The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

Meeting Gabriel Combs again after nearly five years was a shock. All the former young-punk anger and wiry strength that I had seen when I first met him was gone, replaced by frail deliberation, lumbering gentleness, even a kind of solemn grace. “Can I offer you some coffee?” he asked apologetically when I arrived at his small apartment in the rough and densely populated Stevens Square neighborhood of Minneapolis. He seemed unwilling to look directly at me, turning his back to the sink of his tiny kitchenette. “It’s fairly fresh. I just need to heat it up.”

I demurred, and held up the bag of Middle Eastern food I had picked up on the way over. “I can’t drink coffee this late in the day,” I said, “but I am hungry. You guys want to eat?” (Another artist named Ray, who has long spread an itinerant life between an old RV and the couches of friends, was also present.)

They accepted the food without thanks, like prisoners do, and ate mostly in silence. I swallowed pieces of spinach pie and chattered nervously, trying to get conversation going. I mentioned I was specifically interested in their artist careers, and how had art had perhaps let them to their current stations. This got them both started on a littany recitation of the slights, insults, and the past treacheries they’d endured in their lives, jobs, art pursuits, and so on.

I didn’t take careful notes (I wasn’t thinking of this as a journalistic visit), but I learned a few indelible facts that I record here. Combs had been supporting himself by selling art on eBay for more than two years–ever since he’d quit a job at a photo processing place, supposedly because of “some bitch” coworker who was blaming him for things that had gone wrong at work. In a typical month, Combs makes 25-30 small art works to sell, working in series to save time and reuse colors between images, thus conserving supplies. He couldn’t say exactly why he started selling art on eBay as a “survival thing.” It just happened “by chance,” he said, as he was applying, unsuccessfully, for job after job to replace the one he’d left. “I saw some others doing it on eBay, and I thought I’d try. I just put it out there. I weigh it against all the jobs I’ve hated, and I like this much more. I just need to figure out all of the marketing strategies.

“I feel like I got pushed into this… but I’ve made a pretty good run of it,” he said of selling his art at $10-$20 a pop, mostly to collectors from Europe.

While Combs luck seemed to have run out finally, it lasted awhile. And his art got sent out all over–Germany, England, Spain… “A bunch of people in Spain have my work,” he said. “If I could go anywhere, I’d go to France or Spain. The street art there is just incredible.” But Combs doesn’t have money to get to those countries, let alone to sustain himself for any length. He hadn’t paid his rent since November, and in the weeks leading up to his call-for-help blog and forum posts in early February he had been dealing with the heavy-handed mechanisms of the legal system.

Prior to ending up at the photo processing place, Combs had attended school in Minneapolis for graphic design. I can’t recall which school he attended, as there are several for-fee schools here that purport to train the next generation of working designer. I don’t know the details, other than Combs left school with a degree and a sizeable debt, but he was unable to find work in the field. “I really liked graphic design,” he said. “Really. It just was impossible to find a job doing it.”

The littany of blame, excuse-making, and self-demurral tossed out by Ray and Gabe against all the people in the art and professional world who were keeping them from success reminded me of some recent blog-writings about work and creativity of another Minneapolis artist who seemed to have hit rock-bottom of late.

I’m making no money on music. I can’t get a gig. I can’t find a decent job. And I don’t have a social life because I’m too broke to do anything, and besides, I should be at home recording anyways… Taking a chemical won’t change who you are. It won’t change your brain. It definitely won’t make your life situation any better. It can only promote change. So I’m trying to see what I can change and how I can help myself. I’m just afraid that the answer is to “find a job.”

Any job that fits my qualifications does not fit my skills or personality, and vice versa. That’s the trap I’m stuck in. I’ve gone after jobs that “fit me,” and I don’t get hired, usually because someone more personable is just as available. I was able to slip in to jobs only to get treated passive-aggressively, and sometimes even used as a scapegoat. If I’ve ever had a job that did not fit this profile, it was low pay and small hours.

EVERY employer wants a “motivated, team-oriented, self-starter,” which I can be if I were running a gallery or something. I can’t be that while answering bitter emails from dissatisfied Target customers. And I can’t pretend I’m going to. What the fuck is the point of that?

I’ve always known this about myself and that’s why I fight against the odds and work my ass off in my spare time, making music, making art, promoting the arts, volunteering, running a zine fair, etc. hoping that it will pay off down the line. The fact is that it WILL NOT pay off…

Based on former experience, the best case scenario is that I will settle for something that will pay me to simply maintain my human existence. If I save anything, it’ll cover the hole that I create when I get pissed off and quit. My only life, it seems, is a flat line. It also seems my creativity has been dwindling since I stopped getting student loans and switched to paying them. I made a huge mistake. I invested in myself. I thought being educated would get me somewhere. I didn’t realize that you’re more prepared for the workforce as a high school graduate than as a college graduate.

Anyone who sees the way Gabriel Combs interacts with and approaches the world would quickly know that the root of his problems–his inability to keep a job, to market his art, to get along with others in a position to help him–likely lies solely within himself. It is a case where a person’s voracious creativity not only creates conditions for alienation and isolation, but makes the person blind to the reasons why he is shunned.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a good thing to see a person lose his vibrancy and vigor in this way–particularly when it’s a result of a voracious creative drive. Combs, compared to his old self, is a zombie now–diminished, hungry, lacking any spark of joy. It was vastly preferable to know him when even the smallest slight would provoke a shitstorm of rage and spew, when you were afraid that he might explode on you just because you looked at him wrong, and when you knew he was only seeing the world as a canvas on which he could make marks, literally and figuratively.

It was sad to see him like this, even if he told me he was hopeful and optimistic for the future, proud of his petty art sales, and eager to keep making art work. In the course of conversation, Combs brought up several times the name of Van Gogh, citing something he’d read in his letters to his brother Theo or talking up some aspect of his life. He also mentioned he had recently seen the Schnabel film about Basquiat. I wasn’t sure if he was identifying with these famous artistic failures, or if he was just acknowledging those who had previously traveled the path he was now setting off on.

“All things considered,” says Combs, “I’m a happy guy. What have I got to complain about?… I literally have nowhere to go. I could couch-surf, but I have no permanent place to go. If that’s what it is, then so be it.”

The latest updates on one of Combs’ websites suggest he was scheduled to hand over the keys to his apartment to a court representative on Monday–yesterday–at noon. Below is a picture he posted as the last image from his studio, just before it must have been carted away:

Today, just a few hours ago, Combs posted the following on the mnartists forums:

i’m close to kmart on lake… i have’nt been on since friday, so i missed about the painting on saturday. officially without a home now, having handed over the keys yesterday at noon. anybody know how to get a dvd out of a macbook drive? i stuck the last harry potter movie in here and it does’nt know its there and won’t let it out… i hope it does’nt mess this thing up. i got a ton of drawing done, as i’d been holding back from it for quite a bit. lots of thumb nails for paintings to do. have to get back to painting i a little bit here, but had to check the net. ramen noodles and bread… spring should bloom nicely this year. gotta run…

A recent story by Scott Russell called Setting standards, cutting funding for arts education that appeared in the online news aggregator Twin Cities Daily Planet reports that once-vaunted local arts education standards are currently being threatened. 

For many Minnesota art students, the author writes, “arts seem to be a thinning palette.”

This is because while Minnesota state standards in education focus on the value of art in the curriculum, the actual requirements for art, starting this year (and perhaps due to the No Child Left Behind laws) in a student’s education are minimal: only one art credit is needed to graduate from Minnesota high schools.

“Unlike reading, math and science,” Russell writes, “there is no high-stakes state arts test. Each district sets its own measure of art success. If students pass the art class that could be enough to meet the graduation requirement. That means arts can get the brush-off in the budget process, as schools focus resources on reading and math where success is measured by highly publicized, quantitative test scores.”

This means that statewide, according to Michael Hiatt, director of professional development and research at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, in “traditional schools” art teachers are “getting stretched to cover more and more students.” “It is more of a case of the haves and have nots,” in arts education, he said. “The gap is widening.”

Mary Schaefle, executive director of the Minnesota Music Educators Association, studies equity in arts education. From 2000-2006, she found, the number of “public school students dropped 1.5 percent” while the number of “public school music teachers dropped more than 11 percent”–indicating a drop-off in quantity of music lessons provided. In addition, the story sites the replacement, over this time period, of regular school arts instruction with more supplementary guest artist programs. “Obviously it saves some schools some money,” said one such instructor, “rather than hire a full-time teacher.”

One high school art teacher suggested that currently in Minnesota arts funding is “hit and miss, depending on what district you happen to be in, what part of the state you happen to live in, what the resources happen to be at any given moment.” The results, predictably, are a decline in talent levels among kids as they move through the education system, an ongoing deterioration in equipment and facilities for the arts in schools, and a resulting deterioration of interest among students in these subject areas.

Before I complete my thoughts on one Minneapolis artist who is currently skirting the abyss, a few more words on the topic of how poorly Minneapolis treats its arts community and its less fortunate despite its entrenched self-image (and deep amounts of supporting propaganda to support the image) as a place particularly enlightened and progressive on these issues.

A few weeks ago I quoted a local artist who had blogged that Minneapolis was not all that friendly to artists. After my post, the blogger responded with this: “Minneapolis shouldn’t feel bad about not supporting artists. Lots of places can’t support their artists. But Minneapolis should stop making out with itself in the mirror and take a look at itself instead.” He also wrote: “I think this place is a fine spot for a middle class, well adjusted, creative person with a descent backup plan to get a good start. I believe that I have personal issues that keep me from realizing my goals, specifically in this place.” And he vowed to leave Minneapolis soon: “Come 8/31, there’s nothing keeping me here. Unless I start a fun dance band, or find my calling in middle management, or give myself a labotomy, I’m moving.”

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her exposé about the working poor in America, Nickel and Dimed, famously exposed Minneapolis as being among the least friendly places for people without money. In Minneapolis, the ”living wage” was calculated to be $11.77 an hour, and Ehrenreich got a job at Wal-Mart paying $7 an hour. Because of the poor layout of the city and the inadequate public transportation, she had trouble getting to work on time (she went carless for the duration of her experiment). And because of the lack of affordable housing, she could not find a decent apartment and had to stay in a barely adequate rattrap motel—like many of her co-workers. While she wondered at first how her co-workers could even think of paying $40 to $60 a day for a dive of a room (totaling up to $1500 a month), she soon realized that low-wage earners had to deal with a double-edged sword—they could not afford to pay the large sums (a full month’s rent, plus a down-payment, plus bills, etc) needed to rent a more cost-effective apartment and so had to live in more expensive, less suitable conditions.

Earlier today, meanwhile, the artist Combs made final preparations for walking away from his modest apartment—writing on an artist forum: “i quit existing on paper soon. hidden place in which to land and radiate art, incognito in society, unseen and silent… i feel like moving like a shadow down between the cracks of society and back again. lost and unlost. whole and broken hearted. pulling something out of the self that has craved the foreground, albeit bringing a new lonliness with it…”

I once quoted the Minneapolis gallerian Thomas Barry on how he felt about the city after running a gallery there for nearly thirty years: “In general, [local support] is nowhere near what is necessary to make it a vital place for showing and making art….It was better in the Eighties, most definitely. Art was a fashionable thing and people bought into it….But it’s pretty much been flat for a long time now. A lot of talented people can’t continue to make art because they can’t afford to.”

Were Minneapolis a better place for the working poor—be they artists or non-artists—it might be easier to forgive the place for patting itself over and over for its wonderful self-image. But in addition to the fact that the poor can barely survive here, and artists (who come from all over the region to be in the place that constantly extols itself as an artistic Mecca) often flounder here to get established and to thrive, as I described in 2006, in reality, at best, Minneapolis/Minnesota ranks below average nationally as an art center. Among the failings of Minneapolis in the art realm: in 2003, budget cuts of 30-60 percent decimated the State Arts Board, and while much of the budget was restored for the current biennium (after four years of struggle among arts orgs and artists), that money is likely to go the way of the dodo yet again next year—owing to yet another brutal state budget deficit; arts employees in Minnesota are generally paid 30-50 percent less than their counterparts in other places, leading to large rates of job attrition in the arts worker corps; neither Minneapolis nor St. Paul has a cultural affairs officer, a public arts plan (though St. Paul has a modest non-profit public art org), a functioning arts and culture plan, a cultural tourism initiative or plan, or any of the other features of other cities/regions serious about their arts community; and, of course, all of these factors trickle down and lead to continuing despair and hopelessness among the artists on the ground.

I have no way of knowing yet how accurate was Holland Cotter’s NYT review of the just-opened Whitney Biennial, but, based on his descriptions of the show and what I know of it myself, this assessment sounds about right:

…this year we have a Whitney show that takes lowered expectations — lessness, slowness, ephemerality, failure [emphasis mine] (in the words of its young curators, Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin) — as its theme.

A biennial for a recession-bound time? That’s one impression it gives. With more than 80 artists, this is the smallest edition of the show in a while, and it feels that way, sparsely populated, even as it fills three floors and more of the museum…

Past biennials have had a festive, party-time air. The 2004 show was all bright, pop fizz; the one two years ago exuded a sexy, punk perfume. The 2008 edition is, by contrast, an unglamorous, even prosaic affair. The installation is plain and focused, with many artists given niches of their own. The catalog is modest in design, with a long, idea-filled essay by Ms. Momin, hard-working, but with hardly a stylistic grace note in sight. A lot of the art is like this too: uncharismatic surfaces, complicated back stories…

…the overall tenor of the show is low-key, with work that seems to be in a transitional, questioning mode, art as conversation rather than as statement, testing this, trying that. Assemblage and collage are popular. Collaboration is common. So are down-market materials — plastic, plywood, plexiglass — and all kinds of found and recycled ingredients, otherwise known as trash.

As a side-note, I have visited the past two Whitney Biennials, and I have reviewed them—usually focusing on the Minnesota angle for a little Minnesota-based web-publication. I find Cotter’s quick take above on the past two Biennials to be pretty spot-on, though I’d probably be a little harsher in my assessment of the 2006 show (and, indeed, I was). So, I have no reason to doubt him about the 2008 version.

I also then must say, “kudos, Whitney!” for recognizing—like CAFA—that failure is the order of the day in art.

As a final note, I do plan, once I can break free long enough to do so, to visit this failure-focused Biennial. In a perfect world, in which I have enough time away from my day job and enough left-over energy, I’d write more regular reviews of local and national art for a hungry local audience. (I say this fully realizing that all the local art criticism venues are rapidly dying off.) Still, I’m hopeful that I can, later this spring/summer, visit the seemingly less dire, more circumspect, more internationally derived Carnegie International, which opens in May, and write a comparative survey of these two major art events.

And heck, if I can’t get the review published somewhere good, then you can be sure it’ll end up just another feature of Failure. Stay tuned!

When downturns happen, when people are shocked out of their regular ruts, when the bombing starts and buildings are knocked down–whenever something bad happens on a large scale in the country, the arts are the first thing that goes out the window.

Case in point for today (March 4, 2008), as the collective economic hand-wringing mounts to a deafening pitch:

• Critic Sasha Anwalt, on the NAJP blog, yesterday pointed out that the L.A. Times is canning its long-time dance critic Lewis Segal. Anwalt writes, “this signals a gigantic disconnect between the people and press…. and his loss is worth protesting on many fronts.”
• Last week, Douglas McLennan wrote on the same blog about the Hartford Courant’s buyout of its television critic. McLennan also posted, a few days ago, an analysis of the ongoing failure of newspapers in this country.
• Andrew Taylor, on his Art Journal blog on arts management, wrote about the need for nonprofit mission-driven organizations to consider when to close their doors. (This relates to a story CAFA has been following out of Boston, where the Boston Foundation has suggested that the directors of “struggling arts groups” should perhaps begin seeking “exit strategies.”)
• The arts & architecture blog of the Guardian Unlimited recently posted about the inevitability of suffering for artists, and, appropriately, about the British Arts Council’s painful upcoming funding cuts to arts organizations.
• And, to top it all off and tie it all together, a recent story in the New York Times examines the quaint American habit to eschew all things intellectual. To quote the main subject of the story, Susan Jacoby, author of several books on this subject of American anti-intellectualism: “Now… something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way. Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.”

Be wary of walking under windows, lest you be hit in the head with all the art and culture we’re tossing out.