Jenna Riedl
The following pages contain three essay prompts. Please choose all.
Prompt 1: Please explain to us why you deserve to be here.
Definitions of “us” and “you” are not provided.
Us: a term used to describe the faceless entity that sends emails signed “Visual Arts”. Members may or may not include faculty, students, administrators, that one guy who wrote an art book once, every potential future employer, your favorite artist, and the world.
You: a term used to describe the girl with curly hair and bouncing knees currently sitting in a white-walled room, wondering if it is socially permissible to walk out of her own critique.
The room is white and two-dimensional
The walls have all collapsed
I can feel my knee bouncing and am suddenly filled with a sharp and pointed hatred for this body
This bone-filled parachute that lets me down when I need to appear sure of myself
I wonder, briefly, what would happen if I ran out of the room
(If I walked, calmly and certainly, out of the room.
If I slammed the door on my way out.
If I stood up and said, this critique has been entirely unhelpful and I see no evidence
That it will be anything different in the next twenty minutes
So I’m going to leave and you can all dissect my personality without me.)
In conclusion, “you” does not deserve to be here
Does anyone?
“You” paints dots on cardboard and “us” thinks cardboard is tacky
“Us” thinks cardboard is not intentionally tacky, and this is the real issue
“Us” likes to forget that no one has ever, in two years of critiques,
Asked a single person about their intentionality for working with oil on canvas
“You” would like to move the fuck on from talking about the fact that she works on cardboard
But “us” pounds the words “archival” and “environmental” into the ground like hills to die on
(You know, she’s so conscious of waste.
She should make environmentalism a more deliberate part of her practice.)
Does it even count as doing something if you’re not doing it 100%?
If I paint on cardboard with watercolors from Amazon, am I a hypocrite?
“You” does not deserve to be here because she doesn’t care if her work lasts for centuries
“You” doesn’t need her art to exist in museums, in galleries, as powerpoint slides
For a new generation of caffeinated, careless art history students
“You” made an error in judgment and entered a space where only certain rules were meant to be broken
And she picked different trip wires to snap
No one is wrong
Wouldn’t it be easier if someone was wrong? Then someone else could be right.
They say contrast is an essential element of successful paintings
In conclusion: “you” was supposed to be part of “us”
And neither “us” nor “you” deserve each other
There is no fault
I simply did not fit into the fluorescent-lighting studio box they so courteously provided
I did not try very hard to fit
The most important thing I learned in art school was not how to paint
It was not how to push through when I had no inspiration
Or how to contextualize someone’s work
It was not even how to decipher what I meant by splattering phthalo blue on a wooden panel
The most important thing I learned was this
Someone’s criticism only matters
If their vision of you succeeding is the same as your vision of you succeeding
Whether they mean well (and they almost always mean well) is irrelevant
If they are trying to make you better
But their version of better is too tight on your skin
Sags in all the wrong places
You don’t have to listen to them
They are not mean or wrong
They are just humans, living on the surface
Unable to imagine that the jellyfish of the deep sea might not mind the pressure
Don’t we all live unimaginable lives?
Telling someone to become more like me is not necessarily telling them how to improve
We were not all meant to breathe air
In conclusion, deserving does not come into it
I am here
More specifically, I am
Prompt 2: Where did you get the fucking audacity? (Please list at least 3 examples)
(Firstly) from my anger
Sophomore year, I started flipping men off on the street
As long as they were far enough, old enough
The street crowded enough, my legs ready-to-run enough
No socratic seminars about the ongoing movement for women’s rights could educate me
As clearly as the man who rolled down his windows and told me to get in, sweetheart
The difference between a law and a theory: we know why a theory works
A theory: it doesn’t matter what my grades are or how many miles I run or how angry I am
It doesn’t matter that I, in that moment, would be willing to kill
I will always be 5’2” to his Something Bigger
I will always be smaller than my rage
I am not strong enough to win, but –
Revolutions have happened in the space after that word
(Additionally) from their apathy
I stopped going to church two weeks after coming to college
Did I mention I was president of the Christian a capella group?
Did I mention I grew up spending so much time in the choir room, they almost got us a bed?
I could not separate the gentle prayers and microphone feedback
From man and woman God created them
From gay people have been given a great burden, to resist the temptations of their flesh.
We must honor their struggle to remain pure.
I committed the gravest error a statistician can make
I allowed the outliers to represent the whole
I know that I am wrong, but I know that I am also right
If [silence] given [devaluing of queer people’s humanity],
Then [get the fuck out, girl, they only love you because they don’t know]
How many outliers are too many?
When does coincidence become correlation?
(Furthermore) from necessity
It took twenty one years and seven-ish months to articulate what I experienced
First in third grade when I looked up from the church floor and fell in love with a girl:
Second when I sat in the doctor’s office as the nurse told me it
Wouldn’t hurt to exercise a bit more… and drop down to a healthier weight:
Third when three boys asked me out as a joke
And no one asked me again:
If my community won’t even pretend that I will be unconditionally loved
I need to believe that my worth does not depend on people’s good opinion
Or I’ll believe I’m worthless for the rest of my life
Group test: how can you believe you deserved to be wanted when no one wants you?
(empty space encouraged)
Maybe I was lucky that it was so clear the world wouldn’t love me
I would have clung to the pretense if it had been offered
I would have built my soul around good opinions if someone had ever told me
You’re so close… if you could just –
But I was born in the deep end
They say that’s where you learn to swim
(Ultimately) from love
Does it make you uncomfortable?
Does it make you squirm to know that I love you
Even if I don’t know, as I write this, who will read it?
Does it hurt to imagine that I could love you
Because you’ve learned to experience the love of a stranger
As expectations waiting to be disappointed, a bowling ball balanced on a spiderweb
Do you believe that knowing you would shrivel my love?
Would it provoke terror or envy
If you knew I could not help but love you
Because now, I believe so completely in my own value
That neither your success, nor your scorn, nor your disappointment could threaten me?
Prompt 3: Prove that higher education is worth something. List all primary assumptions at the top of your response.
We can assume that human beings deserve to live in a state of active security rather than absent danger. We can assume that competency is not the automatic byproduct of certifications or admiration. We can further assume that the author of this proof is honestly pretty over higher education on both a personal and conceptual level. That being said:
Higher education is most certainly worth something.
Here, I will solve for the unknown quantity which higher education might be equal to.
If the value of higher education is equal to the amount of job security it provides after college
Than higher education is worth four job offers
Two of which pay almost, but not quite,
Enough to cover rent in the overpriced city where the office building is located
And one of which ends up being a scam forwarded from your impressionable Aunt Margaret
It is worth a checked box for most white collar jobs
60% of which do not require information learned during college
And 30% of which require a PhD and twenty-five years of relevant experience
(Breaking News: parents campaign for internships in embryo)
If the value of higher education is equal to the experiences it offers
Then it could be worth two lifetime friendships and breathless laughter late at night
Inside jokes and quiet mornings in a sunlit cafe
Five scheduled sobbing breaks per week and a guy who wasn’t really trying to harass you –
He’s just not good at joking around
I could have drowned in the experiences they offered me daily, delivered to my inbox
Like small bombs of possibility and guilt
Last chance to apply!
Take advantage of this incredible opportunity!
How does one calculate the worth of infinity?
You can be buried alive under too much gold
If the value of higher education is equal to the self-actualization that it provokes
Then it is worth a therapist, I suppose
And a crisis line that shuts off after 10pm
We’re sorry, breaking down should only occur during business hours
It is worth getting so used to not having approval that I learned to live without it
(Approval: society’s unicorn
Sure, we should all get to see some if the world was fair
But who the fuck ever said that?)
Higher education is a reagent
And I was an existing solution that was primed to thrive because of and in spite of it
But I cannot claim much universal value for higher education
In conclusion: we fail to prove the alternate hypothesis
There is insufficient evidence to prove that higher education is worth anything
In conclusion: a single experiment, when successful
Requires replication
But how many successes are required? And how many failures are acceptable?
(definitions of “success” and “failure” remain unclear)
About the Author
Jenna Riedl (she/her) is a standard New Englander who pretends to be from Boston and insists that winter isn’t really that cold. She recently graduated from Boston University after studying Painting and Statistics, so naturally, she works in Events Planning while writing on the side. Her work has been published in Aisthesis and Kaleidoscope. In addition to writing, she spends a lot of time hiking and drawing small dinosaurs. You can see Jenna’s artwork on her website: https://www.dotproductsbyjenna.com/, or her Instagram page, @dotproductsbyjenna.