The Imagination: Fear to Face.
“Back to Imagination. We touched on it earlier.”
You called it a keyword. It is. The failure of imagination undermines everything. I start with me. Every day I am trying to wrestle me down to the ground, grab hold of this slippery thing and get to its core. Daylight, stuff—jobs, shopping, housework whittle away at my concentration.
“You resent that?”
Not exactly. I do, but then I catch that I am resenting it and try to reverse myself. I don’t like resentfulness as a quality. If I feel it, I want to get to the bottom of it, which naturally takes me away from the issue of tackling the imagination, and so I get resentful. The circle has to be dashed so I try even harder to figure out how to handle those errant emotions. Mostly I have to accommodate them. All these feelings in me have to work together. No festering allowed. No self pity permitted. You acknowledge those feelings, biological, physical and emotional, sit down with them. I made a choice at some point that said my main focus is on—let us call it artistic expression—but art produced from a place of festering emotions does not really appeal to me. I want transparency.
(PAUSE)
People are scared of transparency. We are all juggling so much. We all have locked up places, places we will not go to, fear to face.
(PAUSE)
I remember being at Art School, my foundation course at Hatchmill, watching a lecture by British performance artist, Bruce Lacey, along with his partner Jill Bruce. He described life drawing when he was at Art School, how he’d be sitting on one of those horse benches with an attached drawing board, riding closer and closer to the model, lustily excited to be near a naked woman. I remember being thrilled by the honesty of this, and a little disappointed by the childishness of this shared experience. He’d dashed the enigma of the artist, made him all too human—clearly artists are just as silly as every one else. I understood this but a lifetime later and I’m still processing this. We filed out of the lecture hall and watch the artist couple climb down the bank outside into the river where they disrobed and did a wild dance to the green man or something.
(PAUSE)
I was always a performer. After their performance I remember thinking I’d do a performance in the cafeteria at Hatchmill in which I’d confess. I’d reveal myself with a long list of my darkest secrets. Seemed a great idea at the time but I could only come up with one major secret—the joys of masturbation. Might’ve been a weight off to share this but really not that interesting.
Art as art,
art as confession,
art as therapy,
art as simply a way to get things off one’s chest,
art as self-indulgence.
I longed to perform and have always held a spark of the exhibitionist within. He comes out on occasion but these days I press the remote. The self censor flashes on, I adjust the controls and distance myself from the act. To live on this thing must be more than merely me.
“Did we digress?”
We did.
(PAUSE)
By the way I like the new couch. I feel like I'm floating.
Session ends: 8:36AM
No comments:
Post a Comment