day 31 | with this one life this summer day

...

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver [The summer day]

tell me. please. WITH -- not an isolated independent event. what is it that i plan? i've thought about this a lot. it is not a new question i ask myself, though the acknowledgement that i've only got one and it is wild and precious, that it is of infinite value, is a new thought in the past five years. though it has gotten seriously clouded over the past two and a one half. but the clouds dissipate.

this will be a year of direct experimentation, not only will i be pushing my making and my writing to see where it wants to go, i will be pushing and plying who i am and what will and should [should?] come of that. i say i am going to push to see where it wants to go because i don't have a clear vision of "go this way" or "that." i have clues, cues. i know i must sense purpose in a portion of what i do--a purpose beyond self. i don't devine a significant purpose from the making. in fact, i struggle with art as being anything more than a kind of propagation of trinkets, as a form of entertainment. i need it to be something more if i am to run after it whole heartedly. i need the act of making. yes, but i lack a clear vision of it being purposeful. i do see a role necessary in society that a portion of the population be makers, rubbing up against current thinking and stretching it. so i struggle back and forth as to the function and purpose of art. i get an inkling that it is very important, but then in a trinket based economic system, it gets lost again. sometimes we make some art more than it is and negate other forms. i might be a bit junging in how i see the practice of art vs the product. making is critical but not key [or is it? i suppose that is part of this year's experimentation in terms of pushing it to see where it will take me]. in writing, i can see a more substantial purposefulness that resides beyond the self serving. yet my writing is unruly, not yet tamed or directed with accessible intent. teaching, definitely purposeful beyond my self and though a field i excel directly within and propel...it is off the table, no matter giftedness/aptitudes or purposefulness. i've never believed that pecking order systems are truly in our cultural benefit, they typically loose sight of what is really important and become artificially oppressive. peck for the sake of peck ranking. i need to unpack more deeply the elements of excel and propel so as to redirect it in an environment conducive to who i am. i will test that this fall. below the teaching i know lies an intuitive ability to bond groups in a way that intimately knits them. this doesn't mean i become a part of that group, but instead set groups on a course that keeps them interlinking for years, even decades. i have had an inherent ability to encourage and accelerate a group's bonding through transparency, authenticity, vulnerability and, actually, not having the answers, instead having facilitated them in finding their own way. i've done this successfully even within the clouded environment of the past two and a half years. i refined and used the same methods from previous unrelated systems in developing a program within the collegiate setting that instilled these patterns and habits among designated groups. the first semester or two it didn't catch hold, but then again i was in the midst of a messy divorce [perhaps all are like that], and could hardly focus. anyhow, i consider teaching definitely off the table at this point even if considered my primary gift. all this makes a specific direction less than clear and frankly i am too old to run after things in which i am a cog but not a specific asset. placeholding, cogging, is not a path that interests me. perhaps that is a spoiled mentality, yet everything i have read supports the idea of pursuing the dream based on the hardwiring. ha and my hardwiring has always moved me to work but never for money. much of what i do well is highly valued by culture yet highly underpaid. i am attempting to kick maslow's hierarchy to the wind in some kind of screw you-life is far better than a system inherently locked in an attitude of not enough.

so what is the dream? as i snap my wings open, what is the path upon which i will float before the too soon arrives? so tell me, what is it that i should do with this one wild and precious life i've been gifted? 

how do i weave the making, writing, mentoring into something new? something different? what do i refine to move me into that snapped wing float?

for now i shall wonder the hillside of my friend's and pick wild blackberries--that is prayer, it is a paying attention, a form of kneeling down, a way to get back to the task of what it is i do with this one wild and precious life.

day 27 | route of returning

but returning isn't an option. back, yes. return, no. life is nonreturnable, nonrefundable. there are simply zero redos. the route only moves in the now with a constant drifting forward no matter whether one's mind fixes at various points in the past or the future. the preference would be for mentality stabalizing 80% in the now, i'll save 10% for reflection so as to learn and not repeat and 10% projecting into the later so i can at least sketch out a rough pencil version of the future to move toward.

i've currently been reading Duhigg's The Power of Habit, Tharpe's Creative Habit and listening to Stuts and Michel's text, The Tools. They are highly interrelated yet come from entirely different paradigms. Duhigg's is a synthesis, an amalgamation, of research studies (with references) about habit, memory, etc, in conjunction with change, Tharpe's is her dance and coregraphical path and the role of habit/behavioral and mind patterns to bring her work to fruitition, and finally the tools are a therapeutic model for change now without the need to cull from and get stuck in histories. In many ways all three are saying the same things. Undergirding each process which mimic one another just labeled with a distinct language system is a processing and future setting via a practice of behavioral exercising and writing. Duhigg's text actually references studies that indicate a direct increased rate of recovery (change) for those who wrote daily--working through the mundane patterns, addressing work arounds or through of pain. the writing seems to entail not only a to do listing (agggghh small bites sized goals) but as in Stuts/Michael's text includes unpacking and almost essentially documenting ones self studies, experiments. all require work, but result in greater sense of energy. all three texts are extremely practical. everything i've read on creativity supports this same role for the written (handwritten) language. admittedly though Tharpe's procedures, her anal rigidity, work well for her practice, it is clearly aligns with her personal disposition. I concur with her procedures but will have to adapt them to my disposition which is not highly controlling or calculating in style and definitely not in terms of habit.

perhaps today's take away, which i think i would like to embrace for this year, is one William James latched onto for a one year experiment. i am a watcher and at a very base level as i watch others i long ago came to believe that change is not actually possible, that the free will we believe rarely emerges from the forces of systemic histories that propel us into our own futures. i find this core undergirding belief unproductive, true or not. it inhibits me. no, in fact, it paralyzes me into an Eeyore mind set--"oh bother." This translates into WHY BOTHER?

'"All our life," William Janes told us in the prologue, "so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits--practical, emotional, and intellectual--systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the later may be...

...James mad a decision...he would conduct a yearlong experiment. he would spend twelve months believing that he had control over himself and his destiny, that he could become better, that he had the free will to change. There was no proof that it was true. But he would free himself to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that change was possible. "i think that yesterday was a criss in my life," he wrote in his diary. Regarding his ability to change, "I will assume for the present--until next year--that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."  Over the next year, he practiced everyday. In his diary, he wrote as if his control over himself and his choices was never in question...Later he would famously write that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change. And that one of the most important methods for creating that belief was habits. Habits are what allow us to "do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally with sufficient practice, do it semi-mchanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all." Once we choose who we want to be, people grow "to the way in which that have been exercised, ..If you believe you can change--if you make it a habit--the change becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occur--and becomes automatic--it is not only real, it starts to seem inevitable (ha so much for free will), the thing, as James wrote, that bears "us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be."

it may not be that simple, i wouldn't really even call it an attitude adjustment, but a test that i will run for one year, an experiment--acting on the belief (whether or not i believe) that i can change, direct my course, have free will, alter habits of mind and action. this does not negate the belief in a higher power, but falls under the concept that the best part of me that dreams, will do so in alignment with the way in which i was built. Anyhow, i will use writing to get there, to navigate, put into practice--work through the mundane unthinking daily rituals and invisible decisions of mind and body by unpacking them in real space [exercises] and through the space of the mind evidenced in writing, testing  habit cue/ritual/reward loops, believing i can alter them, making it so and writing as though i am in control of all this, that i am asserting my will into creating a specific destiny. as an experiment i will function with belief that i have purpose, that what i do matters.

pragmatically this means reviewing the three texts [studying] and putting into practice the tests, the data collection [documenting], the future casting based on what is.

day 24 | decleating

so funny...i am never too far along to not be able to make bad art. i've made some this month. so this morning as i walked into the studio, i just started draping a tube from the shelved egg nose blob foam plaster piece...though i don't care for the eggishness of the white part, i was very pleased with the draping.

8'h x 2'w x 4'd, rubber, foam/plaster, wooden shelf, tie wire and clips.

so i sat back and popped on to facebook posting pics and status update about the work...

"looky. looky. I made a discrete object that doesn't have to be mounted into the wall studs. it's just a shelve with standard wall anchors. 

it's a painting! hang it on the wall and go! oh yes. oh yes. snoopy foot dance atop a red doghouse."

...then i pressed post. within thirty to fifty seconds, the whole piece pulled free of the wall and crashed to the floor with the nose blob egg foam plaster monstrosity rolling to a stop at my feet. bahahaaaa. i just bragged about how i hung it. well weight wasn't the issue, instead it was a total torque job as evidenced by the way the screws and anchors pulled free...need to use the winged anchors next time. i check the other shelves and they too were starting to pull free in the same fashion from the wall...

ooops. Humpty Dumpty...the king's men did not come but all the artists in the building arrived at my door to make sure i hadn't been egged to death.

after the crashing hoop la la i check the other shelve cleats (all have weight at front = torque) ...

no artist or art object was harmed in the sudden gravity surge. i am incredibly grateful that the plaster egg did not crash onto my head/neck while i was below the piece yanking the rubber around. 

anyhow, i picked the piled mess up off the floor and just kept right on draping the tubes this morning, just more floor bound...and am pretty sure i made the rock alien from one of the original star trek episodes. i think spock mind melded with it...

one is never too far along not to still make some bad art. fortunately i can say i was just goofing around.

though i am pleased with all the work generated around the process of memory, the way it holds, releases, distorts things, i was especially pleased with the suspended ball set.

i was equally please with the feminine pieces though a tad embarrassed by them...

the evolution was nice. i loved the blue foam but it would have been too much with these pieces. lots of new ideas--shaped shelves to support tubes, smaller worker, foam, plaster, conduit,

canvas, and more. i enjoyed testing new materials.

ha and to think i started the month with conduit...

day 23 | often my first impulse is the correct one

then i fidget or move something. there simply is no cmd-z in real space with tubes each having their own own inclinations. pin here, clip there, move it a smidgen and the entire piece is simply different. snip here, cut there, bam different. once the clip, snip, pin, position is shifted, there is no going back. my preference for exhibition will always be toward a space i can install directly within. moving the work forever changes the bulk of it. a few works never change perceptually...ie incessant thinking and incessant thinking [again]. 

there is immense joy when my first impulse, even if uncomfortable in its connotations, is the right one and much gnashing of teeth when i tweak it into something other and past it's function. grrr. so today i road the currents of my blobby nose to my girl parts and finally to ooooh i need to cut a new tube because i lost the depth and form when tweaking with attempts to abstract a form that made me emotionally uncomfortable. so i sit here and pout a tad and will begin again in the morning. ok well not really pout because there is something inherently predictable in my process and going a step or two too far. 

admittedly even though posting process images to facebook, i don't know why, i was pretty dang uncomfortable with the initial forms that held their own. back to the girl parts discussion.

tomorrow--get to work [fidget one new tube onto right cleat shelf to replace the current blah blah one and sew up at least one more ball to suspend], write thank you letter, tidy space, organize truck, then open studios. thursday, load large tube form on the flex conduit with Patrick's help [plus one], load all art materials, clean studio, laundry, pack, pay for shop consumables....prep for friday's meander.

day 22 | ha. evolving...becoming more feminine and less masculine

thank goodness.

day 22 | perhaps this is why i am unable to sink my teeth deeply in shallow space. perhaps.

“asking unanswerable questions in a non-existent language.” -- Bo Berkman

excerpt from Tom Butter's essay, Some Thoughts on Eva Hesse

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/07/art/eva1

day 22 | spherical experimentation

day 21 | hmmm. déjà biting shallow space.

i really should edit this before i hit submit, but alas i am not.

Seven useful tools -- seek truth, not do-doing, be open, get support, learn from everything, cultivate a real love of self, have a practice.

déjà biting shallow space. i really enjoyed yesterday's autocorrect in which de-habiting was converted to déjà biting. there is something important in that somewhere i am sure. this morning though it seems to overlap or underlap with seeking truth or avoiding it.

truth | the forms i make often have strong gender specific bodily reference, typical feminine. somewhere in 2005/06 as i stepped into my own skin as artist, a shift away from designer, a shift away from invisible, these leadings became overtly evident. only once or twice, jokingly, did i set out to have that to be so. though initially i liked to believe my work came from trying on patterns i observed in culture and then unpacking how these played out with me, they ended up self referential in nature, it was definitely with the intent of analyzing culture, with a sort of self distancing built in. yet there is no distance, as a matter of fact the work is extremely intuitively autobiographical and unfortunately [?] highly public.

yet in terms of truth, i have not been able to truly unpack where within myself these repeating forms emerge and why they are repeated so often. i have inklings of maybes, threads i might tug and follow. i am not interested in living in a way that has me biting shallow space. it seems to find a deeper space i might follow these threads as to why these highly feminine forms [eeek. vaginas, folds, breasts, orficies. go away freud and klein!] keep manifesting in my work...it is a bit uncomfortable unpacking why one, this one, might make and publicly display such vaginal forms.

what the hell am i saying and to whom? i am pretty sure my work is largely a talking to myself, a trying to bite deeply, but i am not sure how to get there. but i must be attempting something more because the work and process are so public both in real space and cyberspace. am i making an assertion? a plea? a reveal? what am i doing? why?

a thread of subthreads...

relaxing into my own femininity sometime after the chrono reads 43 and occurring concurrently with a subtle grief of the losses as i approached the pause, a loss of biological and cultural femininity, i began making work in real space, three dimensional space. shoot right when i was just finding my own femininity i was loosing it. this relaxing into my own femininity, embracing it as an actual component of my identity was new. i previously was unaware of a conscious usage or dependence on my gender specificity. i would even say i intentionally submerged it. my parents in traditional gender roles worked to instill an independence in me, a gender neutrality. it was the heyday of full on feminist movement. my folks tried to raise a liberated she-child in a gender specific home. with little gap from that i married into a system in which men feared the feminine in response to historical familial systemic abuse, addiction, and dysfunction [redundant since the first two As cover it] -- the female feared. the subtle thinking and actions reinforced a gender neutrality that was already in the works within myself. to be female, to be feminine had negative and even detrimental ramifications, much in the same way to express emotion [a feminine trait?]. ha. though unnecessary financially, i worked from the onset of the union of 23 years because the unit clearly communicated if i did not, i would be like his mom [gracious wonderful nonworking woman who sat on boards at church, hospitals, and nonprofit do good organizations. the woman i knew was always striving to better herself, to be healthier, to love more deeply, to find god, to make a difference, etc. but like us all, the unit lived still with the alcoholic mother from his childhood, a woman long outgrown by her own hard work that i never met. i only knew her now version]. so combine my history, my inherent disposition, cultural context, with the unit's needs, an intentional and unconsciousness submersion of latching onto or attaching myself, my identity, behaviors, to the truly feminine was definitely playing out through childhood and the bulk of the marriage. yet an acceptance of my own femininity, relaxing into it with its concurrent fading has been definitely simmering to the surface--first in the non-languaged based form of making. my question is why? to what end? for what purpose? i am not interested in a simmering for the sake of simmering in the same way i am absolutely not interested in art for the sake of art.

i feel like i have bitten this before but haven't found depth of space within it. so now i will begin biting more tentatively...feeling for more threads...

 

identifying myself as artist, stepping into my own skin, is relatively new, making is not...

day 20 | déjà biting shallow space

ooooh. that is the most awesome autocorrect. I intended to type dehabiting. mmm. sometimes I love auto correct. 

the work | not finished yet, but closer. top piece needs replaced (was left over from test one). need to add lip to hold foam sides on frame. also need to explore surface coatings to prevent dirt and scuffs. 

i know. i know. i made parts. shoot. frankly, i intended to make a square super soft like funnel entrance thingy, instead, i made girl parts. dang. at least i didn't make 25 nine foot tall suspended vaginas this time. oh, freud would love my work!

day 20 | habit

ha.. . reading the text, the power of habit, and laughing as it clearly supports the way i developed the structure and content of the entire first day of WASH, Workshop in Art Studio + History, along with the pace of that first crazy few weeks of making. all of which are critical to the flow and expectations for the entire semester. scope, sequence, structure, content and delivery is imperative if the goal is critical thinking, self reflectivity (both of product [choices-material, method, content, context, form] and process) and application. probably why it has been copied and repeated. learning [creativity] requires at some level the unpacking of our chunking, habits and assumptions of mind and movement in both cognitive and real space. the book is very good, the research studies of interest. i do enjoy when the data supports what i have developed intuitively. i developed much for the program--initial structure that sets the pace and intense programatic expectations, community/table team based studio setting, guided individual nonverbal (crit guides) as well peer team process and end crits, the silliness of implementation of game show TV like crits right down to people choice (peer) awards, cyber presence, object study/research guides, projects unique to program, etc. i will miss the development and my WASHers. i am thankful that i publicly documented my teaching process every semester via course blogs and will absolutely not miss the gaminess of the unnecessary political arena.

speaking of habits, this was a good first test run. though foam is still far too flat, shallow, but good test run. the forms are reminiscent but not quite right yet.

day 17 | talk of commodification has enter the dialogue a good bit oflate

so i laughed on today's outing when i stumbled upon farmers taking that idea to full fruition. i'd noted the heaping mound from a distance and was initially lured by the round forms recognizable from a great distance.

but as i drew ever nearer it became exceedingly clear that this was total cow commodification as the stench of fermenting fecal matter wafted my way. so many metaphors in that i don't even know where to begin.

commodify that!

day 17 | bahahaaa. I thought it would be lighter

but fifty pd bag of plaster = fifty pds of object plus foam and burlap. who knew? ok. I did; I just didn't know it'd take the whole freaking bag. I've a bit to learn about plaster. I used it in my grad thesis with tar, but I was pouring it into molds along with the tar. mixing and pouring is pretty straight forward.

tomorrow I sand this puppy butt smooth (baby butt that is).