social Research in New York and Emerson College in Boston, had been making what she laughingly calls “perverse” little films in San Francisco (“high sex, high drama, high tragedy in three minutes or less”) before she came to UCI. Although she has no training in studio art, she’s not in grad school to learn or hone formal approaches or skills.

“I came here more for ideas,” she said. “For me, media was just a tool to get an idea across.” She was attracted by the prospect of working with a young faculty with “diversity in terms of identity and background . . . and a constant questioning about what that means.”

Similarly, although Jenkins--who graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland--has been a photographer since childhood, he was pleased that UCI is “not media-specific. They don’t treat you as if you’re a photographer or a painter, which is kind of refreshing.”

Although he laughingly admits that he still has “this desire to take the perfect picture--it’s something I almost fight against,” he also admires such artists as Jeff Wall, who use photography in deliberately non-reportorial, subversive ways.

“One of the interesting things I’m finding out about graduate school,” Jenkins said, “is that it’s all about ‘Why? Why? Why?’ It’s almost not acceptable to feel intuition, to say, ‘Well, you know, I just like it because it fits in with what I’m thinking.’

“I think there’s a part of the process in which you have to step away from what you’re doing and take some time to figure it out. ... I enjoy working with the faculty, but one of the things I’m trying to work on here is gaining the trust of [my] own self.”

MARY ELLEN STROM

Mary Ellen Strom, who moved to Irvine in August with Ann Carlson, her partner in life and art, already has had a career as a video and performance artist and teacher on the East Coast.

For her, the lure was being able to “rethink ideas, and read and write, and have room to fail and play and explore new mediums.”

Strom and Carlson’s new piece, “West,” is part of “Uncommon Sense” at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles (through July 6), a group of collaborate performance-cum-installation pieces dealing with social issues.

Videos by Strom and women artists recording daily life in their global hot spots--Belfast, Belgrade, Chiapas, Mexico, and South-Central Los Angeles--can be viewed on binoculars positioned around a corral where Carlson performs as an unconventional rodeo contestant.

In Strom’s video, which reflects cultural and personal issues of power and vulnerability, a flag-bearing rodeo rider and pounding horses’ hooves are juxtaposed with images of two naked children playing and a woman’s nude torso repeatedly falling to the ground.

“It’s been an incredible experience, making this work under the benevolent scrutiny of this department,” Strom said. “I think it’s imbued the work with a different life than if I had pursued it on my own.

PAULA ROSS

Paula Ross remembers with unusual clarity the art pieces she made as a child (with unusual clarity)--perhaps because it took her decades to return to making art.

After graduating from the University of Michigan with a psychology degree, she did two years of graduate work in clinical psychology only to decide it wasn’t was she was cut out to do. Ross eventually wrote for an alternative newspaper, the Willamette Valley Observer in Eugene, Ore., and broadcasting on public radio. In her free time, she wrote what she calls “fictionography,” a blend of autobiographical and fictional elements.

“After a while I got very frustrated with just words on the page,” she said, “because it felt too static. [They were] in a way inaccessible to my manipulating them, to physically working with them.”

Living in the Bay Area in the early ‘90s and doing freelance editorial work, she took classes in playwriting and performance art. But neither seemed to be her metier. Then, in 1993, she impulsively took a weekend art class through UC Santa Cruz Extension.

“It was a revelation to me,” she said. “It was like this whole world opened up. I still have the drawings I did in that class. I was showing them to one of the teachers here and I could still feel the emotional welling up that they evoked.”

For Ross, the lack of “rigid categories” in the UCI studio art department was a selling point. Always especially fond of editing the tapes she made for radio, she is taking a music-department course in computer-manipulated composition.

As part of an extensive project about the Middle Passage--the slave trade route from Africa to the West Indies--she made “Without a Visible Weapon,” which combined an environment of sand and small plaster boats with an audio track of autobiographical recollections (happy childhood summers at the beach; racist encounters as an adult) and metaphoric imagery.

“The difficult part is, I’m having to simultaneously learn techniques, learn about materials and develop craft while I’m trying to realize a vision,” she said. “It’s exhausting but it’s exhilarating at the same time.”

RON STROUD

Ron Stroud, 27, is focusing most of his attention on a body of work about memory.

For “Purging,” the piece he had in the grad-student exhibition, he showed a blurry video of himself repeatedly pricking his finger, projected on a screen made from yards of dental floss painstakingly wrapped around a frame.

A brief text written on a mirror related a seemingly autobiographical story about having been bled by his grandmother as a cure for childhood sickness. The mint smell of the floss, a soundtrack with a descending musical motif and a buzzing hum pervaded the small, darkened enclosure where the piece was shown.

“I was trying to reference the idea of memory in the form of a video,” Stroud said. “It’s about pain and trying to relieve pain. It’s about obsessiveness. And it’s about the uncomfortable mood created by all those put together.

“The basis of the work is a personal story,” he said, “but . . . I didn’t want the viewer to think the work actually was [autobiographical]. . . . Maybe I’m asking too much of the viewer . . . but I guess I was relying more on the obsessive nature of the piece. It’s not just about the story; it’s also about the mood and atmosphere.”

Stroud, who was raised in Korea and came to the U.S. at age 13, when he was adopted by an American family, majored in painting at the University of Illinois. Although he still makes paintings--the most recent ones deal with language theory--he’s been exploring video and installation at UCI.

“Basically, I’m using grad school to mature my work and have a concentrated two years of work,” he said. Asked about the influence of faculty and fellow students, he is circumspect: “They all have different perspectives on things, so you pick and choose from what they say.”

At the close of the interview, Stroud handed over a dollar bill fashioned into an origami bird. It was clipped to a self-addressed postcard with a note requesting a description of what the recipient did with the bill. He is collecting the information for an artist’s book--yet another idiosyncratic, investigative project that sets this student body apart.