I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a career. I never grew up. Yeah, I fuck off a lot, and do things that might be considered immature, but that stuff never stood in the way of growing up. The kind of growing up I’m talking about is more external. I was born in 1981, and spent most of my life believing that I was supposed to work hard, be ethical, look for a wife, and not break the law, and if I did those things I’d come out the other end able to abide my intentions and find fruition. I was never “normal” but I was also never that far into the fringe. While I enjoyed a lot of things that fell outside of the status quo, at the end of the day I still wanted succes in very regular terms, I just wanted that success via less conventional avenues. It never seemed outlandish.
I was lucky enough to land an almost free ride through undergraduate on Florida’s Bright Futures scholarship. Bright Futures just meant that I got good grades and high SAT scores in high school. When I finished my undergraduate education I was 24 with no debt, and the best thing I could think to do with myself was to go to graduate school and accumulate a larger than life heap of debt. As far as I could tell it wasn’t a problem because I was ready to be a professor until art or music really took off, and I was so passionate about learning. Looking back on it I was just way too caught up in trying to please my parents (if you don’t have Jewish parents you probably can’t understand, but I’m sure you can imagine), and I put too much faith in academia to be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge above all else.
Anyways, by the time I got out of graduate school the country’s economy had gone from opulent to decimated. I spent 3 years applying to roughly 30 or so PhD programs in an attempt to avoid the job market and continue my education, but I got denied by all of the programs I applied to. 2007, the year that I graduated, was the beginning of some pretty serious upheaval in this country. The job market was bleak as fuck. And after working full time at various New York restaurants during my master’s degree I simply went into working full time plus at restaurants. I kept making music, as well as visual art, as well as writing, and desigining, and maintained that as long as I worked hard at what I was passionate about, and worked hard at a job at least 45 hours a week I’d get ahead. But, by the time 2010 rolled around nothing had happened. By my estimation I would sooner than later begin to slip backwards. I hit the wall. I had followed all the tenets, yet had found none of what I sought.
Now, I took all the time to say that because I think it’s relevant to what a lot of folks are going through. Every American is sold some sort of lie in America, but I feel like our generation was sold something en masse that simply dwarfs the notion of a lie. A lie is a pertinent detail that has been omitted or manipulated in one person/side’s interest in order to produce a desired result. A lie adds another layer of social mechanisms to a situation. It complicates an exchange. What we were subjected to did not complicate the exchange, and it did not add another layer to the situation that coming-of-age-young-folks were dealing with. When the wool was pulled from our eyes it was revealed that we were the sad saps left holding both the bill, and the shitty end of the stick for more than 20 years of reckless legislation privileging corporate interests over the lives and liberties of the citizens. For folks who tried to enter the workforce after the year 2005 it was an uphill battle. And because of the way our wage, taxation, and banking systems are set up, if you had debt before 2005 it’s likely that your situation hasn’t improved much.
That’s a very long way of setting up the opportunity to say that’s what I see in Nicholas Forker’s art, but I don’t know how else to do it. He renders meticulous, and incredibly compelling depictions of astronauts. But, being that he’s an artist, and not just a draftsman—as his uncles, and grandfather are—his astronauts don’t just float through space in stunning life-like depictions. Nicholas’s astronauts live life like you and me. And that’s just an inverted way of showing that like his astronauts, we are surviving in a way that is profoundly detached from our surrounding, while a hostile environment around us remains cold and vacuous. And this is all in spite of the fact that we can see other folks existing without the need for such complex apparatuses of survival. It’s a rough world, and it’s not easy to survive out there. But, there’s a silver lining here too. For Nicholas, and a lot of other folks I’ve been talking to lately, the tides seem to be changing. Finally. And given the political climate, and the context that is our nation, it would seem that the change that’s happening for individuals is the indication of a larger systemic change rolling out.
2012 is gonna be a good year if you’ve worked hard to get it. And if you’re in New York for it, swing by Nicholas’s first solo show next year at Mallick Williams. If you can’t wait that long check him at Scope Art Fair down in Miami in a few weeks, or stop by the Rag and Bone wall on Houston Street where Nicholas is curating. We’re all floating in space, but it feels like we’re colonizing here. I’m excited to see how we’ll survive in this new world, but however it goes Nicholas certainly puts an interesting spin on taking it all in.
