Faculty Friday - December 18, 2020

WAYL AND’S TIKTOK KING

Mr. Behm Finds Online Audience

Andrew McDonnell H`20, English teacher

In the earliest days of social media, the self-deprecating way of saying you were popular online while not wildly influential in your day-today life was to state, “I’m huge on the Internet.” Online fame was the sort of insubstantial notoriety that rarely meant anything in the real world. The line between that day-to-day and the virtual has grown increasingly fuzzy, though. Students at Wayland are more likely to rattle off the names of YouTubers, gamers, and social media stars than they are to know more than five film actors.

Thus it is nearly surreal to discover a rising social media star on Wayland’s faculty. Justin Behm, Wayland’s artist-in-residence and co-chair of the fine arts department, opened a TikTok account in mid-June. Students had been encouraging him to join the short-form video social network since December, but as he recalled, his response was the reflexive one of most adults encouraged to join a new online sensation. “No,” he recalls saying, “TikTok is garbage.”

But then around February, he started enjoying art and music videos he found there, and in June, looking for a creative outlet during pandemic-induced isolation, the art teacher opened an account and began posting videos as he sculpted and threw pottery in the Wayland art studio.

Four months later, his videos have over ten million views and his channel has 134,000 subscribers.

It is gratifying to see someone as talented as Behm discover a new audience for his artwork. His pottery is unbelievably intricate, often combining elements of coral growth into disparate objects and human figures. In his words, his art explores “the power of imperfections and spontaneity as well as man and his ability to transcend his own limitations.” On his TikTok, he continues this artistic exploration, but he is also clearly having fun.

In addition to showcasing the creative process and skill required to compose his trademark coralloid pieces, he takes audience requests to sculpt everything from “the smallest mug possible” to “the largest mug possible” to clay figures of popular cartoon characters. He also composes video responses to a variety of questions. One viewer asked Behm, who was born without a right hand, to sculpt his “missing” hand. Obligingly, he did so, only to realize that he had accidentally made himself a second left hand. The video concludes with Behm laughing riotously at his own mistake. It garnered 750,000 views.

The popularity of that video and some of his other lighthearted videos is satisfying but also a source of frustration to Behm who notes, “It’s always a video that’s trash, that I think is trash, that blows up. Like the first one I did, I put clay spaghetti on my arm. That was a throwaway video that I did in a minute, super dumb, and it blew up. That was my first viral video.” It made its way onto other platforms, including an Instagram account with 16 million followers and into Reddit as well. Behm compares this to a video he made in which he sculpted a full woman’s face in minute detail surrounded by over a hundred small pieces of clay coral. The spaghetti-hair jokey video has been viewed 1.2 million times. The painstaking artwork: 8,600.

Despite the disparity in those numbers, he is committed to finding an artistic balance and finding a way to engage viewers with the art he’s most proud of. The interactions he’s had with an audience of a wide variety of ages has opened doors and given him a daily motivation to create. “I'm doing sculpture and I'm highlighting my work in a way that I wasn't before,” he said. Prior to discovering TikTok as an outlet, he was struggling to find time and energy to pursue the avenues that many traditionally associate with artistic success. Behm says his thoughts were, “I have to have a show or I have to have a residency or I have to have something in order to do this work and I need pressure in order to be motivated. But the idea of doing that… on top of teaching… to me, it was just not gonna happen.” TikTok, however, provided an instant audience without the pressure of pursuing a gallery show or residencies. “I can just record a video and post it immediately,” he said.

The interactions he’s had with an audience of a wide variety of ages has opened doors and given him a daily motivation to create.

As a result, Behm has been able to connect not just with a wide audience but also with a community of artists online that he might never have met otherwise. He is part of an Instagram group chat with other potters, and he was recently asked to participate in International Clay Week, a global event that partners with galleries, potters, and sculptors around the world. He has also received so many commissions through his work on TikTok that he had to stop accepting the extra opportunities.

Despite his early resistance to the format, Behm says, “I don't know if I would have gotten through quarantine without TikTok.” His success on the platform has translated into the sort of street cred that teachers rarely earn in the classroom, and students are invested in his success, congratulating him, say, when he earns another thousand followers. He says it is another lesson that keeps him mindful of his audience, and that he sometimes has to return students’ attention back to the classwork. “Because right now we're going to talk about painting,” he says. And they must listen. For Mr. Behm is huge on the Internet.

INTERESTED READERS CAN FIND MR. BEHM’S VIDEOS AT: TIKTOK.COM/@JUSTINBEHM