Illustration by Sana Amin/The Gazelle

Whenever someone mentions Rubén Polendo’s NYU Abu Dhabi core class Reinventions of Love, I can’t stop wincing, immediately followed by an internal justification saying, “It wasn’t that bad.” I wonder whether I’m one of those people who can’t seem to say it as it is, if I always feel the need to bluntly state the brunt of a harsh truth. Reinventions of Love wasn’t a pleasant, enjoyable experience for me.

I tried very hard to make it an enjoyable experience, though. I took Reinventions of Love while I was overloading on coursework along with an internship and Foundations of Science. It wasn’t a smart decision, and I’m always quick to admit that. Trying to balance as best as I could, I also admit that I wasn’t able to give the class the time it deserved. But that serves to emphasize my point further — it is not a course to be taken lightly, even if one thinks one can do it all. While writing this, I realize that there are some classes that demand respect and attention, and if one cannot dedicate that amount of time and concentration, then it is a great disservice to the student, the teacher and the course. I made that mistake.

There were a lot of things that I enjoyed about the class. Those experiences are still the reason why I say it wasn’t that bad. Creating art, performing using one’s bodies as the medium of expression, having an open channel for creativity and the full freedom to shape the class into whatever we wanted, the class was creative in all its dimensions. From reading Rumi and the Ramayana to watching David Lynch films, no one could ever accuse this class of not being inventive or diverse enough.

We all do have a bullshit threshold though. Something that seems creative to me might seem like bullshit to someone else, and vice versa. While the so-called art experiments, labs and assignments were wonderful and influenced my creativity, I loathed the readings, the music we had to listen to and even some of the films we had to watch. While I definitely enjoyed reading and discussing Rumi, the Ramayana and some old Arabic love poems, I just couldn’t comprehend the fascination that we were supposed to fathom with Patti Smith, Cindy Sherman or any of the music we listened to. I tried to — I really did — but I just abhorred them so much I couldn’t make myself like them. I’m a very logical person, and so if something doesn’t make sense to me, I cannot appreciate it. It could be that these artists have something truly incredible in their work which people can appreciate, but even after multiple instances of attempting to understand them, I failed. Listening to others talk about these artists seemed that people were complicating what the artists were saying, which might have been straightforward in the first place.

Perhaps that’s the biggest reason why I didn’t like Reinventions of Love. Because people wouldn’t call a spade a spade — they would call it a black, upside down heart that had a stem coming out from the bottom, which signified the two parts of it having a common root. Yeah, we’re all familiar with complicating things to increase the word count on an essay or to sound more intellectual. I saw a lot of my classmates do that in those discussions; while they’d be lauded for their insight, I’d usually get a response along the lines of, “Yeah, not really, next,” and then I’d resent my classmates and Rubén for discriminating between our ideas. After all, we were all going on tangents and hypothesizing, so why did their hypotheses make more sense than mine? Perhaps it was just the bullshit meter that I mentioned earlier — to me it all sounded the same, but to him, mine sounded like bullshit, while theirs sounded legitimate. And eventually, I got sick of all the hypothesizing too — why did things have to be so complex and have multiple meanings? Why wasn’t simplicity appreciated, and why did things have to be so dark and muddled up?

I’m not sure I understand Rubén’s or other people’s affection for dark, psychologically complex and disturbing ideas. I like to keep things simple and clean — I won’t revel in the darkness and make it sound interesting, because to me, it’s dark, and there are a lot of other more complex and intriguing things in this world that are lighter and that deserve this hype and examining under a microscope. Giving the world your worst as an artist is not art — yes, art is emotionally taxing, but there also has to be substance and wonder in your art; there has to be a unique idea. Just because something is taxing, just because somebody is intrigued by it and other people jump on the bandwagon, doesn’t make it art. I guess everyone has their own definition of art, and I happened to be in a class with a professor and some fellow classmates whose ideas of art directly contradicted mine. Or perhaps my reluctance to take the comments seriously stemmed from the fact that I had overheard my classmates making fun of the content and seen them dislike and disregard it with my own eyes and ears, and then heard them praise it a few days later as if those incidents had never happened. My definition of art and my way of examining it are different and those didn’t receive the same acceptance in class as the others did.

Since taking this class three years ago, my idea of art has grown. Given my major and the number of projects I still take on, I am yet to create something, but my creativity has become more defined and certain now. In freshman year, I was exploring everything and going through the process of trying new and different things. I had my art experience with Reinventions of Love, and today, thanks to this class, I seek out other forms of art that are within my realm of appreciation and wonder. I now know that this class did have a profound impact on me, teaching me about how the world works as well as about myself. It may not have been a pleasant experience, but it was definitely a learning experience. And who says learning is easy? After all, if our body undergoes growing pains, then perhaps lessons like these are crucial to our internal growing experiences too.