(As he realizes, while playing the dread scrabble game, that midnight is fast approaching, and the day's blogue entry... hasn't... been... written...)
So, because I have nothing better to do, and no one else to do it with, I've been watching myself for the past couple of days. I have just a few projects to complete, between now and, say, the middle of March, and it's fascinating (by which, I mean I'd like to tear all my hair out in sheer frustration) to see just how little it takes, for me to find. oh I don't know, perhaps a bit of lint on my shirt, with which I will allow myself to become preoccupied for... how many hours does the average day have, anyway? One would think that, with age and experience, the tricks of one's own mind would become more transparent, and one (meaning, for the time being, me) could laugh -- ha ha -- and brush these silly distractions aside, and get to the real work. Because... time... doesn't... increase... Does it?
But, if one thought working around or through avoidance would get easier with maturity, one wouldn't be talking about me. And I think there are two underlying factors, that combine to help keep me pinned to whatever seat I happen to be occupying at any one time, instead of getting up and walking the entire fifteen feet, to my basement studio...
Partly, I believe that I have, over the years, learned to be what I call a 'fugitive artist'. Other things were always more important -- I hadn't been hired to draw on the back of those computer cards, damn it. And so on. So I learned to be sneaky, and to do little things, quick little drawings, and elaborate doodles during meetings, and little sketches of sleeping commuters on the PATH train... Small works, that would fit on my lap. Too little time and energy at the end of the day? I'll just do a tiny bit of something, and put it someplace safe. Which, in my world, is indistinguishable from shoving it through the shredder.
And even earlier, during grade school and high school, and especially at home, I learned to be guarded about my art adventures. Even in the legitimate art classes, I seemed to hide what I was doing, from the other kids and the teacher too -- it seemed as though, if anyone saw what I was doing, before it was finished, that inquiring gaze acted on my emerging work as a kind of developing fluid -- you see my drawing and -- presto! -- I can't do anything else with it.
And, as will be no great surprise to some of you who've read other entries, the home front was especially perilous, especially for art. The way I used to sidle past the eternal vigilance of my Horrid Grandmother was by pretending that I had vast amounts of homework -- homework being the only activity of mine which was more important than, say, scrubbing the back stairs again, because they weren't clean enough the first time. Years after I'd left my father's second home, I was back for a brief visit, and my Horrid Grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. "You know," she said, in a warm and cozy, reminiscing kind of voice, "you were always the hardest one for us to punish." She had a wry kind of half-smile on her face. "No matter how long we took television away from you, you just didn't watch for that much longer. We knew you had that art of yours, but we couldn't figure out how to get it away from you." And she shook her head ruefully, as though remembering what a scamp I'd been. In a way, this was validation I never expected to get from any of the parental figures in that house. And it helped explained, in part, that fugitive stance I felt compelled to adopt. And still find so automatic.
One way I get around these internal impediments, is by creating an obligation for myself. An exhibit is a great way for me to feel the dread of failure -- the awful fear that the opening time will arrive, and I won't have my work done. Because of this, I've developed the (perhaps not entirely unusual) habit of cramming all the necessary work into as little time as possible, and working like a maniac, up until the time the cheese has all been arranged on the platter, and the doors are being unlocked. Oddly, this sort of temporal tight-rope walking seems perfectly natural to me.
What trips me up, though, is having... too much time, and no one to hide from. Without the pressure of the relentless deadline looming over me like one of today's faster glaciers, I seem only to generate dull and lifeless bits of this and that -- things made with the same material components of the work I recognize as my 'real' stuff, but without tension or energy. I really don't understand this.
But I know this problem isn't only mine, by any means. In the book 'Art and Fear', Ted Bayles talks about how critical it is for artists to know that the work they're doing is actually going someplace. Otherwise, as I seem to have found out, making things is much like marching around and around a military parade ground, someplace in Texas, in the September sun -- marching and marching, and when we're done, we're still in the same place, and have only gotten sweaty. I guess I really do need the implication of dialogue -- the notion that someone else will stand in front of this creation of mine, and maybe have some new, unanticipated ideas.
Beyond the need for an exhibit, though, and an audience, I'm currently facing a rapidly-dwindling amount of storage space. I waited to do sculpture for as long as I could -- having been warned, in undergraduate school, that photography and sculpture were only for rich folks, who could afford the equipment, and the space necessary to pursue these efforts. Because I so strongly identified with my roots in poverty, I backed away from the idea of making anything that couldn't be bound in a book.
But the intoxicating discovery of glass-blowing took care of that. Because I did my graduate glass work in Rochester NY, I could find relatively large and inexpensive work/storage spaces; much of my thesis work, and two large, room-sized installation pieces from a residency in Kansas City MO are still stored there, some seven hours by car. One way. And I still have plenty of my odd glass globules here with me, in South Orange. But I'm scared to resume that work -- having the raw materials is bad enough, but finished work is always ten times more difficult to pack and store.
So, I avoid my basement work space. It's the irony of ironies, that at a point in my life when, at least for the time being, I seem to have the requisite physical powers to continue with my recent sculptural work, the process of making yet more 'stuff' feels vulgar. I feel like a very un-cute version of those animated blots of green phlegm in the cough-potion commercials -- only I'm much larger, and don't revel as much as they seem to do, in this sense of being a kind of disease. I don't know why this has me so in its grip -- I can't seem to talk myself out of another phase of shame, stemming from the fact that the impact of my 'success' is an impediment for someone else -- an expense, an inconvenience, an embarrassment. It's difficult to verbalize how painful this is.
So. I suppose I'll try some trick or other -- I find 'The Zimmerman Plan of Distasteful Avoidance' works on a generally reliable level. I simply have to give myself a few truly loathsome chores to do, within a relatively strict time-table, and then leave the smallest possibility that, before I start... cleaning the gutters with my bare hands, for instance, I might have just a wedge of fifteen minutes, to get a little bit of artwork done. More often than not, that fifteen minutes stretches into an afternoon. I can hire someone to clean the gutters. Or fill them with cement.
The shame, though, is more difficult, and quite powerful. Right now, I'm thinking that, perhaps, dark rum might be the answer. Lots and lots of it.
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