Below is an excerpt from my written thesis entitled, It is What It is:

Notes Toward a Ventral Pedagogy for the Plastic Arts

CHAPTER 3

THIS IS WHAT I (TRY TO) DO

Below is a series of short reflections on the way I try to be as a person in general and a person that’s an artist, specifically. They span from the clearly pragmatic to the vaguely profound, and usually work their way from one end of that spectrum to the other and back again within a single reflection. The style therefore oscillates between the recommendatory to the ruminative and thus has an openness that allows for broader application based on one’s interpretation. This is what, I believe, it looks like to attempt an explanation of the haziness of one’s personal habits as they intersect with strongly held beliefs, professional demands and the best of intentions. Sometimes the most seemingly banal, insignificant or peripheral things are the ones that most need to be written down precisely because so often, they’re not. These are the circumferential things that support and therefore allude to what is more central to being the artist that I am. Humor inevitably plays a part. Such is the nature of attempting to get at things that are more or less ineffable in terms that are concrete.

Pocket pencil

            Very rarely do I not have some sort of writing utensil in my pocket. You never know when you might need to make a mark, write down an idea, do a quick calculation or sketch something out. Something to write on is not so important as you can usually find something in a pinch—a receipt, a scrap of cardboard, a coffee cup, an arm. As far as these kinds of utensils go, a pencil is best because it does not make a permanent mark. Permanent marks are like absolutist claims. They are dogmatic. I prefer exploratory marks. They can have the same force of authority while retaining some flexibility in the face of shifting ideas. However, clothes rarely have pockets on them that make carrying a pencil easy. Are you listening, clothiers worldwide?

If it’s not a mechanical pencil, then it’s always floating around in your poorly designed pocket and therefore stabbing you in the leg, breaking off at the tip or, inevitably, in need of sharpening. Mechanical pencils usually have clips on them, and the tip will only break if the lead is extended. This makes them a better option overall but they’re ordinarily fairly delicate machines, so I usually resort to a Sharpie or other felt tipped marker for ease and convenience. Although, by doing so, I place one of my tools in tension with my philosophical position on the subject of permanent marks.

However, a friend gave me a pencil that has a great deal of potential: The Kaweco Sketch Up 5.6. The 5.6 designation pertains to the diameter (in millimeters) of the lead. The hefty diameter is fantastic for marking just about any material, regardless of its texture. Whether it be concrete, tree bark, canvas, leather, or rusted steel, the Sketch Up 5.6 makes fast work of marking it up. It has a built-in sharpener and a hefty but comfortable brass body, but no pocket clip. So, people of Kaweco, if you’re listening, this is one way to make this a nearly perfect device for most of one’s marking needs.

Put it back

            I strive to have designated places for as many of the things in my life as possible. And I also strive to put them back in this place when not in use. I fail… a lot. But, I’m getting better. And I have noticed a marked improvement in my quality of life roughly in proportion to my adherence to this perineal admonition.

            When I come back to a thing…be it a tool, a piece of clothing, a utensil, whatever, and find it exactly where I left it and in the condition that I want to receive it, it feels like a love letter from myself. Who doesn’t want to receive love letters— especially those that don’t belabor the point with purple prose or stop short of fulfilling their purpose.

Hydrate          

            Our bodies are mostly made of water. Actually, on the subatomic level our bodies are mostly made of nothing, but what we do know of the other part … the something part… water, is apparently of the greatest proportion and therefore of central importance. The good news is, contrary to popular belief, scientific research has shown[1] that coffee is not quite the diuretic that popular culture believes it to be and therefore it too can be contributive toward one’s hydration needs.

I have found the best and most handsome production mechanism for the delivery of coffee to one’s body to be the Technivorm Moca Master. I personally employ a model that is orange, though this has no bearing on the efficiency of the machine or quality of its product. Each morning, after drinking a glass of water, preferably outside (while the coffee is brewing) I quickly commence my coffee consumption that thereby ensues without interlude until approximately 4 PM. Any caffeine consumption after 4 PM has been shown to disrupt one’s sleep—Not good (more on that later).

In my opinion, drinking coffee, always hot, never cold, or even lukewarm, is an amazing and contemplative activity. Alternating between sips of coffee and sips of water is the optimal delivery modality. As a secondary benefit, frequent trips to the restroom to urinate breaks up one’s day into a steady rhythm of strong bouts of intense work and brief pauses that give one’s mind rest and nominal distance from the demands of their labor.

I find Guatemalan beans of the lightly roasted variety to be of the highest quality and most agreeable character.

Do nothing as often as possible

            Doing nothing is very difficult. If this doesn’t make sense to you, then you may have never done nothing correctly. The way I like to do nothing is by sitting but sometimes I do it by standing or walking. I don’t usually do it lying down because I have found that when I do this, I just fall asleep. Then I end up sleeping, which isn’t nothing. Some people like to call this meditation. But it’s not meditation. Meditation is something. Lots of people around the world are trying really hard to do this thing called “meditation” but meditation is just the name they have given to the experience of how hard it is to do nothing.

            I can’t explain how to do it because I can never know what it’s like to be you. Nothing might be something different for you. What I can be sure of is that when you get it right you will immediately understand how valuable it is. In my experience, it seems like nothing is doing a lot of work without me getting involved and that the work that it’s doing improves my ability to do something else after I get done not doing anything.

Listen

            Crickets are really helpful here. Vehicular traffic is too, preferably some distance away, like a faraway river. Sometimes the things people say are helpful too— but not when you can’t hear them because then you can’t listen. When people speak, think about the words they use, in real time. If there’s something you don’t quite understand, ask them to explain what they mean. This is helpful to you and them. Oftentimes they don’t really know what they’re trying to say.  That’s when it gets quiet; and things get interesting.

Sometimes when people talk, they actually don’t want you to listen. They just want you to hear them. When this happens, don’t ask questions about what you don’t understand because understanding isn’t the point anymore. Use analogies to underscore things they’ve said so that they know you’re still hearing them but don’t want to interrupt the momentum that they’re generating. When you don’t want to hear them anymore, start gently infusing humor into these analogies. Generally, they will eventually stop talking or change the subject if you do this. If they don’t, then they aren’t really listening to you either so tell them that you’ve got to go and then leave as quickly as possible. Who the heck wants to talk to someone who doesn’t really want to listen to them anyway?

            I find that quiet things are the best things to listen to. And it’s best to listen to them somewhere where there’s a lot of quiet space around them too. The quiet space gives you the ability to really appreciate the nuance of the quiet thing. Fire is a great one, along with the crickets and the traffic. Rain is a little cliche at this point. And the wind is usually too loud but sometimes these things work. I used to own a 1966 Chevy C-10 with a 350-horsepower engine. Sitting in the cab of the truck, the engine felt far away and up close at the same time. That was a great thing to listen to. It was warm and comfortable, and it smelled like it was doing something—Which it was. I can still hear it if I try.

Speak

            The only way to clarify your mind is to give voice to your thoughts. If they remain in your head, they are unreal. If they remain unreal, the potential is that they grow and become more sophisticated and entrenched in their unreality. Your unclarified mind is rigid and dense and selfish— Self-referential, actually. If you go too far in this direction you end up in a place where, if you open your mouth, nobody around you will understand what the hell you are talking about. You’re too far gone. At best you’ll be like a person from Paraguay standing on a street corner in Beijing screaming in Swahili about particle physics at the birds and cars passing by. At worst, you’ll be nasty and dangerous. And not in the good ways.

So, speak up. Don’t be scared. Don’t blather like an idiot, filling the air with noise for fear of silence. Say what you have on your mind with confidence, brevity and clarity. It is by the force of these attributes that your words will be taken seriously and if your words are wrong, all the better for having put them out in the world for adjustment.

Decide

The only way to understand a decision is to make one. You can’t really understand something until you are committed to its implications. It becomes real— visceral. A decision unmade, by contrast, is only hypothetical and therefore can’t instigate in you any understanding of its potential consequences in any sense that isn’t itself hypothetical.

When you are existing in a sub-optimal condition, the only way to change that condition is to decide to do something else. And if the situation is sufficiently abysmal, it almost doesn’t matter what the decision is, with a few exceptions (doing meth, killing yourself, etc). The decision will likely be of only minor significance i.e. “I may still be poor but now that I’ve decided to look at clouds for 20 minutes, I’m poor while looking at clouds”; you may think, “it’s surprising that there’s only one cloud today”. In the context of an artistic practice this looks like, “I have no money, no materials and very little time. But I found this piece of wood and instead of crying about everything I’ll cut it into a bunch of pieces and then look at those pieces”. The point is, the decision has slightly altered the sub-optimal conditions under which you were previously living. This creates a new condition to respond to… and on and on. The decisions will become more sophisticated as you reflect more deeply upon each new situation in which you find yourself— a series of situations that you have now created.[2]Such is the process of actively participating in an ongoing chain of causality. You still may ultimately be poor but the conditions under which this poverty is experienced have qualitatively shifted, maybe even improved.

Uniforms and Costumes

Clothing exists on a spectrum. On one end of that spectrum is the uniform and on the other is the costume. However, it is sometimes also accurate to say that some uniforms are costumes, and some costumes are uniforms. Regardless, I define a uniform as some mode of dress that is either dictated or chosen and that has as its primary consideration some utilitarian purpose. The matradee is finely dressed and the mechanic wears overalls, etc. The task is to please a customer visually in order to set them at ease or otherwise signal the importance of the dining experience or to protect the body from hazards and materials while maximizing comfort and flexibility, respectively. The edge cases are obvious; the attire of architects, doctors and realtors are all costumes-uniforms or uniform-costumes— can’t call it.

The point here is, how many decisions do you want to make on a daily basis and for what purpose? I want to make the least number of decisions possible while simultaneously having each decision exert the maximum positive impact on my creative endeavors. This translates to burdening my mind with as little superfluous bullshit as possible. I have determined that choosing what to wear is superfluous bullshit. You can see that it is by comparing it to something else. For example: choosing what to eat. Choosing what to eat isn’t superfluous bullshit. It has second and third order consequences or benefits (your choice) for your overall metabolic health as well as your enjoyment of life in a direct and visceral way. There’s a lesson here about striking balances.

Choosing what to wear, by contrast, is either for a task, or set of tasks, or it’s for “show”. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t decide what to wear. I understand that some people are excited by the exercise. What I’m saying is that I prefer to choose as few times as possible. I am an extreme case because I essentially wear the same thing every day, but my clothes do what I need them to do fairly well and I am really only concerned with my appearance insofar as I don’t look threatening or filthy to others. After all, I can’t really see myself anyway. And I wouldn’t want to change my face every day (another thing I can’t see), so why my clothes? That would be strange and confusing for everyone around me. For me, it is one less decision to make each day. And that time and energy adds up.

So, just like preparing your meals for the week ahead on a Sunday evening, choose in advance. I consolidate as many of my superfluous bullshit choices to one day a week, a month, a year… or a decade, in some cases! I believe it to have a measurable impact on my cognitive freedom and quality of life.

Watch what people do

I’ve never seen anything so bizarre as a human being. A bird has never disappointed me. I’ve never been put-out by a firefly or disgusted by a reindeer. And plants are nothing but astonishing if you really see what they’re doing. But humans are truly baffling and therefore potentially, infinitely, shocking. Keep your eye on them. Watch what they do… how they hold their bodies. Look at their faces… not skeptically or with suspicion but as if you are a species unto yourself… a curious outsider.

See how they move, how they pretend, how they obscure. Of course, airports are great places to do this as are restaurants, amusement parks and grocery stores. Wherever there’s a confluence is best. It’s a compression of the human experience. Once, in an airport, I lived for a year, in only an afternoon. I lived for a century once over 10 months spent in southern Iraq, and I lost at least a decade in bars across several continents. This activity, watching people, will give you more proximal insight into culture than any reflections contrived by some sociologist of the contemporary human condition.

It will stir in you all of the things that make for the richest stew of human experience. You will be horrified, inspired, disheartened, enthralled, saddened, enraged, exhilarated and crushed by banal tedium. But, if you are human…if you retreat back to your human condition of inhabiting all of these “things” after you have watched these people, you will have empathy. And that is what we need. And I’m not talking about empty-headed sympathetic compassion which is more about your own projections— Projections of how you think of yourself interacting with the world. What I mean by “empathy” is cold hearted and rational empathy, with an ethical sensibility that cuts across every sphere of conceptual concern.

As much as necessary

Understanding how and when to stop is an important and highly personal skill. Refraining at the right moment is totally idiosyncratic in most situations. There are of course exceptions. Chest compressions need not be belabored when the patient is again conscious and in recovery. And inflating a bicycle tire far beyond the recommended pounds per square inch is inadvisable. But, in creative endeavors that have no objective standard, stopping short of an embellishment that destroys all previous effort is a skill of sensory detection, not recognition. In these types of efforts, if you have already recognized the unnecessary thing, the time to exercise the skill has already passed. You have necessarily failed because you are beholden to the fact of its existence.

So, how do you cultivate an ability to recognize, in advance, a potential future that justifies an optimal present stopping point? I say, spend most of your time pushing to the point where the thing you’re doing crackles with anticipatory magic. It sounds mystical but only because language fails in cases such as this. It’s that point at which something starts to burn your hand or your mind or your sense of restraint. It is at this point that you should stop. Put everything away. Don’t look at it. Eat a sandwich, look at the wall, clean your kitchen, trim your toenails. It will be there— the thing you’re working on. Nobody is expecting it. Leave it for a day or a week or a year. Don’t be afraid to just leave it. But understand that if it really is important, return to it intermittently— not to work on it but to observe it. It will change, even in its frozen state. Your mind will work through it without you involved. This skill depends on all other skills. You can only exercise it to the degree that all of the other ducks are in line, so-to-speak.

As little as possible

Complicated plans make for convoluted results. I don’t know about you but the last thing I want to do is overcomplicate my efforts and the results that they produce. The more complexity a thing has, the more ways it can potentially fail when subject to an environment that has no consideration for its needs. As it is, everything gains complexity when in the hands of a creature with brains such as ours. So, the easiest way to reduce the complexity of the end result and the process that gets you there is by way of beginning with the simplest proposition. Complexity, by way of necessary support for this simple proposition, will swiftly reveal itself and accumulate.

At one point the Eiffel Tower was the tallest building on the planet. All Gustave Eiffel wanted to do was place the upper edge of his steel structure above any other on earth— A simple proposition. And although his structure is incredibly complex, in many ways it is also no more complex than it has to be. All the more so impressive given the limitations of his day and the impact they had on meeting the challenge embedded in his simple proposition.

Money

Money is real. I hear people say that it’s something like a collective myth or a social contract, but these are euphemisms that obscure reality rather than clarifying it. You can understand that money is real not by observing what it is but recognizing what it does. Money feeds my kids, and it keeps the bank from repossessing my car or foreclosing on my house. I don’t mean that I feed my kids dollar bills, for example. What I mean is money enables these things… and, when it comes to money, the distinction between enabling and doing is one without a difference. However, we live in a culture where money is a squirmy subject. But, no matter how much we might squirm, if we look at anything in the world of culture, of human relationships, money is operative. We need it and we want it but also we need to be seen as if not wanting it. 

In light of this, just like speech, if ideas about money are left to languish in the abstract space of our mind, they become demented and ultimately counterproductive.

So, talk about money. Do so with honesty, brevity, and clarity. And also do so with grace but without apologies. The more of us that do this the more we will triangulate what the value of our ideas and labors actually are and in so doing challenge the institutions that circumscribe the depth of what we owe and to whom it should be relinquished.

Sleep

Sleeping is so good. It is the most productive form of personal annihilation. Many researchers are striving to understand why this is. And they’re making some progress. But they still can’t explain why this is.

The best thing you can do is to do it— every day and on a fairly consistent schedule. Like a sweaty circus performer, keep that life plate spinning on top of the fragile stick that is your sleep. Otherwise, everything comes crashing down. Figure out a way. There are no good excuses. Once it’s gone, there's no getting it back and if losing it happens often enough, everything will eventually fall apart.

Feel things

Large portions of our built environments have been paved over, flattened, or otherwise smoothed out. Therefore, the texture of the things that we have to engage with in order to be a fully active participant in our culture has been significantly abridged. The eccentricities have been designed away for us and we have thus become intolerant of the unexpected. Surprise or novelty is slowly becoming conflated with a mistake that somebody else must have made inside a world that is ceaselessly contrived around us. There are many materials in our homes, offices, schools, public spaces, etc.that we can’t even identify because form and surface have been prioritized in many cases over material and depth.

As an artist you can begin to lose purchase on the world if you’re not careful. Soil isn’t dirty; it’s clean[3]. It is the matrix for a new future produced through innumerable collaborations of decay and regeneration. The unrefrigerated red sauce sitting on a sun-baked restaurant table inside of a plastic squeeze bottle is dirty. And furthermore, it has no texture, and its flavor is everything your brain was attenuated to want, all at once. It’s everything and nothing at the same time and therefore, weirdly, immediately forgettable, and regrettable.

The glass rectangle in your pocket doesn’t feel like anything and that’s one of many reasons that it has begun to take more than it gives. But it’s not going anywhere which means we have to become increasingly vigilant. Squeeze a palm full of dirt and rub it into the creases of your hand, touch the tree in your neighbor’s front yard, feel the seat of a chair and notice its texture before you descend into it. This is the lexicon of the artist.

There’s a reason why there’s slippage within our language between emotion and sensory input. Sandpaper can be aggressive, a color can be bold, an outcropping of rock can be menacing, and a table can be grandiose. However, cataloging all of this is something done with your skin, your ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. It can’t be written down, but it is essential to record. It is a responsibility that if not taken up willingly and regularly will be forgotten, and the flatness will subsume us all.

Confront shortcomings, regularly, gently

So… you drink too much. You eat too many donuts, have intrusive and disruptive thoughts, you fail to meet your own expectations or those of others. You feel stupid…and hate yourself for feeling as though you’re stupid. You give up too readily and make excuses in order to justify why you did.

This is good. It means you’re human. The bad part is not articulating these faults to yourself explicitly with some clarity and empathy (see above about empathy). If you leave things vague and indeterminate you’ll never have the opportunity to either improve or forgive yourself. My belief is that you probably won’t change completely (I don’t seem to). If you try too hard to change too drastically, your innate nature will claw its way back and assert itself, eventually. Maybe in a new manifestation that’s even more deleterious.

I implore you to dance with these aspects of yourself. Let them in and push them out. Make deals with them and feel emboldened to shut them down when the time has come. But never, in the ebb and flow of this exchange, condemn yourself for being irredeemable. Just strive to be better in relation to your demonstrable faults, as you clearly and gently define them.

Material

Every material has potential. The best way to get at that potential is to understand the material as it is, not as you envision it to be. The latter strategy is one of seeing in a given material the potential it has to solve some problem or to meet some aim that you have for it, or other problems or aims that are entirely independent of what it inherently is. By contrast, a material’s fundamental potential is that which it has without you getting involved in the first place. It’s just there, albeit in most instances unnoticed. That’s where the artist becomes handy for the culture. The artist looks at the material and sees what it’s got going on and thinks “wow, would you look at that”.

This is a crucial juncture in the whole art making enterprise. This is where the artist could really overdo it and screw everything up. This is where they get excited and start making the material do things that drift away from its essential nature, where all that potential is. Next thing you know the tree is wrapped in neon lights and the Rockettes are dancing in front of a video projection of WWI footage. I thought this thing was about a 2x4?!

The right way to do it is to slowly coax out that potential with the lightest of touch. No drastic movements here. Just whistle at it quietly and offer some gentle suggestions. Get it in your hands and turn it over to give it a good look. Run your fingers over it, feel it. Go away and let it be for as long as necessary. It’ll ripen up. And if you didn’t quite see what was there, if all you had was a sense that something definitely was there, eventually it will come into focus. If you need to get some test pieces of the material for some focused experimentation, do it. Just don’t do anything too hard or drastic until you know exactly what it has to offer (likely many things). Once you notice whatever that is (at least one of them), then you’ve got it! You’ve snared it!  And once you’ve got it, this is the moment where you only have to do one more thing… nudge, to underscore what you saw… so that everyone else can see it and appreciate it, the way you did.

Even drywall has this kind of potential. It basically exists for two reasons: fire protection and to cover up everything inside the wall that we don’t like to see. But these aren’t its potential— not the kind I’m talking about. That’s the other kind of potential, the Neon Rockettes kind— all bells and whistles, no brass and nickel. Ultimately, the less you think about yourself in relation to the material, the better.

Collect much, organize much

The more you see in the world of material and the more your faculties of attention are attenuated to the potential of these materials the more you will start to collect these materials. If you’re not careful, you will be smothered under the psychological and physical weight that this scale of collection engenders. If you fail to organize these materials, then you are missing two key opportunities: to appreciate and to edit.

When you organize your materials you are giving yourself an opportunity to re-encounter them. This is a simple way to enrich your experience of and appreciation for them as they are. And as you re-encounter them you are also giving yourself an opportunity to be underwhelmed by their potential. Generally, if I am underwhelmed by a material after returning to it three times, I get rid of it. Don’t get me wrong, the thing doesn’t have to blow your socks off and your appreciation of it doesn’t have to be anything other than practical. But if the collection of materials in your possession is a train wreck of disorganization that you refuse to see for what it is, so too will be your mind and, ultimately, there will be diamonds that you can’t see for all of the roughness that obscures them.

Exercise

My father has a t-shirt that says, “I get enough exercise pushing my luck”. And if you knew my mother, you might read that as a cry for help, not sarcasm. However, there’s an underlying resignation in the sentiment that can’t be paved over with humor; an acquiescence to one's material degradation. Artists aren’t great at prioritizing health. I don’t know why. I could speculate but no amount of speculation will change the fact that many artists lives have ended prematurely, in no small part due to unhealthy lifestyles.

It’s counterintuitive because artists' lives are pretty chaotic and unpredictable. If anything, they’re the ones who should be fit— ready to meet any challenge. I’m not talking about the kind of fitness that allows you to pull off an iron cross on some gymnastic rings. I’m talking about the kind of fitness that enables you to drag dead weight through a frozen forest at three in the morning— fitness for the long slog. Stretch your body, lift things that are heavy, do something that makes you breathe heavily a couple times a week and eat little and cleanly. It’s really that simple. Staying on the balls of your feet is imperative here. In a chaotic profession where nothing is guaranteed, reactivity is essential. If you’re brittle, when it comes time to move, you’ll just end up breaking.

Integrate (or, work towards it)

Due to the fact that art is essentially useless it’s hard to integrate the practice of art making into one’s life. It’s not that art doesn’t have value, it definitely does; it just isn’t useful in the way that science or technology is useful. And this is a demonstrable fact. Example: A painting isn’t a defibrillator. It’s a measurable fact as well, specifically in the vast monetary difference between National Science Foundation grants[4] and grants issued by the National Endowment for the Arts[5]. The difference can be measured in of billions of dollars.

So, the real struggle for the artist is one of integration. Even if your artistic practice is subsidized by academia, you will never be wealthy, even by modest standards. But you’ll be comfortable. And if it’s not subsidized by academia, you (and your family) will likely never live a comfortable life, financially. But it doesn’t mean that the struggle is not worth it and that you can’t be happy.

So, except it now: your life will be one spent chasing down temporal and cognitive freedom. You’ll be perpetually carving out some hours here and there to make the best of your little bit of freedom in order to produce some object that most people won’t ever see or care about. But the good news is that most people don’t ever have ideas of their own, let alone good ones. That’s why there are so many systems in place for mediocre minds to carve out comfortable lives of benign drudgery.

In light of all this and given my more-or-less factotum existence, I think I can give a few pieces of advice:

1)     If you have to work outside of the arts, find a job where you can get access to free materials and tools.

2)     You should do the best you can to hold part time work, especially when the jobs you’re doing are really shitty. That way, your employer will not expect much by way of time from you but what you lose in money you gain in time so you can spend it doing what you love and looking for a different opportunity. And when you do leave, always try to do so on good terms, even if you absolutely despise the people you work for.

3)     If you do end up doing work that isn’t totally integrated but meets many criteria for your desired lifestyle, make yourself invaluable to that employer, organization, whatever. This will ensure that you can work toward integrating what you do with what they value. This creates flexibility.

4)     Talk to as many people as possible (this is a tough one, I have found). You have no idea who the hell anybody is or what levers they pull. Be able to articulate what you do or at least what skills you can offer the world and transmit this information face-to-face as much as possible.

5)     Your goal should be to achieve as close to a fully integrated life as possible— a life that feels like all of your individual efforts somehow contribute to each other rather than perpetually compete. The closer you get to this, the better you will feel and the more productive you will be. Make incremental and measurable steps toward it.

It’s not about you

Ultimately, none of this is about me or you. It’s about our culture, in as narrow or as broad a sense as you want to interpret it. “You” and “me” are just conceptual anchors that make it easier to talk about these things but they’re not essential elements to what’s going on at the macro level, culturally and materially. You’re going to die… maybe today. I might already be dead, by the time you’re reading this. But we can both count ourselves fortunate if something we’ve made survives our mutual demise. So, craft it well.

Tell those people in the future that you, a representative of past people, cared about this thing, the collective thing we’re all doing, even if most of us are doing it absentmindedly. Be it a piece of furniture, a sculpture, a painting, an idea, whatever… what it is doesn’t matter so much. The craft of it matters. This is not to say that the things you make won’t ever fall apart. They are constrained by the methods and materials that make them. So, those too are important choices. But if you choose to make things that disintegrate before curatorial or cultural forces choose them for consideration, you’re choosing to devalue yourself and your voice and in so doing denigrate the culture of which you are a part.

You’re saying, “none of this fucking shit matters anyway”. If that’s what you want to say I encourage you to reconsider. Because in doing so you are expressing that the lives of those who will follow you aren’t worth living. I encourage you to tell them that it’s worth it. Do it with the object that you make for them. If it’s delicate, then you’re telling them to be careful. If it’s durable, you’re telling them that your work will be hard to destroy. If it’s useful then you’re inviting them to keep it close by. If it’s beautiful, then you’re telling them that there is hope.

[1] Killer, et al.

[2] In this paper we will take for granted that free will does, in fact, exist.

[3] In Act One, Scene One of Eugene O’Neil’s Pulitzer prize winning Beyond the Horizon the character, Andrew states, “[Glancing at his hands.] That isn't dirt—it's good clean earth.”

[4] $9,874,000,000 total for FY 2023, (ref NSF website)

[5] $168,730,000 total for FY 2023, (ref NEA website)