LILY PRILLINGER
"Miscellaneous Work"

various media, various sizes

The selection of work featured in the 'miscellaneous' category of my website is an assortment of 'thematically random' paintings that I have made in the last couple of years. Most of this work was created while I was getting my Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, which I attended between 1999-2001. Some of this work was created after graduation during a period I refer to as The Dark Age. I refer to these paintings as 'miscellaneous work' because they never seemed to fit properly into any other body of work. While I vividly remember the things I was thinking about when I was making each piece, these thoughts are scattered and disparate, and can not be shaped into a singular set of related concerns.

One of the problems I encountered as an MFA grad student was the general rule that an artist should be, if they are disciplined, seriously interested in one set of related concerns and explore these related concerns ad nauseum, if not for themselves then for the imagined viewer, before they (the artist) should become conceptually engaged with any other ideas, which would yield entirely different sets of related concerns. While I was at art school, graduate students who adhered to this general rule would make the same body of work over and over, perhaps with slight variation, and more often than not, they would be considered more purpose-driven than their flaky peers. While this 'unofficial' general rule was never actually enforced policy of the San Francisco Art Institute, it was strongly encouraged to be singularly commited to a singular conceptual set of interests, and the art students who were capable of doing this plausibly, seemed to thrive. I suppose that this emphasis on having one good idea made sense on a number of levels.

Essentially, One Good Idea should be enough to sustain countless projects and having one was like having an enormous, cracked piñata splayed before you, brimming with treats. I guess the logic behind this dogma was that if the artist's initial ideas and formal concerns were of any nutritive value, they would be able to nurture him (and others in his care) for a long period of time without tasting stale or turning rancid. Subsequently, having one good idea forged self-discipline: if the artist had any significant chops, he would be able to dig deeply into the guts of his singular interest -- over and over again --and come up with something compelling and 'fresh' each time. This creative approach held practical value for the instructors, too, in that they could recognize the issues that each student faced, monitor that student's progress with greater efficiency, and offer cogent criticisms to that student-- all within the 30-minute, once-monthly tutorial session. Given that the art school I attended claimed to be pre-occupied with 'building careers' of its students, it worked in the school's favor to have a student body with a highly-organized sense of self-purpose: after all, having One Good Idea is a brilliant marketing strategy in that it might be just enough to make a student artist's work appear strong and relevant, and thus, hypothetically marketable to collectors (and sufficiently appealing to a dealer) who might in turn, exhibit the artist's work in a gallery, thereby casting a spotlight of success on the artist as well as on his alma mater. One Good Idea works for everyone involved.

It didn't work very well for me. Prior to attending the San Francisco Art Institute I hadn't been entirely committed to painting or drawing as a medium. Rather, I had been a sort of free-love, flop-house floozy to the materials and various media that passed through town. I had done quite a bit of sculpture and installation, and looking back I probably derived more pleasure from working with found objects than I did with 'the craft' of oil paint. Even so, my fate at the Art Institute was sealed: I was in 'lock-down' as a prisoner of the Painting and Drawing department. There was very little cross-pollenation between departments. Students stuck within their disciplines and their work reflected this loyalty of expression. Any one who styled themselves as conceptual hi-fliers was usually lobbed into the decadently futuristic "New Genres" Department festooned with less-futuristic items such as yarn, extension cords, and half-busted video equipment. Conceptual low-fliers, on the other hand, grunting like Chewbaccas, or heavily-sedated King Kongs with knuckles dragging on the floor, found a place in the Painting and Drawing department. I wasn't a very good painter technically, and I became infinitely worse as a member of a department that was perpetually intoxicated by the sordid fumes of "Craft is Content" propaganda. In any case, I made a lot of paintings that didn't really fit into a distinctive category, thematically or technically. For the first few semesters, my paintings built up like a chain-gang of irredeemable non-sequiturs. My haphazard approach was firmly admonished by my instructors. I could see their point(s), but I couldn't see my own, and I flailed under the One Good Idea regime.

I think that the instructors were well intentioned in their approach to help students who needed to define their interests and goals, but all too often the seriousness and / or talent of a student was gauged by their dogged adherence to a singular interest. Instead of having one good idea, students would desperately cling to one mediocre idea, and sometimes even one bad idea, in order to be taken seriously. There was a lot of pressure to be internally as well as externally consistent for the sake of thematic consistency. There was a vague notion that undergraduate work was about conceptual and technical 'experimentation' and graduate work should be officially concerned with close 'examination' of concepts and techniques. But upon closer examination, graduate work felt more like conceptual 'termination', (which is an amusing afterthought given that a Masters in Fine Art is technically a 'terminal' degree.)

In response to the pressure to have a focused 'purpose' most students began to do one thing over and over and over again as though heavy repetition of certain feats would vault them into superhuman status. The graduate program was like a small, non-traveling circus whose atrophied performers supplied a shabby routine of arcane and obscure tricks repeatedly and unsurprisingly. Practical descriptions of their specific activities were casually flung around as though they meant something larger and timeless. We all engaged in recreational critical spin to support this flimsy enterprise. I think we all made the mistake of assuming that a systematic, outward presentation of a one idea, good or not, would imply depth and conviction and would therefore command more critical meaning. Sadly, persistence did not ensure success. Bodies of work lay rotting in the studios like clones of corpses, and students struggled to make them meaningful by attaching small conceptual toe-tags. For instance:

Strangely enough, as I remember some of the artists I went to school with I am less inclined to remember them by name, or even their faces, than by the activities they repeated in the name of art practice. I suppose that is not such a bad thing, really.

During the period of time that I was making most of this miscellaneous work, I tried really hard to come up with an all-encompassing description for the work I was making. I think I did this in part to conceal the fact that I wasn't too sure what my actual purpose was. The following is a shifty statement I had written halfway through the graduate program:

As a figurative painter, I operate as a visual strip-miner.  Dense bounties of social landscape give forth an infinite terrain of objects, incidents, and information.  In my work, I sift over, collect, discard, and explore the colloquial mess of daily life.   I map stock-imagery from contemporary life against moments from my personal history. The collisions of meanings and interpretations that arise sustain my industry as a painter.  It is the moment at which the visual non-sequitur adopts the guise of metaphor that I perpetually investigate.  Simultaneously, I celebrate and revile the unabashed lures and dogma of commercial imagery.  My work employs and implies the affectations of commercial language so as to better examine the ambiguous loop between product and desire, package and promise.

The comic tone of my paintings subscribes to the Freudian account of humor as a psychological device that processes information that is emotionally 'unacceptable'. Conseqently, there is a pervasive ironic anxiety embedded within my visual narratives and use of imagery. Compositionally, my work engages traditional Western formats, such as portraits, landscapes, and religious triptychs, which in turn enable me to examine contemporary allegory against the allusions of historical constructs.  By adopting these canonized motifs, I aim to chart the relevance of painting to contemporary life.

While I may have a greater sense of the mistakes I made as a younger artist, there is no guarantee that I won't make entirely different and worse mistakes in the future. It is obvious to me now that I basically stopped making art after graduate school as a reaction to my great fear that all of my potential projects would lack relevence and critical value. I am not sure if this lack of activity is a sound resolution to my problem. After all, is is better to be an good artist who doesn't make anything, or a bad artist who makes things badly?