"Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed."
Fantasy people make believe people, how can you go on, but you're still livin'
Listening to Erykah Badu this morning after being totally immersed in ways of thinking that are very outside of and beyond my subjective experience. Realizing that, though I value ways of thinking that are less self focused, it's important to reflect on my emotional experience of life and take it seriously. If I don't, I end up in this harmful, disconnected territory in which I am willing to put myself through too much.
Sometimes things are so painful and repeatedly challenging I have the urge to disconnect violently from my experience. I want to sever my immersion in minute by minute life, my perception, from my thoughts and from my emotion. I want to deny my intense feeling. My experience is very potent, so I can't just pretend painful things aren't happening. I have immediate, strong emotions AND thoughts about everything that happens to me. Its the opposite of passivity. So instead of being detached or indenial during painful experiences, when I'm in this fearful place, I tell myself my experience is irrelevant. I tell myself that, considering the billions of people having similar experiences and my relative insignificance in human history, I can't really think my pain matters.
It does though.
Art made from pain is beautiful and significant and no matter how abstract and encompassing my thoughts become, I will always be grounded in and return to my subjective experience whether I like it or not. This is my vessel for abstract, creative thought. If I deny it, my ideas and my art will stop making sense. They will become context-less.
As a person, I become disconnected from the people around me. I don't want this. My connection with others through art, through love, through friendship and mentorship is the greatest reward I've experienced in life so far. So I'll take my experience seriously and listen to myself when I hurt. Erykah Badu reminds me to do this.
Right wing intellectuals have been imagining a new(not good) future while left wing intellectuals have been noticing and pointing out how hopelss everything is for way too long and now we are paying the price We should trade Michel Foucault for Buckminster Fuller out of sheer necessity if we have to worship the ideas of a dead white man
2/5/2025
I feel like I need to moderate my treatment of art institutions in my recent thoughts to reflect the practical approach I'm trying to come up with. I'm not on some sort of take down, cancellation mission of art institutions. People do that all the time. Its an accepted art form (institutional crit) and/or a practiced protest method (@changethemuseum on instagram). This is constantly taking place with no sign of efficacy. Instead, I want to look at these networks of institutions as a small part of the area in which artists can be effective in society again.
We should appreciate, collaborate with, and put to the best use, all available institutions and networks with the goal of increasing the immediate effectiveness of art on society by directing its energy outward--towards what's outside of the art community--rather than inward. Sometimes that would include existing art institutions and networks, but not always, and not necessarily. It isn't engaging with institutions that hurts artists. Its believing in their power to change things more than we believe in our work or ourselves. We continue to put validation by whatever institution we've decided to believe in before any other goal of our art, and it is this that prevent's its effectiveness more than anything else.
What we claim about our work often directly opposes this reality, which creates a kind of surreal confusion around artists' intentions. Because we are incapable of stating our actual desires and motivations--to be validated and empowered by institutions--we resort to complicated explanations of the great social/moral/political impact of works that are actually designed to exist in institutional spaces that limit their potential. Artworks created for this purpose can't be socially, politically, or morally effective.
Furthermore, by leaving our legitimate self-interest unstated, we also forgo the possibility of dissecting it, critiquing, it, understanding it, and altering our methods of achieving what we want to make them more effective. We seek institutional validation because we want power. Simply, we want the power to share art we think can effect change in the world. We also want recognition and admiration, money and security, a sense of social and professional relevancy. At least that's what I want power for at a foundational level. I think beginning with this honest admission is the first step in coming up with better methods of engaging institutions. Step 2 is realizing that seeking validation from art institutions in the standard ways likely will not result in the above stated goals.
In this writing, I want to point out that its not even the institution that causes the problem. Institutions aren't always great, but they're inevitable and full of valuable resources that we should use. Rather than blame institutions for artist's inability to effect change in the world, artist's should take responsibility for our belief that we need them for power. We don't.
In art communities, this disempowering belief manifests as the reverent, worshipful manner with which we regard certain artists, museums, galleries, schools, etc., and the amount of time and energy we dedicate to this activity. In fact, I'd say most if not all of artist's time is spent in service of institutions, from the making and conceiving of art to social media presence to professional activity. Most all of this is done with the end goal of attaining approval by some entity that represents institutional power. It barely matters what these particular revered individuals or institutions are. I could list examples endlessly. They vary by group and by taste (another idea I can't take seriously). For example, one clique might worship Bauhaus artists, while another worships the social practice legacy of Suzanne Lacy. Some worship the Whitney Biennial, while others worship local political arts orgs that are supposed to counteract elitism in stuff like the Whitney Biennial. We adopt the attitude of awe around certain artists and institutions that religions give their gods, though most of us are more or less anti-religious (another vague ideology passed by osmosis to the art community from theory with little overt discussion or effort to trace the tendency to its source). [Insert impressive art person/org ] is to art people as Jesus is to evangelicals.
We are neither practical nor critical. In a feat of delusion, we may even worship the performance of criticality, materialism, and atheism, dogmatically enforcing their aesthetics and language, an appearance and communication style based on visual trends of modernism and post-modernism, in our art lives. But that's just one example. As humans, we can worship anything, any aesthetic, and person, and history. It seems like we seek this out because we desire someone or something--anything--show us the way to live, to show us what's right. Unfortunately, once a person finds the right way, they inevitably find the wrong way, which must then be condemned. This attitude is dangerous because it causes us to see certain people, institutions, ideas, and art as superior in an unarguable way. We end up judging work not by its effects in the world, but by its conformity to the agreed upon ideal. This moralizing approach doesn't help anyone.
While our attention goes to admiring and miming what is essentially history--something that emerged from successive layers of the past accumulating into this thing we "like", the world turns, and people like Elon Musk effect change. Artists put all their energy into demonstrating their fealty to art traditions, and no matter how cool or modern, the sycophantic action is the same--it leads nowhere. Artist's actions are ineffective because they are trapped in this feedback loop of institutional validation. They are not oriented towards the effects they have on the world. Instead, they are oriented toward a state of mind (reverence and worship of history and its representatives) and the products of the mind (thoughts that produce art).
Its not that art has no immediate impact--its that art's impact is being directed only towards the goal of validation by the institution. It could easily be directed elsewhere, but it's not. Museums, biennials, galleries, and other art institutions and art people also do not direct their energy towards the massive area outside of the art sphere/community/world/whatever you want to call it. Why? My answer is that they only exist to sustain themselves within the network of art systems and institutions. There is no practical, effect-oriented goal of art that exists beyond its own admiration.
This whole argument is definitely related to Benjamin's idea of aura. Artworks no longer carry the offending aura, however. Thankfully they are innocent again, reproduced to the point of meaninglessness, to the point of inauthenticity so profound its now nothingness, like Morandi vases. Images are the perfect still life objects, (an idea I'm explore in my newest paintings). Its also not the institutions that are the problem, though we admire them for the same reasons Benjamin said we admired art objects--we see in institutions a supernatural-seeming ability to effect change in the world, which we are convinced we can't achieve without them. They have the power and are the powerful creations of masterminds, thus they carry the aura rather than artworks. But I don't think its this institution aura that's to blame either.
We have two objects people have willed into being and both of them are faultless--art and art institutions. Its actually just our way of thinking--our need to worship a "right" idea and condemn "wrong" one, and our willingness to devote all of our energy and resources to the demonstration of our "correct" position that is at the heart of this ineffectiveness of art. Changing the efficacy of art in society will have to begin with changing our whole manner of thinking and behaving around our work and in our social circles and communities.
Just focusing on the art, just being activist artists, just quitting art to influence policy or something won't be enough. We have to change the way we think, speak, communicate, and engage systems.
2/1/2025
Old art methods aren't working socially, politically, economically. By not working, I mean they're really having almost no effect except within our little closed networks (local art scenes, internet communities, etc.) or for individuals (the very small number of wealthy artist who make money from their work). They aren't really helping anyone. The old art methods are just sustaining their own systems and we are kind of like the fuel of the system rather than its beneficiaries. Even the most famous and important artists whose work is all about social change, institutional critique, social justice, etc. have almost zero effect outside of art systems. No one knows about what we are doing. We just keep throwing away all of our effort into the void in the middle of the pit of the art world.
Whether its a conspiracy or not, the fact is that these systems are worse than echo chambers. They are little prisons with invisible boundaries in which we can literally do whatever we want and it will have no effect on the rest of the world. We can rage, protest, be as weird and abject as we want, go to extremes of effort and visual and social loudness, and none of it will be heard outside of our little bubbles. Social media and internet communities in which people openly criticize art systems and institutions arent really different, though at least people feel emboldened to point out the glaringly obvious in those spaces.
This wasn't the dream of the people so many of us emulate and admire. I personally think of Dada artists and the early performance artists like Carolee Scneeman and Allan Kaprow and in the US who were trying to make an new art that wasn't so dead and easy to ignore. Action wasn't supposed to be caged in massive museums/mausoleums, but it has been. Its contained and useless. At every level, art systems and institutions function on an "every man for himself" basis. Participants compete and hold on to their small pool of resources, all of which are used to sustain whatever local art system barely allows them to live. All this in spite of the fact that so many artists claim to be working against hierarchies and individualism. In my opinion, though intentions are good, most of this work is performative rather than substantially different from paintings and sculptures. Their end goal is the same. To have a show in a gallery or museum that will be experienced by the same audience in the same way a painting will be experienced with a little variation in space and time. These ideas aren't working because they're enacted within a system that contains them and prevents them from functioning. There is no way artists can meaningfully effect politics, social systems, etc., with this being the case.
Instead of seeking institutional validation or doing anything with systems or institutions at all, including critique, artists working in this vein should direct their efforts outward, towards the rest of the world. We should be willing to accept the consequences of intense actions in non-art spaces, and we should work together to plan them.
I really believe that its continuing to work within these systems and institutions--continuing to serve and sustain them--that is preventing artists' good work from having an effect. We have to stop worshipping famous people and big name institutions. We have to stop serving the idea of our own personal ascension within these systems. We have to abandon them if we want to participate in changes taking place in the world right now, which we should be.
Artists' skill set is well suited to counteract what people like Trump, Elon, Peter Theil and Curtis Yarvin are cooking up for America. They've got a plan. Artists could have a plan too. We are just as smart and just as wild. But we are stuck in this jello of art history and personal fantasy. Being cool and having shows seems like its enough for most of us. It isn't enough, and in the end we won't have anything. What little we have now won't always be available if this bro fantasy is fully realized.
1/30/2025
As I’ve developed this idea, I’ve taken a lot of thinking from Graham Harman and his Object Oriented Ontology, Arthur Danto and his idea of the philosophical disenfranchisement of art, and Nietzsche in his description of people’s self-interested motivations, which help me think through power dynamics in art systems–specifically why people behave the way they do, which usually has nothing to do with art. I’ve also thought a lot about Kant and descriptions of aesthetic experience, especially trying to understand the particular flow of perception, understanding, and judgement as it takes place in the act of art making, which is so much more complex than standard aesthetic experience or the experience of the art viewer. I’ve also thought a lot about phenomenology and detached, descriptive language in the art making process as a tool for understanding it better. I’m thinking through this because I love art and think it generates a power that will help people resist overwhelming external influences in rough political, economic, and social circumstances.
We believe the power that comes from institutions is our only source of power as artists, but its not. In order to understand and access the power inherent to art making, we need a new language to describe what we do, intentionally disconnected from institutions, other disciplines, theory, politics, etc.
It’s true that to be an artist now you have to be accepted by a set of institutions. If you aren't, you're just not part of the conversation. It’s also true that language has replaced image as the means of understanding art within the institution. How we describe the work (and especially how representatives of institutions like critics, art historians, and experts from other academic disciplines write about artworks using specialized language and complex arguments) matters more than the work or its image. Without language and institutional validation, art isn't fully functional in the network of galleries, museums, art departments, etc. we all participate in.
At the same time, it’s commonplace to joke about the silliness of art speak, of wordy artist statements and unintelligible theoretical writings, usually full of jargon from non-art disciplines. My own grad school writing was embarrassingly like this. We know intuitively that the language of institutions misses a lot about art, but our criticisms take place outside of the institutionally sanctioned discourse. What we read about art in Artforum, in museum wall texts, gallery press releases, etc. is different from what we say to our friends in private.
I take the frustration with art speak as evidence that art’s dependence on language and institutions isn’t inevitable or accurate in describing how art works or how it’s made. It reveals the problem we all know exists with the way we contain and discuss art right now. It reveals the small area to which we’ve restricted art and artists. I’m on a mission to de-contain art–to release it from the bounds of museums and galleries and dead, boring language. I think art’s influence is immediate, affective, and sometimes visceral. Works that master these qualities ignite a kind of power particular to art that evades language and transcends institutions, and that will eventually win out because of how it affects people. Art doesn’t really require an institution, validation, or an explanatory text. We’ve just played along with this convention enough that we’ve forgotten why we are doing it in the first place. We do it because we think we need to align to famous, powerful people and museums and galleries for our work to become known. Do we believe in their supremacy? I never did. I believed in what I was doing in my own practice and wanted to grow somehow. The power contained within the microcosm of the art making experience is far more potent than influence or institutional clout or complicated theories of art proposed by experts from various disciplines could ever approximate. In fact, the institutions and theories only exist to showcase, explain, disseminate, and archive the work of artists. Right now, the project closest to my heart is observing my own artistic practice closely so that I can develop a language that isn’t institutional, but artistic, so that artists can more easily access the power directly available to them in their practice. We’ve learned to ignore this power, and we can learn to take it seriously again.
I contrast two types of power that I see at work in artist’s lives and that we routinely confuse/conflate. The first has to do with influence over increasingly large numbers of people. It’s about dominating and controlling the narrative, and changing the way more and more massive groups act, consume, think. In my opinion, this kind of power is dangerous because its a voracious appetite that requires no goal. Ceaseless expansion is its only end. It helps nothing. Its content can be anything, no matter how vile, useless, or harmful. Furthermore, the goal of influencing ever larger numbers of people seems increasingly absurd. The number of living people on earth is incomprehensibly large. I see the desire to reach an endlessly expanding group as pointless and ineffective, especially if this becomes an end in itself.
The second type of power is one I’m working hard to understand. It’s the power I see originate during the act of art making. It requires nothing but observation, willingness, and open mindedness on the part of the individual artist. It demands nothing from others. Really, it is nothing, but results in artworks. I’ve been using object oriented ontology and other relation-based philosophies to help me observe this microcosm.
There is an inherent incompleteness in the idea of power as influence, domination, and control. It’s the idea that power has to occur on a massive scale to matter that I disagree with. Noticing the phenomena within the art making situation is helping me to describe this other kind of power that I am so wordlessly familiar with already.
In my daily drawing practice, I notice how my understanding shifts as I work. I notice how external objects appear to me, traveling from their spot at a distance from me, entering my mind, then exiting again as physical images, awkwardly mediated by my body and its line based approximation of my vision and my thoughts and feelings. This is a quiet, solitary process. I don't think in words when I do this work. I’m immersed in a set of complex relations. It’s like I’m on a carnival ride of super slow experience. Nothing is mundane in this state. I’m communicating with the external (often inanimate) world, and I am instantly shifted by this set of relations. I see the images I generate during this process as powerful because they affect my actions, my decisions, my understanding of and response to my surroundings. I witness a similar phenomenon as I teach drawing. Students’ way of being in and understanding the world shifts in the act of drawing, often very quickly. In the classroom setting, relations are even more complex because of the intentional intervention of discussion and instruction. We have to consciously stop the powerful process of drawing to attempt to understand it, though it’s obvious such a process is far too complex for language to grasp. We enjoy passing around our experiences of the process because it’s moving. It’s probably similar to the reasons people like to tell scary stories or talk about their children. These are intriguing human experiences that provide many rewards, and so is the act of drawing. The same is true for all other forms of art making though I have focused on drawing in my thinking so far because it’s the one I know the best and it has a special relationship to mimesis, aesthetic experience, subject/object relations, physicality, and mental versus perceptual imagery etc. It’s a good basic starting point for thinking about how art works.
The kind of power I experience in the drawing process begins as an exceptionally small thing. It comes from the most basic act of acknowledgement in which I recognize the distance between my eye, my body, my arm, hand and fingertips and some other object, usually something unimportant. It is also totally private. There are no witnesses to document the occurrence of this event, and if there are, they don’t see anything remarkable. Yet the works that emerge from my relation through drawing with the external world (and even with my own consciousness in the case of drawings made from memory and imagination) are special. We love some artworks. We celebrate them, and even worship them. People like me love, celebrate, and worship the drawing process itself. I return to it again and again because it is a source of power for me. I’ve been nourished by it for my whole life. I worship it because it is safe to worship. It is nothing. Its the quietest part of my mind with the smallest part of reality. Not a god or a cult leader or a state or institution. It can’t betray me because it doesn’t really exist outside of my own perception in a particular moment.
Though I have a sense of awe and love as I draw, I don’t think it’s necessary to see this as a mystical process. It’s all very clear and accessible as a series of relations. I’m not looking for a vital or essential source within me or anything else in describing this process. I think describing the unfolding of events in the network of relations is enough to illuminate a forgotten tool of empowerment. We have abandoned tools like this favor of influence, domination, control, and recognition, none of which are bad in and of themselves. They just aren’t fully effective ways of giving people agency.
I also do not mean to negate context by focusing on the microcosm of the drawing process. I understand that its impossible to detach from historical, social, political, economic etc. conditions. I know I bring all of these to the act of making. My focus on this small area is only meant to simplify the scope of my inquiry. I think its necessary to re-evaluate the most basic parts of art making in order to understand how they work on a massive, macro scale. I think we've been doing macro thinking too much, while losing touch with the micro and forgetting what art is especially good at doing.
I started this essay writing about art institutions and language and the limits they impose on artists’ agency. Art people mistakenly believe we are beholden to the theories of art that created these dependencies—the dependence of images on language, the dependence of the artist on institutions.
But, like the theory of the Christian god, these theories have to be preached an ritualized to be influential. We believe them because we repeat them and see them repeated everywhere. All theories gain influence this way, but art isn’t a theory. Art is an active, wordless relation between consciousness and the external world, or between consciousness and itself.
memory is the new reality
Living in memory and nostalgia through multiple images or aesthetic objects seen or experienced at once.
Winter Break 2024 (mostly notes app and music)
Distortion in drawing thorugh awkwardness, chance, gesture, layering. Photographic noise, random unintentional images, printing versus direct images specifically for the lack of clarity that indicates a distant time or memory
Sound that is distorted, noisy, distant, generally unclear. Calling on imagery from distant but known times and places. Its hyperreality but its so sweet and beautiful. Everything we do is already a memory, already aesthetic. I don't mind that. Already beautiful, rarely sublime. the sublime is still scary and unpredictable.
I've listened to a lot of music over this break. It's all of another time, but made now. Each artist immerses in some distant moment, recreates the sound of that time, creates a huge distance/extreme closeness between now and then. The result is a special sweetness, so personal and private. is it an escape? A fantasy? I don't think so. i think its necessary for unlocking some sort of love in art. This is image making. Image making is always at a distance form reality, and that's why we love it.
Art that forces people into the ugly moment is valuable too of course, but right now I'm not drawn to that--to art that ends with that goal.
The drawing and painting process fascinate me because when practiced in particular ways they record the process of beginning in the ugly moment and ending in some other reality, generated by the complete art object--the image--that transports viewer and artist. Images awaken the mind.
Movie at Nana's
Last July, I watched a movie with my mother and grandmother. I was surprised by what I thought and felt. This essay is an elaboration of my surprise. As a contemporary artist working in academia, I am well aware of what low brow creations count as artistically valuable and which do not (whether or not I agree with those valuations). The movie I watched that night was what most art people I know would call bad, and not bad in a good way like B horror movies for example. In my world, these are unarguably trendy. This movie was not trendy. By “serious art people” standards of taste, it had no redeeming qualities. The movie, Ordinary Angels starring Hilary Swank, is based on a true story–the story of an alcoholic woman who relentlessly fundraises to pay for a dying child’s liver transplant. Sentimental, predictable, but also …real? Girl, [aesthetic considerations are] so confusing, as Charli XCX sings in the song of the same name from her recent album Brat, which has taken over the internet. (Bracketed text added by me). I evoke Brat throughout this essay (italicized text) because of how, like Ordinary Angels, the album messes with ideas of what’s good and not good artistically, how we form our own judgements, and who, at the institutional level, gets to decide what should affect us significantly and what should not. Brat also deals with subjective experience, which I think is the best means for understanding art or anything else. A clear picture of one’s personal, subjective experience and how that relates to the external world is, in my opinion, the necessary precondition for consequential artistic action. As I wrote, phrases from Charli’s songs flitted in and out of my mind, cutting to the quick of my ideas and emotions. I include them where they entered my thought process, not because I view them as artistically superior or valuable, but because they were with me at the time of my experience of the movie, and then of writing. Their inclusion carries additional weight now, in August 2024, as Brat has been propagandized by the Democratic party, with Charli’s support, for the Harris-Walz presidential bid. I rely on descriptions of my lived experience even as I think through art ideas because I believe it grounds my thinking. Though my thoughts about art can become convoluted, my momentary experience just is. It flows and guides me and remains open for me to interpret as memory. It tames and slows my mind, quelling tangents and bringing the most relevant ideas to the surface. As with my art, my best thinking emerges with memory. What follows is my description of the event of the movie, Ordinary Angels, from my perspective and how it led me to a realization about the relationship between subjective experience and art. —— As the opening scenes played, I was condescending and distracted. Hilary Swank’s over-done down home Tennessee country accent, the absurdly hot roofer dad whose daughter needs a new liver banging away at roofs in tight jeans and with that popular hot guy mustache, heartfelt AA meeting shares and alcoholic table dancing, cancer stuff…I was sitting there on my Nana’s couch barely able to contain my disdainful smirks and scoffs. I was also glued to my phone, deleting and re-downloading instagram over and over again because I’m addicted to it, trying to stop looking but also obsessed with imagined messages, likes, follows. My eyes darted between the TV screen and my phone screen. My disapproving laughter, barely audible, must have emerged somewhere between the screens and my fiending social media engagement. My Mom dozed, bored. Periodically she’d stir, giving me looks that said “Don’t be condescending.” I’m ashamed I’m still so immature, but so is my Mom. When she wasn’t sleeping she’d catch my eye and laugh-smile as the roofer dad cried for the first time in front of his daughters, as Hilary Swank convinced multiple CEOs to make their private planes available in case a distant liver popped up, as the cute bad-liver daughter beamed behind jaundiced eyes while getting her first (possibly-drunk-Swank-administered) make-over. Probably about an hour into the movie my phone got really close to dying and I had to plug it in. I got up from my snuggly spot on the couch and asked my 93 year old Nana (who just lost her 95 year old husband, my Pa, about a month and a half ago) if I could unplug her iphone and plug mine into her charger. “Of course!” she said, always ready and willing to accommodate. In my mind’s eye, I see myself shuffling in my bare feet from the couch to the chair where the phone charger sat. I see my stare, beady-eyed. I was then on a mission to sustain my connection to instagram communications, judgements and evaluations of quality, social game playing, how I stack up. Lol, why I wanna buy a gun? My focus was squarely on my self, but my self-awareness was nil, my awareness of others even less, though I’d come to my Nana’s house to be with her…just to be with her. To watch movies with her because she loves it and it unites us during a hard time, the time after Pa’s passing. Girl, so confusing. Experience is disjointed when I zoom in like this, analyzing a moment that passed quickly and wasn’t overtly consequential as it occurred. Why couldn’t I focus on my Nana if I was there for her? Why couldn’t I let go of my dumb art life, social media, and my phone? Why was I compelled to react negatively to the bad movie? Haven’t I proved that I know what’s good art and what’s not? Haven’t I proved that I can hold my own artistically, in my judgements and in my work? Why is my consciousness so divided, so out of my control? And why do I struggle so much with locating my morality, with behaving in a way that reflects my ideas, my desires, and with accepting that behavior? Why I can’t even grit my teeth and lie? In the experience of watching the movie with my family, I create my morality by oscillating between 1) proving I have good aesthetic taste through disdain and then 2) by denying the importance of taste, setting it aside to be present for my family (and judging myself for not doing that). Both moralities are more about my self-creation than about right or wrong action, which I’ll return to later. —— With Nana’s blessing, I unplugged her phone, an older iphone, and set it down on a chair with a bright, busy upholstered pattern of deep blue-green and pink. I plugged in my less old but still old iphone and shuffled back to the couch without it. My experience of the movie up to that point had been filtered through my social media engagement. Comparison, judgment of others, self-judgment, active communications about art (and about who wants to consume and engage me) had roiled beneath my presence in my Nana’s living room. I don’t wanna share this space I don’t wanna force a smile This one girl taps my insecurities... As I snuggled back into my couch spot and refocused, I noticed my experience was different. There had been a shift. Was it in the movie or in me? Was it in my Mom? She seemed to be paying more attention. Nana stared straight forward. She isn’t sentimental and she notices everything. I knew she’d heard my scoffing, and I knew she saw now when my demeanor changed. Normally this would have embarrassed me into being more engaged but I was very distracted by my self during this time. A transition in the plot from light, conflicted action to a revelation of deep emotional wounds and how those drag out, play out in hard times had begun to transpire on screen. A montage set to sad music rolled. Hilary Swank had started drinking again. The hot roofer dad was ghosting her and she couldn’t see the kids. He hid his crying from everyone (except the movie audience), shaking with sadness alone in his bedroom. His hugeness and hotness and mustache made the crying scenes more sad to me. I started to cry around that time. After that, I couldn’t stop crying. When the score told me to be sad, I was. I felt everything with the family. I felt uplifted as scenes of the rural Tennessee community coming together to get the bad-liver girl into a helicopter during a blizzard so she could finally have her liver transplant evolved on screen. Tears pooled in my eyes and rolled down my cheeks as the big hot dad finally said “Thank you” to alcoholic Hilary Swank as he climbed into the helicopter with sideways snow blowing around him after months of resenting her constant, unwanted presence. Instead of laughing at the bad art, I remembered all the times I’ve needed people and how truly amazing they have been. I’ve certainly despaired. With my self-centered personality, despair is kind of increased from the norm I think, simply because I emphasize my own experience so much. Thoughts about my own despair didn’t drive my tears, however. Memories came after my eyes were wet and I was in my emotion. My response was instantaneous, visceral. Philosopher Brian Massumi describes this phenomenon in his essay The Autonomy of Affect, pointing to the primary nature of affect–how it comes before thoughts–as well as to its power in the experience of art. We remember and cling to affective experiences. Intellectual experiences can’t compete with affect. Affect supercedes thought, and even self-consciousness, launching us immediately into a stratosphere of connected experience, through art. What a feeling. Bad tattoos on leather-tan skin, Jesus Christ on a plastic sign…fall in love again and again, winding roads , doing manual drive…Everything is romantic. Ordinary Angels and a moment with my family, who are not art sophisticates, captures the essence of my being so much that I am compelled to return to the moment in this essay. I opened up during this experience, I loved it, I want to think about it again and again. In this way, it is more powerful than any gallery experience in my recent memory. I’ve always been sensitive, emotionally, physically, etc. I remember crying during a Coke commercial while also making fun of how contrived it was in my teens and realizing this doubleness and reactivity is just part of who I am. I’m a live wire, and I experience opposite ideas or feelings at the same time, with awareness. I respond to most everything with intensity, mostly by mimicking and then riffing. I would like to dance more than I do because it feels heavenly to me to copy and respond to movements. That’s certainly why I like to draw so much. It’s moving with the world. My condescending attitude isn’t as ingrained as my artistic responsiveness, though it can be prominent. It came from a feeling that I need to be perceived as knowledgeable in the art world once I realized my abilities, class status, money, and education, each of which are meager, weren’t going to get me very far. I’ve been counseled many times not to think this way by well meaning people trying to build my self esteem, but we all know status matters in art professions. Condescension isn’t the way, but neither is faking naivety or an inability to feel fear or resentment. Practically, condescension is probably an evolutionary stage in becoming a self-sufficient, competent art professional. The observation that matters to me about this experience and that made me want to write had to do with the simultaneous and equal status of my derisive, mocking thoughts and the sincere and visceral emotion that led to my tears. It isn’t that one state of mind is right and the other wrong, or that one is more real, or that one is better behavior. They are of the same status within me, at the moment of viewing. They both occur. They are both self- creating mechanisms for me in terms of the morality I discussed above. By this I mean that in both cases I’m more concerned with who I am for doing either behavior than with how that behavior affects those around me. It’s a morality that is about self. Contemplating this self morality is what I do to prepare myself for presentation to and consumption by others. Morality is only one part of this, though it’s an important part. It’s probably impossible for me to answer questions about affect, thought, the nature of self/consciousness and morality in one essay, especially with all the art I’m making and want to make. So here I choose to let my thoughts meander around them. Taste, though, I feel reveals itself in my experience of Ordinary Angels. I’ve long had issues with taste in contemporary art discourse and social settings, having noticed during my art world indoctrination as an undergraduate at SAIC that I could convince myself of the high value of any art, regardless of medium, style, origin, skill, form, etc, by recontextualizing it. Simply by surrounding the art with admirable art people, institutions, appropriately cultivated white cube (or self-consciously anti-white cube) spaces is enough to venerate a previously outcast artwork. Do it yourself. Imagine Ordinary Angels (or any Hallmark style movie) in MoMa or wherever else strikes you as the height of contemporary taste. Imagine a person you admire discussing the bad movie with reverence or interest, maybe calling it a film. You’ll see the thing transform, most likely. It doesn’t matter if you like the film or not. What matters is that you could reasonably imagine it taken seriously by others. Art matters less than its viewing circumstances when it comes to taste. I take this for granted, which means that, when considering art as a cultural tool, as socially performed taste encourages us to do, I don’t overvalue skill, nor do I put too much stock in the number of hours spent laboring with materials or ideas or people. These may be important activities in some regard, but they are likely extraneous to the mobilization of one's work in the power structure of art on the basis of taste. It’s sometimes hard for me to accept that my ability to recognize quality in art doesn’t emanate from some deep understanding of its inherent value because it feels like it does, but I believe in the argument I made above because I see it play out all the time. Art’s inherent value is a separate question to me, and in my opinion, should be discussed first in terms of a private act of making, specifically the artist’s aesthetic experience, and second in terms of how an artwork functions socially, affectively, economically, after it has left the studio, and third, in the relationship between these two scenarios. It’s a separate essay. Instead of equating taste with value judgements, consider how it functions socially. What are its effects? Where does it emerge? My experience shows me that taste is something I communicate to others in the social arena. It isn’t a private thing at all. What I like isn’t my taste. It’s my preference (and even then at some times of life it is likely affected by what I think others think I should prefer and enjoy). I might privately prefer and enjoy many things that I wouldn’t want to reveal to art professionals, because to do so would be a demonstration of my (poor) taste, as long as I’m unaware of their (poor) taste, and whether we agree on the “real value” of some embattled low brow creation. B horror movies, reality TV, memes, porn, any variety of kitsch stuff is up for grabs, but letting on too soon that I’m into any of this could jeopardize my status with a powerful art figure of refined (aka different) taste. This scenario reveals taste as a social tool used to communicate a public understanding of trends, and possibly personal shared interests. I privately prefer aesthetic experiences that I enjoy. Publicly, I demonstrate taste. I show the world that I have studied the social hierarchy of art systems and can read its language and trade its currency. Taste refers to trends, not to the spiritual or intellectual value of art. Nietzsche makes this distinction in his book of musings, Beyond Good and Evil (Part Two, The Free Spirit, section 32). He describes the importance in modern human history of understanding the significance of things by their consequences instead of by their origin. If I analyze taste in terms of its consequences, I see that it is social. If I analyze taste in terms of its origin–in terms of artistic intention–many interesting problems arise, but they all have to do with the private mental experiences of others, phenomena we will never be able to observe. It was Immanuel Kant, in his treatise on the relationship between the mind and external reality, Critique of Pure Judgment, who popularized the idea that thought is separate from the external world. Ideas, and presumably artistic genius, are the product of a God given spark, a pure mind unadulterated by impure experience. According to this thinking, artist intention trumps any consequence my art has in the world. My experience of Ordinary Angels foregrounded my recent thoughts about taste, demonstrating the power bad art has over me, even as I am immersed in (dubiously) sophisticated art discourse and related social hijinx. Maybe the most interesting thing about my experience with Ordinary Angels and the thoughts that followed is that Kant wrote his Critique of Judgement over 230 years ago. Nietzsche’s direct critique of Kant in Beyond Good and Evil was published about 140 years ago. They are both well known thinkers. Kant has been canceled innumerable times by several artistic and philosophical movements. Nietzsche, who directly critiques Kant, is currently popular. Despite our apparent consciousness of this history, its ideas, and what they mean for art, our aesthetic philosophy remains Kantian, privileging artist intention over the effects of art objects, while our participation in art society is, as ever, about the consequences of taste demonstrations, aligning to Nietzsche’s thinking. We could make more interesting art and have more interesting art engagements if we emphasized (and analyzed) the consequences of work, it's affective power, its social power, over artist intention. Nietzsche rightly points out that our obsession with our own minds, our ideas, our experience, comes from Kant’s thesis that God is causing us, in private mental experiences, to have inherently valuable thoughts that determine actions (art), which must therefore carry similar value. This is a view based on the religious philosophy that centers on the human mind and its essential specialness and holiness. In this view, external forces are subordinated by human thought. 140 years ago, Nietzsche suggested that we might try letting go of this ideology. Seems like a worthwhile exercise, and several materialist political and artistic movements have attempted to do so. However, our engagement with art is a weird pastiche of contradictory philosophies, some practical, and some basically spiritual. I do not know exactly what this means, but I see it weakening art’s power, and that’s what bothers me about it. I care more about the moving experiences produced by art than anything else, so it’s not trivial to me that I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been viscerally moved by art in a gallery or museum. The other times have been in less controlled settings and they are innumerable. I don’t know what this means, exactly, but I often feel alienated and unmoved during the art viewing experiences I’m expected to enjoy as an art person/professional/whatever it is. I don’t know if I belong here anymore…Charli sings of the music industry in “I might say something stupid.” I often think this while in the midst of some inspired revelation while watching reality TV, annoyed at the art world that it never happens in museums. Ironically, I feel a simultaneous desire to become a part of my art community in a way that I never have before. I want to participate, I want to share, I want to be fully present. I want to understand my fellow art people, to leave my own mind with its dubious, untested judgments and see how my presence and thoughts are met in real time. I want to see their consequences play out. I’m reaching out. I’ve understood myself enough, and now see it as the means for connection. Talk to me, talk to me Oh talk to me in French, talk to me in Spanish Talk to me in your made-up language Doesn’t matter if I understand it Talk right in my ear, tell me your secrets and fears Once you talk to me, I’ll talk to you And say, “hey let’s get out of here Shall we go back to my place –Jessamyn Plotts, August 2024
My outlook is constantly transforming, and I believe in nothing but the willingness to allow this transformation. I've been trapped for too long in a few patterns of thought that have limited my relationship to the world and to my art. These patterns of thought have to do with moralities I learned first as a child, then as a person who spent a lot of time studying. My desire for interesting art led me away from these patterns of thought, which ended up confining me to represent my identity ad nauseum, and always with the requirement that my identity be tied to a belief system of which others approve. That may be a social necessity, but I think it's the job of art to break down those understandings--not simply replicate and reinforce them. My writings in the section will address this in various ways until I feel like I've articulated my current ideas ( a never ending process haha). The more I understand, the more certain I am that the slow(er) process of painting (as compared to the rapid (er) processes of "new media") is an important counterbalance for understanding art. But for painting (and drawing which I treat as one continuous phenomenon that loops and interpenetrates in single images) to do this, it has to be re-conceptualized. It has to be thought of differently. For painting and drawing to be as beneficial to the current mind, collective internet mind, as they can be, they have to be thought of not as fully formed images, but as microcosms of slow image formation, where we can see the entire progression of image construction as a historical process in the creation of a physical object. Paintings should be thought of in terms of process, but not the kind of process that is about gestures and marks (though these will always be present), but about the building of an image and how its made. Fully formed, complete images are easily made by digital photographs and AI now. Painting is slow, personal, awkward, physical, and subjective. It should capitalize on those things rather than try to hide them. By doing this, it can reveal thought processes, physical and emotional experiences, etc...pieces of the human condition as it exists now, not as it has existed. Painting and drawing are much closer to a individual experience than other image types (social media, digital phone photos, ai, video), which are made so quickly and without physical friction in the form of technical difficulty, the bulky, unwieldy qualities of 3d objects, emotional and cognitive interference., Painting requires a slower physical embodiment. None of this is to say painting is superior to any other form. Instead, what I mean is that painting and drawing have complementary information to offer new media processes.
Woke up really early the day after surgery really wanting to carry out some ideas I've had for images.
I will never have enough time in my life to do all the things I want to and imagine doing.
I could have 10 arms and infinite time and never finish.
But I am very happy with how things are going with my images.
I feel unburdened in a way I haven't before.
Physical materials, usually an afterthought for me, are becoming much more significant because of what they mean and what they do.
I think I'll start another observational studio view painting like the one on the lower tier of the easel. I have a rule I follow when i do those and they are very grounding for me. They keep my observation sharp and complex, especially when I find I'm roaming in ideas (which I am). Roaming in ideas isn't a bad thing, but I know its best for me to be continuously looking at exactly what's in front of me, because I can forget, and when I forget, I lose my tether to reality.
I don't start believing in supernatural things or become delusional when this happens. It's a lot more boring. I just get too convinced I'm right about everything, which I never am, and have to go through some long difficult process of becoming humble again which I'd rather not do. Better just to keep looking closely at what's in front of me...
Last night, I fell asleep reading about kinematics, which is basically studying how objects move and interact without knowing much about the objects themselves (mass, etc.)
I love reading about physics and math that has to do with the relationship between material things and mental things.
All the thinking I'm doing right now deals with that relationship--specifically how personal, human power is generated through that relationship.
I'm using the drawing process to understand the formation of that power.
I'm doing a lot of reading and studying of math, philosophy, and magic.
September 2024
I woke up in the middle of the night, compelled to state:
I direct my energy toward things that will benefit me and the things I care about the most.
For most of my life I have been confused about how and where to aim my artistic force. At times I've deposited my most valuable insights into bottomless pits. I've whispered my best thoughts into voids. But for whatever reason I have a different experience now.
How dark, possibly abusive or manipulative, or deeply romantic and obsessive love narratives like Bella and Abel relate to the cultivated pop image, global politics and war, their actual relationship. Basically how the personal, pop culture, and war and genocide all exist simultaneously and weave in and out of each other. Do we notice? We all try to figure out how to live with it all going on, how to switch modes, or let everything layer and happen together.
Tax Day 2024
If I write will I find something to latch onto? Some sort of conclusion or resolution...physical pain combined with taxes and a general bereft feeling have left me...like zoned out kind of dizzy, just listening to the same Lana Del Rey songs over and over, standing at my standing desk, praying for relief and drinking my 8th cup of coffee. There is art on the wall behind me that feels just humiliating. Even though I think its good. It may be years (probably more liek months) before I can show it because I'm afraid someone will interpret it correctly. Sometimes its hard for me to know how the murky mental images I extrude will be understood by others. They seem kind of obscure, mysterious, even to me, but I'm often shocked by how closely they reflect my thoughts and feelings and how immediately they are understood.
failing at eating disorders, photoshop collage, 2024.
transcending Chris Kraus, photoshop collage, 2024.
For the past month I've been contemplating ways of escaping the constant thought of my own identity in my work. I've been thinking about my gender and identity and making art about it since late childhood. I've tried to transcend social, economic, sexual, etc. limitations so I can create and think about whatever I want at a soaring level. At the same time, like most other women I know, I was hurting myself, trying to obtain the rewards I saw women getting for thinness, coolness, whiteness, manic pixie dream girl-ness (the most accessible consumable female form for me personally lol), however conscious or unconscious I was of what I was doing. But I want the soaring level of thinking and making, and thinness, whiteness, manic pixie dream girln-ness, coolness, seeming to be of mediocre intelligence--they all interfere with what I want. So do relationships with men. Art has always been the most important thing to me, and it always wins out over everything else. I have it, I have the soaring level of thinking and making I've always wanted, and I try to be there as much as possible. My desire to generate images and think about them is so strong its hard to communicate, and I do it, no matter what. I always will. It's going to win over my temporary personhood in life. No matter what my "female identity" is while I'm alive, it will be brief. I could be many things, and I am. "I was one thing, now I'm being another." (Lana Del Rey, Happiness Is A Butterfly) Who I am for the moment, as a briefly living being, is not the most important thing to me. I want to be free from the thought of it. Self-forgetting.
A mentor noted to me once when I was 28, "Your work right now is driven by sexual energy. Remember that one day that energy will be gone. What is left beneath the sexual energy that drives you?"
He was right, and I did have an immediate insight, which I will share in a moment.
Some might think his comment sexist but it wasn't. I had consciously and purposefully weaponized my sexuality in my work, and he was willing to point out the tactic for what it was. It was methodical, not unhinged or emotional. LOL. Most of my teachers and mentors at the time wanted to pathologize my choices, as in see the content of my work as a sign of mental illness and categorize it as some sort of catharsis, which it was not. They and others now even mistakenly believe that this view is therapizing, as though it would heal me to see myself as "sick," or even "victimized." I see this as a big mistake, the consequences of which are disempowerment at a deeper mental level than at the time of the original traumas or offenses or whatever you want to call them. Rapes, overdoses, horrors. My work, my artistic representation of and handling of my experience, was not catharsis, but a honed and meticulous instrument of horror inducement, meant to appeal then to horrify. I appreciated my mentor's willingness to treat me as a thinking person, capable not only of planning, but of planning beyond the level that most around me could anticipate. It was a confusing time because the sexual energy that, as he noted, drove my work, was also driving me to hold onto my appeal to men. This conflict has been difficult to resolve because I, like all beings, want freedom and power, and if I feel like I get freedom and power from something, even if its not real, I don't want to give it up.
Observation. My immediate insight after hearing my mentor's challenge--because that's what it was--was to realize that my primary action and interest in and reason for doing and use of art is as a tool for understanding the world. Its not that I like to sloppily spill my guts with pretty cool colors. It more like how American society thinks of a scientist than how American society thinks of an artist.
I think. I plan. I am methodical. The things I do are logical. I anticipate other's action and interpretations. I'm intuitive. Intuition isn't being a loosey-goosey, silly girly thinker. Its thinking that happens very fast.
An addition made on 4/26/24
I don't know how unreal "feminine power" is. Is it the kind of power I feel like I have when men like me and women are jealous of me? Is there something inherently (aka essentially) powerful about femininity, female sexuality...or is it just sexuality in general, carried on the current of trends, appearance, beauty standards, etc that has power? Sometimes it seems obvious that [femininity, femaleness, female sexuality, as it is consumed by men and everyone else in society (its not just men lol)] is truly very powerful, and that women scorn each other's sexual prowess, critiquing and chastising, (often from an intellectual standpoint at least in my life) because they are competing, trying to take each other down. Other times it seems obvious that the female sexuality I have learned and that I am sold is a horrific trap, one that forces me to constantly evaluate and manipulate and torture starve, abuse my body and mind. Other other times I feel aware of something essential, though I don't know if I believe in anything unchanging, especially within the self.
Other other other times I think sexuality is what we have to work with. I will be sexual no matter what. I can't reinvent the wheel in one lifetime, so I choose to work with what I have so I can participate. I never stopped believing in the myths of feminine power, though. I don't use the tools clionically or begrudgingly. I use them with reverence and belief in their influence Maybe that's because I see them materialize around me constantly. Its so clearly the belief of powerful women like Bella Hadid (who I have begun to study) that using the world's expectations, accepting and leaning into and participating in them is the way to become powerful.
It is a matter of what kind of power it is, or what power is. Is power controlling and influencing others? If so, why do those who infuence and control seem to suffer just as much as those who don't? What is the relationship between power and suffering? Do I just want the power not to suffer? No, that isn't it. I'm a former Christian so maybe this is just a vestige of my childhood faith, but I still believe experience of the sublime, the spiritual, higher power, whatever you want to call it, originates from suffering. Whatever that is, that's what gives me power. Power to consider all of these ideas rather than starving myslef to death or drtinking myself to death, which is what I was doing without it. For me, its just power to listen for whatever the sublime is instead of to my own thoughts.
Carolee Schneemann's piece Interior Scroll is one of the most influential artworks of my life so far. The act and the text. Its so meaningful to me on a daily basis, what its like to live as a woman artist. Its ecstatic, uncomfortable, the type of labor, the type of interactions, the expectations, the way people want or expect me to appear versus how I actually am. This is the text from the original performance. There are two parts to the text. The first part was read from Schneemann's book, Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter. The second part was read from the scroll she pulled from her vagina.
https://www.schneemannfoundation.org/writing/interior-scroll
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/schneemann-interior-scroll-p13282
This is a painting of Miley Cyrus I made in 2019 at the Vermont Studio Center residency.
It seems important to note that painting and drawing can be used to question and explore things that disturb or that I don't understand rather than explain them or state something final about them.
That is most always how I use painting and drawing and the creative impulse in general. I may be come with opinions and notions of how things should be, but I leave those when painting begins, even when I don't want to. The painting (and drawing) process doesn't allow me to dominate reality with my own thinking. I have to submit to the physical materials, what is revealed about my subject as I go over and over her.
I come with criticisms of Miley Cyrus, yes, but I also like her music. I paint her not to elevate her or to tear her down. I paint her to understand her image and how it functions in the world.
I don't know where this gray atmosphere came from but it fits with my uncertain feeling. There is no art worth writing about or making. In order to access the part of myself that feels alive and able to create, I have to forget about art enitrely. Art in the world, (outside of an earlier state, what I think of as my creative desire and impulse) is a collision of wills, just like everything else, and its impossible to think or make in that area. So I don't even think what I make is art. It takes place before art, and the dissemination and circulation of what I make after that creation phase is art. The circulaton is art. the movement is art, but I prefer the time before art. That time is pristine and safe.
Memory
This is a video of my MacBook Air screen that I took in 2020 while I was re-watching all of America's Next Top Model. I used the video in the work, Daylight, which just premiered at Good Dad Studios during the Austin Studio Tour this past weekend, so yesterday (11/12/23) and the day before (11/11/23). I've linked to that work in my performance and video section on this site as well, and either this morning or soon I will write a bit about it. But here I just want to briefly discuss the idea of memory in art using this video as a starting point.
If all my work begins with and stays very close to an immediate experience of life, particularly my life, then every time I look at or experience my work I feel transported. Remembering, also, is one of my primary actions of making. It's the point of origin of many drawings and other works. I have a memory. I become immersed in remembering, then I feel like I must translate that memory to others.
As I am transported by looking at work I've made about memory, I notice that work in particular holds the interest of viewers. Memory is a potent tool for communication of material or ideas that are not made for entertainment, but which require viewership, interest, and attention to function (art). I've noticed this as I analyze people's reactions to my work. The art that relies on memory, uses memory, translates memory, is captivating to people. Maybe it's in the same way that stories are captivating to people.
Communicating memory helps with an art problem I've noticed. As stated above, art is not entertainment. To take it further (to the extreme I love to live in) I don't think art is really a commercial thing, no matter how much we want it to be, have made it that way, no matter how much it literally has to exist in that way now because there is nothing that's not for sale anymore...
So, if art is not entertainment, then getting and keeping people's attention is not and cannot be the motive of art. It's something different. I think a lot of people would agree with me at least on this, if not on my views on whether art is/should be commercial.
For me, the problem arises when artists throw out the viewer's interest and investment along with their attention, conflating entertainment and attention. This results in boring art that people don't really want to look at.
I think it's possible to interest people without entertaining them. To get them to want to look without relying on meaningless but stimulating imagery. I think communicating memory does this.
Making art-time and labor
I'm tired of leftwing buzz words but I'll use some here because its the vocab I know to describe what I'm thinking.
Its a privilege to be able to make work using traditional art materials, have time to plan grand art concepts, installations, set ups, to produce polished work, to produce work that requires a lot of concentrated studio time. It's a privilege I guess I hope to have someday, but at the sme time I think one of the things I love most about the kind of work I've learned to do--what I see as some of my best work--is brevity out of necessity.
When I was in grad school one of my professors was Michelle Rawlings, whos work I admire. She visited my studio early in my time at SMU and described my work as "breathless" like something might happen to keep me from making it, so it had to be done quickly. She was right! The kind of life I've lived makes it so that if I don't act and extrude my thoughts and images quickly and not too carefully, I may never get to extrude them.
One thing I love about drawing is that its accessible under whatever circumstances. there's almost nothing to prevent it being made. It takes a special kind of deprivation--the kind of conditions we would call barbabric or inhuman--to prevent a person from being able to make a mark.
I value ideas, methods, marks that eschew polish in favor of communication--in favor of existence. i've encountered so may times gatekeepers of the art establishment who have told me not to produce, not to show, not to publish because there are loose ends, unconsidered pieces, not enough editing, not enough polish....and to that I say, whatever, maybe you're right but I'm going to take the quickest action possible to execute and share my experience. Critique me from the other side.
Always on the Verge of Death
I've not been able to belive in the same imagery or narratives for maybe 2 years. I had this very fruitful period of drawing, where my thoughts were totally in synch with my body and drawing movements. Those drawings kept emerging even as I lost interest in their subject matter/content. It's all seemed less interesting to me since I started dealing with this undiagnosed health problem.
That's because the subject matter of the previous drawings was about a different life experience. Sexuality and danger, I guess, to sum it up.
Last night the continuum between life and death emerged as a way of understanding my newer drawings. I am making self portraits, but they are about the disintegration of the self and the freedom that comes from detaching from my self-narrative, realizing that I will only be here for a short time, and that my experience is mostly exactly like all humans who have lived, are living, and will live after me. It turns ou the danger of sexuality and identity that defined my life and work up till now is like every other fear and monster. It all portends death, and death is coming anyway. I think thats what all of these selfie drawings are about.
Problem 1
MOney
Problem 2
Time
Problem 3
How much of problem 1 and problem 2 do I need to make problem 3? The art? problem 3 is the art. What should it be? Should I be happy to make a little painting with the meager amounts of time and money I'm allotted by the state? Seems off.
Problem 4
Attention. My attention on what I'm making versus working versus life versus internet life. Your attention and how much of it is actually available to view the thing I'm making? Probably not much?
Problem 5
If somebody's attention gets on my artwork, what is it they end up looking at?
Problem 6
Having a problem with everything. Accepting almost nothing.
October 2023
I'm tired. It's 7 am and I'm about to teach a class...at 9. But I get here at 6:30 because of an i-35 commute and I want time to think etc...
Video, the mind and mental processes and images and language versus objects. The relationship between art objects, experience, thought and how we just take art objects for granted, like no one is even trying to create new types of "objects" anymore, even though the objects we've been relying on for a long time are inadequate. Thinking of "objects" that are less object-y and more information-y.
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I had a full blown instagram argument with an artist from some other state on Brad Troemel's comments section on a recent instagram post about taste. Just made me more certain that I don't give a fuck about whether art is good or bad. That's our stupid artist circle jerk obsession. We allow ourselves to be disconnected from reality based on the idea that it's enough to know whether an image or art object is "good" or "bad". That's a sad state for art but I do think its the truth--we (artists) are mostly delusional and disconnected from whats going on in the world now. And making non-traditional art or art that tries to directly deal with politics doesn't solve the problem...because we are still talking about art, which is different from just having political opinions or making direct statements. Art has to figure out actually meaningful ways of dealing with stuff that's going on. I think we are mostly either dropping out of the world and painting pretty or interesting stuff to analyze with each other or making statements that lean more towards propaganda, journalism, or social science than art (also to analyze with each other).
Weakness, Mystery, Ambiguity
Ive been holding this paul klee drawing in my mind, revisiting it regularly, where it just appears. Its soft and weak, and that weakness and gentleness adds to its mystery. It is mysterious because it isn't overdetermined. Its not an illusion of mystery. The thing knows something I don't, and by looking I become vaguely aware, probably of something I will never understand but can sense. Separate from the drawing (I can't rermber if it was before or after I started looking at it) I had this vision of a drawing--a perfect picture in my mind accompanied by direction to make it (more than an urge, a feeling of you have to do this now, that I listen to and accomadate asap when it happens) while I was watching the "thinking genius" montage at the beginning of Oppenheimer in a dark theater with my boyfriend and his child. The image was a an abstarcted figure, a conglomeration of times, certainly in the spirit of early 20th century observation and abstraction, like Picasso and paul klee ( i know theyre different but you know what I mean). I did make it, then I started making many more, and they are very similar to the paul klee drawing. My first image is below. Anyway, there is so much power in admmitting to uncertainty, in allowing the alchemy of drawing and image making to guide my actions rather than "ideas", "concepts", "outcomes"...anything with an answer. i do not care about answers. At all. We know so many answers. I care about seeing a small bit of the unknown and picturing it so we can share it, sense it, feel something from it. Have intuitive knowledge of it.
September 2023
I need to explain that all of my thoughts are not about myself and my identity. How I am perceived, my femininity and what that means for me as an artist and instructor, etc. In fact, almost none of them are about that, but, like I feel like I have to explain this now, I always feel like I have to start with my identity, apologize for it, aggress with it, intimidate with it, make a strong statement with it, use it like a battering ram to force my way into the conversations and worlds I want to be a part of. I use cultural icons like Lana del rey to do this because she did the work for me. Potent toxic femininity to push with since thats the form I've taken (feminine), though I don't really know that I am that, in essence. I just need to explain, to prove, that there is this well of thought I hide beneath all of what I just described, because when I share it I'm not taken seriously and I'mstill afraid of that from the ast few times I was hurt by it.
August 2023
June and July were like dreaming. I've still been been thinking a lot about the relationship between Observation, Memory, and Imagination. I've begun to collect drawings made by my students with specific instructions in each mode, and I have an idea of someday creating a book that deals with the differences in mental processes that produce each type of drawing. But I need to collect many images and have many conversations before I do that.
In the meantime, I'm trying to be quite disciplined about making one of each type of drawing per day, no matter how busy I am. This way I can study the process.
I am increasingly uninterested in making polished, colorful, monumental images. Part of it is that I can't afford painting materials. I am bitter about it. I feel rejected by "painting". recently I became aware of some negative opinions of my painting. Someone whos paintings I think are literally terrible also thinks my paintings are terrible. Lol. That's why I can't really get behind a viewof art that's like "oh, who's better? yes, that's it. that person got it--they really captured "painting"--but you didn't" :((((.
It seems patently silly to try to discern quality based on formal or aesthetic qualities now.
Maybe as a reaction, I don't even want to try to make "good" art anymore. Like, hasn't that been over for a long time? Can't I explore whatever I want without trying to make it pretty? Isn't it the same with my body and appearance? As a girl, can't I look however the fuck I want, not try to please whoever or get whoever's attention (not just men. there are lot's of people who are not men who get deeply invested in other people's appearance) and just galavant all over the world wreaking havoc? Just kidding, but sometimes, yes.
Aesthetic beauty is way less interesting than how the ugly or wrong offends, and what that offended state says about how people are currently thinking, at least to me.
I am still interested in the sublime, which I don't think a person can experience, let alone translate, without the limit...the Foucault limit, at least how I understand it...when things go so far and get so close to the edge, they're dangerous.
May 2023
Dark Heavy Feelings
self-destruction as creation
Becoming through destruction. An aesthetic expression of experience. All the colors and movement of life in real time. The bad art that constantly flows with intermittent good things. The smallest drawings that show this transformation are the best. Feeling obliterated by life and barely expelling glimmers of experience as drawings and paintings.
Performance, physical presence, violence, movement, dance
Needing a spotlight
Impossible to fully realize the expressions I need to make through static images alone. I need wild movement, wild experience to be fulfilled. A type of movement and way of being that truly has no regard for the opinion of the watcher or for what is expected according to art norms because it's just about being in time and understanding what's happening while its happening. Making immediate beautiful representations of life as life occurs.
Floating on the surface of existence, watching my life as it passes with detachment.
There is power in not caring. Knowing I'm one of billions and choosing to aestheticize what happens to me while I'm alive. "Fight for the right to make art out of my life....fight for the right to be different in a world of fake bitches..." something like that that Lana Del Rey sings in an unreleased song. Boyfriends and physical and mental pain are the source of my art and if it doesn't seem deep enough, who cares that's just what it is.
Checked out in a good way.