The Brooklyn Rail

A million years ago—okay, in 1964, a year for important events and social change that I’d rather not inventory here—Allan Kaprow wrote “The Artist as a Man of the World.” In it, he lays out the full-on bourgeois-ification of the artist: just another person who needs to keep the house warm, the kids fed and in school, pay the cost of life insurance.

Kaprow points out: “Unfortunately, also, in the new myth of modern art artists can no longer succeed at failing. Deprived of their classic enemy, society, they cannot comfort themselves in their lack of recognition with the refrain ‘they will discover me later,’ for now their only opposition if they have any, is the competition.” Artists must “put up or shut up, succeed in conveying their own vision in reasonably good time or consider giving up their attempt,” because if you can’t argue your works’ significance over others, then you may get squeezed into oblivion. I like Kaprow still: one, because he is actually funny; and two, because he could be writing this today, with only slightly different rubrics.

Why am I citing this over-cited and often under-understood text in an attempt to celebrate Lumin Wakoa? It’s certainly not to historicize her or her work. In 2009 while she was a student at RISD, there was an exhibition that performed the cut throat act of squeezing out some artists in order to privilege others that Kaprow indicates above. The arguments were of the moment, and also, historically dredged up. They weren’t moralizing so much as one upmanship of art world arguments. How can a drip be critical, or not, how to avoid the sentimental or decorative, because those things are still inane, correct? How can a painting be indexical without being condescending? And is condescension actually good, maybe? I could go on… Really, there was a vying for a particular ironic distancing of painting that now resides in some non-sexy purgatory.

Anyway, there was a panel discussion, and then the discussion was brought to the students. Many, vying for a position, asked questions that reified the arguments. I distinctly remember Lumin raising her hand, with a beautiful, affectionately snarky smile on her face. She had joined the RISD MFA in an ideal, if difficult state. She had significant skills that more likely got in her way of expanding the work than helped her, as is typical. What wasn’t typical is that she worked in various capacities, exploring paintings from life, process painting, strong narrative ideas, and she also used decorative motifs. It was a buffet of methods not conventionally used by a single painter who wasn’t calling themself a conceptual artist. She hadn’t built the arguments that would help her bolster a divergent practice as painter yet—that would come for sure—but she was about ready to jump in full throttle with the question she posed to the group. It went something like this: “You know, as far as I can see, all of the artists you’re mentioning, on both sides of your argument, make equally handsome, bluntly gorgeous work. What are we really arguing here?”

It was like someone had turned the fog machine off. Suddenly the competitive posturing was laid bare. She was drawing for herself pathways to utilize beauty and sentiment, toward authenticity, beyond the binaries posited in the discussion. Her question amounted to that realization, at least for me. For Lumin the climate was insufficient, the lines being drawn between what’s valid and what’s not were actually ridiculous. And worse, they were being used to enshrine some artists while delegating others to the margins. To designate who gets to be the authority. Are not these authoritarian impulses fodder for the right to break apart any possibility of coalition on the left? Divide and conquer?

Beyond starting the process of building a strong ground for her own practice, Lumin was propagating another way for artists to treat each other by calling BS on this particular turf war. She was making a demand of the artists and thinkers on that panel to stop competing and instead support each other in their common endeavor, not because in art anything is excellent, but because excellence is the larger struggle that weighs on all of us. She was saying that we should all strive to raise each other up, to tip the bar together, not stake claims on a binary end of an argument that will likely be irrelevant in five years. The argument posed did not expand the endeavor of painting—of what painting can and can’t say or do—it closed it down and limited who it can include. The discourse siloed it for a select, privileged, highly-educated group of mostly—you guessed it—white guys (very lovely guys, I should say).

We have made some progress since 2009 with the work of de-siloing, clearly not close to enough on the systemic level. Yet even with our current band of thugs trying to reverse the work of equity and inclusion, I will never forget the lesson I learned that day from Lumin: if the climate is insufficient, turn the fog machine off and interrogate the questions you are posing. If they draw an arbitrary line along some territory, ask yourself: who do those lines serve? Then, get to work finding ways to ask better questions. More often than not students teach us more than we teach them. Thank you, Lumin.