Wednesday, January 9, 2008

The difference between work and ideas

I am tangled up in my work, now.
two endless weeks away, and now back fuller time than ever.
This is a success:
I am a full time student/artist
If nothing else, I aim to be entirely invested, entirely in my work
Playing with the line of 'unhealthy' obsession- to better know that level of commitment in myself.

This sometimes makes me feel terrible- with my trash system under renovation,
so the studio and my whole life is littered with my refuse. This feels like no clarity anywhere.
The bags of milk cartons, sprinkling of wrappers and receipts everywhere screams at me:
'WHY AREN'T YOU WORKING RIGHT NOW? IF YOU WERE WORKING HARD ENOUGH YOU WOULD HAVE THOSE BOXES BACK UP AND THEN YOU WOULDN'T HAVE TO LIVE AMIDST YOUR OWN FILTH'
I have a high tolerance for mess- that I am bothered means that things are out of control.
Today, finally, I got those boxes back on the wall and so within a week I'll have a place to put my trash, again.
I'm sure something else will replace that to stress me out.

I am worrying about the disjuncture between my ideas; The Art I Want to Make
and my studio as it stands now: The Art I am Making
I wonder constantly, is this a legitimate fear?
Because of my obsession with synthesizing, any peice of work or string of words will only every illustrate part of what I'm grasping at and so a day or a week of work piling newspapers or sorting trash or drawing portraits makes me feel like I've lost sight of the greater whole. I am learning that this is necessary, trying not to make it make me feel bad.

Right now, difficult thinking is absent from my day to day work.
And as I am working, and the work feels menial, I get nervous
But hopefully and probably my ideas are just latent, already obvious to me, sitting behind the day to day grind of building.
Not every day has to be a day or revelation. Or, not every day's revelations need to be conceptual.

Will ths space come to embody the entirity of my experience?
Will clarity just happen, or will I want to force it upon the space, and will that be possible? Will that be okay?
My housemate Emma, a jazz musician, talks about learning to separate the judging from the creating.
and I used to think this was not as applicable to my work as to hers.
But I think about this a lot, now- trying to enter in to a period where I am not trying to make sense of, not synthesizing, not judging, just letting happen.

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