Another Hysterical Putdown Artist
Goes to Town
(revised 19 June 2006)

Her name was Sally Steffler nee Brown and thence nee Anderson, mine was Barbara Jean (Marie) Gurskey nee Campbell nee Brown (later nee Brown, yet again) and we were both in art school.
Lemme tell you about it.

We were each about to complete work as undergrads in a Midwest Big Ten University. I was earning a Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts, her interest was only for the Bachelor of Arts. The same basic thing you might say and I might agree except for certain very clear differences.
You see, the Fine Arts degree (BFA) meant that one completed more hours of class time than the Arts degree (BA). It was also necessary to receive sponsorship of two university professors in one’s field for the BFA and also if one intended graduate work, to proceed to work toward the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree.

I had less than no interest in teaching art in the public schools in Michigan, partially because of the way I saw my contemporaries treat our art teacher when I was attending high school in a small town near Ann Arbor. But, mostly, I didn’t like public schools and neither did I appreciate compulsary education.

But, back to ol' laughin' Mustang Sally, our heroic BA earning, other woman's husband screwing overweight girl with a penchant for foul language. She was palest white in color, freckled and she had full lips. She carried herself like a wrestler sporting and touting her “sensitive skin” like a badge of honor. By that I mean she walked with a bit of a swagger, probably due to the extra girth of her thighs. She radiated anger and frustration and had an unsurpassed need to express it.

I saw her slightly sad bravado as a kind of cover for something else I was willing to forgive, giving her the benefit of the doubt. I thought time would heal the wounds she seemed to be carrying around as excess baggage, one failed marriage behind her, a child she parented alone and other stuff nameless to me then.



We’d go on some Friday afternoons to the local bar where the art crowd drank socially to celebrate the end of yet another week. We celebrated the joy of the work or were just glad another week was over. For me it was the joy of the work, mostly, but I also drank to take the edge off my worries concerning my mom who, at the time, was losing an eight-year long battle with cancer.

Sally was a loud and frequent laugher. There was a restlessness to her. It was the kind, as a matter of fact, that took her into the bed of one of the art department professors, the one that she had most proudly seduced. She laughed nervously about the tears that flowed in front of one of his classes afterwards, evan as she giggled callously in the same class.
He was crying publicly from the guilt he was left with after their brief fling. She had no respect for him, his tears or his pain. She whispered about him in his presence.
He was known to be a heavy drinker. It was obvious from her talk to me about him that he was little more than a conquest for her. His tears, meanwhile, proved to me, at least, that she was a lapse of good sense for him.

After that rather ugly indiscretion all Sally could say about her status as an art student was that she was dying to get done and get out and teach art in high school.

I guess I should have seen her displaced aggression coming far in advance of the afternoon when Sally attacked my person in a drunken rage. She dressed me down in a classic dump of lousy feeling born of bad temper, most probable denied guilt which was intricately laced with jealousy of my commitment to my work.
She was envious, too, of the seemingly rock solid marriage I was enjoying at the time whereas she was between husbands in more ways than one.





I suppose her denial of any shred of guilt or other civil feeling following her conquest of the quiet, gentle and appealing man who she had slept with should have tipped me off to the tumultuous emotions which she was about to wield in the face of my lack of appreciation of her life decisions.
Her notions of visual art were light-weight and her knowledge of contemporary art world / cutting edge thinking were as backward as her understanding of the history of art.

She had taken all the required classes and left it at that. By comparison I had read everything I could get my hands on about art fitting it into all waking hours between classes and running a household with two sons and a husband who was developing a drinking problem of his own.
I was as fascinated about my field in contemporary terms as I was about its ancient history, my desire for more was insatiable. My lust for time to work was nearly lamentable.
Sally’s thinking was patently superficial to the reasons that the best work in the field is ever accomplished. I should have known that our personal and professional differences were too large to rest well on a sea of alcohol.
After working her courage up by getting suitably soused she told me she had something to say to me.
She said she had a “bone to pick with” me. She told me I wasn’t going to like what she had to say. I stupidly sat and gave her permission to tell me what she had on her mind, thinking that a friendship could always survive the truth as one might know it.


She began by saying she thought my art slant was phony and that I thought myself superior to her. She went on to tell me, “You make me sick…” with all my notions of art and my aspirations to make great work.

My near reverence for certain artists that excited me to make more art repulsed her.

On and on she went, grinding an ax of a mind that was so dull and inadequate to the task of excellent work in our field that it seemed she could hone on forever and never find anything of beauty or depth in her path without destroying it with pleasure and then laughing over it.

Attempting to sharpen her own cutting edge she clearly seemed to want to hurt and harm me ... all because of her own frustrations and lack of anything useful to say either in her work or in her interpersonal sphere.

There I sat, dazed and frozen in place wondering who this spoiled brat of a foul-mouthed creature was, where all this venom had come from and whether she would ever stop.

She continued to harangue me until and up to the point that she finally wound down and had nothing more to say.
I had sat and listened in stunned disbelief at her need to cut me down to what she thought was the acceptable social size.
Dumbfounded, I saw her personify all the trite and thoughtless conclusions of the average American who thought nothing of art, fine or otherwise; belittling its value except as a tool to any end that merged with a paycheck or other tangible reward.


She was an art teacher at heart and an insatiable American woman like most of the ones whose main ends were a bourgoise life and a shiny new car, husband, home and whatever else gave her status in the most obvious terms.

Sally and the Junior League.
Sally and her art education connections in the Lansing Schools.
Sally’s sexual needs.
Sally’s desire for amusement, more Sally, Sally, Sally than would ever seem reasonable to a rational, thoughtful adult.

To this day I do not know why I didn’t just get up and cold cock her precisely in the middle of that face.

Of course, you and I both know why I didn't do that.

Mayhaps I am and was an artist but such violence was simply not an option for a gal like me in 1969.

Remember, women could not go to war except as nurses, back then.