Midway and Personal Complicity in Danger

Monday was my midway board. I expected it to be low-key, and to feel in control. I cleaned up my studio, and made a list of questions, specific quandries I wanted advice on. I never looked at the list once during the hour. I anticipated entirely wrong.

I felt like over the course of the hour Julianne went through the internal process I went through over the past few months. Being excited, coming to realize the delusional grandeur and potentially preachy elements of my ambitions, and then finally reconciling it with a need to focus on the personal, to not illustrate because comprehensiveness is not possible.

I was so frustrated for much of it. I know I know I know I KNOW this is impossible. I know I KNOW I shouldn't want to make replicas, ilustrations, signs, falsities that attempt to directly communicate some sort of larger problem, and yet I still have that impulse, deeply, but this is not an impulse to be didactic-okay, maybe a little bit. But mostly really its to be self-educational. I believe and feel like I have to believe that art will help me figure stuff out. They said 'don't worry about the audience,' and I'm really not worried about them. I'm worried about me and my place in the world, my relevance. This exersize, this year, is entirely (and mostly unapologetically) self-centered.

So self-centeredness is the antidote to the problem of preachiness in art? That sounds terrible. Better if I call it self reflection. Political impulse+self reflectedness=art-condescendence

My board helped me identify a few parts of my design for the six rooms that don't yet fit this agenda of including myself in all presentations, not to try to be an invisible intermediary between art and information. The Port, definitely, was starting to feel funny, and they suggested instead that I just have everything in carts custom-fit to the objects. this is awesome. this makes more sense. I need to figure out how to make the carts and how exactly to talk about why this is what needs to happen.

They also really didn't like the bunker, and that bummed me out. I really loved the idea of having an installation made of canned goods, but again they said that this was trying to talk about a phenomena outside of me- consumerist paranoia in general instead of paranoia that is mine. This is true.

The idea from the bunker came directly out of Andrew Szasz's book "Shopping Our Way to Safety: how we changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves". The book is about Inverted Quarentine, a term he invented to talk about fear of global danger/calamity and the catagory of responses that a person uses to try to separate onesself from harm. Just like when Americans built bunkers in their back yard to prepare themselves for the threat of nuclear war, we are now moving to the suburbs, buying our bottled water and our 'natural' foods to quarentine ourselves from the danger all around- which is a real, real danger. We consume so many man-made substances from eating, drinking and breathing, that newborn babies are now born with an average of 200 chemicals ALREADY INSIDE OF THEM. These include commonly known toxins such as lead and arsenic, pesticides, phthalates (thats the stuff that makes plastic malleable- proved testosterone interrupter and in SO much plastic. I just learned about them a few months ago and they scare me a lot), and all sorts of the sythetic compounds, some of which we have very little or no idea what the potential effects on humans are.

There is no way to test the safety of this situation. We are the experiment, earth is the lab. From the perspective of society as a whole, efforts to isolate onesself are delusional and futile.

But I am not society- I am one person, and from this perspective reverse quarentine is practical, safe, comforting. MAYBE it saves me from some danger, MAYBE I am being a conscious consumer and endorsing better products, but DEFINITELY it makes me feel empowered in the face of things I cannot control.

This is the experience I am trying to make my art out of, work that embodies fact in such a way that recognizes emotionality and the filter of my hand and my mind. Thus, despite the urge to make art that illustrates, that makes physical a phenomena I think is true (such as reverse quarentine) my mission here is to make art that expresses my complicency in these phenomena. Art is pedagogy, not sociology.

In my midway I felt like I was fighting- no no no no you just don't get it, I understand your criticism and I am making these choices despite it, with an understanding of incompleteness and failure. But upon reflection, I think I was being oppositional, and that their criticism is support. I feel really creatively internal, now. Other's opinions are hard to take and hard to filter, and I just don't think I want any for a while.

Which is good, because in january, it will be just me.