For years there has been a relatively common complaint among students about the nature and purpose of the work made in the educational process. Students will spend hours and hours on a drawing or piece of art with the only pay back being a grade of some kind and little else to show for it, leaving the art they worked so very hard on seemingly forgotten. One solution to this problem would just be to make education free and affordable for all so students wouldn’t constantly be thinking to themselves “why am I paying this much money to work this hard only to get shat on by some dude for a stupid letter grade?”. However, the real solution is simple and much smarter; take every student’s artwork and build it into a giant mountain. Now why does the mountain need to exist, one may ask? Another question is why does art need to exist? To prove one key point- that it can. Art is complicated, life is complicated, art is big, life is big, this mountain… it’s big. At least 13 stories tall. Literally and metaphorically. Why 13 stories tall? Because that, I believe, is how much the work worth putting into this mountain is worth, and that’s quite a lot of work, even if it may not seem like it. Also, the mountain would replace the needless fountain in between the library and that other building that has like…the LAC in it and other things? The point is, when the horses come to visit Pratt, they won’t just be parading around a fountain, they’ll be parading up and down an entire mountain. 13 stories of material is just enough to symbolize the frustration of creation without soul, as 13 is unlucky, and spending hours and hours on work one does not actually care for is the very definition of unlucky. At the bottom of the mountain, serving as its foundation, would be a concoction of all sculpture major’s artwork, as most of its rectangular but more importantly heavy, and spacious. The next layer would be comprised of the blueprints and rough sketch design for every single assignment from every single major, thus bringing the mountains height up from ten feet to probably at least one mile in height. In order to condense the mountain and not make it one large flimsy pile of paper, however, the blueprints will have to be coated in a thick glue-like substance, thus causing the mountain to now look like a giant abstract cinnamon roll. From there, we simply add every single unwearable project created in the fashion department for padding and to separate the heavier layers from the lighter ones. This is to make the mountain—in the extremely unlikely case it's needed to be—mobile. Just in case the lease does finally run out on the Pratt property and all that. Next, any other 3d or 2d work (with the exception of the painting, film and photography majors, of course) would be placed into a compactor to be made into 3 foot by 3 foot bicubic blocks that would make for a more organized and easily climbable mountain. Each block would be carefully placed on the mountain, just as carefully as the artwork the block is made from was created as. Finally, at the top of the mountain, a series of hard drives containing only the crappiest 2d technical work would be melted down to form a special and unique mantle for another series of hard drives containing the best films and photography created at Pratt institute. In addition, the mountain would be layered, with every single unwanted painting from the painting major, each carefully cut from its canvas and even more carefully stapled to the side of the mountain to add color. Finally, using a single bulldozer, a haphazard pathway will be carved to the top of the mountain so that only the strongest students may ascend it. If this all seems a bit too complex, there is a much simpler solution; simply let people make the kind of work they need to make.
- Dylan Bowman