
Tell Me I’m An Artist by Chelsea Martin Review By D. W. White
Tell Me I’m An Artist by Chelsea Martin
ISBN: 1593767218
Page Count: 368 pages
Publisher: Soft Skull
Publication Date: September 20, 2022
Review By: D. W. White
Everyday Existentialism in Tell Me I’m An Artist
What is art? This timeless, answerless question has been asked quite a lot of late by artists themselves. In an age of reflecting and reexamining much within society, the essence and raison d’être of art has been, if not on trial, at least under cross examination. In movies and interviews, essays and tweets, artists and audiences alike have debated the existence, responsibility, and obligation of artistic endeavors. This line of questioning has been found with increasing frequency in the novel lineage into which Chelsea Martin’s aptly titled TELL ME I’M AN ARTIST neatly fits.
Set in San Francisco a decade ago, Tell Me I’m An Artist is the story of Joey, an art school sophomore tormented by her semester’s final project. She has elected to remake the movie Rushmore, a film she has never seen and knows amusingly little about, in an attempt at, well, something or another, something that is artistic and makes some sort of point. Joey’s self-perceived lack of genius, ambition, or confidence—especially when contrasted with her elegant, wealthy, and talented best friend Suz—is at once a central concern of the plot and an effective vehicle towards heroine-sympathy. Martin has created the quintessential college philosopher-artist, one who differs from those found in real life only by her self-awareness and honesty. This, then, is the sterling feature of Tell Me I’m An Artist: the precision, pathos, and power with which Joey, as both character and narrator, captures the experience of college and the question of art.
The contrast between Suz and Joey extends to, and in many ways emanates from, their respective backgrounds. Joey’s family life emerges as a secondary narrative, one that feels purposely calibrated and is afforded much attention from Martin. Her sister, Jenny, struggles with drug abuse, often leaving her infant son in the care of their mother. For her part, Joey’s mom is not much better, constantly demanding money from her living-on-Ramen-and-free-coffee collegiate daughter while making excuses for her absent eldest. As Joey struggles with her final project, the economic realities of San Francisco and her familial troubles intensify both her situation and, happily for the reader, contemplation. Martin, with Joey as her spokeswoman, can be remarkably poetic, capturing the glimpses of beauty occasionally found among the swirling winds of youth:
At home, finally at peace with my hot spiked tea, finally ready to be creative, I sat down and opened the document where I was taking notes for Rushmore.
I stared at the ficus tree outside my apartment window, nostalgic for the present moment…I hadn’t fully appreciated the tree, I now realized. I never gave it the consideration it deserved. I almost started crying thinking about how I didn’t give the tree the attention it deserved while I still had the chance. Then I started feeling nostalgic about the feeling I was having about the tree. Would I ever be in a position again where I was about to lose so many things I cared about at once and able to project all those feelings onto a tree? I would miss this someday, when nothing was at stake and there was nothing in my life worth worrying about losing.
Martin paints a complete, robust portrait of her protagonist, aiming to capture her emergence as an artist amid collegiate questions of meaning and creativity while breaking free of her family and the life she’s left behind. While it succeeds in contextualizing Joey, at times the remembered asides and narrative branches about her sister and mother feel more caricature than character, as if the novel is simply playing the expected hits of an inland California family, far from the glamour of the coast, struggling with money, addiction, and abuse. Especially in the first half, these pressures often seem to float away with the turning of the page, opening the book to the fair critique that it is perhaps more concerned with encompassing questions of privilege than exploring them. As the deadline for Joey’s project grows closer and her worries mount, however, this plot progression is given more weight, filling out to some degree the book’s early questions.
The real benefit of this decision, on the broader level of the novel, is less the actual circumstances of the two characters so much as the self-confidence and completeness of their respective artistic visions. Being in the first person we can only glimpse Suz’s inner world via the conjectures of our narrator, but this is all the more effective. In Joey’s view of her best friend—one colorized by her own self-doubt and insecurity—there seems to be none of the hesitant neuroticism and humorous introspection that defines Joey’s journey towards a more profound understanding of her art and herself. In this way Tell Me I’m an Artist manages to comment on the deeper divisions created by disparate social economic backgrounds, as confidence and belief in oneself is gifted to Suz while it eludes Joey. Structurally, Martin’s decision-making further aids her, as the novel’s vignetted approach—another fictive element rather en vogue of late—mirrors the moment-to-moment existence of the tortured undergraduate.
Naturally, Joey’s quest to finish her project and discover her identity as an artist is something of a metaphor (even as she really, seriously, must finish her assignment), but she nonetheless offers some endearing and accurate commentary along the way. In an early scene, she manages to distill the earnest absurdity of college and art with nothing but a broom:
In the front corner of class, I noticed a wooden broom standing on its straw bristles at an angle I found pleasant and soothing…I wondered if the broom was set there intentionally to please and soothe me, or to make me aware of my ability to be pleased and soothed by broom placement. Maybe it was someone’s left-behind art project from another class. Or, alternately, maybe it was not art at all, but the work of a careless (or overworked) janitor. If it was left by a janitor, but still caused me to think about all the same things it would have if an artist had set it up, would it not be art? Maybe both could be true, and the janitor who left it there had artistic intentions about it. Maybe the artistic intention of the janitor was to make art students think about the invisible people employed to work for them…I then noticed there was a small pile of dust and dirt next to the broom, a little brown pyramid like cartoon dust sweepings. This, to me, felt too on the nose, too convenient, proof that the broom was an intentional artistic gesture meant to bring awareness to the classist assumptions within the viewer and pit their conscious and unconscious minds against each other. Oh, it was art, undoubtedly.
Tell Me I’m An Artist comes at a time when so much in the world is open for investigation and interpretation, reassessing and rethinking. The novelistic interrogation of art, simply this year alone, is a rich one, with Martin’s work fitting alongside, among others, Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Mark Haber’s Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, and Steve Stern’s The Village Idiot. Martin’s book captures much that has given rise to this movement in the first place. Be it novel or painting, film or directionless, sophomoric project, art is an independent, solitary pursuit, one that in its isolation builds vast halls of reflection and introspection, echo chambers in which to contemplate, obsessively or willingly, the nature, the reason, the point of one’s craft. Taking its place among these reverberations, Tell Me I’m An Artist is a humane, funny, and honest dissection of youth and creativity.
Chelsea Martin is the author of Tell Me I’m an Artist, Caca Dolce: Essays from a Lowbrow Life, Even Though I Don’t Miss You, and several other books. She received a BFA from California College of the Arts in 2008 and currently lives in Spokane, WA with her husband and child.
D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. A graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and Stony Brook University’s BookEnds Fellowship, he serves as Founding Editor for L’Esprit Literary Review and Fiction Editor for West Trade Review. His writing appears in Florida Review, The Rupture, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among several other publications. A Chicago ex-pat, he now lives in Long Beach, California, where he frequents the beach to hide from writer’s block. He can be found on Twitter at @dwhitethewriter.
22 February 2023
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