Bethan recommends “The Art Teacher” by Rufus Wainwright
Rufus Wainwright’s ‘The Art Teacher’ threw me off-centre when it popped up in my Spotify Discover Weekly as I mindlessly fiddled with spreadsheets at my office job. His lucid vocals, layered over sparse piano rocking back and forth, told of a girl’s first love: her young, charismatic art teacher. I was shocked by the song’s simplicity, both in production and subject matter. It felt intimate, close, and overwhelmingly real.
The lyrics tell a simple story – a vignette of the besotted schoolgirl on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum juxtaposed against her adult self’s reflection on the memory – and Wainwright is light on detail. There is no description of this beautiful teacher or indication of his artistic identity beyond “he liked Turner”. In a kind of chiaroscuro, Wainwright reveals the ‘picture’ of his song through negative narrative and musical space. The teacher, like the darkness of a Caravaggio, is made even more desirable by his unknowability. ‘The Art Teacher’ reflects this incomprehensible beauty in its desperate attempts to capture the past. Wainwright’s breaths sound like he’s drawing air through his teeth in brief snatches of pain, which is what this memory provokes for the narrator – momentary, almost-pleasurable, stinging reminders of what’s forever lost.
As Katherine Williams remarks in The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter, the ever-flexible “I” pronoun allows Wainwright to play with gender, aligning his own homosexuality with the girl-narrator’s love of her teacher and hence blurring the line between artist and subject. He reaches out to the listener with clarity and honesty, simultaneously baring his identity while also hiding behind a female persona. The final line, repeated from the end of the memory sequence, reads as a cliché on paper: “Never have I loved any other man”. The directness of his connection with the listener, however, accompanied only by repetitive piano and muted trombone, allows Wainwright to transform this impersonal cliché to something personally felt and intensely believable. This song is proof of the power of art – visual, musical, or verbal – to focus the generality of human experience into a piercing Cupid’s arrow.
Bethan Holloway-Strong is a university administrator (by day) and a writer (also by day). She thinks a lot about weeping willows, ways to hang pictures on the wall while keeping her rental deposit, and peaches.
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