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.