Oberlin students line up for art, not game tickets
Darccity
Taking Art Every Semester for 62 Years
By JOHN L. PULLEY, Chronicle of Higher Education
Oberlin, Ohio
Self-portrait of the artist as a young woman: A diamond chip glitters atop the
stud that pierces Sarah Dolecki's lip. The gem catches and refracts the light
that bathes the second floor of Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum.
The ersatz beauty mark, explains the 19-year-old student, is what body artists
refer to as a Monroe, as in Marilyn, the muse of Andy Warhol.
Ms. Dolecki, a tattooed photographer with a pixie haircut, chats amid a swirl
of students in the brightly lit corridors that overlook the museum's main
gallery below. Students flip through more than 400 works of mostly modern and
contemporary art -- rows of paintings, watercolors, silkscreens, lithographs,
and woodcuts that lean three and four deep against the walls. For $5 each, the
original artworks can be borrowed for the semester.
Ms. Dolecki wants to immerse herself in the artist's vision, to see through
another's eyes: The cockeyed vision of Picasso, or the Moulin Rouge-inflamed
eyes of Toulouse-Lautrec. Or perhaps the pop eyes of Warhol or Lichtenstein,
the starry and striped eyes of Jasper Johns, the psychedelic peepers of
Salvador Dali. She can choose Renoir's impressions, Goya's intensity, Chagall's
whimsy. They are all here.
Flip and stare. Flip and stare. Flip and stare. Some browsers scan the checkout
cards on the backs of the artworks, curious about who has previously rented
which pieces. The decisive ones have already cut and run. Canvases tucked
beneath their arms, they stride home, happy hunters eager to hang their
trophies. Few of the artworks go unwanted.
Ms. Dolecki has grabbed a large Richard Hamilton photograph of a gunshot
victim. The ethereal image is grainy and distorted, transforming the fallen
body into an otherworldly wraith. The title of the 1970 work is "Kent State."
"Initially, I didn't know what it was," she says. "I'm really happy with it."
"My sister totally wanted me to get a Picasso and loan it to her," she adds.
Her sister attends West Virginia University. "It's nice to get a Picasso."
The Picassos, though, are long gone, snapped up by students who spent the night
camped out in the museum's courtyard.
This ritual has played out on Oberlin's rural campus each spring and fall for
more than 60 years. Long before frenzied students at Duke University thought to
camp out for tickets to basketball games, Oberlin's students were roughing it
for art.
Two days earlier, on a Tuesday in mid-September, students began signing up for
the big event. The list eventually swelled to more than 180 names. The most
determined were already airing out their sleeping bags.
On Wednesday evening, with the overnighter at hand, a student lugged in a
mattress. Someone else arrived with a TV. Students climbed into the courtyard's
dry fountain, the perfect spot for a late-night blabathon. Some cellists
commandeered a nearby tent to practice their chops. The obligatory pizzas
arrived.
"It's a party kind of atmosphere," says Mariko Koide, No. 72 on the list. The
24-year-old graduate student's prior queuing experience involved camping out
three times during the 1990s to gain entry to Wimbledon. Two weeks ago, she
arrived in Oberlin and took up residence in a barely furnished apartment --
kitchen table and chairs, blue couch, a "really dumb" rug. The rooms were "very
white," just pleading for art.
At 5 p.m., the first hourly roll call was taken in the courtyard. You snooze,
you lose. Everyone is allowed to miss just one roll call, or two by proxy --
but more than that and you're out. The students themselves created and enforced
the rules.
The last roll call of the evening was at midnight. By 4 a.m. the courtyard was
chilly, the final flickers of conversation extinguished. Someone rustled.
Someone coughed.
Sixty-two years ago, Ellen H. Johnson, a young art librarian who had recently
been pressed into service as an instructor at Oberlin, had a radical idea. "It
occurred to me," she wrote in her memoirs (published posthumously more than
half a century later), "that if students could have works of art in their
dormitory room it would not only develop their aesthetic sensibilities but
might encourage ordered thinking and discrimination even in other areas of
their lives."
Relying on an "abundance of youthful nerve," as she put it, she wangled $700
from the college to purchase and frame reproductions of art masterpieces.
Over time, Ms. Johnson used the programs' proceeds -- students rented the
pieces for 25 cents in the 1940s -- to replace the reproductions with original
works. She made the most of limited funds "by scrounging around for half a
century in galleries and studios throughout our country and Europe, and from
Teheran to the Australian outback."
Ms. Johnson, an early champion of Pop Art, achieved prominence in the art world
before her death in 1992. She knew Warhol, Lichtenstein, Johns. Their works and
those of other artists often made their way to Oberlin at deep discounts or as
outright donations.
The museum does not divulge the total value of the rental collection, but
individual pieces are estimated to be worth up to $15,000. (Lucille J. Stiger,
Oberlin's registrar, says some pieces are removed from the rental collection if
their values appreciate sharply.)
Ms. Johnson's efforts have had a profound and enduring effect on Oberlin
College. Alumni often remark that the college is where they "learned to look at
art," says the president, Nancy S. Dye. "They say it changed their lives."
Morning comes fast. Some campers, unable to hack it, have decamped under cover
of darkness for toastier accommodations. The diehards rise for morning roll
call, signaling their presence with croaks. Then they are let loose on the
second floor in groups of five, each person scrambling to find the the perfect
piece.
Although the perfect piece has occasionally found itself in the grabby hands of
two students at once, none of the borrowed artworks has ever suffered serious
damage. Nor have any been lost or stolen.
At times, frames do require repairs and routine cleaning, but there is no
evidence that anyone has ever played quarters on a Matisse or used a Picasso
print as a Twister mat.
"I got it! I got it!" someone yells, scoring a coveted Lichtenstein.
The initial burst of infatuation, Ms. Dolecki says, can fade quickly. Last
semester, she rented a piece composed of primary colors and black lines. At
first she liked it. Then she started to hate it. Soon she covered it.
Spotting a student handling it now, she intervenes.
"I told him it got on my nerves," she explains later.
Others have had similar experiences. Two years ago, a student was unable to
live with an Andres Serrano photograph of a Klansman. It came back. Another
student returned a disturbing AIDS-themed silkscreen by David Wojnarowicz that
depicts skeletal remains.
But art soothes as well. At her first rental, Ms. Dolecki selected a lithograph
made up of colored blocks. She liked it, but she didn't love it. Over time,
though, it drew her in. She says that she found herself staring at the blocks,
and that the piece "began to take on my own meaning." That experience, she
says, has moved her to seriously consider declaring art her major.
"Art," she says, "is created for people to look at. The longer you look at it,
the better."