The Dartmouth Review: The Art Freaks of AREA

We all see them around campus, and, well, sometimes we do a double-take. We wonder where they get those clothes—and that hair dye. We wonder where their totally cool off-campus house is. We all want to know what sparked their existential crises. Who am I talking about? The "Art Freaks." You know them. That girl who stumbles into class a few minutes too late with purposefully disheveled hair and comments about the moral solipsism of globalized consumerism. That guy who took the Bob Dylan seminar not because it's totally cool to fulfill an English major requirement by listening to music you enjoy, but because he wanted to find deeper meaning in the phrase "Leopard-skin pill-box hat."

Michael Audet

—A piece of "artwork" in AREA called—no joke—"Origami Vagina," by Miriam El Rassi '05.—

These are the people who control and dominate the two student-run art galleries on campus, AREA and NovART. While both profess to be open to students from all walks of life, they are in reality becoming more selective and exclusive.

AREA is a student-run gallery space located at the Top of the Hop. It was established in January 2002 by two senior studio art majors, Katherine Grayson and Laura Tepper, to give a space to student art on campus. The first exhibition featured four senior majors' works and was entitled, "Abstract: An Introduction to the 2002 Senior Majors." They have since expanded and now send out blitzes to the entire campus inviting anyone to submit their work. Submissions are chosen from this pool. This organization receives funding from the Committee on Student Organizations (COSO).

NovART is the other student-run gallery space on campus and is located in Berry Library's Novack Café. Students are assigned a portion of the wall and can curate their own individual shows. NovART was established more recently and clearly triess to reach a different audience-base than AREA, which holds openings and feigns a more academic role: the application process involves submitting a proposal for your mini-gallery space. Both of these organizations curate and hang several shows per year.

I know exactly who these "Art Freaks" are because I am one. Well, sort of. At the very least, I've wanted to be one for a really long time. In middle school I used to listen to my dad's Jethro Tull and Simon and Garfunkel CDs on repeat. I went to art camp. I tried to be vegetarian for a while. My friends and I wore black nail polish on our fingernails. I knew what nihilism was before my junior-year history teacher introduced the concept. In eighth grade, I knew that Weezer's "Butterfly" summed up my life. And I understood that Le Petit Prince wasn't just a children's story. I have the material for an impending existential crisis, too. I suffered from a minor addiction to Afrin in sixth grade, and my parents were divorced sometime during my formative years. Once during soccer practice, I left my purse on the front seat of my Jeep with the windows rolled down. My fake ID was stolen, and I couldn't buy beer for the rest of high school. And I've pretty much always been toying with the idea of becoming a full-fledged atheist. My life has been pretty hard.

I was committed to being "alternative" for quite some time before I gave up trying. I dyed part of my hair with grape Kool-Aid once. I wore Sambas with multi-colored laces until ninth grade. I even shopped at real-live thrift stores for clothes (although this was mainly because there wasn't an Urban Outfitters in Memphis, my hometown). My senior quote was going to be "Life is not light but refracted color," but another girl in my grade beat me to the punch. And I even had piercings. I got a second hole in my left ear twice and a cartilage piercing in my left ear once. Unfortunately all three holes never healed properly, and I took them out because I got tired of sleeping on my right side for a year. But even more importantly, when I graduated from high school, I celebrated by getting an...eyebrow ring. It didn't even hurt, and that's not a lie. However, my then-boyfriend's mom always gave me weird looks, and I eventually got tired of getting it caught on the top button of my polo shirts.

So you see, I have pretty much always considered myself an "Art Freak" on the inside. It's just I can't express it very well. It's too hard. My hair doesn't look "cool" disheveled. Pink's really a much better color with my skin tone than fatigue. Those Indian-inspired sequined shoes are really bad for my arches. My favorite CD these days is Celine Dion's Live � Paris. And frankly, pot just makes me want to go to sleep, not sit around and mourn Derrida. So I look like your average "mainstream" girl, walking around campus. And sometimes the real "Art Freaks" make me feel like this is a dirty, shameful thing.

I hope you've begun to understand by now that to me the term, "Art Freak," is not inherently a bad thing. So I will continue to use it.

In many ways the "Art Freaks" on campus are very similar to the "DOC" people. Who are these "DOC" people? Well, they also tend to live off-campus and they cook their own organic food as opposed to eating in the dining hall. This apparently makes them morally superior to those of us who still live in dorms and wait in line for Tuna Skewers. Your average "DOC" girl rarely wears make-up without feeling like she is "selling out," and the average "DOC" boy tends to walk around campus in flip-flops even if it's just not quite warm enough. This way, he appears "tougher" and more physically fit to withstand the cold than the rest of us. But more importantly, members of both groups choose to tell others around them what their interests are by what they wear. They force "mainstreamers" to see them as different and, dare I say, better? How else do you explain using a $200 ArcTeryx pack to carry your books? Additionally, both groups put on a fa�ade of being open and welcome to all when in reality, both come across as exclusive and off-limits.

AREA has recently become increasingly exclusive. It began in 2002 as a showcase for studio art majors, but it currently claims to represent artistic students from all walks of campus. The physics major who doodles in his margins; the environmental science major with a secret passion for photography. But do they attract these people? And if they attract them, do they pick them to put their art on the walls of AREA? Many of the artists whose work currently hangs in the Top of the Hop are familiar names in the Studio Art Department. Does this mean that their work is better than the rest of us? Possibly. After all, this is what they do with the majority of their time. But I've noticed a growing trend with the art chosen for the walls of AREA is their "shock value." Is it then possible that the secret mission of AREA is to portray students at Dartmouth as "on the cusp" of the contemporary art scene?

Works like Krista Oopik '05's "Butcher's Bargain" are indeed fascinating. Her juxtaposition of consumerist messages with sensory objects such as the smell of rotting beef and the fur-wrapped raw meat are Damien Hirst-inspired references that ring loud and clear with many of us "Art Freaks." However, these types of installations and works with similar type of theoretical messages seem to have been chosen exclusively and to the detriment of more aesthetically pleasing works that would appeal to a different audience. Yes, dare I say it? A pretty figural drawing might appeal to a "mainstreamer" more than an action painting.

If you are an "Art Freak," you know what I mean. The last time you went to the MoMA, your "mainstream" friends hurriedly ran up to the fourth and fifth floors to stare longingly at the Cézannes and van Goghs. You, on the other hand, stared at a Jeff Koons for 10 minutes until grudgingly going to meet your friend upstairs. You didn't talk about it, but you found your "mainstream" friends' taste juvenile.

In an interview with the Daily Dartmouth in 2002, Grayson, one of the co-founders of AREA, said that one of the purposes of the gallery space was to "engage the whole campus and create a dialogue about student art." If AREA and NovART indeed desire to open the campus up to a "dialogue" then they need to cater to a diverse audience comprised of "mainstreamers," "DOCers," and people even I can't stereotype. Until then, COSO continues to fund a group that claims to speak for the campus, but in reality only speaks for a small minority.