"When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has": "I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras.... You've no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it's incredible how one grows."
-Michel De Certeau quoting Witold Gombrowicz's "anti-hero" to conclude the introduction of The Practice of Everyday Life
“I’ve been trying to take the simplest possible pictures of the trees - a single centered subject, no shadows, no movement, a benign camera angle - so that their narratives can emerge gradually. The challenge is to include what’s necessary and to exclude the extraneous. The task of distilling is extraordinarily difficult.”
-Zoe Leonard
"The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is of contact with a known landscape. ... Such objects as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. ... It's wish is to avoid contact with the landscape."
Wendell Berry, from "A Native Hill"
Finding God
Someone once claimed, "if you are an artist, your god can be whoever you want, but art must be your religion." I was originally repelled by this claim because I took it mean that art should be the only thing that matters to the artist; it is the absolute, the authority you are subject to. But as I've pondered that idea over the last several years, I've come to realize that I had it backwards. Art is not the god, it is the religion. It serves the same function as any religion, an instrument with which to interact with an authority. In previous times, that authority has been gods, monarchs, religion itself, patrons, museums, etc. Today, the artist has the luxury and isolation of being her own god. I've become fascinated with the idea of how artists are handling this authority and more specifically, how can I personally enact a responsible artistic practice from this place; how do I craft the religion I offer to my viewer to interact with me?
Considering the public context of my art over the past few months has led me to an increasingly interior and narrow view of the public I wish to define and engage. Originally I hoped to compose a project that would lasso my myriad ideas, goals, and artistic interests into some Wagnerian-scale epic with an aesthetic and homiletical climax that would leave all viewers enthralled and certainly secure my place in the early 21st Century art historical canon. My worshippers would be many.
But these months I found myself at a series of conceptual crossroads where I had to choose one way of thinking about my work over another. It quickly became a process of distillation. Through this process I have jettisoned many qualities, subjects, and palpabilities that I originally embraced. With each of these decisions, I found myself tearing out pages from a large volume that now feels much closer to a poem. With each book of my bible that I left out, so too was I excluding potential followers. I no longer hope to have masses follow my bible, but I hope to have one who will long consider my poem.
I think that a major turning point in the way I thought about my artistic practice was seeing Zoe Leonard's installations at the Hispanic Society of America called Analog and Derrotero. I saw in the manufacture and organization of her photographs a conceptual structure, a framework for making, that felt very close to my own sensibilities. Her media and subject matter are very different from mine, but I detected a familial relationship of how to investigate and render a subject. I recognized meandering, analogs, simplicity of form, directness of observation, transparency of the working process, literary tendencies, gravity towards abstraction, a political consciousness aimed at herself as much as it is the greater world. These are all qualities I desire for my own work. Seeing Zoe accomplish all of this with such a quiet observational habit on a solitary subject had a huge impact on me.
But what captured my attention most in Zoe's work is that by allowing her direction to be influenced by her subject, she was effectively submitting to it, yielding her artist-authority to the observed. She was no longer fully god, but in service to some other.
Tiny Realities
A note on equivalents: consciousness equals reality. Individual consciousness equals individual realities, the only kind accessible to individuals. Collective consciousness is inaccessible. The distance from one's own consciousness to one other's is the only path we may try, arduously, to travel. That meandering path itself, without destination, is the home of democracy, centrality, non-hierarchy, imagination. This gap between consciousness and between realities, this tangible otherness, is the home of a greater electrified scintillating reality.
A Real Analog
An art object represents the meeting place of two realities, that of the artist and that of the viewer. It is their progeny. It is its own reality. The art object is real.
Writing My Catechisms
This is not an idea, it is simply what is most important to me,
to activate meandering, that act of fidelity,
through longing.
So, what landscape do I wish to meander (What do I long for)?
existing perpetually within the distance from one's own consciousness to one other's. To know and be known, to hear and be heard. This is the only path that I feel I may begin to mark and record.
So, I'm going to make very simple paintings, life-size full-length portraits, of pairs of close friends lightly embracing that look something like Gainsborough's unfinished image of his two daughters.
I imagine the people I want to paint as existing in this place I long to be. I want to represent their connectivity and imply my longing and distance from it. I see these pairs collectively as an avatar of my unformed distant singular, my public, my one other consciousness.
These portraits will represent a type of starting point for me, basic observations, empirical research, from which I will try to answer the question, how can one person know one other.
I am yielding all of the physical characteristics of these paintings to impulse, that necessary arbitrator. The figure is both necessary and arbitrary for me, it is just an impulse. The same is true of using painting as the medium. These are both instinctual. So will be the many other decisions.
Dying God
I hope to become an artist who seeks anonymity, acknowledges he has nothing new to say, is less than arm's length from another, ushers transparency through informality, imagines others through meaningful nuance, and submits to coequality.
Or, as Franz Wright wrote in Beginning Again:
“If I could stop talking, completely
cease talking for a year, I might begin
to get well,” he muttered.
Off alone again performing
brain surgery on himself
in a small badly lit
room with no mirror. A room
whose floor ceiling and walls
are all mirrors, what a mess
oh my God—
And still
it stands,
the question
not how begin
again, but rather
Why?
So we sit there
together
the mountain
and me, Li Po
said, until only the mountain
remains.
Disclaimer
These [statements] are not intended as categorical imperatives, but the [thoughts] stated are as close as possible to my thinking at this time. These ideas are the result of my [thinking] as an artist and are subject to change as my experience changes. I have tried to state them with as much clarity as possible. If the statements I make are unclear it may mean the thinking is unclear. Even while writing these [thoughts] there seemed to be obvious inconsistencies (which I have tried to correct, but others will probably slip by). I do not advocate [this] form of art for all artists. I [hope] that it [will work] well for me [where others may not]. It is one way of making art; other ways suit other artists. Nor do I think [my] art merits [all viewers'] attention.
