April 7, 2020 - August 26, 1936
Nature and love and happiness have not passed through the waves.
I watched my daughter apply to France’s top art schools this week. This required her to fill out lengthy dossiers d’inscription, list the three films, three books, and five artists “qui vous ont le plus marqués”, create and explain a work of art entitled “Moi et les autres”, compose lettres de motivation and notes d’intention and, as if that wasn’t already onerous enough, write an essay about how Donna Haraway’s cyborgs and Paul B. Preciado’s telebodies can “nourish or re-connect your thinking and your plastic practice”.
Then these cumbersome elements, along with selections of 7, 10 or 15 jpegs of her recent oeuvres, had to be merged into single PDFs weighing no more than 20 MB and uploaded, before midnight Wednesday, onto Parcoursup, the French government website that “manages the balance between undergraduate places in French universities and other higher education institutions.”
The portal, in place since 2018 and notoriously buggy, allows students to make from 1 to 10 “wishes” and up to 20 “subwishes” for the schools they want to attend. “Hence,” as Wikipedia puts it, “undergraduate programs receive far more applications than they used to, and some universities have to consider more than 100,000 student applications. This has led to tensions within French universities and contributed to a controversy between left- and right-wing parties.”
Take it from me—this is our third kid through—there is no controversy. Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, navigating through Parcoursup’s many mazes will be a terrorizing experience and an unmitgated shit show.
And sure enough, two hours before the witching hour Wednesday my daughter’s screen went blank, and then about half an hour later filled with this message: “Le site Parcoursup est momentanément indisponible."
That momentarily unavailable moment dragged on for the next two hours, and then the screen informed us that the deadline for application file uploads would be extended till 10 pm the following day. By then, of course, the damage had been done. The panic the panne provoked—on top of the mental anguish and pressure already in place all week—pushed everyone to the brink. Sleep that night was sketchy. Parcoursupial cyborgs and telebodies crowded our dreams. It was so traumatising that I decided there and then to write a follow-up to a piece I wrote about art schools a few months back, in which I asked dozens of questions, including these:
i) Why does so much contemporary art look like homework?
ii) Are institutions of higher learning the best environments for art instruction or is the increasing professionalisation of art, by which I mean the almost universal obligation for academic certification, with its attendant conformist tendencies and standardising effects, 100% depressing and awful and evil?
iii) As Jerry Saltz once wrote, should degree-granting Fine Art departments “stress courses in craft and various skills — from blacksmithing to animal tracking?” Or, as the late Dave Hickey suggested, should their “evaporating” raison d’être no longer be “training sissies for teaching jobs” but be spilled wholesale into Athletics departments attended by students for the same sole reason basketball players go to NCAA schools: not to get a piece of paper but to “make it to the pros”? Or — and this one’s mine—should art instead follow the Premiere League football model, with youth academies and farm teams feeding new talent directly into the top-drawer maws of Team Gagosian, Team Zwirner, and Team Qatar?
iv) Did the art world engender the art school or vice versa? Did the art market create both, or are all three — art school, art market, art world — so far up each other’s arses you can’t tell them apart?
But then I remembered that today is April 7, and that on this date four years ago a friend of mine, Robert Cordier, an artist of exceptional vitality and scope, became one of the 34,000 people in French nursing homes killed by COVID-19 between March 2020 and March 2021.
So.
I have a photograph of Robert, looking gaunt and frail a few days before his death, and another of his casket in his open grave. I’ll spare you those. Instead, here’s a shot of him with Jimmie Baldwin, taken in 1964, when they were working together on the Broadway production of Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie.
And here’s a short film.
And here are some Substack posts about him that I wrote a while back.
Making the Scenes (Part 1)
This is the first in a series of posts and podcasts about the late Robert Cordier, a Belgium-American director, producer, poet, playwright and screenwriter who died on the Man Ray floor of the Alice Prin nursing home in the 14th Arrondissement of Paris, of Covid-19, on April 7, 2020.
And here is the poster of the documentary we made about his life and work.
And here’s a trailer for the film.
And here’s a poem I wrote the day of his funeral.
And here’s a poem that my daughter wrote when she was six.
And here are some pages from her most recent sketchbook.
And here is a request.
And here is the first-ever photograph of a wave.
Thanks for reading. Don’t go and die on me. And sorry for the sissies crack, but it wasn’t me. It was Dave Hickey.
As someone with an MFA I can only speak from personal experience: the art degree world is, in fact, bullshit. Valuable to the extent anyone engaging with it seems it valuable. But aside from that it’s a lifelong loan, a few lifelong friends, and a life of remembering to create for the same reason your daughter wrote that beautiful poem: to remember to keep existing.
The whole pack of your are geniuses. I love her poem. Did she write that in Bam Bam?