Artist Statement
Written March 1, 2018, in Brooklyn, New York.
Freddie the Cat, very definition of litheness. Never was there a cat who more undermined the litheness of everyone else just by slinking through a house in Brooklyn. Freddie’s perched on a desk, watching chickens in the backyard, watching songbirds. Why is it that describing the world is so much of my freedom each day? This black wood sculpture beside me; the way Vanessa’s house has high art mixed in with hay from the chickens, old ratty furniture, children’s bookbags, board games, Christmas decorations that haven’t been taken down. The whole thing is completely uncompelling til it suddenly becomes a subject of my investigation. Empty clay plant pots on the porch, more bicycles than there are people, trash in the yard. And then these sculptures that could and maybe should be in a museum.
I think it’s the way I need to re-make the world each morning. Start from scratch, take nothing as a given. In such a way, I arrive to the world as something awake, or as awake-er than I’d otherwise be. I arrive with lungs ready to breathe the air and ribs ready to feel those lungs. Some people have said this as an aversion to labels, but really I think it’s an aversion to cliché. I’m all for labels, which is to say I’m all for language, the way making a word for a thing can create the possibility of that thing or create a knowing-ness about that thing that just couldn’t happen before the word. This is true of the word queer and the word turquoise and the word heterogeneity and it’s true of words describing emotions. At some point a word for disappointment didn’t exist, a word for curiosity didn’t exist. And so humans didn’t have a precise knowing about those things. It’s true of the word autism and the word schizophrenia.
The thing is—I don’t want to assume that all the labels that worked yesterday still hold today or hold in the same way. Maybe “schizophrenia” isn’t serving us today; maybe it’s too limiting or inaccurate; maybe it ignores superpowers in favor of highlighting pathologies. Maybe we realize “turquoise” is too generalized and is being used to smush together what are actually six different colors and it would be possible to name each one, and in naming them we become able to see them.
I’m not sure why I say “we” other than that language is a shared project. But like—that’s what I am, a creator, and my materials are words and concepts primarily, and I want my material to also be my body—which, it is, but not yet in a direct performance art way—but anyway, the point is: not everyone has the need to recreate the world from scratch each day. But I do. The need, not just desire but need, that’s what make me an artist or it’s what makes me the artist I am. It’s what I have to offer others. The ability to take things as new each morning; the capacity and desire to bear witness to things as they are in their own radical freedom. Which is to say to embrace with equanimity and love things—people, slants of light, bodies of water, made objects—as they are, to genuinely not want or need to own or manipulate them. And to hold that together with an uncompromising refusal to accept other things (all forms of violence; subtle and extreme forms of oppression and control and harm; the commodification of everything).
These things are what make me the artist I am, the human I am, and one of the main reasons I need to walk is to remember that. That’s why walking is my non-performance performance art project. Because I forget. I forget to start over each day. I forget to open to my own capaciousness and let other humans come and go as they will, without grasping at them or pushing them away. I forget to risk play; I forget that I can choose joy and that over-seriousness is a performance I buy into simply out of habit. I forget to resist systems of violence: I forget because systems of violence are so normalized and so familiar and the propaganda is that our safety and freedom depend on them. So I walk, and every morning I write, and that is how I remember.
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In her long essay on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt writes, “Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet—and this is its horror—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste to the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.” When I say that I am walking around thinking, or riding trains and thinking, this is what I am referring. Maybe that is grandiose; maybe it is excessively earnest; but it is what I am talking about. Almost every time I hit the fourth or fifth mile of walking for the day, I realize some blindspot I hadn’t seen until then. The way that my sister-in-law is asking me for help, underneath all her subsumed anger—and the way I’m refusing her request, and how my refusal is a kind of cruelty. For example.
Hannah Arendt says that evil is banal and it’s true. She writes, “The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a ‘completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him,’ the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and present the true enigma of the trial.” I have been thinking about this—banality—lately. Because I wonder if everything big, everything that matters most, has a banality to it. All the soul-sappingly boring paperwork that has to be filed, for example, in courtrooms or with tribal governments or in hospitals; all the monotonous board meetings and zoning commission meetings and port authority meetings….on the long long road to freedom. And you don’t even know if freedom is coming or just more loss. You do mounds of banal paperwork on the prayer that it could come, it could. That’s heroic. The banality of the heroic. Someone should write an opera about that. That’s the opera I want to see.
I went to a viewing of the race-based comedy-horror movie “Get Out,” and speaking on a panel afterwards a black actor-director said that a movie like that, it gets at the drama of racial trauma, yes. But after the drama, there are years and years of boring, daily, post-traumatic trying-to-heal. And, he said, no one wants to make or watch a movie about that because it’s boring. And I thought—but those are exactly the kind of movies and plays I want to watch (and write). Art about the banal because that’s where all the big stuff happens. Is it possible to get free after being trapped? Is it? It is possible to live joy? I want to know, and I want to know it in the daily a lot more than in the anthemic.
The banality of hope. Hope is you alone in the shower talking yourself into reaching for what feels to you like nothing. Hope is mostly unsung. I want to be the kind of human, and artist, who can offer people trapped in silence a song.
Art—I must believe this—can sing into the spaces that mostly aren’t sung. Artists, I think, or at least the kind of artist I want to be, have the capacity and craving to lean into the banal spaces and know them for what they are and make the epics or collaborative dance pieces or sculptures that tell the truths that really are the truths about what’s okay and what’s not, what makes us more human and what is worth showing up for, what we must not tolerate even if it’s normalized and even if we’ll be punished for resisting it. Artists, or at least the kind of artist I am trying to be, peer into the banal and it flowers or festers before their gaze, and they offer it back to the citizenry in its laid-bare, anything-but-banal state.
I’m not so concerned with the distinction between philosophers and artists, other than maybe that artists bear witness more and solve less. Hannah Arendt, a philosopher, looked at Eichmann and said he just looks like a normal man, which is one of the most important things to know about evil. When I was in Cape Town and Joburg, looking around, I was so struck by, nauseated by, how you can’t tell by looking at the white people who did or didn’t do what under apartheid. Everywhere in the world, almost everyone very good and almost everyone very bad, and all the rest of us in between, looks normal, nondescript.
Artists are trying to hear what’s dance drum beat, what’s death drum beat, what’s noise. Artists are closing their eyes and trying to feel the vibrations under the vibrations. That’s why it’s so important to me not to get used to things, not to let the normalized be the normalized, not to numb.
But there’s a difference between numbing and resting. A difference between a morally indefensible form of looking away—and literally going to sleep because the human body and spirit do actually require rest in order to live. I’m trying these days to lean into the radicality of rest. To admit that exhaustion, too, blunts my ability to love and to witness ragged truths. Rest and play are radical, which seems like a throwaway and kind of toothless statement until you spend months in a city like New York where exhaustion and work are idolized.
I’m not saying that I can see or hear or feel anything anyone else can’t. (Though maybe it’s false modesty to claim otherwise.) I’m just saying I’m trying to, oh I don’t know, well, I’m just saying there is a kind of thing I want to be up to.