Artist Statement?

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

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?

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

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

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

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?

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.