altered book project & other thoughts

having no room to do art at all in my tiny shared apartment, i set up a folding card table in the one free floor spot of the living room, thus blocking off the fireplace. i am thinking lately about concepts of make-shift art space and also how our conditions shape our process. artists throughout human history have created no matter their circumstances, right? they make due whether or not they have the perfect materials, whether or not their lives were jeopardized because of it.

not at all a comparable hardship but for years (especially the 10 years i have lived in pricey but small san francisco apartments) i have had to make art that i could clean up afterwards, causing me to move from oil paint to acrylic for its quick drying time. and, despite my very organized nature in all other areas of life, in art-making i continue to lean towards the haphazard, and the surrender that goes along with it. i collect many found objects to be put into pieces later -- i have accepted that i am just a collector (of stories, words, books, facts, images, objects)-- it isn't convenient, but i am this no matter where i am. in an ideal world i would like to have a room with many shelves so that i could see what i've accrued. as my space is now, however, this isn't possible. so i squirrel things away in semi-organized boxes, not remembering what i've gathered. i mean literally, i cannot remember the object a mere second after i've closed the box. it's quite strange. then i have no time to really look through things in the small chunks of time i have for art making so i've adopted a grab-bag style of it, just putting my arm into a dark box and seeing what comes up. it's like receiving a gift every time. it's also VERY maddening, but illuminating too.

speaking of illuminating, ever seen the film 'everything is illuminated?' i was so jealous of those carefully labeled bagged objects, the uniform (albeit dusty) boxes on their shelves. if i have to be this collector person that i am, the painstaking and meticulous process displayed in that film would be attractive in many ways. but a different creative process and not really my style. i used to lament this, but now i surrender. to who i am, how my brain is organized -- the beauty and the magic in it.

anyway, back to my point about creating art no matter the circumstances. while creating this altered book journal i found myself returning to a familiar, well-worn groove. couldn't place my finger on it at first but then i realized the process is one i've been doing for years. children don't understand why they are drawing what they're drawing, and yet, they do...so i learned early how to censor. too many people, for so many reasons, learn this censoring. it's sad. the disparaging of self-expression is all to common....but i've noticed that the truth of children seeps out somehow. perhaps the truth of all of us, especially us artists.

an example of my own censoring process is how around age 12 i started writing fictional journals instead of a first-person, confiding-style diary like most other kids write at that age. they were completely made up-- a different girl altogether with different friends, living within a different geography, getting different grades and i even crafted the folded notes she received from her friends. i vicariously got a break from my own straight-A pressure as i wrote about her flunking out. i loved making it, and so then started others. i made collages of images from other children's points of views, and then collages of words which blended with my practice of writing poetry. it was a meditation on otherness, in a way. and it was probably also a way to develop my compassion, because i would imagine hardships that other people were experiencing (or appropriate hardships i'd learned about in school, on the news, in books, etc) and i would really delve in and write while imagining how that would affect their thoughts and feelings. however, something obvious was missing: my own point of view. i had a deficit of that. my late teens and adulthood so far have been about reclaiming that, and struggling to develop a compassion towards myself as much as for others (after all, it is impossible for true kindness to work any other way...).

in terms of my art, for years i only expressed myself in this very coded form. i found myself writing this line, sometimes underneath layers of paint so nobody would see it: listen to what i'm not saying. obscurity became my genre as a child, in my writing as well as my visual art. it was from this disposition that i came to abstract art, and simultaneously to experimental playwriting, fiction, and poetry. it is where i found myself this winter, creating yet another piece with the themes of secrecy, the fragility of messages, and elusive, aged truth. i'm embracing the idea that what was never spoken can maybe never be spoken like it would have been originally, and sometimes can only be whispered and even then perhaps never heard. i am exploring the questions of whether the telling itself is important, and to what extent the listening/receiving of the telling is crucial, and how the two inter-relate.

in terms of the written word and my relationship with it, i remember a writing teacher told me i wouldn't be popular in the mainstream (a hard comment to hear as a college student who secretly wished herself famous) but then i listened beyond ego to what she was really saying. i asked her to say more. she rephrased: you won't have many readers, but the readers that you have will read you fiercely. i thinking i am finding/have found those readers, and those writers too. the coded/uncoded ones who speak a gut-heart-truth. i like a writer who respects their reader enough to make them work. and i like writing that warrants re-reading, and re-reading again. pay-off and peeling layers.

i am working on a story about an artist who writes letters to her unborn granddaughter within her paintings, somewhere between the layers such that it may or may not be legible when (and if) they eventually get peeled off. she thinks that when the paint peels, the warp of the writing will create a poetry in itself that this imagined daughter will make sense of in a way that helps her to live more authentically.

this old woman writes the letters with the deep hope that her granddaughter will find and read these letters, but yet doesn't do something clear and straight-forward like writing a typed letter or making a video of herself speaking. also, she doesn't even know if she will ever even have a granddaughter. she has one son but she is terminally ill and he has no plans to have kids yet. before she dies, she will give the message to her son to pass down to his daughter, should she exist at all in the future. she will trust that her son won't open the letter himself that has the directions about how to chip away the paintings, and, her son being the upright and honorable person he is, he won't. however, he may lose it in a gust of wind. and so, like so many, our messages become treasure hunts for people in the future. or for nobody at all. or maybe the only person 'reading' is the reader of the story i'm writing. or maybe nobody will even read that story because either i will never finish it or it will never be published, in which case the only people receiving this woman's untold/half re-told/warped and yet still untold hidden story is: you.

anyway, that's all an aside. this blog entry is becoming mammoth!! yikes. let me finish so i can get to the beach to exercise and home before sunset.

as i was saying...

the space of autobiography, for me, needs to be inhabited by one. for now. and thus i am still protective of my unshared truths. i thought i was finally riding a departure from my genre when i started this intermedia class, but found myself in familiar territory once again. it's just where i am most comfortable, this terrain of the unspoken. i guess there's more to be left unsaid.

and it's not a bad thing, per se. there are, perhaps, more of us riddled speakers than not, and probably especially within the visual arts community.

today i revisit these themes from a very different intention than i did as a child. then the codes were very much about hiding, about not being found out. now i have no wish to hide. i still sometimes speak in codes but with the attitude of a linguist; with the intention of understanding my own language and allowing others to understand it too. increasingly, my coded messages reach my own ears, eyes, spirit, mind, and heart, and this is where my art-making is the most meaningful to me. me reaching myself. it is probably my only current measure of 'success.'

there are times when people make art without knowing why and people see it and are moved, also not knowing why, and there is a tacit understanding between us all, despite it all, right? or often someone's precious truth we mishear and paste our own reality on top of. but so what. the making is for the maker, really.

i don't feel like looking back on this entry and editing it because i just feel like getting outside, but i'm also looking forward to this evening when i will finally have time to work on the stuff for the intermedia show. i do a lot of staring at computer screens for my other work and my eyes need a rest.

and so again i'll find myself tearing up books, pictures, creating an altered book journal like i did when i was 12. i'll most likely layer and paint. but also, as i write this today i am remembering that back then it wasn't just for therapy or for some profound development of my childhood angst that i liked doing this stuff in the first place. i wasn't so self-aware. it was just...fun.

~