One Last Time

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

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

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?

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.