5:00am: The alarm goes off in an annoying series of beeps. I hit the snooze button to lie in bed for 8 extra minutes in the dark, listening to the dog’s steady breathing, unable to see the piles of folded laundry, opened books and wilting ivy on the windowsill, my muscles filling up with the twitch of all the things that have to be done/won’t get done today. The important thing is to get my Grad work organized. Patterns. It’s a good idea for the notes and the artwork. And the way I see it, it’s about the fragments that structure my life. A cup of coffee, feed the dogs, and some thinking about it. This is my favorite part of the day. It’s just getting light and I’m having ideas.
6:00am: I’ve made my lunch to take to work, eaten breakfast, maneuver around my (cranky in the a.m.) daughter, take the coffee to my bathroom. A prescription for being mindful is to focus on mundane tasks, like washing your hands. I try to practice this focus in the shower, but I lose the moment when the image of a a fallen tree— giant rootball exposed on the bottom—becomes the perfect ‘nest’ for the components I’ve made for my ‘vagina’ Project. I can’t remember if I used hair conditioner
7:15am: Some things got done- dressed, remembered to take my lunch, mailed back my Netflix, beat the schoolbusses. Some things didn’t- forgot my coffee-to-go, the Art in America I wanted to read at lunch, my bank deposit. Remembered to set my intentions to the universe that I will get to where I’m going safely, my Jeep intact, and have a good (happy), productive day. I also sent this intention on behalf of my daughter because she forgets where she can go in this life.
8:00am: Things that make you go Hmmm...
During my commute to retail-work, I listen to filmmaker Scott Hicks interviewed about his PBS documentary on Phillip Glass, with excerpts from the film. 2 things stood out:
Glass describes his (enthusiastically disciplined) process as not writing music, but listening for the music that's already there—like an underground river below the dirt and geology—and pulling from that resource to USE in composing his music. Listening. Seeing.
In my 20s, I hated feeling as if I didn't possess anything meaningful (substantial) to say and at 47 I am constantly digging through all of the accumulated substance to find the purity of expression. Hmmm…
The 2nd was a story told by Glass about graduating from Julliard (an accomplishment) and then studying in France with teacher/composer Nadia Boulanger, who began by pushing him and showing him how to forget everything he already knew and learned, to begin-again- and learn to be a composer.
Hmmm...When I label myself, see myself, hawk myself as productive, contributing, self-sufficient, surviving woman, it is SO difficult to dismantle that scaffold and bust open that cocoon- isn't it just? Those attributes get me out of bed each day and take on what's needed to make a life. There's pride and a sense of able-ness. I've spent all of these years with Me- Look what I can do! It's gotten me this far! Sitting in the parking lot, waiting to punch in on time, so I never, again, have to sit with the 27 year old assistant manager, asking me what he can do (do I need different hours?) so I can make it to work on time and Me, not being able to explain that it's not about the schedule, it's about me needing the paycheck and Me, not wanting any other job, but getting up each day to make a life of art and art of life.
I leave my Jeep, clock in, available to art as life/life as art in Glass’ storytelling; a reminder- that I do not know everything (or perhaps anything) I need to know about making art, and that what I know already may be set aside.
9:00am – 12:00pm: Trying to maintain some connection to the patterns of my current project but Sales Associate work is distracting. I am not alone but I sense the loneliness and empty spaces in the conversations at work. An old man stands very near to me, tells me I smell good. He shares the details of his small repairs, killing time with nowhere else he has to be. A woman searches for air filters; her husband used to take care of these things but he died 3 months ago and she doesn’t know where he bought those stupid things. She tells me it’s hard, suddenly not knowing anything about her own house.
12:00pm – 1pm: I pack the same thing for lunch most every day. Yogurt, fruit, something crunchy. I snack on the same nuts and dried fruit every day. I try to read a book I had stashed in the Jeep, but I nap ½ hour instead. A wave of anxiety. And a thought of my packet deadline makes it worse. Deadline. A grim term for sending out art and writing into the world. It should leap from one mind to another, making the ideas live, not buried in emails and paper.
1:00pm – 5:00pm: A young cashier says her tarot readings advise ending her long engagement, she knows the cards are right, but she can’t leave him because he needs her; she thinks he’d get suicidal. A woman customer replays the complaints about her husband not getting anything done around the house. A cashier asks me “Don’t you sometimes just start a fight with your partner because you feel like it?” (No.) I am living in the middle of the “intimate public” created in this culture for women to buy into an ideal and romanticized commonality, that all women are disappointed by love and we are all the same, in it together, no matter our differences. This mass-mediated culture obscures our political agency; women are helpless to do anything more than affirm our ability to feel. In between, there is workplace camaraderie, the caring gesture of a friend who brings me coffee, consumerism and sometimes I score some trash for my artwork.
6:00pm: I’m home and starving. Yogurt is never enough. My daughter won’t be home, the dogs are fed. I prepare a salad and reheat the last (finally!) leftover of homemade beefaroni, eat in front of the computer, trying to stuff in more research. I started smoking again. I forgot to call my mother back. So what does all this have to do with art? Everything and nothing. The stuff of our lives is where art comes from. This makes women’s art different from men’s art. Because life is this stuff, patterned with so many different threads and often with little sense of what the final product will look like. We are working from subconscious patterns. How much of art is scratched by our obsessions, our intricate details, or the marks themselves? Knit from the strands. It’s not wise to specifically define the differences between men’s art and women’s art. But it should be obvious that it does not quash the expansion of human experience to see it this way.
7:00pm has gone by already!
8:00pm: Typically, I’m running out of space and the day begins to unravel. I upload the blurry portrait images of my family, including 3 generations of wedding pictures. A 50 year schedule from a 1931 Jewish funeral handout, noting which days to light the memorial candles. An image of the rules for Jewish mourners. And a fleamarket find of nurses posing on their graduation day (ca. 1950s). They look so white, in complexion and starched uniform, proud, and ready. My brother graduated from nursing school 2 years ago. He recently resigned from his 3rd facility, still searching for his place in that world. Oh the stories and patterns. My patterns. My relationships. My learned behaviors. Upload image of my heart shaped river stone collection and 2 nests. I remember to call my mother- a reiteration of: my busy schedule, her health, our love.
9:00pm: I’m wearing down. Phone call from a friend who has more and less of the troubles I do. I am an artist and a therapist! Upload images of eggrates and cardboard grids.
10:00pm: Upload images of the new ‘vagina’ Project stampings. I tried a latex based black house paint on non-absorbent poly paper- meant for dry-erase makers (yard sale purchase). I like the surface pooling appearance. I tried a vinyl floor tile, leftover from a house project, as a substrate. Same latex house paints. This has a built-in surface texture. I worked on this piece after watching the V-Day, Until the Violence Stops DVD. I scratched in marks based on my memory of the stitches displayed on a female genital circumcision model—used by a woman who travels from village to village in Kenya, rescuing girls from this horrifying tribal/cultural tradition.
11:00pm: Upload ‘vagina’ lids; experiments with grids and roots, piles and containers. I’m trying to make as many as I can. This is an obsessive act, imagining hundreds of these to make enough visual impact, to equal the real daily numbers of U.S. statistics on physical violence against women. The algorithms and equations that were used by banks and brokerage firms had no reality. This is a grossly simplistic explanation. But the lack of common sense and proportion on all sides of this financial meltdown, filtered into my project. The statistics don’t have a concrete meaning until we can see what those numbers actually look like. This sounds like I am equating human beings with tin cans. I’m not.
My concern with the scale of this piece, as it flickers it’s images in my imagination, is how often that obsessive scale has been used- Louise Bourgeois, Maya Lin, Anthony Gormley to name a few. This concern has me listening for music under the dirt and geology.
12:00am: Throw a load of sheets into the washer. Set the alarm. Eat a pear. Read last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine, and sleep.
2:00am: Wake at the sound of a freight train’s air horn signaling its arrival in Shohola. The wheels screetch on the tracks and the rumble sounds like it’s in my backyard, but it’s not. The dogs are snoring and my blanket is wound too tightly around me. I need to get loose.
2:00am – 5:00am: Dreams. Dreams give me more time.
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Cogito, Ergo Sum ( I think, therefore I am) Who Does Descartes Think He Is, Anyway?
Archimedes used to demand just one firm and immovable point in order to shift the entire earth; so I too can hope for great things if I manage to find just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshakable. (Rene Descartes, AT 7: 24; CSM 2:16)
The quote above is arrogated without context. One of the problems with articulating my context and my criticism is that I have nothing more than a broad reach across history, philosophy and aesthetics. While I have been reading, reading, reading (!), all I have to offer at this time is a Dick and Jane see Spot version. I am easily seduced by an essential-ist approach, like Lucy Lippard’s:
"I've written 18 books about art, and I still don't know about the philosophy of art, so you can forget about that," she says (http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/04-27-98/alibi_art1.html).
Nor, does she have much experience with Derrida or Lacan. Me too! I say (except for the 18 books part). And yet, Lippard has become authoritative in terms of art 'meaning' and criticism. Oh, and I think I am in love with Dave Hickey...
“ I am interested in works in which something happens when you look at them. And also I am interested in works that have either the simplicity or the complexity to change their meanings. Good art, to survive, must change its meaning…Works of art have to be free enough in the culture to sustain reinterpretation over the years, and they have to continue to happen, and that's very difficult. Works of art don't have messages. They don't have determinate meanings. They're not just formal objects. A [Jackson] Pollock doesn't mean anything, but it has meaning, we can find meanings for it, if we care to. I am really not concerned with what the artist meant. It's totally irrelevant. I have written a lot of fiction, I don't know what it meant, I know that the story doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Artists don't know what they're doing, so why ask them? What matters is, what the consensus of opinion of what the work means on a particular moment. And it really matters that a work of art can survive the changing of its meanings. I am very concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning; I am not really concerned with thought or with what things mean. Works of art, according to TS Elliot, are objective correlatives; they are things in the world that we use to correlate our opinions about. That's not meant to discount the artist. It's meant to free the artist, so they can do what they want, because they don't know anyway. I know some grown up artists who know pretty well what they are doing. Ed Ruscha knows what he expects to get, so do Bridget Riley, Richard Serra, and Ellsworth Kelly. But these are people in their sixties and seventies. Anyone who is much younger than that, if they are any good, are still improvising. And then there are people, like Rauschenberg, who are 70 years old and are still improvising. Bob doesn't have the faintest idea what he's doing, but he is doing it every day. I am interested in that, I don't like rules. I think art is for people who like art, who like to talk about physical things in the world.” –excerpt from http://www.zingmagazine.com/zing14/hickey/index.html
I am writing from the center of the storm of Packet 3 and of course I'm still fumbling with the structure of these things. Where's the balance located? Obviously, NOT in how I perceive these packets. I still can't figure out who/what/where/when/why it was, or I decided, that each packet should maintain the same layout of information regardless of the current engagement with my process- and in the end I don't STRICTLY adhere to the layout anyway. Once upon a time, in a land far away and long ago, I was motivated to believe and behave accordingly: good girls are responsible, don't make trouble, are polite, practice good hygiene, and make others happy in spite of my self. Today, I'd like to say Fuck That! and actually live like I meant it (I'd still brush my teeth and wash appropriate places...).
Facio, ergo sum (I do, therefore I am): I want to make art, rather than write about art. I have been wanting to make things, rather than write about making meaning-full things while I make them. The ‘work’ seems more authentic than their ‘stories’; they are creative non-fictions.
The vertigo each week as the deadline approaches has just kicked me in the teeth- and I decided this packet that I'm kicking back (how DID the phrase " kick back" become a description of relaxation or extortion) in the sense that I am going to spend the rest of my daylight before the packet deadline practicing and living what I want to do most- visual art. The rest of the degree dogma will have to wait. I think.
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