Todd Adams doesn't know what to do. He'd like to leave El Paso and go elsewhere to get his MFA, but he has a really cool job that he can't just quit.

Adams is the strapping, good-looking lad who lays whiskey down five nights a week behind the bar at GeoGeske on the corner of Cincinnati and Stanton. "It's a blast," he says.

"It's not just about making drinks, it's about giving people an experience, it's like performance art. Watching people is one of my favorite things, and my job is like the Discovery Channel, watching people go through their rituals, picking someone up, getting rid of someone - in love, out of love, drunk, sober - every combination."

He's frustrated, however, because he feels that bartending rather lacks the intellectual stimulation of art school. When he was an undergraduate at UTEP, he loved the camaraderie of the sculpture studio, bullshitting with the other students and debating with the faculty. "It was really fun, joking and teasing each other - it's all very machismo you know, making sculpture in Texas with the guys. At the restaurant we gossip a lot, but when it comes to discussing art theory, I don't have anyone to talk to. That's why I feel like I have to hurry up and go to grad school and be surrounded by people who are thinking the same things I am. Sometimes I see an old classmate and we talk for 20 or 30 minutes, but then I won't see him for another month or two, and I want to have those interesting conversations every day, but I work in a bar.

"My bosses don't understand what I'm doing or why I want to be an artist. They think it's a mistake for me to pursue art because of the lack of profit, and they want me to stay and develop new restaurants and bars with them. They tell me that if I stick with them, I'll be making six figures in ten or 15 years, but it's not about that to me. They don't understand my need to have acceptance in the art world.

"I'll be miserable if I stay in the restaurant business. I don't want to end up 20 yrs from now being out of touch with the culture and not know what's going on. I wish I wasn't working so much. The work of a lot of artists is about their early years, and I have to experience being an artist now. I'm 31, and I feel like if I don't switch to being a full-time artist in the next five years . . .

"When I graduated from UTEP, some of the professors told me that I was going to end up in the restaurant business, so any show I've been in since has kind of been just to prove them wrong."

His relationship with some of the UTEP faculty was rivalrous from the time he enrolled. He first learned about art as kid growing up in Tyler, Texas when his mom would take him to look at the French Impressionists in the Houston and Dallas museums, and later, after he got out of the Air Force in Alamogordo, he moved in with his uncle, Steve Edwards, on Robinson Street. Unlike the teachers at UTEP, Edwards sells his original artwork at craft fairs, and he and the academics are dismissive of each other. Adams was saddled with a legacy of perennial contention between his uncle and his teachers, which he then stirred up a bit himself. "I was always challenging people who were telling me what's what, whether they're right or wrong, and my professors at UTEP were adamant about what was art and what wasn't art, and so was my uncle.

"My uncle is a Southwestern realist and his work is about the mastery and technique of traditional media like etching and painting and sculpture, and I'm thankful that I had him teach me about those things. Academics are happy when someone comes along who has the talent to actually make things, but ultimately they're more interested in ideas, and in giving art a twist and being edgy. During my first couple years at UTEP, I was caught in this clash between the contemporary art at school and the traditional, white-trash background role model I had at home, and I almost quit UTEP because I couldn't figure out what I wanted. Finally, I came to believe you have to have both. Linear perspective was figured out hundreds of years ago, and you can't just be good at that and expect to impress people. Good art has to make you think, but if you're a conceptual artist and you don't have skill and talent in traditional media, that's not enough either, what you make has got to be beautiful.

"I want to record what our culture is currently about, and my work has become a little gender related lately. I'm not an activist artist; I've never been political because that bores me. Gender, on the other hand, is one of the last areas where there's a lack of tolerance, and I want to be a part of making people more open-minded to new ideas. That's why I dressed up like my mother in front of the art department.

"I basically went through some stories about my mom showing me how to do manly things like how to tie a tie, how to shave, how to fight a bully off - things your dad usually teaches you - but I'm telling these stories while putting on make-up and dressing up like my mother as if she were going out on a date with a prospect like she did when I was seven years old. It has something to do with my childhood - my mother raising me - but part of the piece was the audience's reaction to their preconceived notions of how secure I am in my manhood when actually I'm afraid to throw a football because I might look like I throw like a girl. I believe that an audience is the conclusion of a piece of art - art isn't finished until an audience sees it.

"I have to get to the point where I'm just making art, and I need the conversation of graduate school to do that, but that scares me because if I go off to grad school, nobody's going to know me there, and how could I have an effect on an audience that doesn't know me? They would have to be interested in what I'm doing, but they wouldn't know me. They couldn't understand that performance piece about my mom because they don't know me.

"Here, I'm a bartender and I know a ton of people, and when I have an art it's basically my customers and art students and friends and family that come, and they go there knowing, hey, this is Todd the bartender, or Todd the art student, and they all know me.

"It's all about the audience for me, so maybe I should stay here for a while and minimize my property, get rid of everything I don't need to make art, and just be an artist in El Paso because I have an audience here. I'm thinking about moving into a warehouse downtown. As long as it has a toilet and sink, I could build a shower, and I could work, sleep, make art and eat there. It doesn't matter how you live when you're an artist because the girls will still come to your house They don't care if you live in an old body shop.

"Or maybe I should just move to a big city and do exactly what I'm doing now, but do it there. I could move to New York and get a job bartending there. I'm a good bartender, I could work three days a week and live frugally. I could make ends meet in New York, I could live in Brooklyn.

"I'd love to be able to go to New York and suffer a little bit in order to make my work, but I don't want to go up there and become bankrupt or get deeper in debt. I need to have a plan. I need to save up and then go to New York and reinvent myself. Wouldn't it be great to reinvent yourself as an artist every couple of years? If you could make it in a gallery and start selling to museums, and then start doing different work under a different name and make it again as a different artist, that would be great.

"It's just that it's so comfortable in El Paso . . . I don't know what to do."

- 30 -

©2003 Richard Baron

Send comments to Richard at rbaron@elp.rr.com.