Third Street

THIRD STREET

DON HẢI PHÚ DAEDALUS 2022

I was a night security guard at the graduate school studios. It was a work-study gig, but usually there was no one there at night, and I’d leave the obligation of oversight to the other security guard. In my mind, we’d divide the duties, sometimes I left early, sometimes she’d leave early, but speaking with her recently, she recalled it differently. In her memory, it was just me ditching out early while she studiously continued painting. I say this not to self-incriminate, but rather to remind the reader that my memory is flawed and these images attempt to reactivate a neural network in the mind–mine and yours–about how things were. Or could have been.

The job of security guard is important for another reason. It was during one of these work hours– my last night of work!–when absolutely no one else was in the building (see! she did leave early sometimes!) that I peaked in each space and snapped a photo. I didn’t touch anything, I didn’t move anything. I know, it’s a little invasive and for that I apologize, but! I had to peek into the studios to make sure no one was there and that no one was dead or dying, so I thought why not peek through my camera?

The studios were booths. Nearly cubicles. Architectural spaces formed and transformed by the legal, financial and cultural guidelines. There were no roofs over the studios because of fire code. The sprinkler system that hung from twenty feet above the floor reminded us of the industrial past of this place even while threatening our salvation through a deluge, in the event of a fire.

There were no doors, just drapes. Security or authorities must be able to get into the studio space. I recall something about it pertaining to our own safety, but in the next breath the orientating student mentioned we weren’t allowed to live in the studios.

Even before looking at the images, I knew that I had to share them at some point. Some images look like a snapshot of a crime scene.

I couldn’t look at these images for more than a decade. An image can be accessed but a collection–framed by a past intention, imagined in the future–must return from that uncharted part of the mind where urgency, relevance and loss cross in an uncomfortable synapse. The institutional transition doesn’t hurt, either.

After my steps slowed by ceasing joints, a distance measured not by space but time gives me a perspective on the notion of legacy. What is it that we were doing there? We weren’t just students. We weren’t being trained or encouraged. That crass notion of the educational industry–remunerating knowledge and access–couldn’t have been why we were there. Even if a dull thump of acrimony from the failure to complete that transaction pulses through some part of our body. SFAI was and is a visceral feeling. If excoriating your pain liberates you from trauma, making art at SFAI was an epilectic seizure.

No one wanted money. We wanted to transcend the conditions in which money would be needed. The skater on an ice lake, whose glide is smoothest when a small puddle forms from the friction of the metal blade on the ice–elation–even as security is being carved away. This has and continues to be the impulse for creation. It is the reaction to the boredom of evolution’s statistical imperative. We will die. I only wish I would have had more sex during grad school.

We embraced the strange, the marginal. Look at these images. They could be interspersed with photojournalism of a disaster from the tornado corridor. Art is messy because life is messy. Even the most polished, “finished” or completed pieces spill over under the scrutinizing eye. I’ve seen it and take down entire towns, when the flood gates fail. We didn’t try to contain or finish.

Some of us did nothing at all. Some worked until the clock ran out.

I recognize a few studios and art pieces but that’s not what stands out in this collection, when I try to assess the components of the image, in an attempt to edit and organize them. I see material excess. Things that form piles, a state of stowage or teleological reimagining. I didn’t realize this at the time, but the outcome was fairly predetermined, based on the support, supplies and resources available. What we could make was a function of the world into which we were born: the material paradise of the post-war era. No more rationings. Wealth was a television and one of everything, filling the two car garage and the cars parked in the driveway.

I’ve tried to keep in touch with some of you. For those who’ve let the distance grow, I get it.

We were adults with beautiful bodies and the curriculum was a disaster and then everything disappeared. I moved back east. But I brought these pictures with me.

It makes sense that we take images for granted. We’re surrounded by them and how can you see magic when you’re still on stage, grasping for the wizard’s coat. Images are surrogates.

There’s a suggestion that if the universe is expanding it must be expanding into something.

And from that something how would the universe appear? All the dimensions–length, depth, width, time, strong, weak–can be visually described in a holographic two-dimensional plane, from beyond the edge of the universe. Flusser states that imagination is the ability to “encode phenomena into two-dimensional symbols and to read symbols.”

Looking at these images I realize now that not everyone was at art school to read books or get philosophical in a scourge of smoke from bummed cigarettes. Some people must have felt asphyxiated by the suggestion technique, tekhne or ars had anything to do with epistêmê. I felt the opposite. To me the excerpts of books felt unjust to the context of the entire work. But of course were we to read entire books we’d have no studio time at all! And each idea that our generous instructors wanted to share wouldn’t get its just hearing so instead they surrounded us and tore pages from their favorite books and threw them at us, like dog breeders who were waiting for the domestication of these hungry beasts. Did you eat? Was it digested or vomited

back at their feet?

My commitment to my beliefs have gotten softer. I wonder if yours have too. Have some grown more certain? The legal fiction that establishes a precedent and upon which subsequent laws are staged, each seeming more stable and reliable, is a useful metaphor for teaching and learning art, but moreover the tropes that we now see so ubiquitous just got their start there.

Did you have instructors who didn’t have an MFA? And what would that imply? What was the experience for you?

Practically speaking, I expect most of you to read this book like Where’s Waldo. Flipping through the gunk and junk to identify your studio or someone you had a crush on. And maybe you’ll stumble over a couple people you haven’t thought of in a while and maybe a feeling will bubble up. If that happens, put down the book and reach out to them.

New York, NY March 22, 2022

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Third Street © 2022 Don Hải Phú Daedalus Photographs of the graduate studios at 2565 Third Street in San Francisco.

All images © Don Hải Phú Daedalus Font: Avenir family (light, oblique, medium) 12 pt