3rd
Space and Time
Now that I have officially completed phase one of my “transition to new life where I am a grad student with a fiance” - I have been thinking hard about how I’ve changed in the last four years. And, like most observations about myself, I am trying not only to quantify this change, but also to determine whether it is positive or negative.
Moving gives you a good opportunity to re-discover and re-read things that you’ve thought, felt or believed, and to see them almost as if you were reading the words of another person. Or, reading the words of others and finally recognizing the truth in them that you dismissed at the time. Example: I came across my final review from undergrad, signed by a committee of six that listened as I presented my thesis. Elona Van Gent was the one who actually wrote the final notes, and the comments she made were basically this: all the success of my work in concept and form (she called my Muff the “most effective piece of interactive art I’ve ever experienced”) were compromised by my attitude toward my subject matter, my past, and my emotional investment in all of the above. As an artist who had experienced powerful, confusing and traumatic things, I was able to put my emotions into the work in an effective way, but my attachment to them got in the way of my presentation of the work to others. It was so much about me, that I cut off opportunities for my audience to connect and be affected by the work and my stories. Simply put, I was too self-involved. I was also busy telling myself little stories about love that were unfair, looking for people who might help me understand the shadows, and living out my convoluted theories in ways that were unproductive. I was lonely, and hurt and this felt like a driving motivator for me to make art and I let everyone know it.
Now, I am significantly more happy (aside from periodic financial concerns), and have found someone I can love for real, worked on my most authentic (rather than most seductive) friendships, and have given myself permission to be more playful with how I think about my life and my work. I can make a better case for myself and my thesis work than I could have four years ago because I don’t feel tied to my old personal narrative. I am seven years away from my most dramatic year, and am amazed by how it feels like a lifetime away, or like the life of someone I know, love and empathize with deeply. Instead of feeling my past like a full closet threatening to spring open, pour out, and bury me, it’s more like a small box on the top shelf that I know is there, that I take with me wherever I live, and occasionally that I chose to explore.
This space seems good. I feel more separate from my formative experiences, and imagine that this distance will allow me to be more objective in making work. However, I wonder if I have lost something in the process.
When I was younger, and maybe this is true for everyone when they are teens/ young adults, I seemed to feel things with great amplitude. There was a kind of constant desperation that tinged my emotions, from joy to sorrow, making each seem like the absolute peak or valley of my life. And then, I would spend hours, days, weeks, months working my way up from the valleys, and trying to bottle and preserve the peaks: writing, drawing, painting, arranging, and dramatizing. Yes, I wrote terrible poetry about men I shouldn’t have loved in the first place, and I created esoteric paintings with imagery built from my own personal lexicon of loss, but the feeling that motivated me was so powerful I could move with it swiftly, and it would carry me through long nights where I barely noticed the time was passing. Maybe everyone at twenty-two thinks it’s so important to use an entire stanza to describe the apathetic curl of smoke from mesmerizing lips, or to rejoice in using eighteen wheelers as an ironic metaphor, or to incorporate serendipity as a heavy probe into some truth we are sure we have stumbled upon. Maybe everyone finds it easier when they are young to pause and write delicately about random moments of intimacy that are inherently youthful: cuddling with strangers like puppies, duets on train tracks, making promises, stealing away, watching water, clouds, sun - feeling everything so vividly, seeing the brightest colors, and hearing familiar sounds in a way that makes you stop and listen with awe for as long as is required to savor the strange music. Now I wonder if there will be so much to write about.
If I wrote bad poetry about leaves twisting in a river as a persistently lonely younger woman emerging into my twenties, then now I am posting facebook status updates about the practicalities of adulthood. I feel like I’ve replaced creativity and poetry with a spreadsheet, status updates, and carefully executed plans. This is great for me emotionally - I have someone who wants to spend his life with me in an extended conversation - and I don’t need to write poems and address letters to No One to get my feelings out. But, I can’t help but wonder what this will mean for me as an artist.
