It seems like another lifetime ago.
Some people separate their life into decades, which I used to do. I rather like the word “era” now. The dictionary defines that as, a long and distinct period of history with a particular feature or characteristic, and I think that fits, although I don’t necessarily agree that the time period has to be “long”.
I’m not sure why, but I’ve still been thinking about the past a lot since the new year. The first week of the year, it popped into my head to look up all the old apartments I lived in. Looking them up brought up a flood of memories. Since I knew Mario through all of them, naturally, a lot of them involved him.
I was living on Sunset Boulevard about 2.5 miles west of the campus of UCLA. I transferred there as a Junior after satisfying all of my general education requirements at a junior college. I was pursuing a B.A. in Studio Art, so almost all of my classes were art classes. I was really into photography, so one of them was an advanced photo class, which I had really been looking forward to.
Mario was in that class.
I’m not sure I really noticed him at first. There were only like 12 or so people. It was still the first week of the class. I think it was the second class. I didn’t really vibe with the instructor it was turning out to be. The first class all she did was show us weird videos and not do a lot of talking. I was already missing my junior collage where they had a fantastic photography program and a state of the art lab, dark room and developing rooms (and even a lab tech that had all the chemicals mixed for you). UCLA had 2 thirty year old enlargers and 2 developing rooms and you had to bring all your own stuff.
It could have been my utter disappointment that the university that cost way more than my junior college kicked it’s butt in that department combined with an equal amount of disappointment in this particular class that stoked the fire that was brewing the longer I sat in this so-called advanced photo class. When the instructor started talking about assigning a task for us to take a snap shot of a tree, I lost it.
I interrupted her with 1 question…
“Is this an advanced photo class?”
She stopped. Utterly shocked someone would challenge her.
Everyone in the room kind of vanished because by that point I was in some kind of zone and went on basically ripping this particular class and the instructor’s approach apart. While the instructor was still shocked, I got up and left. I marched down right to administration and dropped the class.
By the time I got back, that class had let out. I got into the elevator to go up a floor to go to the next class and it was just me and Mario. I didn’t even know his name at this point, but I had recognized him from the class. He had long, kind of curly dark hair and was wearing an old army jacket. He looked at me, smiled and said something very much along the lines of, “That was awesome what you said to (instructor’s name)”. I think he’d also mentioned that I basically said what everyone else was thinking and that I should have seen the look on her face when I walked out. We exchanged names and basically said, see ya around. Years later he would still tell that story, from his perspective on how I had the guts to do that and he immediately liked me from that moment on.
He ended up being in another class of mine, so we started hanging out a bit. This other class we had was called “New Genres” at the time and included things like video, site specific type of work as well as performance art.
For the final project that semester, Mario had planned a performance piece. Imagine if you will, an empty room in the art building about 20’ x 20’ (we could sign up for them for site specific and performance pieces). There were no windows. We were all let into the room and took up spots sitting on the floor around the walls. He set up a fog machine and a strobe light. The rest of the lights were off so the strobe was the only light. So it was disorienting. To add to the ambiance, there was a boom box pumping out hard techno. In the middle of the concrete floor, there was a pile of ice cubes about 6 feet long, 3 feet wide, and about 2” deep. Mario had on a bath robe, which he promptly threw off and then laid down, naked, on the ice cubes. And that was his “performance”.
Honestly, I was dying laughing inside. I knew what the piece was all about. We had kind of an inside joke going about how hardly anyone was doing any “serious” art – that it was all just boundary pushing in the way of what people could get away with and call it art (honestly, his was tame compared to some of it) and then claim there was some deep meaning to it. The sheer ridiculousness of it combined with the fact there was no deep meaning at all was what made me laugh. He laid there for a full 15 minutes then the music stopped and it was over. But we all sat there quietly the whole time. You can see everyone struggling to find meaning. Maybe in was really art? Who knows. He got up, put the robe on and then someone turned on the lights. I can’t even remember if we had a discussion about what it all meant afterwards. I think we all just kind of shuffled out of the room and that was that.
One day, we were walking through the sculpture garden and another student we knew had set up a BBQ and was grilling rocks as a performance piece. Someone else had made a giant “mattress” and stuffed it with styrofoam, which Mario took the opportunity to lie down on and pose so I could snap a Polaroid.
It was truly a peculiar time and place and I highly doubt the same sort of antics go on there today in classes. The only lame thing was that I really didn’t get anything but meeting Mario out of UCLA. So many of the art classes were like that New Genres class and no real instruction was taking place. I didn’t learn any great art techniques. They didn’t even have any type of classes for people who actually wanted to pursue art as a career (like how to market yourself/your art and the general business side of things). I really hope that program improved for students that came after us. I did have some interesting classes in the Film and TV department as well as the music history department though.
And all in all, I really don’t have any bad memories though any of that 2 year time period where we were both going to UCLA and hanging out.
Those 2 years were an era all on their own.