emerging avant garde?

Having recently re-read my post stillness from January, it is truly wonderful to now read this commentary by Art Critic, Andrew Berardini.  Instinctually, I know that the Art-professionalism-trend is a horrific distraction from art making and living artfully.  Hence, struggling with pressure to become professional has always been...  a struggle. 
Perhaps there's more to think about regarding "professionalism" and taking oneself lightly? seriously? too seriously?
Once again, these rational terms compete with the abstract matter of art and with the often irrational nature of the working artist.  

Read on: 

HOW TO BE AN UNPROFESSIONAL ARTIST
By Andrew Berardini
March 23, 2016
No one likes being called an amateur, a dilettante, a dabbler.

“Unprofessional” is an easy insult.

The professional always makes the right moves, knows the right thing to say, the right name to check. Controlled and measured, the professional never fucks the wrong person or drinks too much at the party. They never weep at the opening, never lay in bed for days too depressed, sick, broken to move. They say about the professional, “so easy to work with” or “so exacting but brilliant.” The professional takes advantage from every encounter, employs every new acquaintance as a contact, always hits the deadline. When asked about their work, they know what to say, a few lines of explanation sprinkled with enough filigreed intrigue to allude to abysses of research, the mysteries of making. They answer emails in minutes. Their PowerPoints are super crisp. Look at their website, so clean, so modern, so very pro.

You don’t feel like any of these things.

You are hungry, tired, overworked. You drank too much at the party and then slept with the wrong person, and then the really wrong person. You missed the deadline, it just thrushed past with a whoosh. Hustlers around you disappear into wealth and fame. Your dealer tells you to make more with red, those red ones are really selling. Maybe, she says, you make only the red ones for a while? Your student skips class to go to an art fair. The most pressing collectors are the ones holding your student loans. They keep calling, you wish you could trade them a drawing. It can take days to answer the simplest email. Your website, if it exists, is in shambles.

You wander. You doubt. You change styles, media, cities. You experiment, you fail. Again. And again.

Unprofessional most literally means “below or contrary to the standards of a paid occupation.” Who makes the standards? Is everyone paid? Fairly? Is being an artist a job or something else? Who sets these standards? Do you wish to be standardized?

Art and success.

So easy to cocktail those two words together into “professionalism.” Pull up a famous artist’s CV and work from the beginning. Does success look like a sculpture plunked outside the Palace at Versaille? Is it a biennial, a prize, a blue-chip dealer? Is it the cover of a magazine, a thick, chunky retrospective catalogue? Even more evasive things just glanced, the luxury sedan like a bullet, shiny and hard, that the aging photographer bought after he dumped his smallish gallery and long-term partner, for a bigger dealer and a younger girlfriend, shiny and hard as his car; or perhaps, the off-hand mention of a domestic servant, a personal chef, the third nanny, the smallest chink in the opacity of wealth, so very far from the roaches scurrying in your kitchen sink and the fact that you’ve eaten nothing but mushed pumpkin and cigarettes for a month.

This did not feel professional, but it’s true. These things you experienced to be an artist.

Your body of work is a mark of your passages, the richest of your thoughts and the deepest of your emotions. Simply manifesting this into art is hard enough, but today you feel like you need to be professional. The pressure and penury makes you nervous and cautious. What can you make that will take the iron of poverty from your flesh, that will make this feel less like a terrible mistake?

Can’t you tell by my clothes I never made it
Can’t you hear that my songs just won’t sing
Can’t you see in my eyes that I hate it
Wasting twenty long years on a dream.

Lee Hazlewood, “The Performer” (1973)

Somehow making money makes us feel for real. Money we can trade for food and shelter, for time and space and materials to continue. These things are hard and pressing, but it’s not the money that makes us real. We are real already.

Everyone can be an artist, not because they have a degree or they sell, but because they live life artfully, with skill and imagination, freedom and awareness.

But artists trade promissory notes and subsume authority into institutions for some outside validation. Proof to your beloveds they weren’t crazy in supporting you financially, emotionally, spiritually. Later, broke, you exchange dreams for money, or even, later yet, make other people’s dreams and trade those instead.

Collectors, they are really responding to the red ones.

The path is clear for the professional. BFA, MFA, Commercial Gallery, Museum. 5 Things Every Artist Has to Know About Getting a Gallery. 10 Easy Tips for Killing Your Studio Visit. 3 Totally Simple Steps to Art Stardom. Mix in a teaching appointment perhaps, a grant here, a residency there.

For the unprofessional, it isn’t so narrowly defined. As Charles Bukowski wrote, the shortest distance between two points is often intolerable.

It’s not that artists shouldn’t be paid for their labor, but we ought to refuse the assignation of value and worth purely based on salability or the validation of institutions. Systems will always seek to swallow us. We must resist the efficiency of its gears with the softness of our humanity. Unprofessionalism is asserting our right to be human against this machine.

Fragile, weak, doubtful, bumbling, to be “unprofessional” is to simply be human. This does not mean acting without ethics, honesty, or basic kindness. These finer qualities can easily exist independent from how we trade our time for money.

Professionalism makes a person into a brand. The cynical think this has already happened: our slightest movement tracked for personalized advertisements, our declarations and photographs that we share with others all branded and branding, self-awareness as commerce. And though others can attempt to professionalize you, reduce your spirit to a slogan, a product, a logo, you do not have to do this to yourself.

For the time being we live under capitalism, but we don’t have to be broken down into its systematic alienations, divisions, inequalities, of all value to market-value.

In some ways, I was piqued to write this by Daniel S. Palmer’s recent essay on hyper-professionalization just published in Artnews, which ends on an inspiring note: “In a moment of monotony and conformity, artists must reclaim their freedom.”

He opens his essay with a young artist pitching a practised spiel, surrounded and over-handled by art pros. This fails miserably to impress Daniel Palmer. Obviously, being a professional in this sense doesn’t always work. It might have currency with those who are also hyper-professionalized like this particular emerging artist, churning through a system crafted for exactly such purposes. But it didn’t work with Daniel Palmer, and it wouldn’t work for me.

Such clear professionalism is crass, careerist, empty. Repulsive even. “Ambitious young artist” always sounded like an insult to me.

I see making art as the necessary expression of the human spirit. We all need to live, but when the acquisition of wealth becomes the primary endeavor, you are no longer an artist but a financier.

More than a gallerist or a manager, a dealer or an advisor, a critic or a curator, more than an army of assistants and a clutter of collectors, an artist needs the courage to act alone and a community that makes such acts more bearable. One that allows us to be vulnerable, inappropriate, to go rogue, go wild, act weird, and fail.

To be amateurs, dabblers, dilettantes.

An amateur is filled with love beyond compensation, the dabblers fearlessly go places they don’t belong, the dilettantes happily lack the hidebound pretensions of experts. When we step out of the imposed confines of professionalism, we can be as open as students, able to flirt with other modes, to seek knowledge, experience, and value in our lives without limits.

Stripped away of institutional validation and the pressures of the market, we are free to be human, to be artists, to be unprofessional.

Copyright © Momus 2015

symbols

Did I mention that I suffered a dog-bite on my hand a few days before Christmas?  The purpose of pointing that out is that my hand was far less "on the team" then usual, and it was my right hand, so I began reading like I haven't read in years.  When your creative productivity goes down, the need for another point of focus grows.  The great thing is getting through to the blocked self-permit needed to allow myself the "luxury" of just sitting and reading!  I love reading, and I'm glad to be back in the swing of it.

The books have been novels by Sara Gruen, Wally Lamb, and non-fiction by Marion Woodman, Judith Duerk, C. G. Jung and poetry by Mary Oliver.

The strength and common thread through all of their writings has been the search for self and the attention to symbols for self knowing.  Little by little, I turn further toward the importance of symbols in dreams, journaling and relationships, and my art becomes a more overt conduit for depicting and understanding those symbols.  The critical thinking that takes shape through meditation (through art making) on a symbol or symbolic image is, what I'll now call (thanks Jung), alchemical.  As in meditation, this thinking is non linear, abstract and holistic, but instead of using the process to check out, it seems there is an opportunity to check in.  Over the years, my inability to intelligently express abstract ideas through verbal language played into a weakness of mine - fear of fraudulence and stupidity.  In lieu of depicting what is bizarre, raw, abstract or confusing from my creative mind, I have protected myself (checked out) through organizing my art within public comfort zones, thus avoiding putting tender vulnerability on the "chopping block."  To be honest, I think higher Ed for artists should specifically address and engage (check in) with this vulnerability, abstraction and confusion as much or MORE than it stresses professionalism and competitive, art-market stuff.

So, being that I don't currently participate in the art market, who's doing the "chopping?"  Inevitably, myself.  And I'll say, I don't believe that my work up until the recent past was shallow or less important.  There were courageous and bold efforts, personal expression and worthwhile risks to be applauded.  I am especially glad to have made artwork with and for a dance company, made large, site specific installations, and to have learned to take A LOT of time on projects instead of pressuring myself to be prolifically productive.  The difference then was that, even though the natural symbols and effects of myself came through in my projects, I wanted to express ideas that were related to life outside of me.  Perhaps that was the framework for my art that seemed necessary in order to talk about it and share it with people, relating to what is more conventionally understood.  I believe many of those works started as the more cryptic and personal visual language of my own ways and being.  Then, much of the project was steered by my impressions of public perception and acceptance, leaving the initial abstract vision to be reformed and polished (Errr...  chopped).

Depicting abstract symbols of my psyche felt awkward and exposed.   Does this relate to a college art critique wherein a peer student mocked my symbolic artwork (or so I thought he mocked my work)?  I think that moment indicated to me that not only was I "weird" outside of the art world, but even amongst peers I was weird, and that felt like a chopping block.  That moment did not end badly, my other peers and my professors weren't addressing my work that way, but, it did provoke a paranoia in me.  I have always picked up on the comments and critiques of "art professionals" and I have been hung in the balance of "is it too weird?"  "Is it weird enough?" and "Will they like it?"

In contrast, Nikki Giovanni teaches her students to ask a question more like, "Do I like it and is it good enough for me?"

The superego-boombox that I have long shouldered adopted that self-conscious and insecure perspective that tells you that others' impressions of your work come first and your personal journey is submissive to it.  If others saw my work as weird or confusing, then I had to make my work more understandable or just minimal in aesthetic so that there were few overt symbolic messages.  (I do love minimalism and my most minimal art has been a great relief and comfort to me.)  If someone whom I respected as an artist/art professional made a dismissive remark regarding some symbol or symbolic imagery that feels important to me, I would adopt that dismissive thinking and the superego would remark, "yes, now you know where to draw the line with your vulnerability."

An artist peer of mine once groaned, "Ugh!  Self portraits!" with a grossed out expression.  I have no idea why she would be dismissive and repulsed by self portraiture - perhaps it is too often a mode of self expression which is difficult to face?  At that time, I was courageously making more self portraits, including much symbolism otherwise, and I immediately felt I had to keep my current work "mum."  Thankfully, I did not keep mum beyond our conversation, but her words and expression goaded me, confirming my Superego's fearful message, "yes, keep it to yourself."

This was my first artwork after chaos time (see below), also a first effort at grandly portraying personal symbolism.  

Keeping it to oneself - a harsh contrast to the creative self, the artist.  So here's the thing that springs up in me as my new tour de force in life:  It's YOU, it's YOURs, it's BEING and it's HUMAN.  The social structure that was set up for you was not what you needed in order to make YOUR ART.

Chaotic events occurred in my life (yes, chaos, like murder and death), which brought me to the bottom and to the darkest place.  In that depth I realized, there's no time to lose, there's no other life to live, there's no need to succumb to any program for life other than my own intuitive and real desires. Making my artwork can and does reflect all of this.

Carl Jung points out that when we shine a light onto our shadow, we find darkness, and that is rightfully so.

Ever since (what I've usually called) the chaos time, there has been a slow, subversive energy and thought process that has recently become more the leader as I engage life and art.  I've learned to temper the superego with intuition and allow abstract thinking/feeling it's rightful role in my art making.  Symbolism, which has always been apparent to me, even when suppressed or confusing, now regains it's rightful role in my art-making and in my self-making.

A very recent watercolor/drawing, an effort to play into the stream of consciousness and allow whatever comes up.  Much like dream analysis, I can look at the image after the fact and see or follow clues from the subconscious mind.

Poem for ordinary time

Looking out over the sky, you are.

Looking down into my lap, through my hair

shining in the sunlight, too bright to see

heating my back through black shirt.

Keeping our faces shaded

squinting briefly toward the sky.

Listening to the motors

cars or motorcycles or whatever

the passing of tires on the road

the dog's lips smack

a single bird's...         not a song, not a noise

only

the sound a bird makes.

Pacing

      and looking out.

Sitting

      and looking in.

un moving through the moments

no ticking of any clock

stillness

marred by progress

anxiety of all the All

Looking back into the sunshine in my hair

the dog's curious nose at my back

glowing, streaking threads

listen, sniffing curiosity

As the jet flies over,

the dog growls.

He knows something's no good.

Don't we all?

We don't.

He patters away to look after you.

cross-stitching-again-again-again-again-again-again-again

spending time
again
with thread and needle
with my face
and yours
spending time
again
and again

resisting the restlessness
exploring ordinary
time
with my self
and you
and the thread
and the needle
and the tiny
moments
and the meditation on
each pixel
a stitch
another stitch

yours
and mine

and everything in between
the fabric

stillness

I just got off the phone with a podcast, On Being with Krista Tippett interviewing Pico Iyer.  I had never heard of this man, but apparently, he's friends with some of my favorite knowns such as the Dalai Lama and Leonard Cohen.  He also lives in a very remote, mostly off the grid home in Kyoto and has a place in the US as well where he works in almost solitude on writing and thinking.  In this interview, he spoke of how in his twenties he became very successful - in the American fashion - as a journalist in NYC.  By "American fashion," I mean the fast paced, forward moving, self aggrandizing, never enough conventions that I know I, myself, grew up believing was my ticket to... Gosh, I'm not sure what I thought the ticket was for!  So then, at 29 he hit a wall, knew he needed something less like "distraction" and more like "attention," and embarked on a career of solitude, stillness and the resulting writings about his evolving philosophies on those human rights.

Wow Wow Wow.

I am so relieved as I contemplate what I just listened to. (....and of course there was more to it than stillness and solitude, so really, have a listen.)  The reason I feel relieved is that recently, I've uncovered in myself that convention of "fast-paced-forward-moving-self-aggrandizing-never-enough" and found it to be terribly uncomfortable and something from which I'd like to be free.  Having been convinced throughout my adolescence and young adulthood (via parent, church, school, and community norms and direction) that this American "way" is The Way, it's been a struggle with my SuperEgo to realize that it's not the only director in my psyche, but there are other players who not only have a critical voice, but have to be acknowledged and tended to.  Those other players have abstract names that are only relevant to me (the voices in my head - as they say), but for this format, I'll call them, Intuition, Wisdom, Feeling, and Myth.  (Some other time, perhaps I'll explain more about why I label them this way.  I'll say though that Myth, to me, is not "a lie" but instead, the story of Human kind, overarching humanness.)  Iyer talks about the knowing of one's self, the inner life as a human need and of course, despite the prevailing conventions, doing this inner work of self discovery is the foundational work to support all of our outer work and relationships.

So, this describes, for me, what the previous year was unfolding for me - a gradual shift into becoming a person who spends the majority of my time doing inner work.  Throughout the year, I felt great resistance from Superego when Intuition and Feeling were my primary focus.  Superego tried to distract me with chores and false obligations, but little by little, I noticed my own Wisdom, and she reminded me, in my own way, that Intuition and Feeling are really the Me that deserves to live as part of the great Myth.  Superego still pipes up with a shaming sensation as I lose track of time, allow myself to be completely absorbed in my art or music, or simply do not apply my creative skill sets toward a recognizable "career."  How sad, the shame that I (via Superego) feel or didn't want to feel was the unconscious motivator for my "success" and propulsion through professional realms.

Remembering Art made almost a decade ago when, however unconsciously, I decided my art-making is a vehicle for my stillness.  This painting, Breathing Room, was a real-time transcription of my breathing on a giant canvas.  I gave myself permission to do this work in stillness and solitude, and now too, I give myself permission - but consciously.

Without continuing down the long road of discussing SuperEgo, I'll bring this back to Pico Iyer's talk about the necessity of solitude and stillness as means toward attention (AKA awareness), and point out the big affirmation that I felt while listening:  I have permission - Intuition granted, Wisdom granted and Myth granted permission to be still as long as you need.  Up until 2015, I naturally possessed the Intuition, Feeling, Wisdom and Myth that I am now choosing to acknowledge and embody, but the hard-lined conventions of Superego steered against my right to know, legitimize and activate these players.  2015 was just the beginning of realizing true inner needs and the metamorphosis into a life of stillness that more thoroughly honors, reveals and empowers my essential being.  My creative survival and my art depend on this kind of stillness.

print making

Making prints, as in, print-making was one mode of art-making that hooked me when in college.  Maybe it was my personable, inspiring and empowering professor, Jack.  Perhaps it was the satisfying repeatability of the images - if anyone takes a look at my website or elsewhere in this blog, it is obvious that I will repeat an action, a process, or an image/symbol for a very long time (I am also a long distance runner and can make gnocchi or tamales for hours).  While printing with Mark Lunning at the Art Students League of Denver for the past few months, it has also become apparent to me that this art media is offering me an immediacy that is helpful in keeping up momentum with my art working.

Let me elaborate on this issue of momentum.  For about 3 - 5 years, I've been making epic projects.  I will diligently work on the same project for 5 - 12 months.  The vision, drawings, technical planning, acquisition of materials and summoning courage to really begin may take 2 - 3 months.  Then the various phases of repetition (mind you, this isn't tedium to me and I'm not bored) - whether it be dying fabric, sometimes dying it again, and again, measuring and cutting fabric and measuring, sewing, measuring, sewing, sewing, measuring, seam ripping, sewing, seam ripping, measuring, cutting, sewing, measuring, and so on and so on (oh I forgot all the pressing and the organizing and referring back to the drawing from months ago).  There's even more to this and then more steps for finishing.  I am more or less describing the piecework that I do (I don't actually quilt - see definition), but the epic process is very similar for my cross-stitch projects and other media that I've worked with over time.  And here's what I'll say about momentum:  At about 2/3 of the way into the process, I usually come up against this big feeling of non-productivity because I don't yet have the product of so much labor.  I think this is an American psychological hang-up - being productive means rolling out and showing off a lot of products, and having news about what you're doing because there's "always something new!"  About 3 years ago I got really clear with myself and decided to turn against the contemporary American way with my art-making.  I don't actually care to be prolifically productive with my artwork (what will I DO with all of that work anyway? I also get grossed out by the art-market and choose not to participate, so I really don't need a lot of "inventory").  I prefer an art making experience that is more like the culinary movement, slow-food.  ...but even slow food has an amuse bouche carefully added in along the way to refresh the palette and liven up the pace.

Lesson learned:  Commit to the long haul, and find ways to keep up the creative motivation along the way.

haiku excuse

...and less piano keyboard time.

infected dog bite
right middle finger "sore thumb"
less typing these days