State The Problem

One Last Time

2008-05-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

The project ended. I finished ripping it apart. My room now stands as an empty white room, red writing still visible under coats of paint.

The project stood for two fast and beautiful weeks, many visitors and an overwhelming amount of praise. As I wrote at the time, it is difficult to confront the ways in which I have re-shaped myself around this work I've done, and so now feel lost without it. Aimless.

Continuing this blog feels like holding on, this phase of live is done but its effects reverberate through me, months later. I am still just starting the work I had not thought about as I wrote this blog, the sorting myself out again.

I am writing about this new, less focused phase at noexpertsupthere.blogspot.com

Other

2008-04-22T19:59:00.000-07:00

and then there was that other thing
that last element, unspoken here.
Outside my front door, he built a ramp up to my window, and I watched him through a cloud of plastic bags.
He peered at me while I cut 2' by 4's, dissapeared back in to my universe.
We stayed later and later, each in our own artist tornado,
until finally one night, I let him in my space, and we didn't leave.

I am complicit even in those ways of loving others that I have so much lamented,
in looking with affection at that man.
a MAN
who is kind to me and slightly taller.
I cannot escape any of the systems that I believe (want to bellieve?) are wrong, those systems are in me.
Sometimes they feel right for a minute or a day or week, and then I get so scared.

I tried hard to make something that was not about Beautiful.
I know I could make it look pleasing to me- the challenge was, really, how deeply could I learn?
And months of spiraling in to that learning that felt so heavy, that made me so anxious and mean and scared,
then-
We were sitting on my bridge, I was hunched over, with the stapler.
I looked up, and it was beautiful.
We were sitting there together and I was smiling.

What does it mean to look at him lovingly in that place I made to empower myself? Does it weaken that intensity?

The project is done, now, he helped me rip it apart.
Some things were too heavy for me, I felt ashamed.
He took a sledge hammer to the bridge, and we both cried.
This is not what I expected, this is not what I thought I wanted. is this what I think I want?

The project is done, now, and he is still here. It is beautiful, I am so lucky, and/yet/but/therefore I am scared that ultimately, I have just given in.
Why is this so hard for me?
Perhaps that difficulty is sign that this is so much learning, and it is a good learning. And so, I have to feel that despite The Problematic, it is also Teh Good

Thoughts from Just FInished

2008-04-21T11:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Artist Statement?

2008-04-18T18:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Registrar,

I have chosen to write my artist’s statement in the form of a letter to you. It is one of a series of letters that I wrote and displayed in my project to all of the people who have helped determine the course of the work I have done this year. You have asked me explain to you exactly what my project is, and also want to tell you what role Bard has played in it. I know that my letter is going to be longer than you asked my artist statement to be, and I hope this won’t upset you too much. My work this year has been against the idea of self-editing, I want to make as much apparent to the viewer as possible, and so I want to tell you everything I think is relevant. You can skim the letter, if you want. It won’t upset me.

I believe that we are living today in an increasing moment of ecological crisis, and that as a young person it is appropriate, maybe even necessary, to feel panicked. I began the year with this anxiety, believing that there must be a way for my artistic process to further my understanding of why I find the larger systems that control today’s world to be so upsetting. I wanted my artwork to be a means to synthesize the disparate ways ecological crisis affects my life. I wanted to embody all the daily decisions I make to try to explicate myself from systems I think are wrong, all the academic learning about ecology that had played such a larger role in my experience at bard, and the personal, emotional work of facing a planet in crisis. Early in the year, it became apparent to me that these ambitions were impossible to fulfill- the work of synthesizing ones personal, academic and creative lives is not a project with an end. Thus, I came to see my senior project as a series of attempts, a collection of projects that collectively represent a yearning to know the planet and my place within it. I chose to work in my studio, making all of the necessities of my creative life part of the project. This minimized the amount of time I had to spend making my ideas in to finished objects, and maximized the amount of exploration and learning. This choice stems from my belief that art is essentially an act of self-education; a way in which a person learns to set an agenda for themselves that synthesizes the logistics of the material world and their intellectual, emotional and/or aesthetic interests. I wanted my project to be a testing of the ways in which I believe art has unique potential to be used in ecological pedagogy. Essentially, I spent the year as a test subject for my own educational theories

I divided my studio in to six rooms over two stories, and made each space in to a project or set of projects that helped me to deepen my understanding of how I am complicit in today’s ecological crisis. Here is a description and explanation of the rooms, called by the names I’ve refer to them by all year.

The Port was an entryway, which by the time of the opening was entirely empty. This was the space where things stay until they have another place, like any real port. I call this space a port to remind myself, jokingly, that my studio life is not separate from the problematic institution of international trade. Like all other places where humans live and work, my studio is a place that depends on a vast set of resources. The ceiling of this room was covered with paper bags hung upside-down. They were meant to evoke a sense of urgency, and to introduce the audience to the accumulation that will fill the rest of the piece

The Trash Room was a small room filled with cardboard boxes floor to ceiling, in which I stored and sorted all of the things I would have put in the trash and recycling since September. There were also two video monitors in the boxes- one playing a video of me emptying out my compost all year, and the other of me engaging with every light switch and electrical outlet I come in to contact with in my daily life. This project was the idea I began the year with, from which the rest of the project evolved.

The Office functioned as one would expect an office to, with a desk and chair for me, some small sets of shelves, a clothes rack and a comfortable chair for visitors. This is the space where I checked my e-mail, made small drawings, and wrote in my senior project blog, which can be found at statetheproblem.blogspot.com. On two walls of the room, I drew a large flow chart that connected all of my strains of thinking for the year. It included an exploration of the bad social systems I am complicit in, the things I consume and throw away, and the events of my life that led me to make this project. Another wall housed rough drafts for this flow chart and other texts that inspired it, and the fourth wall was built entirely out of newspaper collected from the red hook recycling center.

The Bunker was a glorified closet, housing all the things I needed to build the project, but not often enough merit keeping them in my office, as well as all of the other things in my life that I hold on to based on some ambiguous feeling that they will be useful in the future. I used this collection as a way to explore in myself the tendency we all have to try to stave off our fears by surrounding ourselves with objects . Because the room consisted of things that I thought needed in the future, but not actually once the project is complete, it was locked, but a peephole was provided for viewers to experience my collection.

The Altars Room was a deep red room with a cushy floor made of old clothing arranged in color order, which I believe to be the most beautiful thing I know how to make. Around the edge of the room were small tables, at which I wrote letters to all of the people who influenced the direction of this project: friends, family, professors, famous artists and thinkers, and even a few objects such as my car and my power drill. I wrote these letters as an exercise in articulating sources- to make clear to myself and my viewers that the making of this work of art did not happen in a vacuum, but rather exists within the context of my life and thus of the world. For those viewers who had letters written to them, it doubled as a way to re-focus the experience of my piece from that of a passive observer to one of a knowing participant. The letters serve as an acknowledgement that inevitably, when a viewer knows the artist, we process the piece as being about the artist, and so my viewers- friends, family and the bard population at large- will inevitably see the piece as being about me.

The Library housed the collection of books I read, or wish I’d read as part of the making of this project. It is a physical bibliography of the project, and a space for continued learning for myself and the viewer. The rest of the room- floor, walls, ceiling, furniture, was entirely made of plastic bags. I chose this material because it is the easiest to amass of all post-consumer wastes. Almost everyone uses them, and almost everyone saves them. It is one of the most blatantly thoughtless norms of American consumption. The challenge of collecting thousands of bags asked me to interface with many people in the bard and red hook community, bringing them in to my project and forcing me to articulate my agenda to many different types of people.

Bard has played a critical role in shaping me in to the person who desired to make this project. The education I have received here-inside the classroom, extracurricularly, through my involvement in the Trustee Leadership Scholar Program, and in my friendships here has problematized the aspirations to be a sculptor that I entered Bard with, and called in to question my most basic assumptions about my role in the world as a person of extreme privilege- a white, American woman with a great deal of education and wealth. Bard has taught me to see the flaws that exist with this institution, which leaves me feeling cynical about the school, but also grateful. My senior project has absolutely been the capstone of my learning process here, the synthesis of many of my academic, creative and personal aspirations. With it completed, I begin the scary work of making a life for myself outside of the comfortable context of this institution. I am very conscious of the fact that my identity and this year of art work that has come out of me have been shaped by the series of opportunities this school has provided me. Thank you for facilitating that.

Sincerely,
Rachel Schragis

Opening

2008-04-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

I have done this thing, and it is finished.
To me, the room glows. IIt is much more beautiful than I expected. For me, this is a reason for hope. I wanted to confront crisis, to allow myself to go deep in to being afraid, but my hands couldn't help but make it beautiful to me. There is no REASON I should feel optimistic, after this year, but I have to and I do. Embracing the situation of the world as I find it, of myself within that world, is petrifying but that does not mean that it is also invigorating.

I feel this project is successful because I have kept learning until the last day- both technically and intellectually. This week I learned to install videos, to show my year of compost and electricity. I learned to build a staircase. This morning I tied "eco-system collapse" in to the flow chart, thinking about the common results between actions that poison the land like landfills and industrial agricultural, things that strip the land of resources like deforestation, and things that shift the land like the changing weather patterns that result from global warming. The opening is about to begin, and I am finishing my project by writing this. I have aimed to make work that makes me learn as much as possible.

For days, now I've felt scared about the opening. This place feels like an externalization of my body, and so it is as if hundreds of people will be walking inside my body tomorrow. It would be much worse if I had any doubts I had made something great. That much I know. Many efforts are failed, but there are so many efforts here, and the space speaks to me of the yearning for clarity I've felt, if not the clarity itself. I guess I am ready to let anyone in.

to re-post after opening? good enough?

2008-04-11T19:12:00.001-07:00

I KNOW THAT I AM NOT A CATEGORY, A HYBRID SPECIALIZATION
I AM NOT A THING- A NOUN,
I SEEM TO BE A VERB- AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS-
AN INTEGRAL FUNCTION OF THE UNIVERSE
AND SO ARE YOU.

-buckminister fuller

I came across a quote I'd written out way way back in the earliest phases of reading, back when I was deliberately researching individuals who I thought were good thinker/doers. I forgot about it, it shakes me.

Nine more days of work until the opening. Many days of finishing plans, tying up loose ends.
This quote goes in the library I am putting together, in the file of collecting all the drawings, sketches, notes I've made, and also all the ones I've been given.
Everything is the peice
Everything is potentially available to the audience
Everything of me is laid out in the face of crisis..

Newspaper Wall

2008-03-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

Newspaper wall, you are finished.
13 feet high and 10 feet wide, narrowing to 6 feet where the bridge juts out from you, seven feet off the ground.
I built you to the ceiling today, at last. Weeks and months of saturdays at the recycling center, hands in the dumpster:
"do you have any newspaper today, ma'am? can I take it for an art project I'm working on?"
hoping they think art students are cute and not spoiled.
I talk to the volunteers and farmers and old women.
"you again?!" they say. "you still need MORE"
they invite me to their house to take old furniture, bring me plastic bags.
I will give them postcards next week. They want to see what newspaper girl has made (one even calls me lady- strange).
Our aquiantence makes me feel good, maybe too good. My artwork is a small blip in this town. Not just for my peers, not just for my school.

And all for you, newspaper wall!
You are so heavy, so dense, so fragile.
As you've grown I've thrown my weight against you, to make sure you were strong.
Run my hands over you, gazed at you. My precarious partner, looming over me as I sit at my computer, make my flowcharts and drawings, talk with my friends.
You are a testament to my commitment, a singular jesture to show that I believe in labour, that I am willing to work.
Visitors say wow wow to the bags when they walk in, gaze or pass by my trash, and then stumble across you in the back room and say OH.
this work you are doing must be rather epic, if this pile, so huge it's stupid, is just another thing you do.

I was upstairs not more than two months ago when you fell. You were eight feet high, then. I screamed.
a cloud of your filth descended on everything, grey and thick.
You spared my computer by two feet.
You took a week to rebuild, and I was tempted to leave you there, you looked beautiful on the floor.

When the flood came I cried for fear of you. water seeping in to you, if you fell this time there would be no fixing.
You would be what you would be.

You will be terrible to dismantle, wall.
slow, heavy work, to bring you bit by bit back to the dumpster from which you came.
Like most of my work, you're just a diversion from the waste stream. I am powerless to stop this:
the newspaper existed already, and so will be returned to the earth someday in a less than ideal form.
A visitor weeks ago told me I MUST keep all these things out of the trash, perminently- which I think is delusional.
Everything is trash.
Maybe I will find another home for you- a house with a wood stove, a permaculture farm.
A less direct path back in to the post-industrial earth.

For seventeen more days of work and fourteen days of display, you will stay here.
I've done a good bit of banging around you, I think you are safe for visitors. I hope.
You are grown, now, and so it is time to rally the rest of the room around you.
Shelves to fill, piles to sort, letters to write, drawings to make, floors to sweep, railings to build, lights to hang.
Everyone will be finished in seventeen days.

Aversion to clean

2008-03-13T12:27:00.000-07:00

A respected visitor came yesterday and to my surprise, gave lots of feedback I did not like.
I hesitate to write about it, because I know her thoughts were well intended, and that something in our conversation must have gone awry.
But still, I left feeling angry and misunderstood, which in itself was motivating.

The least productive thing she said was:
its just not clean enough.
She took it back when I explained myself, but still every time I'm alone driving in the car I yell:
clean. CLEAN?! CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN?!?!?!?!?!
WHO- ARE - YOU, and WHO DO YOU THINK I AM to even THINK you can tell me my work should be clean?!

She meant aesthetically, I'm sure.
But did she also mean less dirty?
This taps in to a pet peeve that I now back with moralistic language,
but really is just a preference.
at fourteen, I told mom I'd only use five hygeine products a week, to try to control her requests that I make myself less dirty, took showers only when commanded to.
When I got to college I loved that no one told me not to be filthy.
I showered on friday afternoons. only.
sometimes I want to look presentable to all those clean people now, so I've gone soft , but really I like to wait.
Hair feels softer if its been greasy first,
room is more clean if I first let it get to be a MESS
If I weren't trying to be a good housemate I'd do all of the dishes all at once once a week.
I like the cycling, giving in to entropy and then tackling it head on.
This is the disposition that makes me believe I am alive at the key point in crisis. I want all problems to be extreme.

I think clean as the predominant aesthetic is itself a big problem. (yes, okay, I'm going to whine about The White Box...)
as long as we believe art is best seen in sparse context, we are crippling its power.
The world is not really comprised of empty temp. controlled rooms, we push to maintain them in the face of mounting odds.
Making these kind of unreal spaces to present art in, and to make art that feels right in clean atmopsheres, is to define art as something separate from the real world, to assert that art is a total experience that begins and ends with itself, and that the Real World outside the white box would distract from it. Sparcity also implies that traditional art spaces- white, empty, clean- are both neutral and unreal, which exempts them from political and social scrutiny. I find this unnacceptable, because the hierarchy of the fine arts undermines the legitimacy of creativity of all other people.

expression belongs everywhere in planet trash soup. Every context, every mess.
The Big Everything is complicated, and so to stay relevant, art must be too.
to make clean art, digested art, would be for me to deny that underlying reality of uncertainty.
Clarity would be a lie. the world is not clear.

My heart ached when my visitor said "oh, well if its ABOUT being messy, there should be no relief. you should just fill those empty spaces, fill it with anything, quickly, in a few hours"
There is no "Just Anything". There is no "Just Fill It" because there is nothing besides stuff and space to fill and time to do it in. Why is a blank wall less of an object than a pile? They are both trash.
and I am constantly attempting to make order, here. There is tremendous amounts of sorting and deliberation. But it is a failing effort, and I have learned to be content with that. Neither physical nor conceptual reality will ever fit the frameworks I set up for it. Most of my thinking will not be apparent to the viewer, my senior project will look like a giant mess. Reality cannot be catagorized. It is not clean.

Flood, But Joy

2008-03-09T15:58:00.000-07:00

For my birthday, my studio neighbors wrote me poems. Here are two:

1
Neighbor, neighbor yes
swim across refuse ocean
to give me a hug.

2
though I joke and kid
constant-fucking-ly
I admire your perspective
what IS happening?
Go the long distance
Push through the manufactured
lime green gelatin
Go on, fight your past
recycle recyling
Bust on the bougie
Or wrestle schrageese
collect your feces
stick'm in a jar
or whatever you do do
and stick it to the earth
oh yeah, don't forget
senior project april 12th
first things first of course

The building flooded saturday while I was in the city. I packed up fast and took the next train back. For three hours, in the car, on the train, at the station, a car again, the shuttle home, I shook and waited as my friends called with updates.
the main room is covered. we're going to get sand bags,
our studios are flooded, we want to keep yours dry.
we're building a damn to protect your newspaper
we've made a holding structure so the wall won't fall if it gets wet
can we use all your old clothing to mop up water?
It looks bad, we've done the best we can do.
we're leaving, they say its dangerous
don't come here alone...the electricity...its dangerous.
don't bother coming back, if you've left yet. whats done is done.

I felt, at the time, like this happened because I left it. If this space is my fears and thinking made physical, than I am not allowed to leave it, now, until it is complete. I felt pulled back here, on the train up the hudson, holding back tears.
When I finally got home I curled up on my bed and sobbed. I could not articulate what for. I return here with a sense of finality- this is the final month, the final moment of intensity. Today I look around and I kind of hate it in here, and yet I'm stuck with what I'm doing. I feel so engulfed. The flooding, of course, is not an event outside the projects, the flood is the project. It is a stress that affects my and my peer's work here logistically and emotionally, but that only exists as a physical reality within this building.

The flood affected me so deeply because I am committed to this room with the full intensity of my fears for my planet. This is not a logical transfer. Valuing this art project so highly makes me disconnect from the rest of reality. I'm kind of a zombie, lately; I answer 'how are you?' with 'my project is great'. Rather than be an actor in the world, I am mostly retreated in to internal battles. This experience is a privilege I doubt I would see myself as entitled to, had I any way to assess such things. No, I am not contributing to solutions for the world or coming up with a plan of action for myself to do within it, but I am testing the approaches I have already invented, cultivating intensity, building a lump in my stomach that will stay forever, I think- certainly will stay once I take this room apart. I believe this lump is valuable, even though it exists because of gross privilege. For now, it is the best I can do.

Like this project, the flood is ecologicaly caused and symbolically loaded. Why does a building flood? Because of how it is built, where it stands, how the town is layed out; the roads, the pavement, the run-off, the plumbing and the slowly growing chance of heavy rains as the planet warms. Our building is in a valley. The assisted living complex built next door this summer was propped up on artificially high grounds so that it would not flood. This must mean more water comes here. They have parking lots, meaning more nearby land that does not absorb rain. Was the sewage system around here expanded to accommidate this new run-off? Where does water from this town go? There is a cement loading dock, much like a half-sunk swimming pool, right next to our studio building. Both times it has flooded here (last time, my studio stayed dry, and so, like any selfish person, I was not shaken up that it had happened) , the pool has filled up and water has come in. There is a drain in front of the building, and the studios flooded so badly this week because there was a tree trunk stuck in the drain. Accidents happen in man-made spaces because we design them as if they are not a part of nature. My studio flooded because this building, this town, towns everywhere, are not in compliance with the eco-system they sit within.

But indicative of the whole project, the trauma that comes out of this flood is a highly privileged one. I can choose to to feel ripped apart by the thought of water toppling my newspaper wall because I could get that call on my cell phone, could ask my parents for cash so I could run right to the train, could go curl up in my warm (unflooded) bed and indulge in despair despite the fact that I am amidst an embarrassment of riches. When I arrived home I was greeted by my three housemates and a warm meal. Even though I piss them off with this self-obsessed project, they are devoted friends, all empathy and their presence unclenches my stomach enough to go to sleep.

In the studio the next morning, things looked more normal than I had expected. There were some puddles but much more remained untouched. I cringed as, inspecting the building, my mind turned to new orleans. I thought about how, gutting houses after the flood, things only sometimes looked as damaged as they were. Water immediately ruins some things, damaged others only when left to soack and mold for months (as was often the case in new orleans), and sometimes has very little effect at all. Here, without the problem of mold, objects were alternately destroyed or fine...within a few hours we could pile up the destroyed things and carry on, stepping over the puddles that were too small to bother pumping out.

How fucked up that that disaster can be, for me, a character building volunteer trip that I instinctivly evoke when I experience water damage. How do I apply my understanding of real and terrible as a hurricane in to something as ultimately trivial as my sculpture project? This is exactly why my senior project is symbolically complicated. I convince myself that this is okay, at least for the year, because I believe that making art is an act of self-education, and that because of this project I will be better equipt emotionally, intellectually, physically, creativy for a world in which I believe real trauma (that does not end when the drain is unclogged) is everywhere, and will get worse in my lifetime.

Because of the damn my studio mates built out of my old clothing, the parts of my studio that would have really suffered from flooding stayed entirely dry. I took all the clothing to the laundrimat and so now, two days later, everything is back to normal in here. This would seem to symbolize that technical know-how, ingunuity co-operation and a little hard work will pull us through ecological crisis without much pain. As Global Warming increasingly becomes a buzz word in the media and politics, more and more people are banking on this to be true, and using Faith in Human Ingenuity as a rational to stay calm about global warming. I have major doubts, but I hope they're right. Applying this logic to my experience with our little flood, the fact that it all worked out okay would be evidence that there is no need to get so freaked out in the future, and that maybe I should have stayed in the city and dealt with the flood when I returned. The dominant wisdom in civilization is that events like floods are 'accidents' that we recover from and then return to our normal goings on. Ecological crisis is starting to factor in to our conception of every day life, but in a very calm fashion. Still we understand disaster and all the sadness that comes with it as outside of ecology, because once we accept that all disasters are ecological we'll have to start seeing our every day lives as a disaster, and our calm, rational, secular society is not emotionally equipt to do this.

If this year's work is an act of self-education for ecological crisis, then part of my work is transitioning to the mindset it requires- which means, understanding all of daily life as a crisis and not being afraid to feel this situation intensely.
Because this is a chosen intensity, it is awkward to negotiate- I end up prioritizing dumb stuff that's part of "the project" over important stuff thats not. My mother read this blog and told me she was worried. She recognized in my writing my obsessive tendencies (which is definitely a huge part of how I've ended up embracing an environmentalist mentality- I just have the personality for it) and asked me to assure her that I was still having fun, that parts of my life are still light-hearted, that I write only when I'm in a particularly worked up mood. And yes, this is true, mom...I still like, make jokes and take breaks and stuff.

However, I do not believe that reacting to the world with deliberate intensity is antithetical to feeling joy. The experiences of the flood and my friend's birthday poems affirm this. The damn they built means so much to me because of how physical my reaction was to not being there when the flood was happening. Their poems about me made me feel some success in my work- that they, like me, see our friendship, like everything, as all tangled up in the fear and problems we are facing as young people. Pushing through the manufactured lime green gelatin together, hugging across the ocean of refuse. I have the space and comfort in my life right now to make art that is exhausting, and I feel good about taking this experience as far as it will go. In more intensity there is more learning, and from learning comes joy.

Artist talks?

2008-02-07T15:04:00.000-08:00

This week at senior seminar, an artist came to speak who made work a lot like mine- out of accumulations of waste products- paper, plastic, tires, ceramics. Mostly paper.

His work was beautiful. Knowing his materials so intmately, I felt deeply moved by the slides of his work, by his simple, elegant execution of a process much like mine. He visited my studio, gave me some good tips on stacking paper safely, and asked me a lot of hard questions. I was puzzled by why exactly he'd do this, but liked the opportunity to practice talking.

However, he was an asshole. His artist talk was painful- he was rude to the students and self-righteous. He fell in to all of the pitfalls of talking about ecological art that I am working very hard to try to avoid. He sited half-relevant statistics, included images meant to illustrate how appalled he was by today's crisis. To his credit, in my eyes, he did not claim his art to be a solution, he acknowledged his complicity in waste. However, this pissed most people in the room off. By using his artist's talk as a platform to discuss ecological issues outside of his work, he primed his audience to look at him as 'part of the solution'. When inconsistencies between his work and talk became apparent, most notably that he also makes work out of store-bought materials and sometimes cuts down smal trees to use in sculptures, people got angry. They saw him as a hypocrite. He responded dismissively and defensively, which made it much worse. I cringed, knowing that his terrible handling of the subject matter we share could well predispose my peers to see all ecologically oriented artwork more cynically, and to be more judgemental of my work.

Since his lecture, I've had a couple of really interesting exchanges about what was wrong with the talk. Our shared frustration leads us to talk about his content, and I end up sharing a lot of my opinions about consumption, waste, and my art's engagement with these issues. This result is exciting.

This situation brings up interesting pedagogical questions for me. By pissing us all off, the artist inspired us all to dwell on his talk a lot more than we would have if he were pleasant. Mostly, I think of agressive or confrontational teaching approaches as counterproductive and fundamentally bad, but some of the anti-racist workshops I've attended in the past few years have made me rethink this. These workshops consistently make me feel terrible by asking me to confront all of the unjust benefits of being white, all of my latent racism. I feel strongly that this is the right approach, because I am not, should not think of myself as capable of combatting structural racism, because the delusional over-empowerment of liberal white folks is part of the problem...thus it is honest for an anti-racist workshop to leave me feeling powerless, guilty, confused, bad. The agressive pedagogy evokes an appropriately difficult emotional response.

I think ecological self-reflection should also make people feel bad, because it is a just sadness. However, I don't think ecological teaching has the right to preach, because what human can claim the moral high ground? We are all suffering from and contributing to planet trash soup. I am trying to find a way to talk about my art work and life choices non-judgementally, non-condescendingly as a way to talk about ecology compassionately, and I think I'm getting good and gauging the appropriate tone. This visiting artist, though, made me more concious of my choices, though, because in a strange way his work was also effective, in that it provoked an oppositional response that called for conversation.

A Letter to Thomas Hirschhorn

2008-01-24T18:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Thomas Hirschhorn,

I am writing to you because you are my favorite artist. I recently bought a book about an early work of yours, "Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake," which has brought your work back in to the front of my consciousness. Also recently, I saw some drawings of yours at the Hessel Museum, and from across the room said "aha! yes! that is what I would like my work to look like!". I had not seen any small collages of yours before, and so didn't identify them as yours. When I discovered that you had made them, I laughed- you are the only artist in the museum who can make me feel like I have a place there! Your work is so central to my life as an artist. You embody my aesthetic and conceptual aspirations, my fears for my work, my skepticism about the discipline we are both working within.

I stumbled in to your installation 'Cavemanman' when I was 16, and was awed. I had not seen much installation art, and certainly not anything that so transformed the space, that was so experiential. I was taken by how clever, unapologetic, earnest, urgent it was, and I still feel that way. My memory of the peice is vivid, if perhaps now glamorized. I am still inspired by this memory, still draw upon it.

When I first saw Cavemanman, I was most taken by your mantra 1 man=1 man, which I took up as a way to encapsulate the sentiment that I had the power to define my goals and practices for myself, unaffected by other's accomplishments or expectations. 1 man is all powerful. But, every person has this same ability and right I have- thus I was at once unique and indistinct, all-powerful and insignificant. 1 man, equal to only 1 man, but equal to only that, to no other limit! This is an idea that motivated and supported me through my teenage years. I doubt that this is what you intended the installation to teach, and even remember articulating that at the time. I think this is wonderful, though. Your artwork presents a lot to process, and so I found within it a lesson that affected me deeply.

Looking back at Cavemanman in my memory, I love it because of the way you fleshed out the full complexity of what seems like a simple, even obvious idea; that modern life is still primitive, old, natural, hidden, mysterious- all of the things we associate with caves. Your peice is about caves and it is also about everything. This is what I love about all your work-your ability to fill a space with what I experience as a sampling of the full complexity of today's world, grounded by a small chunk of language and imagery that is easy to hold on to, that can be grasped visually and linguistically. You do this by embracing complexity and incompleteness. I have read descriptions of you as anti-minimalist, and I think of myself as one, too. I have called myself, jokingly, a Maximalist. More=more. more stuff=more ideas=more learning for both the audience and the artist. Your work does not shy away from the fact that you are a well-read, thinking, critical person, and that you wish your viewer to be one, too. You use text in your work, you place whole books there to be read. You employ big metaphors and symbolism that asks to be explained. Your work demands time and thinking to be viewed. In your hasty executiion you connect the aesthetic of the work to your messy messages, through the employment of URGENCY, which is one of my favorite words and ideas. I may not understand what is going on around me- I can't expect myself to- but I do feel tapped in to an increasing urgency to try to know.

Your work is a precident for me: to use many materials and techniques, to make spaces rather than objects, to draw from within and outside of the tradition of fine art indescriminately, to conquer the ideas that are important to me despite the fact that they are preachy, sprawling, unresolved, to be messy both conceptually and materially, to believe that the sheer accumulation and effort put in to my work will make it worthwhile.

Discussion of your work often emphasizes your use of 'found materials', but it is obvious that you found these things at stores. The hardware store or the grocery store is no more a place to 'find' things than the art shop!!! Perhaps this misdiscription bothers you as much as it bothers me. But Thomas, why don't you re-use old materials more? more overtly? exclusively? You are both educated and compassionate, aware of the complexity of today's crisis, and if you believe in the idea of ethics, you must think that human consumption patterns today are wrong, and that you ought to try not to contribute to distruction. Even more importantly, if you believe that art can be educational, you must see that your choice of materials speaks as loudly as your content, if not more so. Perhaps you are just incrimentally more realistic than I am, since I too use many store-bought materials, knowing that in being an artist and a wealthy american I am complicit in the material systems that my art is criticizing. However, I work for my work to be self-conscious of this hypocracy. I've heard you say in an interview that you use every day materials because 'everyone knows where they come from". But this is shortsighted- the truth is that we do not know, and cannot know, where the many substances our materials come from. This is, of course, my primary pre-occupation, but I wish you would make it more one of yours. Because of my deep investment in you as your fan, your failure to address the implications of the materials of your work within your work pains me. I yearn for your work to express the hypocracy of the materials it it made of, and thus that is the center of the work I am doing right now. In this way, my negative feelings about you inspire my work as much as my positive feelings about you.

I admire the bravery you have in making work with clear messages. You do not seem worried about being called pretentiousness or preachy in your many allusions to great intellectual works and large social problems. I know the fear of this criticism keeps me from pushing my work to its extreme. You also do not apologize for your poor craftsmanship, which I admire as well. This is a constant struggle for me, as I see the argument both for and against it, have peers and mentors that feel strongly about the need to make things that are traditionally beautiful or clean, and the importance of disregarding that impulse. Again, it is the urgency of your work that pushes me towards the impulse to make work in which I pile, sort, rip, hack rather than work cleanly.

Once a teacher said to me that my earnest intentions to make art that communicates moralistic ideas poses a problem, because I am not inclined to be Hip and because I am female. I can't help agreeing that you get away with a lot of the things you do because you are male, and so you are assumed to be talented, knowledgable and autonomous; your attempts at conceptualization and your extensive references are seen as sweet, not compensatory. This makes me angry, because I know that as I young female artist, I am likely to not be given the same benefit of the doubt, my caring will be seen as commonplace rather than inventive, and so it will not be as credited. However, I know that we share our high-caliber education and our whiteness, which advantageously and unjustly affects the way in which both of our work is perceived, and so I feel an affinity with you as a

The peice I am making now, which I think is the most extensive installation I will ever make, is directly inspired by you in a number of ways. It is about waste and consumption, primarily, but in addressing that I believe I adress The Big Everhtying. Like you, it is research-based, and attempts to be emotional, daunting through the assertion of the political or academic, and through accumulation. Perhaps unlike your work, it is also highly personal. In one area, I catalogue all of my trash for one year, in another, I plan to map out most of my consumption patterns, my insecurities, my pathologies, my life history in flow-chart form. I want to acknowledge my sources, to not pretend that my work is an autonomous endeavor. The inclusion of so much personal information supports this agenda. In another section, I am planning to make altars- an idea stolen from you. When I was 16, in fact, I made an altar to you based on your altars to Raymond Carver and Piet Mondrian. Now I am doing this again- making altars to you, bell hooks, buckminster fuller, mierle laderman ukeles. perhaps others. I have a lot more work to do. As in Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, I am following my preoccupations with particular individuals, seeing them as random but personal embodiments of ideas. You are earnesty, irrationality, urgency. Bell hooks is nurture, reflect articulate Mierle Laderman Ukeles is creative identity consciousness (race, class, gender). Andrea Zittel is all decisions are aesthetic, all objects are art and all art is utilitarian. On a much smaller level, I think I will probably also copy your technique of putting books on chains in a way that they can be read. You have to admit that this is kind of a cocky move, but the fact that you've pulled it off makes me think perhaps I can, too.

Why do I want to tell you these things? I realize that knowing your work does not in any way mean that I know you. I do not know that I would like you or that you would like me, or even my artwork. However, I continue to learn from you, and I believe that learning is all that art is good for, and that you would want to know that you are my teacher. Perhaps you agree.

Sincerely,
Rachel

Accumulation

2008-01-17T15:06:00.000-08:00

Accumulation is the purest form of beauty (maybe next to color).
Accumulation is the most ethical platform for sculpture.
Accumulation embodies effort
Accumulation makes time commitment self-evident
Accumulation is honest
Accumulation is earnest
Accumulation suggests over-investment: love, panic.
Accumulation is up/absurd. Not down.

For these reasons:
I am accumulating newspaper, wednesday and saturdays, one carload at a time.
I am accumulating plastic bags, every time I go to hannifords or to visit someone's house
I am accumulating dressers and shelving from dumpsters and thrift stores
I am accumulating decent wood, when I see it abandoned at UBS
I am accumulating my own trash. constantly.
I am accumulating flow chart drawings of things I believe to be true
I am accumulating portrait-drawings of people I idolize based on my favorite google-image portrait of them
I am accumulating drawings of places where trash is when I want to make dumb drawings.

I love this way of working because it acknowledges the idea that any object can be just right, complete.
I am afraid of this way of working because I worry it is not enough, that it is allowing me to indulge a fear of aiming for something to be perfect just because I fear I will fail.
I do it because I believe that enough accumulation can transcend the mediocrity, the arbitraryness of any one peice. Enough accumulation will make my work Whole.

A beautiful moment

2008-01-09T18:00:00.001-08:00

Way back in freshman year, I was obsessed with the idea of Knowing a Material.
Accumulate something en masse, and then half way between It and Me would lie a work of art.
Most of the work I did sophmore year came out of this idea, too.

Now I am accumulating newspaper. Stacking it against the wall, hopefully all 13 feet high. There have been a few avalanches, and after each one I think I've got the material Figured Out, and there will be no more unplanned movement. I turned a chunk of papers on their side this morning, and the whole wall started to slooowly slide. The sheet of plywood I put in for support two days ago started to warp, pulling against the spot I'd screwed it in to the loft. In desperation I unscrewed the plywood and the whole wall continued to move, slowly and gracefully, and then stopped in a form about a foot longer and shorter than it stood before, with the plywood standing up straight again, ready to be re-screwed to the loft a foot to the left of where it previously stood. I've added more support on the far side of the wall, and the waves the newspaper settled in to look beautiful.

The difference between work and ideas

2008-01-09T16:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Downsurdity

2007-12-26T23:05:00.000-08:00

Last month I had to write a new promotional blurb for the Surrealist Training Circus, the other creative child I care for these days. Like the terrible speller I am, I referred a number of times to the circus's choice to make spectacles at Bard College in response to the threat of Apocalypse as 'Upsurd'. My editor/boss/mentor Paul responded that, evocative and apt as this creative spelling was, it was incorrect. I cringed.

The circus, though, is definitely UPsurd. Though irrational (beyond rational?) in nature, working on it makes me feel empowered and optimistic, and it is designed to make all participants and spectators feel that way, too.

Most of my experience right now is not so UP, though, but also is not so emotionally neutral as to be called AB(surd). I am scared by most facts and tidbits of news, by the pile of trash I haul around, the overarching feeling that I am ending my schooling in to a petrifying moment to be alive, and that in my lifetime the planet will become only more unweildy and the urge to comprehend will only be more strong. I find the act of articulating this fear empowering, despite its inherent futility, because I am grasping at some sort of ownership, and as a consumer and a creator, ownership feels good. I can't catagorize this work as depressing. I choose to do my year's body of learning in to the messy, insular, impractical mode of Studio Arts. The work I am doing and the body of knowledge that informs it make me feel both gloom and lightness. It is that funny-depressingness that exists when I stumble on something that should only be funny if it is not actually depressing (real), but is depressing, shouldn't be funny . Whatever makes I or you feel this way a peice of one big, greater something. There is only one force that makes you laugh as you hold you head in your hands, and that is what I am feeling, drawing from, working for. It is DOWNSURD.

Midway and Personal Complicity in Danger

2007-12-13T12:30:00.000-08:00

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.

a plan for december

2007-12-09T12:07:00.000-08:00

I am on the verge of a new phase of construction, my studio is overflowing with 2' by 4's, boxes of newspaper, bags of bags, boxes of boxes. plastic. paper. wood. to make dividers between spaces. I am wondering whether I want to go ahead and by some drywall for the altars room. I'm really attached to having some walls that have that perminent look of Wall. that I can paint a great color and will read as a neutral background, rather than an object, a sculpture, so that I can place other sculpture on top of it and have the content of that object read. Drywall does not read as a materia because in the gallery and most places it just means wall. divider. I don't think its going to work out to use the ethical loophole of taking art materials from other students once they're done, because kerry is the only one using drywall and I'm sure he's going to want it for his project...so I guess I'll buy some. I am a consumer, too.

Backing up: I feel like I've settled on some definitive ways I'd like to divide space and content. I'm resisting the urge to think of these six spaces as representational of any six approaches- to not think of my space as comprehensive in an anaylitical manner, but rather to work from the messiness of many different impulses and approaches and let that messiness sit because its' honest. Not to sort. Or, to sort but not feign completion.

I hope I will stay open enough to let this list morph as the construction takes place:

THE PORT:
If we live in one world with one set of material expectations
it must be so that materials move around.
cola across the ocean is scissors across the studio,
consumption is trade is contaninerization
I am not separate from these processes.
art materials are materials, too.

THE BUNKER:
All this information causes panic and, like the people we are, we think about self-protection.
Isn't that just what eco-products are all about?
natural organic packaged everything is so interesting, and I wonder if these objects will speak for themselves.
buying food is an interesting space in trying to be an ethical consumer, because I buy so many foods that I think are terrible to buy, despite rules for myself about it. Buying food to make art out of feels totally okay, because then I can sell/give the food away and it will get eaten, and thats necessary consumption.

THE OFFICE:
Making flow charts is futile and I want to do it anyway. directly on the wall like Daniela keeps saying? why does that communicate such urgency?
I need a desk to call home base/put my computer at a la abigail's little studio a la elswhere's desks.
Walls of newspaper here, too.
That's interesting: the two types of walls- wall as neutral surface with art on it and wall as art. both are vehicles for content.

THE TRASH ROOM:
What do we do with material once we're done with them?
This was the seed of the project- save all of my trash.
I still wonder if it will be visually interesting enough to stand on its own.
also, videos about electricity, gasoline, water? maybe also one to represent food waste?

THE ALTARS:
I am not an Autonomous Artist, not alone in my thinking
I want to recognize explicitly the shaping of my ideas and explore the way this becomes a process of idealizing other individuals as autonomous thinkers/doers in exactly the way I do not want to be thought of, seeing them as embodying particular aesthetics, ideals. This is what happens to people when you know them as thinker/doers not people.
this makes me think back to the book I made for laura's class sophmore year. "all art is autobiography?"
buckminister fuller. mierle laderman ukeles. bell hooks. andrea zittel. thomas hirschhorn. bread and puppet. elsewhere. greg moynahan. maybe a couple of authors? don't know who yet.

This room is probably the least clear, makes me the most nervous. that's okay.

HEAVEN MADE OF PLASTIC BAGS
big room full of plastic bags.- it just has to happen.

Writing out my ideas is both exciting and scary. Am I over-solidifying by putting in writing?
I know about myself that making a plan enables me to work in a more focused way, even if the plan is entirely going to change. I feel the need to write that, as if to make an excuse for approaching the work the way I am. because it is different from where my studio neighbors are in their senior projects? Interesting.

The definition of the actual spaces will determine a lot. Before I leave for vacation, I would like to have all the walls up. This means building a second loft above the trash room. Putting walls up around the alters loft and below the bags loft in the trash room, also building a connection between the two lofts. If there's time, it would also be great to build the port, because I want this to feel like a structural element (even though it isn't). I guess there are a lot of steps that have to take place before making it, though: stuff off shelves, shelves off the wall, paint the walls? at the very least, lets get prepped to paint before I leave.

that looks like a plan!

conversation between Buckminister Fuller, Andrea Zittel, bell hooks, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles

2007-11-29T13:31:00.000-08:00

I know that I am not a category, a hybrid specialization,
I am not a thing-a noun,
I seem to be a verb-
an evolutionary process-
an integral function of the universe
and so are you.
-Buckminster Fuller

Andrea Zittel: That's very poetic, buckminster, but you have to also acknowledge that you are a person-

bell hooks: you have a body

AZ- yes, a body, that is a physical thing, a noun, and that you are processing information through that specific body. Phenomena have happened that lead to you, and you in turn have the power to cause change, but in that you are a human with opinions and experiences, you cannot be purely 'an evolutionary process', you process data through your lens of experience.

bh: denying that body is dangerous, because it suggests that your experience is infact an objective fact.

BF: of course there are specifics of my life that have led me to the body of work that I am doing, but that does not negate the fact that I am developing innovative material. It is considered, researched, tested, and I believe to be objectively beneficial to a world in crisis. The dymaxion car and dymaxion house will make modern life possible for all people. My invention of them is not an outpouring of myself, an autobiography, but stand as autonomous works of engineering and architecture.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: What do you mean by 'autonomous'?

BF:It is important to me that my work be understood as outside of all pre-existing thought. What I am trying to acheive is new and revolutionary. I am not a specialist, drawing upon the work of previous intellectuals in order to refine this useless body of thought that we label academia, but rather a force for the new synthesis of information that will and does produce truth that is actually useful to society at large.

bh: I appreciate that you acknowledge the limited influence of educated white, male academics, have chosen to distance yourself from this cannon, and are attempting to put your research towards social change. But I also need to ask you how you think this is possible- to work both empirically and entirely indepedently. I think it's delusional and disrespectful not to acknowledge your influences.

MLU: and really fucking male! who do you think you are, claiming independence from all thought previous to yours?! I've never heard anything more narcisistic. Your claims at autonomy are a symptom of the overblown male ego that exactly characterizes the body of thinkers you are trying to distancing yourself from. The engineering of housing requires collaboration and upkeep. You may think of yourself as entirely autonomous, but who is going to pump the gas for your dymaxion car and wash your dymaxion toilet? By claiming that you can only be relevant by working entirely independently you are invalidating the work that supports you: maintenence work. the jobs of the working class and of women. Really, Buckminster, what has your work accomplished? By refusing to collaborate ,almost everything you invented has failed to go in to production, and your work has been relegated to the rhelm of ideas that you claim you are not a part of.

AZ: Mierle, I see where you're coming from, but I also want to assert that unrealized does not mean unproductive. Following that logic, and concept, any artwork that does not translate in to commodifiable economic product is not useful to society. My work, like buckministers, is utilitarin in orientation but exists as a suggestion, a model, an idea, rather than an actuality. I believe this is the place of artists- to suggest what might be possible but isn't yet, based on knowledge of what is necessary. To say that responses to problems have to yeild solutions is also to say that those who don't yeild solutions, such as artists, must only address address irrelevant or apolitical topics.

bh: Of course I believe that it is valid and wonderful for artists to address contemporary problems, but you must understand the impracticality of your work as a privilege you have been afforded as a fine artist, Andrea. In a more technical discipline, the lack of applicability and coherent explainations of your inventions would be seen as a sign of failure.

BF: But exactly, it is crucial not to see Andrea and I as failures because we are working independently to process the situation of today's world.

bh: Then do you see yourself as an artist more so than an inventor or architect?

MLU: why are you forcing him to make that distinction? Whatever you do is art is art is art.

-Buckminster Fuller is a bizarre architect from the 60's, best known for inventing the geodesic dome, interested in egalitarian efficiency but often retroactively appointed a father of ecological design
-Andrea Zittel is a contemporary artist working with themes of waste reduction and efficiency. She blurs the distinction between pragmatic object and art-peice, and studio practice and display space in a way that I find really inspiring.
-bell hooks is a a writer and teacher who deals with talks a lot about race, gender, pedagogy. I've read too little or her work to really be able to include her in this. I just think she's great.
-Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a feminist conceptual/performance artist from the 70's(?) whose work I'm not always so in to but who has said some things I find really inspiring about the connections between sexism, classism and ecological crisis.

This debate came out of reading some of Buckminister's autobiography yesterday. As the only man whose work I'm really looking at right now and rather a cocky figure, I wanted to argue with him but instead imagined how some women I think highly of would talk to him. Of course, none of these people would probably actually say what I attribute to them. The discipline of fine arts a liberation from the need to research comprehensively or site my sources? Or maybe just an excuse not to? Or a means to incorperate the intuitive and emotional with equal weight?

on material waste and conceptual product: the impulse to sort and the need to feel

2007-11-28T15:49:00.000-08:00

to not throw out is to save
to sort is to make sense of
to document is to be accountable for
and then I am saved, I make sense, I am accountable.

but all attempts at comprehensiveness fall flat
and I am not exempt, not above.
The line of autonomy- of my belonging, my trash, my ideas- is guessed at and arbitrarily drawn

I can show you some things I've kept out of the garbage (for now)
and I can show you that I am trying to be thorough
But, rather than fabricate completion, I would rather show you that I am honestly trying
and honestly failing to push through confusion in to clarity
I am stuck here, with you, in that soup.

Earth dismantled in to elements, synthesized in to objects without regard for the need to dismantle them back in to elements digestable by the earth.
research, observations in to the printed word, in to the telephone, on to the internet- the knowledge that is known grows faster than the population. There is too much for any one person to hold in themself as true.
Water down the drain, exhaust out the engine, thoughts out the keyboard, moving too fast to process

life on earth is bound to get more complicated, more tangled. more violent. more toxic. more idiotic. more misunderstood.
Where analytical sense stops short emotion begins.
and so we will either shut ourselves off or feel more overwhelmed, more paniced, more futile, more lonely, more sad
The common denominator is urgency. This is what exists and what we must make grow.

First Post

2007-11-24T19:36:00.001-08:00

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.