Love for Viv

Last night I watched Project Catwalk, Britain's version of Project Runway, as I do every Wednesday. It was the episode before the final three are chosen to show at London Fashion Week and some of the designers really put the 'Catty' in Catwalk. Fellow Canadian expat Chelsey (in the back) and self professed 'straight lad' Ross (demonstrating his straightness by seemingly attempting to board a passenger into Pam An's fuselage) were confronted by mentor Ben de Lisi about their feeling that Viv Whelan (far left), a 42 year-old self-taught mum of three is 'just a dress-maker' who 'doesn't deserve to be here'. They got a thorough reaming by a vexed Ben who did it in front of the remaining group which included an unwitting and therefore somewhat humiliated Viv. Afterward, Ross seemed to have smoothed things over with Viv who handled it gracefully but I'm sure the whole thing stuck in her craw. I don't know what a craw is but if she has one there was probably something in it.

The cliquiness of the non-Vivs made me think about how formal education in the creative arts can cultivate rigidity in its students. This certainly wouldn't apply to everyone, I'm speaking in general terms; that when approaching art academically, in an institutional setting with professors and lecturers and reading lists and scheduled times to 'create ' in a predetermined location of predetermined wall colour and decor, there's an unconscious conditioning that results in the defining of the chosen discipline in absolute terms, and any deviation is seen as ungifted-ness and unworthiness and grounds for peer disqualification from following in said discipline. That was a long sentence.

There's a powerful sense of entitlement that can come with formal training. You've become one of the Chosen, selected for admission to a competitive program and identified in a certain way for the duration of the two or three or four years it took to get the paper that tells the world that you officially know your shit. Viv is an outsider and doesn't have the docs that say she can play with the big kids. And yet somehow she won a challenge (for streetwear at that) and received high praise for her Mac dress; if she were younger and they didn't know her background or had only seen her completed work, would the others have figured out she was 'different'? I doubt it.

These students are heavily reliant on validation. Their hearts and souls are continually handed over to be judged as they anticipate the verdict on whether they're 'good', not just as artists but as individuals, it's who they are after all. It can be very threatening and destablizing to have someone who followed their own, less or differently structured path, compete with you on equal ground. How do you justify the time and effort you've spent, and more significantly, what is the value of the positive appraisals given to you by 'those who know' if anyone from the street can stroll in and show you up? What are you then?

This is in no way a suggestion that formal training is a bad thing. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in visual arts and did two years of advertising creative in college. And for gawd's sake I'm married to a professor. My view is really a composite of my experience at university as a painter, essentially, and my journey (geez I really hate that word but I can't think of a better one at this ungodly time of night) into self-directed learning in my new chosen field (that I discovered outside of school). I can appreciate both sides.

In time, when dear Chelsey and Ross are established and successful, I'll wager a pint they'll feel silly about having made such a fuss over Viv. Or they'll blame it on creative editing.