If I didn’t feel like a failure before I did now. All the elders in my family are doctors or in the medical field and I felt like this was the letdown everyone expected. I graduated from my small conservative Christian undergrad magna cum laud but now I couldn’t hack it in the “real” world around “real” people.

Oh well. I moved on. I processed my film at a community darkroom. I bought a scanner and worked on my images digitally. I took wet-plate workshops and learned the process myself, turning my bathroom into a make-shift darkroom on the weekends. I worked full time, I did the housework and paid the bills and did all the stuff that people are expected to do. I was able to do everything I wanted to do in grad school at home, on my own time. I also started visiting my grandfather.

Moving to Rochester put me geographically closer to my grandfather than I had ever been before. I started visiting him every weekend and I was surprised at how much older he was and how much he had changed from my childhood memory of him. He needed help putting in light bulbs and picking fruit—too afraid to get on ladders because he’d lose his balance. I realized a favorite swing was gone, probably moved years before and I had just never taken the time to notice. He walked slower and got tired more easily. It scared me.

I began photographing every visit. I’d photograph the garden and parts of the house that I thoughts were beautiful and I’d photograph my grandfather doing his bee keeping. But I didn’t progress past those subjects. I just kept taking pictures of the same thing and yet I couldn’t stop taking pictures of those things. I knew I needed to photograph but I didn’t know how or what to photograph to be satisfied. I’m not sure I knew why I had to photograph either. It was an urge—a compulsion.

So the one thing missing was still a degree. A piece of paper that other schools, potential employers, could look at and approve of. So, I started sending out more applications. This time all of them were low-residency programs. I had worked it out so that I could still attend RIT the next fall, if I had a change of heart. I also had talked with SUNY and they said they would accept me the next fall as well. But I really didn’t want to stay in Rochester any longer than I needed to and low-residency programs would give me the opportunity to work from anywhere I chose. Hell, I could move to Europe like I always dreamed of…

I got accepted into Lesley University and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Lesley’s degree was through the Art Institute of Boston which sounded awesome. But the acceptance letter from the Vermont College of Fine Arts was personal. They talked about my work. They responded to my work and said why they wanted me in their program. I had also talked to previous students who had nothing but good things to say about the program. Students loved it there and the school wanted me to take part in that. How could I turn that down?

The question of why I wanted to attend a graduate program still wasn’t very resolved. It was almost like I was taking up time—an excuse to not have a job and be successful. Other than the degree itself what would graduate school really do for me?

I’m feeling overwhelmed. I’ve started mapping my journey, putting up forms and quotes and bibliographies on the wall to find consistencies. But I still feel lost looking at all that small black-and-white print. I don’t see a bigger picture yet.

For fun I decided to write my journey down in a narrative. I don’t know if this will become part of my process paper but it might help me think about where I’ve been and how I’ve changed. And I’m going to try to share it as I write.

I’m starting at the beginning.

*   *   *   *   *   *

Why did I want to go to grad school? What else was there for me to do? I really didn’t know what I should do with my life and I didn’t feel that a BFA in photography had prepared me for anything. Sure, I knew about assisting commercial photographers but I hadn’t enjoyed it that much. I’ve joked since high school that I wanted to be an eternal student. And it is true in a very literal sense, not just in an admirable I-always-want-to-learn sense… I always want to be enrolled in school. I love the classroom setting, the academic calendar with nice big breaks for holidays and summer and the motivation to finish projects and continue to learn. The good-job-pats on the back don’t hurt either. Moving on from the high school mentality I figured the best way to stay in school forever was to get a job in one. If I were a teacher I’d still get all the same things I did as a student (except I would be giving the good-job-pats instead of receiving them). An MFA made sense because it would supply the educational credentials to teach at the college level and stay in school.

Did I think I was an artist? Not really. Once I called myself a photographer and an asshole I was associating with at the time told me that I couldn’t call myself that. He said I was only a photographer when I was making a living from my photographs. I was already self-conscious about titling myself “photographer” or “artist” because I didn’t think I was living up to those titles. His comment really struck a nerve.

My first round of applications got me accepted into the photography MFA program at Rochester Institute of Technology and SUNY Brockport’s Visual Studies Workshop. I chose RIT, probably for all the wrong reasons but also the expected ones. It was a good name—ranked fourth on the list of best schools for MFAs in photography—and being such a well known school it also had “well-known” equipment—companies want to convince students they can’t live or work without having their products so when they graduate they’ll stretch their wallets to work with equipment their comfortable with.

I had heard about low residency programs. I knew people enrolled in them. But I wasn’t interested because I wanted a physically school, where I met students and teachers and had equipment so that I could work in a way that was familiar.

I started at RIT and almost instantly hated it. I didn’t last long. I felt almost immediately that the teachers hated me (this is probably an exaggeration) or at least thought I was stupid and I admit I felt stupid. But more than that I felt that I wasn’t going to be able to do what I wanted. The darkrooms were disappearing and from what I heard most students just used them for storage anyways. That was heartbreaking. I love traditional photography and I was especially interested in historical and alternative processes. On our first tour of the darkrooms we were told that no toxic processes were allowed. That meant no historical process (except cyanotypes and Vandyke Brown). Unscheduled darkroom searches were also part of the deal and you could be fined if you didn’t have the proper MSDS info on every container (up to $1,500). No wonder the darkrooms weren’t in use. It would be way too much work to stay “legit,” digital was just easier. This was upsetting to me but there was something even more worrying.

In my first studio class we were asked to think of what we wanted to work on. I had just come back from Ukraine visiting extending family, only the second time I had ever met them. I had rolls and rolls of film that I wanted to process and then work with the images. It was really important to me. I mentioned this to one of the faculty and their response was “Well, that was what you were doing before you came here and we want you to work on something else.” I guess I can see her point but my understanding of a graduate program was a place to develop a personal artistic style and studio practice. How would dropping something I care about help me discover that? Wouldn’t it make more sense to work with students where they started and through dialogue and critiques let the students grow?

It seemed backward. I was going to spend lots of money not allowed to work with the materials on wanted and not on the content I wanted. What was all my money going towards?

So, I dropped out.

Enjoy it at http://www.diemchau.com/

Check it out at www.alexandraryckman.com

“Here, Friskey. No. Come here, Friskey.”

The soft spoken words are clear in the early morning quiet of the house only accompanied by the sound of the bath water splashing against the side of the tub as I move. Moments later I hear the thud of paws hit the floor as she jumps off his bed.

The cat’s name is not Friskey, not until recently that is. My mom found her, or rather the small black cat found my mom and wouldn’t leave. But because my mom already had a cat, one that wouldn’t tolerate other felines eating out of her bowl or using her litter my mom gave the cat to my dad. He always joked that for a free cat she was awfully expensive–some three-hundred dollars after getting her neutered and shots and having her front paws declawed.

My dad named her Whiskers because when he was a boy they had a cat and its whiskers would always tickle his face causing him to say “Go, key,” toddler speak meaning “Go away, kitty.” The cats whiskers bothered him so much that he cut them off not understanding the detrimental effect this would have. Whiskers is named in honor of that cat.

My dad also called her Kitty Whiskers, a cutening of the name as people often do when talking to babies or animals. And this name had its syllables rearranged into Whiskey Kitters, as dyslexics like my dad are prone to do.

So when I finally took the cat after my dad became allergic to her I only referred to her as Whiskey. Years later after several moves, a marriage and a divorce she and I both moved in with my grandfather. And because of his failing hearing and maybe also because English is his second language he began calling her Friskey and no attempts to correct him have succeeded.

Homage to Zoe Leonard’s Tree + Fence series.

Trash bag technology is still progressing. There are people out there coming up with new plastics, forms and scents to make using trash bags better, maybe even a delight. (“I love this bag!”) And yet Kodak has stopped research on film. I don’t get it. I guess, trash bags aren’t in danger of becoming obsolete but it still doesn’t make sense to me. How much better can they make a plastic bag? And will any consumer really care?

I don’t know what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing but I don’t care if anyone else does. I don’t know how to talk. I don’t care about talking about my work. Fuck you. I don’t care if you like it or want to pay for it. Walk by it. That’s fine. You don’t make me feel better or worse on how you feel about my art. Is it art? I don’t care if it is. I make it because it makes me feel good. I make it because it’s important to me. I make it because I want to. I don’t make it for you. You ruin it for me. You make me over think it. My hand is too prevalent and not universal. My hand is not present and makes it uninteresting. If I’m here its no good if I’m gone its no good. I’m not sure it matters what you say. I like my stuff and it makes sense to me. It makes sense to others. Some people will always understand, some people will never understand, some people will understand some of the time. There isn’t an answer, why bother trying to find the answer? Why try to find the ultra-universal? It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. People will make the connections they want to make. There is no art movement. This is no group. There is no art. Is it art? Or is it just me? If you reject it you don’t reject me because I don’t give a fuck what you think anyways. I just don’t care. You’re opinion doesn’t effect my relation to my past. That’s what this is about. My relation to my own past. And if you don’t care you don’t care. If you see your own history, your family’s history, I love that. It’s amazing. People are amazing to be able to relate things to themselves. That’s fine. Run with it. But this work is not about you. It’s about me. You don’t need to understand that. You don’t need to care about that. You don’t need to care about me. You just need to care about you and if you don’t that’s not my problem.

Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression was originally a lecture given by Jacques Derrida on June 5, 1994 at a colloquium in London. This lecture-turned-book is divided into six sections, the Note, Exergue, Preamble, Foreword, Theses and Postscript. While each section covers a different aspect of the concept of archive the book as a whole defines the history, role and definition of the archive especially as it relates to Freud’s “archive.”

Derrida starts with the Note, a breakdown of “archive” starting with the word “Arkhé.” This term recalls the ideas of commencement and commandment.  Commencement suggests that, as in nature and history, there is a there where things take place. And commandment, as in law, that there is a there where things are ordered with authority. He continues in this way talking about the history of archives. The meaning of “archive” comes from the Greek word “Arkheion,” the house of the archons, magistrates. This was the place where documents were filed and the archons were their guardians. This allowed documents to be gathered together, ordered, protected but also available. This brings Derrida to another point about how documents were gathered together. These files came from private to public spheres but it doesn’t necessarily mean from secret to nonsecret because an archive is a place of shelter. It “shelters itself from [its] memory which it also shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets” (2).

Derrida discusses the idea of citation in the Exergue. He first suggests that the archive “is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional,” because it preserves but in an unnatural way which Derrida perceives as an archival violence (7). He goes onto describe how the process of archiving is observed in printing and circumcision. In his discussion of printing the need of an external place for an archive becomes a central point. This need relates to Freud’s concept of the death drive, the self-destructive drive to return nature to the state before one’s birth. “There is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of remission” and this compulsion to repetition “remains…indissociable from the death drive” (11-12). The death drive inciting us to destroy and provides the impetus to archive.

He also discusses how technology changes the archive. The archives of Freud, for example, would be much different if he and is contemporaries used email. How the archive exists is determined by the archivable materials, regardless of how technology allows archives to exist each archive exists in the anticipation of a future. He ends this section by speaking of circumcision, it is a private inscription but also a document that can be compared to printing in that it leaves traces of itself on the skin.

In the Preamble Derrida seeks to define his use of the word “impression” in his title, which has three meanings for him. The first meaning is that of a literal, physical impression onto something, “that of an inscription which leaves a mark at the surface of in the thickness of a substrate” (26). In other words, writing, making symbols or printing. The second definition of the word “impression” is the one that probably first comes to mind as the notion or feeling that is associated with a specific word.  And thirdly he defines “impression” as it relates to the larger title of “Freudian Impression” he gave his lecture as the impression left by Freud. The  “undeniable impression…that Sigmund Freud will have made on anyone, after him, who speaks of him or speaks to him, and who must then, accepting it or not, knowing it or not, be thus marked” (30).

The Foreword is dedicated to a discussion of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s book, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Derrida states that it is Yerushalmi’s undoubted belief, and a major concept in his book, that psychoanalysis is a Jewish science. But Yerushalmi also says that it is something that wont be known until the future. This leads Derrida to question what will become of the archive of psychoanalysis if in the future it is titled as a Jewish science, it would change the relationship of the science to its own archive. The brings into question the relation of the archive to the future, the question of the archive “is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” (36). This relationship is very important because you cannot know the effect or importance of the archive until the future becomes the present. With the possibility of the archive of psychoanalysis retrospectively becoming a Jewish science this conveys the incompleteness of all archives, something to be remembered when dealing with any archive.

Not surprisingly Derrida presents his theses in the Theses section. He starts the section by giving a clearer definition of archive fever, describing it as “to burn with passion. It is to never rest…from searching for the archive right where it slips away… It is to have a compulsion, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). He then goes to state in his first thesis that Freud created the concept of archive as material and virtual as something that is in the psychic space but that “cannot be reduced to memory” (92). His second thesis returns to the early mentioned death drive without which the archive would not exist. By taking the documents to be archived out of the owner’s authority it ensures that they will be kept safe from the individuals self-destructive tendencies. And the third thesis states that no one has shown the archontic principle of the archive better than Freud, which deals with the “law, of institution, of domiciliation, of filiation… The archontic is at best the takeover of the archive by the brothers” (95).

In his Postscript Derrida recalls his definition by talking about the desire to get closer to the origin of the archive. The archive creates a desire to find traces of the actual event or artifact but it is an impossible desire. Also, it is impossible to know what has been left out of the archive, what secrets of the past are still unknown. “One can always dream or speculate are this secret account…But of the secret itself, there can be no archive, by definition. The secret is the very ash of the archive” (100). It is impossible know what has been burned or destroyed and will never be recovered for the archive.