THINGS THAT I REMEMBER FROM ART SCHOOL

Ben Denham

First day, first year, 1998, intro to Foundation Studies. The lecturers told us that when Yves Klein died he left instructions that his ashes be coloured International Klein Blue. I remember a slide showing blue ashes. 

I remember classes from 9am to midday. I remember train rides from Wentworth Falls to Kingswood, the early morning light cutting through the carriage. I wrote in spiral bound A4 diaries, fragments from my dreams. 

I remember fellow student Melanie Donat walking up stairs made of jelly in Space YZ. By "walking up" I mean... well you know what I mean. Jelly isn't something you can make functional stairs from.

I remember sound art classes in a music department listening room. No windows. Lecturer Chris Fortescue brought CDs. We turned the lights off and listened. I heard It's Gonna Rain. I remember trying to just listen to whatever came out of the speakers. We listened to our sounds too. I remember not knowing what to make of the recordings of cars revving. We talked about what came out of the speakers. Making art in conversation. Cassette loops and tape hiss. Chris taught us not to make excuses. His lesson: work with what you have.

I remember hazy evening light, sweating in a packed seminar room at the MCA, ceiling fans spinning, listening to Joseph Kosuth read way too fast. 

Him: trying to squeeze in as much as he could. 
Me then: trying my best to follow.
Me now: no idea what he said.

I remember a semi-darkened room somewhere in the middle of the campus, overlooking the swamp. Blinds moving with the breeze of open windows. Site-specific art. We looked at slides. Real slides. Pre-PowerPoint slides. The glorious screen-glow of focussed light passing through film.  

My site: Ruined Castle. 

I walked from Katoomba station via Narrow Neck on a misty day. I found a book on the dirt road. A big shitty paperback. On The Interpretation of Dreams. Really? Freud? Or was it a pop-psyche knock-off? I placed the book on a white post with a nail-on reflector. I took a photograph. Slide film, Pentax Spotmatic. A birthday gift from my Dad. I kept walking. I piled branches on top of Ruined Castle. I remember scrambling up the slopes. Hauling branches up the boulders. I photographed the branches on top of the rocks. Underwhelming results. Lessons in the gap between what you imagine and what you make.

I kept the book on dreams. I didn't read it. I painted it white. I painted a brick white. I painted myself white facing a VHS video camera on tripod in Space YZ. I stood with a small speaker in my mouth. I played quotes through the speaker. Barry Schwabsky; "If art is just what artists do then by definition the artist is never out of work". It wasn't loud enough. I remember watching the video. Underwhelming results. Lessons in AV setup and shitty documentation. 

I read the Manifesto of Surrealism. I admired Breton's conviction, thought he could be wrong in a good way.

I remember a class out on the western side of Z on a warm sunny day, black asphalt, plastic chairs. Chris Fortescue told us to "just keep writing".  We all read what we'd written. Some people didn't get it, writing what they were going to do after class. Mundane shit. Breton would have been horrified. No deep insights from the unconscious. Chris didn't seem to mind. Was that part of our sound art class? I can't be sure. I kept writing. 

I read Joseph Kosuth's collected essays. I remember thinking he was right, painting wasn't art anymore. I stopped painting. 

I remember Experimental Writing, an elective held in the room at the far end of Z. Lecturer Terry Hayes did a version of Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. A desk lamp illuminating an otherwise darkened space. One of those flat-bed tape decks that he clicked on cue. 

I read the Tibetian Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. I remember standing on the Mountains-bound platform at Penrith station, a woman saw me holding the hardback with its red and green dust jacket. "What a wonderful book," she said. I didn't know how to respond.

I printed colour film in the dark room, down the stairs from Space YZ. I remember walking into the darkness, no safe light for colour. I remember the hum of the extraction fans, the syrupy, sickly smell of chemicals. I remember the steps through the darkness from the enlarger to the processing slot. I remember feeding in test strips and prints, slow-moving rollers taking my work through chemicals, out into the light on the other side of the wall. Lesson: you don't need light if you know where things are.

I remember the room where the prints came out, the beige machine, the slot that delivered the photographs into my hands. I remember the colours being off when the chemicals got old. I remember talking to lecturer Eugenia Raskopoulos in that room; "If these three images are in a sentence then what's the next word?" Her analogy made sense to me. I wrote with photographs, for a time. 

I read Alan Kaprow's Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. A black cloth-bound hardback that I borrowed from what was then called the Ward Library. I remember thinking Kaprow might be right, maybe I'll have to kick the art habit. Did he kick the art habit? Surely these essays are his art.

I remember picking mushrooms from the woodchips in the carpark gardens at Wentworth Falls station. Psilocybe subaeruginosa. I didn't know their name at the time. They bruised blue. I thought they were the psycho-active kind. I remember eating them then having doubts. What if they were poisonous? The possibility of my death became real, for a time. 

Days later I painted myself white in the Newspace shopfront on Balmain Rd. I remember Mikala Dwyer, who was lecturing at UWS at the time, warding off a passing man, angry that I should be almost naked and half-painted, in his field of vision. I remember my focus on the feeling of the small roller on my skin, Mikala between the man and me. He was distant to me, in his own angry world, only metres away. I remember busy painting, punctuated by slow movements when the skin in the folds of my elbows stuck together as the paint dried. I remember reality getting thin and the air thickening, in the hours and weeks that followed. 

I remember when the space where I'd seen Krapp's Last Tape became a computer lab. I remember walking there through Z with fellow student, Jemima Isbester. She took me to see her video Happy on a Sony CRT monitor, the ones with the buttons and nobs under the screen. In the video she holds a smile, staring at the camera for five long minutes. So many fake-smile moments all compressed in time. 

I remember Happy. I think now how we were kids who grew up quickly, how sometimes we made work that was more mature than we were, how our lecturers taught us to be resourceful, how they created a space where it was safe to work in the dark, to reflect the light, to explore. 

These are some of the things that I remember because they are part of the culture and place that shaped me, a confluence in western Sydney unique to that part of the world.