art school gothic

allgoodthingsflowintothecity:

• Film students are pretentious, or so say the graphic design majors. Sequential art majors think they’re better than everyone else, sneer the film students. According to sequential art majors, it’s fashion design students who are the intellectual snobs. You finally turn to a painting major and ask which group is telling the truth. She shudders, her gaze suddenly faraway as if reliving an inescapable dream. “All of them,” she says in a voice like shattered hope. “Dear God, all of them!”

• There’s a hand-written sign awkwardly taped to the fourth computer from the right on the second floor of the Digital Art Center. “Rendering,” it reads. “Do not touch!” Upperclassmen speak of it in hushed tones. It’s been there for twenty years, they say. It will be there for twenty more.

• There is a detailed etching of an erect phallus carved painstakingly into your desk. Every day, it looks slightly little more photorealistic.

• Someone is working on a mural on the wall of an abandoned building outside your window. On the first day, you see the outline of a bird. On the second day, it’s been painted baby blue and it now soars on a background of stars. On the third day, it’s been joined by other birds of varying colors. There’s an outline of a circle on the edge of the composition that the artist hasn’t completed yet. On the fourth day, the birds are weeping blood as they fly into the uncaring abyss, dragged ceaselessly forward by the relentless pull of the void, feathers swallowed up in a black hole of nothingness. The very first bird, the one whose birth you witnessed four short days ago, looks to you with desperate pleading, yet you cannot help it. You do not think anyone can, not any more.

• Your final exam in Art History 101 is approaching. You’ve started seeing the Venus de Milo out of the corner of your eye, behind gas pumps, down lecture hall hallways, peering over bookshelves at the school library. Every time you catch a glimpse of her, she’s closer than she was last time. You can almost make out the details now: face fixed in a frown, arm stumps rough and rocky, always standing in exquisite contrapposto.

• Midterms have arrived, and your mind swims with glorious, chaotic color. You see shapes within forms and forms within shapes; lines fuse together to create alien geometries than make your head spin. The fracas is ever-present, and you long for the cold, clinical touch of the mathematics at which you never thought you would look back.

• “I didn’t get any sleep last night,” complains one classmate. “I haven’t gotten more than thirty minutes all week!” cries another. A third student speaks up: “The last time I slept, the world was young and filled with primeval vengeance. Civilization was a non-entity, the fleeting dream of a people wanting more. I could feel the disowned children of ancient gods screaming for vengeance deep, deep under the earth, trapped in a prison that would not hold forever. When I last closed my eyes, it was to an Earth ruled by beasts.”