Filed under: art, Creative Process, Imagination, Visual Art, writing | Tags: contemplation, Crete, hard work, labor, productivity, residency, staring out of windows, work
While I am a big fan of having an artistic practice, (the kind where you just do your art, whether you’re in the mood or not), I’m also a big believer in the power of staring out a window. I think a full artist’s life is a combination of the two – periods of dedicated work or practice and periods of staring out the window. I fear, in our (metaphorically speaking) productivity obsessed world, that the staring out the window piece will be (or has been) lost.
One of the reasons to go to an artist’s residency in a beautiful place is that it gives you new windows and new stuff to stare at through them. New ideas may come with new perspectives like that. I imagined, when I went to Crete, that if I did nothing else, staring at previously unseen landscapes would be of great benefit to my work.
I noticed, though, that the organizers did not share my interest in quiet reflection. At one point one said to the group of artists, “You’re here to work.” Which struck me as a bit more Factory Owner than Artist Supporter. And many of my fellow resident artists took this work mandate seriously. They stayed late in the studio or went in early. They labored long and with fervor. They were determined to be productive. They came there to make art after all. In many cases, the fervor was their own – because they were released from the constraints of their regular lives and felt free to work all they wanted. But in some instances, some artists went to work out of guilt, out of a sense of “I should be making something right now.”
Many times I found myself saying to another artist, “Maybe staring at the sea is as much a part of your process as painting.” (or playing music or dancing or whatever.) We’ve taken on this sense that productivity is the end all be all for everything and I think it is a terrible trend for everyone – but an even worse trend for artists. Should our work be measured by the same metric as a factory? I would prefer not, thank you very much.
This over-emphasis on productivity, (that is, how much we produce), goes hand in hand with the lionization of hard work. I think, as a culture, we’ve always praised those who work hard. We like “the hardest working man in show business” for example or praise people with the phrase “no one works harder.” We want our heroes worn to the bone, working harder than anyone else, not sleeping and single-mindedly laboring for their art.
But I have become suspicious of these kinds of values. With everyone working so hard all the time, where does that leave the window staring? Art does take labor. It is work, no doubt. But does it need a taskmaster leaning over it, making sure it gets done? I don’t think so. And in my case, I know my work begins to suffer as soon as someone starts to lean over it, even if that person is my own internal taskmaster.
Art is made by artists who are human beings and one of the beautiful things about human beings is our ability to reflect on our existence. I like art that has some space in it, that has some sense of the person making it having had some time to stare out the window.
Frantic art makes me feel frantic. Art that is concerned with productivity doesn’t interest me too much. This is not about the speed of making. Artists who work fast can be just as capable of staring out the window as artists who work slow, so to speak. And some artists have no interest in staring out the window and that’s okay, too. I just feel like every artist should be able to stare out the window when they want to stare out the window and not be made to feel guilty for it. Some folks may turn up to work around the clock and some may need some time in front of the scenery. We should be careful not to overemphasize the work and productivity at the risk of losing the space and contemplation of some necessary idleness. That’s where the ideas sneak in.
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Filed under: art, theatre, Visual Art, writing | Tags: art, Artist, playwright, residency, Visual Art, writing
The barista at one of my local coffee spots noticed I’d been gone awhile so when he asked, I told him I’d been in Crete at an artist’s residency. He’s from Cyprus so we had a good old chat about food and language and weather and then I went outside to drink my coffee and write.
Mid-write, a man walked up to me and said, “Did I overhear you say you were at an artist residency?” “Yes,” I said.
“Oh, what kind of artist are you?” he asked.
“I’m a playwright,” I said, which is, of course only part of the story but for the purpose of this artist residency I was at, it’s the simplest answer, so I told him “playwright.”
This man was visibly confused. Here he was, expecting me to say I’m a painter or a sculptor or even a printmaker or something like that but he has to re-program his brain to deal with the facts of the case. And I don’t know if this guy has a thing for visual artists so he’d come over to add one more to his collection or whatever but clearly he had some trouble understanding that a playwright might go to an artist residency in Crete. After a very long pause, he finally tried guessing – “Like, to study Greek plays or something?”
“No,” I said “I was working on a play that takes place in Crete.”
He nodded and walked away. Poor man, I seem to have broken his brain AND prevented him from adding another visual artist to his collection. Not a banner day for that guy.
But the experience did make me think about how narrow the borders of art can be for some people. Playwrights, to these sorts of people, aren’t artists and probably more broadly, writers of any other genre wouldn’t be either. Choreographers and dancers wouldn’t be on their list – neither would actors or directors. Musicians and composers would likely be a big nope for them. Filmmakers might qualify but only if they eschew narrative entirely. I have a feeling even a performance artist would not have met this guy’s criteria.
And I’m not sure quite what the connection is but I feel certain there is one between this narrow idea of what art might be, who an artist might be, and the general contempt our culture has for art in general.
One of my favorite thinkers/writers about arts issues is choreographer, Andrew Simonet. In his most recent email missive essay, he talked about the artist’s constant (and exhausting) need to prove our worth. He said most of us feel a need to justify our choice to become an artist because we feel how little the culture cares for us.
This is the foundational apology at the center of many artist lives: I’m so sorry I am called to make art. We apologize silently to loved ones, partners, employers, and families because art making holds little value in the world. How do we know that? Artists are constantly unpaid and underpaid.
Andrew Simonet
Thinking of artists as just the people who have things hanging in museums diminishes all of the rest of us – as well as those artists who have work hanging in museums!
Maybe there are a few who feel boosted up by the diminishment of the entirety of art but I think this narrow idea is good for no one.
Luckily, I’d just come from an artist residency where for two weeks no one questioned whether doing art was a good idea – so this guy’s dumb response to hearing I was at an artist residency rolled over me pretty fast but on another day, I might have taken it to heart. I might have fallen into a hole of “Plays aren’t real art” or, more likely in my case, making many 3 Am cases for why plays ARE real art and why can’t people understand that?
Yes, Mr. Eavesdropper, playwrights are also artists. Maybe go see a play, since you like listening to other people talk so much! And think about including a lot more arts in your thinking about art, howabout?
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Filed under: art, feminism, Visual Art | Tags: Ana Mendieta, art, feminism, feminist art, feminist future, Judy Chicago, Rachel Bloom, The Dinner Party
At this evening of art, artist after artist talked about feminism as a key to understanding their work. “Ok,” I thought, “I’m in a safe crowd. There’s no reason to soft pedal the underlying feminist ideas in my work when I talk about it. I’ll just lay some things out that I usually obscure a little bit.” So, thinking I was in a feminist crowd, I talked about some feminist stuff and explained some of its feminist underpinnings.
How quickly I discovered that I had misread the room! Immediately, I got pushback about an underlying conceit in The Dragoning. (A show, by the way, that while it IS feminist in its mission, I’ve never explicitly labeled it as such.) The next thing I knew I was trying to explain that yes, men do kill women. And at absolutely terrifying rates. (How I wish I’d had numbers right then – but now I know that, globally, it’s six women every hour.) All night long, I’d been hearing feminist, feminist, feminist but as soon as an actual feminist issue came up, the room seemed very different. How did we all have such different perspectives on feminist art?
I wondered if it was generational, since I was significantly older than most of the others. I come from an era in which being a feminist carried some stigma. The others come from the GirlBoss era, the #feminist, the pink feminist swag years. It’s possible that feminist art just means something different in different moments. To me, it’s Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party or Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series. It’s work that challenges the status quo and makes the audience reconsider things. It’s not that I think images of beautiful womens’ naked bodies aren’t feminist because I suppose they could be but I might need some support materials to help me see them that way.
This is why I suspect it is a generational disconnect because those who’ve come up in a GirlBoss or Choice Feminism culture tend to have a kind of individualist POV on feminism, that is, it’s about the individual choices of a woman rather than the collective. I don’t blame them for the confusion. The corporate embrace of feminism served to really obscure what we were talking about. It convinced a generation of women that that their nakedness was a feminist act because they were choosing to do it. And if they just happened to please the male gaze while doing it, all the better! I feel like Rachel Bloom (who, herself, is a representative of this choice feminism generation) perfectly summed up the contradictions baked in to Choice Feminism in her song about all the modifications women do to their bodies “just for yourself.”
Put yourself first, girl
Worry about yourself
Make yourself sexy
Just for yourself
So when dudes see you put yourself first
They’ll be like, “Damn, you’re hot, wanna make out?”
Push them boobs up
Just for yourself
Wear six-inch heels
Just for yourself
If it’s just for myself, shouldn’t I be comfortable?
No!
Put yourself first in a sexy way
My feeling is that if your feminist art makes men want to make out with you, you’re probably not really making feminist art. This isn’t because there aren’t some great feminist men out there who might find feminists sexy, there are. I know some personally! But feminist art doesn’t exist to turn men on. (If it manages to do that, that’s a pretty neat kink. Tell me more.) For me, the best feminist art will make folks think or see something in a new way. It will reveal something hidden. It will right previous wrongs. It will give women seats at the table where they had none before. (See: The Dinner Party) Sometimes feminist art makes folks uncomfortable and there are sometimes consequences.
The Third Wave (or maybe this is the Fourth Wave now?) of feminism got a little diluted, I think. It got a little safer for everyone and it got a little buzzwordy. I think that’s okay, since it meant it became a lot less dangerous to talk about feminism. The thing that concerns me is that it seems like that didn’t come with any increased safety in talking about feminist ideals or ideas or art or propositions. It may be a safe word to use in your artist statement these days but I’m not sure it’s any safer to fight for the rights and benefits of women. That’s the part I’m interested in. And not just on Women’s March day when everyone’s doing it.
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Filed under: Acting, advice, art, clown, comedy, community, Creative Process, dance, music, musicals, theatre, Visual Art, writing | Tags: effort, failure, Love, pride, process, terrible, theatre
Sometimes someone you love makes a work of art of which you are not a fan. You wish you liked it but really, you think it stinks. If it’s a piece of performing art work, like some theatre or some dance or some music, you might sit through it trying to understand why this person you love has worked so hard on something so terrible. This feels bad. Sometimes we don’t go and see the work of people that we love just to avoid the feeling. It’s not so much that we’re afraid to have to talk to them about their terrible work afterwards – it’s just that we don’t want to sit in the theatre or stand in the gallery or in the concert hall wondering how our loved one could make such a thing.
I’m sure a lot of my friends have had this experience with my work, too. I don’t like to think about it but I’m pretty sure I’ve lost friends because they just hated my show and they didn’t want to deal with me later. I have a fairly long list of people who came to see a show of mine and never spoke to me or saw me again. This shit is personal.
But what are we supposed to do?
We all have our own taste and if we really care about art, we have our opinions that rarely align fully with others. That’s how we create original stuff! We all have our own aesthetics and sometimes people who love us personally hate what we make. I wish it weren’t true but all evidence points to a complicated mess of love and art and hate all mixed up.
Unfortunately, I’ve often found the way to deal with this is to just not see (or read or listen to) things. I don’t have to feel bad about how I feel about someone’s work if I don’t see it. The problem with this strategy is that I pull myself out of community by doing this. Theatre, for example, runs on reciprocity. I go see your show, you come to see mine. If I don’t go to shows, where is my audience going to come from? If I don’t go see your show that I’m definitely going to hate, how can I expect you to see mine? That you will, likewise, hate? This is a problem I have been wrestling with for decades.
I think I have cracked it for myself now. Watching the show of someone who I love and respect, trying to figure out why they thought this was a good idea, I realized that it was beautiful. The show itself did nothing for me, I promise, and I wish it had and I’m sorry. But the FACT of it? The FACT that all these people came together and worked so hard, with such diligence and passion and belief in their purpose? That fact is gorgeous. It is tremendously difficult to do and the fact that people do it, typically for very little reward, is fucking beautiful. It doesn’t matter if I like it. I don’t like most things. I wish I were more catholic in my taste but I’m not. So – what I feel like I’m going to lean in to is just the joy of watching people make things, to celebrate bad art as good in the larger sense.
I’d like to approach the work I see in the future with the grace that I give youth and community theatre productions. A lot of people I knew in my theatre-soaked youth, who made fun of my obsession, who thought I was a weirdo, now have kids who are in school plays, who’ve become dancers, musicians, actors, singers and these parents are so PROUD of them, bless their hearts. And I’m sure all those school plays are awful. I feel like I need to tap into a parent’s pride when I experience bad art. Because I am proud of everyone who fights through the forest of challenges to actually make something. I wish I liked what they make but maybe pride is enough. Maybe loving their love is enough.
If you’re someone I love whose work I’ve seen, this post is not about you. YOUR work, I love. And I love that you made it. And I’m proud of you.
We want people to love our work, of course we do. We want them to think we are brilliant and we only make marvelous things. We want to believe all that work leads to stellar shows. We want our work to be so good no one could hate it. But – sometimes, especially in the trenches of underfunded art, we don’t achieve the masterwork status we were aiming at. And if you feel bad that I might not be crazy about that artwork you made, just know I’m not crazy about Hamilton, either, okay? You’re in good company. Most people really love it. I don’t. But – I’m still proud of them for making it! And I’m proud of you too.
Photo by Jason Vail
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, theatre, Visual Art | Tags: art, Artist, garbage, research and development, storage unit, theatre, trash
My storage unit was filled with show shit. That is, it was full of props, set pieces, costumes, puppets, mask molds, rehearsal materials, marketing stuff and lots of random creative remains. I hadn’t seen these things in a long while so when it began to emerge, I said, “Well, a lot of this is going in the garbage!”
Meanwhile, it’s complicated. I saved a lot of this stuff out of a sincere hope that I’d find a way to produce the shows again. I have those giant gold frames, the hat boxes and the portable racks for a show that we toured for a little while and hoped we’d tour again. I kept the materials from our creative process on The Door Was Open in case we got the opportunity to explore further. We haven’t. And those six hula hoops probably aren’t entirely necessary to keep around. Nor is the big bag of wallpaper scraps. But I kept them because I hope they WOULD be called into service again. That wallpaper was a miracle in our Research and Development process! Could I really just get rid of it? I haven’t made any theatre (in person) in years. What a lot of leftovers from my theatrical practice! What a terrible theatrical pack rack I seemed to be! I was feeling very rueful about it, truth be told.
But my dad, who was helping me move all this stuff, had a different perspective. To him, it looked like a theatrical life well lived. He told me he was proud of me for making all those shows that that stuff came from. He said it reminded him of the spaces of some theatre folk he knows (and respects). I was feeling like my artistic work had turned into trash and he talked me down off that ledge. It’s really something to watch your feelings go from trash to pride so quickly.
I was talking with a friend about this experience later and she could relate to that feeling around thinking of one’s art as trash. She talked about her body of work adding up to some crap in a closet that her kid would have to deal with someday. She tells me she often thinks about just hauling it all out to the garbage. That thought horrifies me, though! I treasure her work. I could not bear it if she threw it away and I hate that it ends up in a closet because people should get to see it!
But we all struggle with this, I suppose. This feeling that a life dedicated to creation means generating a lot of trash. Sometimes it is literal trash. In my case, I should definitely put that bag of wallpaper scraps in the recycling. That much, I think I can surrender safely. But sometimes having a body of work can just FEEL like trash. It can feel like we’re hanging on to old garbage because it’s not the thing we’re working on at the moment – but it’s not trash. Having a bunch of evidence of previous creations is actually very cool. It’s easy to forget how meaningful these things were and are, still. Don’t throw away your work. Someone will treasure it. It is not trash.
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Filed under: art, Gen X, Visual Art | Tags: actor, artists, capitalism, Gen X, Gen X men, manhood, patriarchy, visual artist
TW: Suicide
You know how certain roads just seem to be extra dangerous? At some intersections, you see heaps of flowers and other tributes to people who were lost there. Governments attempt to put up traffic lights or stop signs but some of those intersections are just relentlessly dangerous.
The places where patriarchy meets capitalism are like that, metaphorically speaking and they seem particularly dangerous for Gen X men.
The day I watched the memorial service for my Gen X actor friend, I also saw an obituary for a Gen X visual artist. Both of these tributes paid homage to the generosity of their artistry, the dedication to their crafts and both seemed to suggest that these men just never really figured out a way to effectively make decent money.
To say I relate to this problem is an understatement. I also have never cared much for material things and also have never really solved the problem of capital. And yet I have not even been tempted to throw myself into a river as those men did. I’m not saying this is why both of those Gen X men ended up this way. We can’t know that. In at least one case, severe mental illness was also a factor but I was struck by this commonality between us all and was reminded of the year when I devised a show about money. In having conversations with my peers about money and all the baggage that came with it, I learned that a lot of the men felt an intense pressure to provide, even as they were following their dreams. There was a different quality to their ambitions to make money. Their manhood depended on making a substantial amount of it. They had a little patriarchal demon on their shoulders at all times demanding that they provide. Or maybe there were two demons – one a patriarch and the other a capitalist and they just goaded one another along, degrading a man’s self-worth until he ended up at that treacherous intersection.
The thing is, even though I have a similar relationship to money and success as these guys, I feel fairly certain that no one would mention it in my obituary or in a eulogy. As a woman, it’s not that big a deal, I think. If I’d managed it, the world might be impressed but not managing it is weirdly expected. (That may be one of the reasons it’s not working so well for me.) That men have to suffer so profoundly if they don’t somehow make capitalism work for them is the intersection with patriarchy. Patriarchy defines manhood and success and it uses capitalism to keep its men in line.
The visual artist we lost sounded like a kind man. He drew hearts in chalk all over the city. There are testaments to how his drawings gave people hope in a dark time. This is a beautiful thing to do. He ought to have been rewarded, honored for his service, given a grant to continue it. But no ones gives grants for stuff like that. A grants committee would have laughed such a project out of the room.
But he couldn’t figure out the unsolvable problem of how to capitalize on a work of service and perhaps saw no way to go on. A project like that is not a commodity. It’s not for sale. It shouldn’t be. And an artist shouldn’t have to starve while he creates things that are truly for the greater good. The thing is, I’ve known quite a few artists who died at the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism. Some leaned into capitalism and some ran from it – but the result was the same. It’s heartbreaking every time.
I don’t know whether this is a peculiarly Gen X problem or if we ought to start keeping an eye on Millennial men now just in case. Maybe it’s just part of middle age? It feels like our generational antipathy to selling out and/or working for the man, as well as our propensity for questioning authority might make this intersection especially dangerous for our generation – but I can’t know for sure.
But I do know that smashing the patriarchy would do a lot of men as much good as it would women. When I fight for the end of patriarchy, I really am fighting for men, too. For some of them, it is a life or death situation.
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Filed under: art, business, dreams, music, Visual Art | Tags: arts culture, bad art, ecosystem, genocidal maniacs, Hitler, painting, quality, Silvio Berlusconi, singing, support, Supporting the Arts, tyrant
From listening to the Bunga Bunga podcast, I learned that Silvio Berlusconi started as a singer. He was reasonably successful and having a great time when, apparently, his dad shamed him, asking him if he was really going to be a singer for the rest of his life. So Silvio Berlusconi quit singing. Even though he loved it. And became a shady ass real estate developer instead. This led him to becoming a shady ass media mogul and then the shady ass prime minister of Italy. Did that go well for Italy? No, no, it did not. Would Italy have been better off if Berlusconi had just continued to do what he loved and just kept singing? I think so. I blame Berlusconi’s dad for the problems of Italy. I also blame the world that denigrates the arts and deems them not enough.
This makes me think about Hitler, of course. Hitler wanted to be a painter. He was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna, where he’d moved to pursue his dreams. He had a go of selling his work and found a few people to buy it. He was fucking serious about painting. Was he any good? No. But some people liked his stuff. They even paid for it – so hey – that’s something. But his failures in art led him to politics and the world ended up with a disaster. Do I blame the Academy of Fine Arts? Nope. No one wants to go to school with Hitler. And he was bad. So. Of course they had to reject him. But someone, somewhere might have encouraged him. I don’t know who but somebody could have kept that man painting and it would have saved millions of lives.
The stories of frustrated artists going on to do terrible things are many. And there are many frustrated artists who ruined the lives around them when they took their own. What I’m trying to say here is that I think we need to take frustrated artists seriously.
Think of all the tyrants we could have avoided if we’d just managed to be supportive of artists or even just gave them some time, space and resources to do their thing. I mean – good lord – Just give artists the space to be artists and the ones who would have turned out to be tyrants can just happily paint in their basements or sing in the clubs.
But – golly gee whiz – what if they’re no good? What if they’re a terrible singer or a lousy painter?
To that, I say, wouldn’t you rather have a gallery full of shitty paintings than the fucking holocaust? Live with the shitty art, for crying out loud!
Embracing art and artists is a great thing to do, just because art is great but it ALSO could be seen as a preventative measure. Prevent a tyrant! Support an artist! Even a shitty one! I swear everyone is so concerned with whether things are good or bad when, really bad art is entirely tolerable in a way that, say, genocide is not. And I say that as someone who, when I’m watching something terrible, acts as though I’m being quite melodramatically tortured.
I’m not trying to say that all frustrated artists are genocidal maniacs (if so, watch out for me!) but an awful lot of genocidal maniacs really wanted to be artists. They would have rather been singers and painters or authors or actors or whatever. I think a culture that encouraged these things would see a lot fewer genocidal maniacs. Support an artist! Prevent a possible global catastrophe! Buy that weirdo’s ugly paintings! You don’t have to hang them up. Go to that terrible play! Listen to that awful album! Do it for the world.
I feel like sometimes when people talk about supporting the arts, they really want to make sure they only support the really good stuff. Organizations have extensive applications to make sure they get work of which they approve. They require references or degrees or resumes to try and insure quality. If you propose running a lottery, they worry about how they will weed out the bad stuff.
But true support would mean supporting all of it – the wonderful, the good, the mediocre and the terrible. It’s like trying to save a forest by just saving a couple of the tallest trees. The forest thrives because of all of the trees, even the fallen rotting ones and to support a forest would mean supporting the widest variety of forest life. The same is absolutely true of the arts. The more supported the entire ecosystem is, the more good art we get out of it.
And if just having a robust arts culture isn’t enough of a reason for you, just think of investment in the arts as tyrant insurance. Support all the arts, even the bad, and maybe you’ll save us from the ravings of the next frustrated artists.
Again, I’m not saying artists are uniquely poised to be tyrants; Surely someone who had potent dreams in another field that were thwarted and discouraged, would be equally likely to turn sour. Anyone with their dreams dashed upon a rock might be likely to turn bad – but artists have their dreams dashed more often than most and there are few places in the world where an artist’s ambitions might be realized to their full potential. I think a world that encouraged its artists, whether they be good, bad, mediocre or genius, would be a much more interesting world. And if my theory is correct, it might also have a lot fewer tyrants in it.
Coulda saved everyone a whole heap of trouble if he’d kept this up.
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Filed under: advice, art, art institutions, Art Scenes, Visual Art | Tags: advice, art, Artist, Jerry Saltz, New York magazine, Picasso, visual arts
If I could offer one piece of advice for artists, it would be to be skeptical of all advice for artists.
After so many years of dedication to making art, I think I’ve heard most of it. Some of it might be useful. A lot of it isn’t. I started to think about this after receiving my copy of New York magazine featuring a cover story of advice for artists. I found myself confused about what it was doing there on the cover. Why should advice for artists be a front page story? I read the advice – hoping to uncover some clues as to what made this front page material but there was very little in the thirty three tips that I haven’t read before.
I discussed this article with another lifelong artist and realized that its presence on the front page probably mostly was a result of the author’s recent Pulitzer prize win. He won a Pulitzer so he gave some advice so they took some funny arty photos of him and put him on the cover. And when I received this magazine, I felt weird about it. Not because his advice is bad – some of it does accurately reflect my experience of making art – but because I don’t understand who this advice is really for. On one hand, it seems to be for “the young who want to” – and on the other, it’s for the veteran and also the one about to have the New York Times come to their first gallery show in Soho. Who is that? An arty preteen with super fancy connections and an old soul?
That’s when I realized how bound by our own experience any advice is. Jerry Saltz, the guy who wrote this advice, is a critic who just won a Pulitzer prize for writing. He’s a hotshot. He may feel like he has his finger on the pulse of the art world – that he’s seen the range of the super star artists and the strugglers. But the fact is, Jerry Saltz only sees artists who are in the mix. For some artists, Saltz coming to their show is their one big shot. If he doesn’t respond positively to their work, it will become the story of the time they almost made it. But the art scene also includes artists who will not only never get Saltz at their art show but will also never get a show. They’re not in the mix. The artists Saltz is seeing, and therefore advising, are in the mix – which means they have already experienced a level of success or privilege. This doesn’t negate this particular critic’s advice – it’s just to contextualize it.
Likewise, any advice I’d have to offer anyone is going to come from my particular point of view. To me, the most salient bit of information in Saltz’s advice, was his perspective that it only takes 12 people to create a successful career. That’s something he’s seen happen a few times I’d wager and probably seems relatively easy to accomplish from where he’s sitting. Why, he knows at least 12 well connected people! And he knows a lot of people who know 12 well connected people. No problem.
But the good news about this guy is that he also understands that not everyone has access to well connected people. And that is one of the things that makes him a valuable voice for the arts. Sure, he may have used a photo of (notoriously terrible family-man) Pablo Picasso to demonstrate that being an artist parent is possible but his advocacy for museum space and artists is incredibly important for the cultural life of New York City so I’m glad he’s out here fighting.
But if you’re an artist looking for useful advice, I regret to inform you that no one has the answers. There isn’t a right way to do this. Living with that sort of ambiguity is sort of what it’s all about.
If you find little bursts of information inspiring for your art, yes, please read them and make your work. If Saltz’s article encouraged just one artist to dig deeper into her work, then it was worth it, in my view.
But if this sort of thing left you a little cold and confused as it did me, take my advice and forget all advice. When it comes to making art, yours is the only advice to follow. Not your teachers, not your parents, not some guy in a magazine and not some struggling artist on the internet either.
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Filed under: advice, art, Creative Process, music, podcasting, Visual Art, writing | Tags: advertising, creative, Creative Process, creativity, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, marketing, spark
Probably, there is no one who can’t wait to read your next play. Probably, no one is itching to read your novel. No one is clamoring for your new album or begging for your next dance piece. Probably you have some loved ones who are very supportive and tell you how excited they are to read your latest writing but 9 out of 10 people really don’t care and even the most supportive person you have on your side won’t see or read EVERYTHING. Your friends might feel obligated to go see your show or listen to your album but they probably won’t come every single time or listen more than a few times. Probably when you tell them about your latest creative venture, they’ll tell you they’re excited about it but they probably won’t come. (Life happens. To everyone. Everyone can’t see everything.) I’m not saying your people are not glad that you make art but the odds are they’re not clamoring for your latest thing. Especially if you make a lot of things.
This is why you have to untie yourself from your potential audience. If you have the instinct to create, you have to do it for yourself first because no one wants whatever you have in mind more than you.
I think this is true even if you’re a popular artist who people want to hear from. Let’s look at J.K. Rowling. Her fans wanted Harry Potter, now and forever. No one wanted her to write a book about a small-time English Village council election. No one was asking for that. But she wrote it anyway. If Rowling was completely tied to what people wanted from her, she’d have been writing only Harry Potter for the rest of her life. But no, not only did she write a novel about an election, she also went and wrote a whole crime series under a pseudonym. I bet you no one was asking for her to do that when she started.
If you’re not J.K. Rowling, your audience might not want anything at all from you. The most likely response you will get to your art is indifference. And you cannot let this stop you. Just because no one particularly wants you to do it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.
If you’re called to create, you have to do it. For you. No one else. Or maybe one other person. It could even be an imaginary person. I have one dedicated fan of the podcast. I record it for him. And even he doesn’t listen to every single one. A more logical person might leave such an enterprise aside. But I don’t make a podcast for logical reasons – I make it for artistic ones. My reasoning mind understands that not every artistic expression is for every one. And that as long as I feel inclined to create, that’s how long I should do it.
No one wants it. But if you DON’T express that unique sparkling thing in your soul, it will fester. Or at the very least, wink out of existence.
If you need people to want your work, you might just want to go ahead and work in advertising. You can go be “a creative” in marketing or some form of industry. They’re going to want your words, your ideas, your drawings, etc. They’ll give you assignments, structures and feedback. They’ll ask you for all you have. They will read everything you write for them. They will listen to all you record. They will look at all that you draw. And you will get payment, one way or another.
But if you feel called to be an artist, you’ll need to be prepared to go where no one is calling to you, where there is no encouragement but your own creative spark. The practice of a life in the arts is learning how to nurture your own spark, how to stoke your own creative fire and encourage it to blaze so it becomes harder and harder to ignore. Learn how to be your own match, your own oxygen, your own kindling, your own log and you have a practice for life.
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Filed under: art, music, puppets, resistance, theatre, Visual Art | Tags: analog, crafts, digital, journalism, resist, resistance
Since the digital age really kicked in, I have watched a lot of things that were important to me fade away. In a world that values social media currency and digital art and so many things on screen, my analog skills of theatre-making, performance and presence have felt less and less valued in the world. While I have adapted as well as I can, I have at times felt like an analog girl in a digital world – a handwoven basket in a factory town.
But since the world turned upside down on Jan 20th, I have found that my old-school art skills are suddenly relevant again. At a recent rally and march, I suddenly realized how many skills I was pulling out of storage to be there. Some examples were: creating an impromptu puppet, gathering protest props that not only can pop at a protest but be light-weight and fit in a bag so I can carry them on the subway, putting a costume together, singing loudly, helping ladies find a pitch when a man is leading the singing and puppeteering.
And it’s not just me – there’s a call for all kinds of analog skills that might have felt lost to the digital age. Examples: Painting signs, playing drums, marching bands, one man (woman) bands, creating spectacle, knitting. Art supply sales are booming. There is something poignant about our old-school skills suddenly being useful again. We can’t rely on video to save us. We need things in real life. Now more than ever.
In a way, it’s a shift of our public spaces out of the internet and into actual spaces. We are all out in public more. And I find I want to bring out even more things into that space. I want to cry in public space. (I was a little disappointed there was no keening at the mock funeral. I could have used a good cleansing cry.) I want to read in public space. (What if we had a Read In?) I want to just sit quietly with a bunch of my fellow introverts and shush anyone who gets too loud.
There is something about this moment that is calling us to really stand behind what we value and those values may not always be obvious. It reveals all the things we’ve let dwindle – things we actually once loved or felt were necessary. Journalism. Theatre. Music. All things we stopped paying for because we could get them for free. If there’s anything to hope for in this depressing mess of a year, it’s that adjustment of value. It’s that subscriptions of newspapers and magazines are back up, people need music like never before and theatre might just make a difference again.
Help me keep crafting
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This blog is also a Podcast. You can find it on iTunes. If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Soundcloud, click here.
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Songs for the Struggling Artist 