Transcript:

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On January 17, 2025, after a two-year hiatus, the second season of Apple TV’s Severance began airing. Severance is a thriller that follows the life of Mark S who works on the severed floor at the Lumon Company. A company that has a corporate practice of “severing” their employees, creating a literal “work self” called an innie and a “true self” called an outie.

The show explores a wide range of motivations and reasons why a person would choose a position that requires them to be “severed”. Severance is about actualizing the anxieties and fears accompanying the dreaded Corporate Office Job, from grief and personal insecurity to conspiracy, to corporate loyalty.

These same anxieties often follow students in the years after graduation. The lives led by the characters in Severance are the nightmare of many art school graduates. Many fear that once they leave school and enter the workforce they’ll be forced to abandon their degrees and creativity in place of survival.

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Those fears are also not unfounded. In a world that has continued to destabilize the arts through the rise of AI and prioritization of profit over product, these anxieties have not only been legitimized but also increased especially among artists soon to be leaving the safety of school into a world that tends to be hostile towards those in creative-leaning positions.

If you ask any current students how they feel about post-grad life, they’ll respond with fear and uncertainty. Any excitement is dampened by the reality of seeking out internships and jobs in a rush to get a foot in the door and become a “successful artist”

In the book “Art and Fear” the authors discuss the reality of the post-graduate slump for art school students, having been presented with four years of strong guidance creatively and academically being left to forge an independent practice in a world that’s hostile to art can leave even the most prepared artists burnt out.

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Post-grad anxiety can lead artists to believe there are clear paths that will lead to the fate of the severed employees: disconnected from their practice, isolated, and doomed to a job that cuts them off creatively or to the life of the “Successful Artist(™)”

But season one of Severance ends with an air of hope.  A hope that something can be changed, and what powers this hope is the intervention of art, untethered to the corporate prison it exists in, art will continue to persist and inspire

While many artists post-grad don’t get into huge career-altering gallery shows, or release their first network-backed cartoon, or big-publisher graphic novel immediately after school ends, that doesn’t mean failure.

There is no one true path to success as an artist or even a true definition of success.

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Severance is presenting a caricatured workspace that pushes the drudgery and isolation of office jobs to its limits.

The reality is that the show’s literalized separation of one’s persona is sheerly psychological and that work/life balance doesn’t dictate the death of artistic practice

There are ways to mitigate the anxiety and prevent it from becoming a death spiral that crushes a career that hasn’t fully started yet LIKE:

Find semi-career adjacent jobs: Teaching, Working in Print-shops, Becoming a Trader Joe’s sign artist

Independently nurturing your practice: Self-Publishing, Working with fellow artists from school to create gallery opportunities, seeking out seminars; STARTING seminars

Melding work and art: Find excuses to make art at your job, use your downtime to sketch or cartoon, find inspiration in your job that sucks

Just don’t stop MAKING ART! Severance is the fear, not the reality. Work and Art don’t need to exist diametrically, cultivate a world where you can continue to have both.