A friend of mine is getting her MFA. She and I do very different work and approach our practice very differently. My boyfriend and I went to see her program's open studios this last weekend. Among the pieces there were films of a woman undressing herself, and licking frosting off something, a woman seated who invited visitors to brush and style her hair and then take the hair home in a plastic bag, various sculptures and paintings, a huge bucket of paint for wading in, etc. It was intense and raw, and unstructured.
My boyfriend is an engineer and a musician. Visual arts aren't really his wheelhouse- but he's immensely curious about them, and talking to him about art is one of the great pleasures of my life- his questions are so big and open that they really push me to think through what I think and know. Often when I talk to him about art I find that his knowledge of music (an area where I know only that I know very little about it) is a really good touchstone for comparison because he understands something I find somewhat incomprehensible, and understands there are lots of dialogues going on among musicians that add something to the work itself- being part of the club changes how you see things- I relate to a lot of music like he relates to art, viscerally hating or liking it, but not sure why. He also gets contemporary dance, which I'm totally not tuned into at all.
So we came home and were getting ready to go to sleep, and we're lying there sort of talking about the day and he says to me, "So do you get B's work?". And that was a devastatingly good question to end the day with. Because the honest answer is as much yes as it is no.
Answer A, "No I don't get it": She's a conceptual artist. I'm much more traditionally rooted in aesthetic and materials, and in making and all of that. I make pieces that go in frames. She makes ideas, which might fit in a frame, if that frame is part of the art. The hours I've spent being an artist have been much more concentrated in skills practice: drawing, ceramics, sculpture, prints, etc. Whereas she's a maker certainly, a photographer, a printmaker in her own right, but her focus, her interest is in the IDEA, and importantly, she's rooted in a lot of contemporary art teaching- she's studied the recent history and theory of art far more deeply and in formal courses. She's getting an MFA, she spends her days with other contemporary modern artists at a very contemporary school, learning from the cutting edge.
Also, and this is one that I think is really important. Her whole life and the language of her life is completely different from mine. She has different visual resonances, different symbols and archetypes, different pop references. This is true no matter who you are- every person who stands in front of a piece is incapable of "getting it" the way the artist who made it gets it- because they simply never will be the artist, never will be that one singular perspective. "Getting it" isn't completely the point of any given work, although at the same time, to be "Got" and felt is also the singular purpose for the existence of every piece.
Answer B: "Yes I do?": So then, accepting that there are these essential limitations to me- that I can't vibrate at the same wavelength as B, that I don't know the language she speaks and the things she knows, that I am on some levels, outside her practice and her knowledge, I do also "get it". I get being an artist. I get the compulsion, the basic inability to "be normal" and live inside the time you were born with (yes it sounded so very pretentious RIGHT AS I TYPED IT. Apologies to the world). Something about the way you live as a person who makes particularly visual arts (I don't know a lot about music, like I said) pushes you in a certain direction, gives you membership in a certain club. It gives you a basic respect for a wading tub full of paint, a willingness to look it over and try and get it- get what that person was doing. I don't think I'll ever make art the way B makes art and I don't think B will ever make art the way I make it, and I don't think we'll ever resonate and feel the same things about the works we make. But at the same time, we're Venn diagram friends. There's a ton of overlaps, a desire to both hit a Baldessari show, a willingness to break into a an abandoned amusement park, combined with the ultimate decision not to because it's not sneaky enough to get away with it.
What Else I Thought about Open Studios at an MFA Program:
When we left the studios I felt so much relief. This was an odd thing to feel. Some part of me wanted to be a capital A, Artist for so long. And a big part of it for me was about being inside the club. The thought that if I were inside the club, I'd finally be valid. When I'm around other artists in a working situation I get insecure. I have performance anxiety- I get obsessed with who is winning. I've come to see this as pretty run of the mill. The book Neo-Bohemia illustrates the toxic culture of artists very well. I think it comes down to the issue of "being famous and making a living". Knowing that everyone else around you might be the person to get famous and rich, and knowing that you might be able to make your mark for posterity and get successful if you hit it right....that can kill all but the strongest person.
You start wanting to succeed so much that you can't see anything else, and the work itself sort of takes a backseat to all the thoughts in your head about who is going to win. This is the true secret to artist's block- its not the blank page that daunts you. Its all the pages in all the books that were already written by someone else, staring at you from your shelves. In the face of all THAT, the very reason you started to make your own stuff in the first place, in the desire to get to be on the shelf with all those heros, you start to die and doubt. And seeing those open studios I realized that for me at least, being in an MFA program would be like being trapped in a library with a blank page and books with guns that were hunting me.
My studio is the opposite of that atmosphere. For one thing I'm half in the closet. I haven't told a lot of my family and coworkers. So it feels protected. I don't participate in an artists community. I just go to the studio. And working suddenly feels like a huge relief. It's just me and the blank sheet and the choices I'm making in there for the next 5 hours or so. There's no such thing as "the art world". I'm hoping to just make work for a long time before that changes for me. At least the next 3 or 4 months, of just working. Reading "Inside the Painter's Studio" was a good catalyst for this- all those folks basically said, "just get up, go to the studio and do your work. Keep your head down. Don't worry, don't schmooze, don't compete. Just work and enjoy the work."
In this week's additional notes/reading: Hennessey Youngman. Be sure to check out his most awesome YouTube videos. Also Twin Peaks, now available on Netflix Watch Instantly (so weird, so good!), and finally, I'm reading "The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving Kindness" by Pema Chodron. This is all good stuff.
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