out of the studio

Whenever I remember that I have a blog and I haven't written anything to contribute to it for a while...  I try to remember why I keep the blog.  The first thought that comes to mind is for the purpose of processing my art practice.  In keeping this blog, I've wanted to have a forum for thinking through the work of making art, sharing and exploring whatever inspires my art-making and showing work in progress.

Lately, my art practice has been only a few hours (if that) each day because it is late Spring and my garden's going nuts and there are berries on trees and bushes all over Denver that I need to pick for making tarts and jam, and the weather is perfect for bike rides....

Agnes Martin used to advise that young artists keep with the intuitive need to be out of the studio at times.  My friend Alvin Gregorio also keeps with the idea that studio practice is not always in the studio and the art practice sometimes needs development via other exposures and creative work. There are certainly creative practices that happen all throughout my life!  The garden is proof of that, and so is this Saskatoon berry tart:

the wisdom of Mary Oliver

I wanted to share this poem as an expression of gratitude for Mary Oliver, a sage poet, a woman who lives the life I imagine possible for any of us, but oft left unlived.  I am inspired by all of her poetry, the accuracy of experience and feeling and experience and feeling.  This poem in particular is about the inner experience, the willfulness we can muster to live...  really live the lives we imagine for ourselves.  Living out one's own essential life requires a struggle, even if just the effort to rise in the morning, against the mundanity and uniformity, which so often blocks our entry into the magical experience of being human.

The Journey - Mary Oliver (from Dreamwork)

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice – – –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations – – –
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do – – – determined to save
the only life you could save.

the inner critic

Most people have voices in their head whether they are conscious of the voices or not.  Obviously, hearing voices can become extreme for some to the point of neurosis or worse, schizophrenia, but I am referring to a normal inner dialogue as it flows through our thoughts.  Sometimes we are not aware of the multiplicity within ourselves and we can be unknowingly influenced by thoughts (inner messages to ourself from ourself) such as judgements, biases, fears, obsessions.  This is putting it quite simple and the matter is truly more complex, but I mean to address the inner voice of the critic.

For myself, the inner critic showed up very early in my life (perhaps around the age of 6?), and represented a compass for finding acceptance from the world outside myself.  I believe this is a common condition with children and young people wherein, we find that we can get through this world much easier if we can just find out what other people like, accept, enjoy, approve, and generally believe successful.  These external influences collect into what Freud called the SuperEgo - the moral regulator! - and it's up to us to find out how those internalized impressions and expectations either work for us or against us.  Each of us also has an unique internal orientation that works with or against the external orientation - altogether, our inner leanings and our outer parameters are the basis for our decisive powers.  External orientation may work well within our family, school, and workplace but can fail us as we expand our connections and communities and begin to feel pulled in different directions without knowing which is right or best for us.  Further, despite lack of practice with inner orientation, the inner knowing (call it "gut feelings," intuition, and at best, essential Self) is nevertheless there.  Without our consciousness for it or choosing to engage this inner orientation into the authorship of our own life, we can feel tension as the external orientation of our Superego can conflict with our unique inner knowing.

I am thinking of the ways in which, as an artist, I have resisted inclinations to make some kind of art because the inner critic (made up of external codes and voices from throughout my early life) hinted at some absurdity in my inclination.  I think of all the times I have attempted to reach something deeper in my creative work and the difficulty and the unfamiliarity of the creative terrain raised red flags with the SuperEgo.  I am halted in my exploration of my prima materia as the part of me that has to "fit into the world" demands that I "use my time wisely" and focus on more practical skills.   How does anyone actually engage in creative work, the response to exploring one's prima materia, if the conscious mind, oriented by conventional rules, does not permit opening the door to one's unconscious dwelling?

I've been reading a selection of Carl Jung's essays regarding creativity, imagination and, of course, the work of psychoanalysis, and he speaks of the inner critic as a "cramp" in consciousness.  Yes, I find that the inner critic (voicing, "Why am I doing this?" or "How is this weird work valuable in the 'real' world?" as I try to make my art) is most definitely a cramp!  As with a cramp during exercise, we must learn to take care of the cramp in order to continue with our work.  A cramp should not stop us from ever exercising again!  Likewise, a mental cramp can not keep us from engaging with our irrational mind and thereby engaging our creative work.  In discussing this matter with a musician the other day, he talked of practicing scales for as long as he needed in order to pass beyond the physical and practical work of it and begin to hear the potential for creating music.  Artists may have to engage with the base material of their work for totally irrational amounts of time in order to achieve the alchemical potential that exists between themselves and their media.  Meanwhile the Superego objects, "Spending 3 hours practicing music scales to then be able to compose?!  Do we really have 5 hours to spend on music today?"  The answer, for an artist of any kind is, irrationally, YES!

Cross-stitch for months... and months... and so much time that the artwork becomes the time spent.  My external rules of "using time wisely," the SuperEgo heckles me from my shoulder, "Why are you spending so much TIME on this project?!" and I have to think in response, because I am an artist, and this is my work.

Though seemingly an obvious idea, often a forgotten imperative of the artist is that doing creative work is of utmost importance to the artist.  We forget how imperative the work is as the rational (industrial, capitalist, media driven) world opposes the irregular, irrational and costly work of art-making.  How many conversations have I had with artists where they actually say, "I have to make my work.  Otherwise, how would I live?  I would die."  It's not a matter of fitting into a schematic of practical use and monetization.  It's a matter of realizing one's need to work with unconscious material (that which comes from within and does not follow the codes of the rational world) because otherwise, it would eventually mount up within us and consume us with it's energy.  Better to engage with it regularly and make it workable and useful within the context of our creative work.  The creative work then becomes the actualization of the whole person, the irrational material of the unconscious balanced by the systems and skill sets of the conscious ego.

Some may believe that creative work is not about the actualization of the whole person and can exist in the realm of practical work.  This is plausible, but I am not that artist.  There are enough aesthetically designed objects in this world without my making my artwork so practical and prolific and commonly available in the lives of many (this practicality is the kind of resistance my Superego puts upon me).  I find resonance in Jung's words, "Everything good is costly, and the development of personality [unique selfhood] is one of the most costly of all things.  It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one's eyes in all its dubious aspects - truly a task that taxes us to the utmost."

The inner critic says, "The task is too much; we need not dive so deeply.  There is plenty of creative work to do without going so far."  But I willfully say, the work of the artist is to dive into the unconscious depths and trust that the inner critic can become instead the tether that keeps us connected with our conscious realm.

All references to Jung's writing in this post are specific to an excerpt from Alchemical Studies (1929) (CW 13) pars. 17 - 45

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