Thoughts from Just FInished

wow, its done. really. I look around the room and everything seems like its in the right place. My whole life feels organized. My dreams feel realized. This room is beautiful.

I have tried to bring as much of my lived experience in to my work as possible- the materials I consume and love, the relationships that support me, the ideas that ground me, the books I read, the colors I am fond of. I have been as exhaustively personal as I could be to counteract that impulse to be general, thus preachy. I have wanted to make this space an artifact of my learning, my yearning to know. And I think I've been successful. The response to this peice has been overwhelmingly positive, both complimentary and thoughtful. A lot of 'it's so beautiful, it's so intense, it must have been so much WORK' but also a willingness to engage, read, ask questions, let the peice be a conversation starter. In response to my letters, I have received so many beautiful letters. From friends and strangers. I have had many more emotional conversations.

But I am taken by the fact that the piece is almost exclusively engaged with or understood as being about ME, an assertion of my skill, commitment, articulateness, crafsmanship, aesthetic. The experience of making my work public has been increadibly validating, but validating of what? Since academia and fine-arts both thrive off of criticism, self-awareness itself is seen as more praiseworthy than what I am self-aware OF. After a week of such gushing, what I am yearning for now is people who will help me know how to better this work- by which I don't mean make a more appealing works of art but how to continue this life of doing what I believe is just, without the crutches that I am a student and so all things are for learning, or that I am an artist and so that all things are for art. In the past week and a half since my opening, this prospect has been overwhelming, and I know it might well be a long time until I feel that kind of focused purpose that I had towards this project again.

With the project complete, I am finding out that I am a new person. I've thrown myself totally at this project, and so inevitably I have re-shaped myself around the needs of this work. Stepping out, expecting myself to return to the experiences, routines, friendships that occupied my time before this work got so intense, I am learning how it has changed me, how I have changed myself.

This scares me. I am re-confronting that larger fear of my place in the world, but without the immediate landing space for my anxiety of the daily grind of my work. I imbued that grind with so much personal meaning, decided it was an ethical work, and only now am thinking about the fact that it has changed me in ways besides making me more ethical.

This year has been a slow and steady amping up of my commitment to my own personal universe and a continual shutting out of "distractions". I did not want to hear that I was being a bad friend, that I had become pushy or self-centered, I would periodically have a conversation about this...but only in order to keep the peace. I did not want to change. I wanted to work. This mostly manifested among my housemates- the three women who have been more influential to and supportive of my work and self for the past four years- were insulted/alienated/mad, not because of the concrete thing I have DONE, but because of who I was chosing to be. The absolute solo-ness of my all-consuming art-making life has to some extent incompatible with the life of collective learning we had chosen to have together, and that I believe is how I ought to live. In the abstract, I see making dinner for all of us, doing dishes, vacuuming, sitting together and talking through our lives is a joy and a privilege, but in the mindset of my work, it felt like a burden. The part of me that exists in that house did not fit in to that experience. And so, as the year wentn on, I was increasingly absent. I could hardly talk about anything besides my project, struggled to relate to their work outside of the filter of my own. I am still sometimes this way, and it is scary to recognize this tendency in myself.

I think the peice of writing that has had the most influence on me was an interview in "DIalogues in Public Art" by Tom Finkelpearl with Mierle Laderman Ukeles. I revisited it recently, to write my letter to Mierle, and now I have been thinking about it a lot. Mierle talks about how her fine arts training taught her to value her own creative autonomy and freedom in such a way that made it difficult for her to feel that the selfless work of caring for her newborn baby was worthwhile. It did not make her feel productive. I understand my experience right now as mirroring Mierle's, a younger example of the way art-training fails to prepare people to live and think collectively, interpersonally. Mierle says that art training comes out of mysogonistic individualism, and to me also it has roots in capitalism- where a person learns to commodify them self. I understand these forces as causes of ecological crisis, and so believe that the effects of my art-training will also create things in me that shape me in ways I believe to be unproductive.

At this moment of exhaustion and post-project let down, I am seeing only the bad things this project has done to me. How do I make peace with all the selfishness I think making art fosters in me, and reconcile it with the other knowledge this year of work has provided me?

In a month I will graduate from college the product of 17 years of private schooling, and am trying to define how to be a productive citizen. I am scared of the potential to turn my daily life in to a cashing-in of the privilege this education has afforded me. I am highly uncertain of how to go about this.