Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT In The Pink
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Aired on 06.30.2010
Unsurprisingly, Andres seems intrigued by Erik's finished Sex Education poster, which looks pretty great. It's been aged and tattered, and affixed to the wall with some rough-torn red tape. Over the bed hangs a huge cross, and then in post he's scratched it all up and smeared part of it with red stuff. The perspective makes Ryan's feet huge and Jaclyn's feet tiny, which is fine, although there's nothing particularly aggressive or scary about their positioning, which is a problem: Without the effects and weird lighting, they could be taking a nap or something equally innocent.
All in all, it's got a preciously produced feeling, but maybe that's just because we saw the process: It definitely feels old, and reminds me somehow of the Nightmare On Elm Street posters when we were little. That sort of knifey washed-out aesthetic. As expected, the text is a bit distracting, and done in a scratchy self-conscious style that seems tacked-on. I was not expecting to vote for him to stay, but given the work itself, minus the intent, I'm pretty pleased.
John's The Recluse is lacking in the colors and design sense that have made his previous things so gorgeous. No neon pinks or orthogonal lines in this one: Just a dude suckin' on his dick, with some words written around him including the top caption "Auto-Follatio [sic] ... Why Not??" The art itself is clumsy, with weird fringe anklets on the man's ankles, and one can only imagine the genitalia are not that well-crafted either. Knowing that John's not a primitive artist in any real sense, he's really putting his line skills on shout here, and altogether it's disappointing. Of all the times to win without immunity.
Mark's In An Instant is, if you'll recall, a triptych: There's a little torn dress on a red-pink field, the soiled pink panties on yellow, and a popped red balloon on blue. Based on the novel Stone Cold Bummer, by Manipulate. The judges are like, "Is that a photoshopped photograph?" Um, yeah. Have you met Mark? That's the limit of what he's interested in doing. He explains all about how innocence can never be regained, blah blah, and generally comes off exactly as disingenuous and sheltered as he's actually being. It's like Marlon Brando sending that little fake Indian girl up to get his Oscar, only in this case she's just been pretend-raped. Just egregious.
Nicole's Vial is about "taking a phobia [of hers] into a communal space." Glad to know she was paying attention when Simon told her to make up some old crap to say. Steve Coogan (!?) suddenly appears and says he approves of this one, because it's aesthetically attractive. I agree: The jars are lit up from beneath, so the stark colors of her various gross thumb-fillings are really vibrant. I mean, apart from the blood I don't know what we're looking at -- some hair, I guess fingernails -- but it's gross without being grungy, like a Saw poster. There's something cerebral and clear about the whole project, which I wasn't expecting. I mean, it's not that interesting overall, but it's styled very well.
Nao's Barely Standing is one of those things that only performance artists ever do, because they're so stuck in their own heads that they don't really care about how anything looks. There's a tumbldown structure made of strips of cardboard, like a falling-down hut, on a green rubber sheet. In one corner of the floor piece, you can see the original thing she was doing, the calamari or whatever they were glued to it. There's a chair in front of the thing, where Nao is sitting, and she is dressed like a total jackass. Black body suit, face covered in plastic with some shit stuffed in there on top like a fecal-sample version of Carmen Miranda, some big beads around her neck just for fun, and what seems to be a merkin. She is covered in maybe real shit, maybe fake shit, but whatever she is doing to the shit is really creepy. Stop palpating your bag of shit right now, Nao.
There may also be corporate logos on the white shift she's wearing over the bodysuit. Oh, no, they're bags from Utrecht. In short, whatever random crap she found lying around at the last second and thought, "Yeah, I can bullshit my way through this one." Which, art school is not a no-BS zone, but when your whole career is based on just acting weird and doing weird shit with weird things and then getting rude with anybody who wonders what the fuck you are doing... That's just a waste of your life. It means you are broken and have nothing to actually say -- the self that you're expressing so obnoxiously is not your actual self, which you have not yet discovered yet because you've been so busy creating, I mean, it's not a coincidence that people like this also generally tend to be pretty shitty as people -- so you end up performing "creativity" instead of actually being creative, which is why people who are not artists should find another field instead of art.
Proud Pussy's Triple Self-Portrait In Bathroom is just as boring as you might think, having seen it not only in the last three challenges but also in her pre-show materials, right down to the Perez-esque stars over her boobs. They haven't written the mean things on them yet. Somebody writes "Yes, they're real!" pointing to her hard fake tits as she voiceovers about whatever the hell.
China Chow is busy counting the penises in Miles's First And Last (referring to his erections, of course), which ends up being a Big Daddy Roth/Harvey Kurtzman sort of mishmash of cartoonish line drawings making up the Mickey Mouse icon. Nothing too interesting -- though his work with pen and ink are pretty gorgeous altogether -- or special here... Unless you count the jizz drooling down the thing. Abdi is shocked by the cum once Miles explains whence it came, and pronounces this a faux pas. I admire once again the way Abdi refuses to dignify anybody else's affectations.
But is it a faux pas really? I mean, I can see why one might think it's gross and all, but I don't really see why it would be a huge deal, anymore than blood or Nicole's parts. I mean, the stuff is readily available. We are not, as a global society, running out of it. And chances are mighty high that in your lifetime you have been in a situation where it ended up somewhere it didn't belong -- in fact, the very nature of its delivery system problematizes its location much of the time, if you see what I'm saying. Not all the time, but more often than is really convenient. Especially if, like Miles, you have OCD.
Next up Jaime Lynn's Church In The South gets a good explanation, as she discusses the way that the work starts out iconic and beautiful, but the more you look at it, the more you realize everything is gross. I know her deal is basically being frustrated with glitzy shallowness and trying to bring that together with her spirituality, but that would be a lot harder to take if she didn't make such attractive things when working on it. The judges don't have much to say.
Peggy Sue's Herpes For Chanel/Syphilis For Prada is more successful than I'd imagined. It's lovely, of course -- what Mark would explain to us is a diptych, of gigantic fashion sketches with various gross flourishes -- and also unnerving. Especially for China Chow, who notes that the Chanel dress and collar are something she wore in a previous episode; in effect Peregrine has given her syphilis. Lucky girl, wearing some kind of knitted helmet in addition to her chunky turquoise jewelry, painted cowboy boots and Anthropologie-looking knit dress and standing there with her monkey arms hanging down and weird album-cover facial expressions, endlessly blinking. Looking at her just makes me so upset.
For the crit: Jaclyn, John, Erik, Abdi, Nao and Jaime. Everybody else leaves, and we begin with Jaime. She explains about the debauchery and danger surrounding Christ in her adorable picture, and Jeanne quickly compares it to a New Yorker cover, which is of course what it looks like, but seems to be a big part of the point.