I used to be an artist. Remember them days? It all seemed so simple then. Initially there was the creation of a body of related work, there were the long days in the studio drilling holes and welding and making molds and pouring metal and scratching the head, there was the artist statement.
All along, though, I KNEW that it was really just about
living it.
People agonize over their artist statements... the instructors indoctrinate us to do so, after all... but for me it was one of the easiest things, perhaps because I knew I wasn't trying to sell a product, but instead just wanted to say something about myself. In some ways writing always seemed easier because all you really needed was a pen and paper, maybe a typewriter. While it still involved sweating, cursing, and a certain amount of dirt, it wasn't like trying to reassemble a wax sprue system covered in silica that has just fallen apart halfway through the shelling process.
My artist statement followed the very simple format of a short biography, about five paragraphs, each relating a period in my life and how it was relevant to
how I became an artist. But at the end, it is revealed that I didn't
become an artist as such; rather, I had always been one and it had taken me more than twenty-five years to figure it out.
Then there was the inevitable process of
development;
this is what my work means,
this is what I'm trying to do,
this is what being an artist is all about. And several months later: no, it has evolved into
this and
that now. And then later: now it's
this.
Then of course I reached the point where I couldn't make any sense of it all anymore, declared the entire concept of art officially
"theoretical", and thus art can be/mean anything, or nothing at all. Which then lead to the conclusion: even to
declare such a thing makes no sense, is fundamentally wrong, as if trying to speak in words in a world where language simply does not exist.
Then the notion that I am not an artist at all, and that in fact there
are no artists.
But back when I used to be an artist, I used to write. Oh man, I used to do it, you couldn't stop me. Through all the drawing, sculpting, tape recording, the writing was always there, an integral backbone to the whole spiel. But it's been a few years now since I've had that flow. Blogging is a goofy reminder of that lack.
I suppose that this isn't that profound, but there seems to be a distinct pressure attached to blogging. I feel kind of bad if I let a lot of time go by without a new entry. As if there is an audience anxiously awaiting my new entry, and I'm letting them down, haw haw. Part of it, maybe, is also that nobody wants to give the impression that they started something whole-heartedly and then let it fizzle out. And then of course there is the fact that the blog is publicly available, thus the need to censor and critique...
Following along with the logic of the pressure, it occurred to me that maybe I ought to pick through my old material from the Glory Daze, and post excerpts of my favorites during those lean times...
