First Post

As the conclusion to my college education, I have been afforded eight months of independent art work and a giant, windowless room in which to do it. This blog is a second attempt (following a muttled, too-serious wikispace that you can find at http://statetheproblem.wikispaces.com/) at creating a format for process writing and reflection. It is almost december. I am three months in to this work and I feel like I am just beginning.

"The obligation of the artist is not to solve the problem, but to state the problem correctly"- Anton Chekhov

The title of this space comes from the above Anton Chekhov quote that my friend showed me. I've never read any Checkhov, so it feels inauthentic to use this quote (and in fact...what's the deal with mining written words for quotes, anyway? probably more on that at some point), but it makes me feel like the work I am doing is urgent- perhaps truthfully or perhaps delusionally.

The ecological crisis is what I am calling today's problem. It is chaotic, absurd, emotional, uncatagorizable. There are mountains and mountains of evidence and a host of theories trying to connect and systematize what is happening on earth as we sit. privitization? globalization? shock doctrine? structural racism? gaia hypothesis? These are the ideas sitting as objects on my studio bookshelf, rather useless between my fabric collection and some sculptures made out of trash bags wrapped in string. There are a million ways to synthesize what we see happening socially, spacially, ecologically today- so much so that the theories themseves call to be synthesized.

This makes me feel panicked. I want to have an all-encompassing system by which to understand what I am experiencing every day, what's 'really going on'. I often feel like I already have this system within me- that if I think, write, research, read, draw, chart, calculate enough than some clear, simplifiable way to visualize the mess of behaviors and crisis will emerge. Three months of preliminary work made me think this was impossible, and a couple of weeks ago I was convinced that all of my ideas about art about research, about visualizing panic, about fusing working and display space were inherently faulty and I had to 'start over'. I had to come to terms with the fact that grandeous efforts are not inappropriate as long as I am ready for failure- or at least incompletion. Large as my room and my chunk of free time might seem, ultimately I am one person in one place for one year and at the end of it, I will barely have begun.

Coming out of the other end of this realization, it is time to really begin.