I realized that on the sidebar of this blog, that anyone can see how often I posted something, categorized by year, which I’ve never thought very much about. But now I do often feel self-conscious about if I'm as productive as I want to be, and thinking that the more I write, the more I must have been in a good place...
Up until this writing, for this year it says I’ve written only 5 articles which is about to be on par with 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.
In 2018, I only felt able to eek out two post and both were long essays about my appreciation for certain individuals.
There are so many notes I could have posted that I think other people may find interesting, but it just seems probably… T.M.I. (even compared to what I do put out on this blog.) And I think that because I see that some years I'm posting like 14, 16, 21 or 33 times, then surely it must have been a good year!
Right now as I look around me, there are piles of papers/notes that I’ve finally gotten around to labeling with a label maker, or I put it at eye level right next to where I type at my home computer so that I have a constant reminder, but now that I’m thinking about the quantity of posts, it’s stripping out all the goodness that these notes hold for me. And yeah sure, it’s the kind of data that I can look at semi-objectively and think about it simply as “information" and reflect on it, but I think that it also lays out a specific story that I tell myself, about my productivity on such and such a year... but don’t I want to feel less pressured to do the things that give me pleasure? This is the time I've decided to do 50 bad artworks after all... Maybe I can break this feeling that it gives me to compare myself with my perceived potential of myself... by pretending that this was a very impressive year (at least in terms of blog posts)
I also have these annoying daily reminders on my phone that show back to me that I wanted to write about the following things:
other to-dos that I told myself I’d like to write about includes...
writing about Bar-Fund and all the things I've wanted to spout out concerning art and money
writing about Landlord Colors at Cranbrook
writing about following Jennifer Moon around as much as I could to find out how one artist developed having non-art hobbies.
And also one of the topics I felt compelled to write about was going to be about how contemporary artists seem to be living in a time of 'therapy' and somehow I was going to tie that in with reflecting on/reviewing/critiquing Mark Allen’s “How To Make an Interactive Work of Art, For Beginners”
It maybe would have something to do with how it felt outdated as advice for young artists today… It's hard for me to imagine any young contemporary artist making a numbered list sincerely... maybe it seemed oversimplified and somehow didn't take in account the artist block that I feel is very real...
but since I can tell that my main points would have run on the negative side, or it would have projected some surface stuff that says more about me, that's not the story I want to own.
I can admit that what I feel is more akin to simply jealousy of someone who does explore what there is to explore, and why even appear as if I'm punching down (although I wouldn't have written it like that, but it could very well be read that way) when this space and other artist spaces in LA are closing, or have been closed, and it seems almost everyday that someone is discussing the void left in Machine Projects wake. (also I'm thinking of Haruko Tanaka, and other friendly artists that I can't believe are not going to just be around...)
Ok I'm sorry, I forgot where I was going with this. Oh yeah, this is a blog post about how I didn't get around to a blog post...
So something Meghan Gordon said to me while helping me with my art portfolio was that there wasn’t enough of MY voice in it. And that my work usually finds a simple conceit, yet it has a lot of depth... I'm also trying to get myself back into the joy of reading, and from the first pages of Adrienne Marie Brown's Emergent Strategies (shaping change, changing worlds) book, there's this bit about depth and improving our metrics for recognizing what has value:
So I'm thinking about posting Mark Allen’s voice, his light-hearted writing, specifically the footnotes to the book that was published about Machine Project, because I really liked the candid details that really tell you what it meant to him, and what he really thinks (beyond just a list). One can sense the depth, the wear and tear of that floor, the mechanisms that whirred in that space, but also whirring in their heads, between the ideas of people, in the e-mails...
Although I’ve kind of met him, I honestly would have had no idea that he had this particular voice in him, that he was the creator of the famed Machine Project. To me he was just the partner to Emily Joyce, the guy who seemed like they must have a lot of free time because they seem to make a lot of free posters…
So this is just a long introduction to a lot of short posts that I’m about to put up on the blog, that I’m not the author of but they sound like something I'd say in a parallel universe, and it’ll blow all of my previous years out of the water in terms of “looking productive” if I can't subconsciously not reflect on it in a negative way. But really it’s in celebration of Mark Allen’s interest in accessibility, by… making his super interesting *footnotes more presence, taking the tiny red words and giving them the gravity that I think they have all on their own as inspirational snippets of projects facilitated, made and completed.
Glad I didn't actually try to write a lot more anxiety-ridden but 'original' content, this is wayyy more interesting. It's the stuff that's already in the world, that could have been just a tad more accessible.
--- --- ---
* And I can’t believe that you can still just search "specific sentences" in quotes and include type:pdf in the search bar and poof. The thing I was JUST ABOUT to re-type by hand exists right there in all of its glory ripe for the copy pasta:
http://www.headlands.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/allen_m_hello_2017.pdf
Up until this writing, for this year it says I’ve written only 5 articles which is about to be on par with 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.
In 2018, I only felt able to eek out two post and both were long essays about my appreciation for certain individuals.
There are so many notes I could have posted that I think other people may find interesting, but it just seems probably… T.M.I. (even compared to what I do put out on this blog.) And I think that because I see that some years I'm posting like 14, 16, 21 or 33 times, then surely it must have been a good year!
Right now as I look around me, there are piles of papers/notes that I’ve finally gotten around to labeling with a label maker, or I put it at eye level right next to where I type at my home computer so that I have a constant reminder, but now that I’m thinking about the quantity of posts, it’s stripping out all the goodness that these notes hold for me. And yeah sure, it’s the kind of data that I can look at semi-objectively and think about it simply as “information" and reflect on it, but I think that it also lays out a specific story that I tell myself, about my productivity on such and such a year... but don’t I want to feel less pressured to do the things that give me pleasure? This is the time I've decided to do 50 bad artworks after all... Maybe I can break this feeling that it gives me to compare myself with my perceived potential of myself... by pretending that this was a very impressive year (at least in terms of blog posts)
I also have these annoying daily reminders on my phone that show back to me that I wanted to write about the following things:
other to-dos that I told myself I’d like to write about includes...
writing about Bar-Fund and all the things I've wanted to spout out concerning art and money
writing about Landlord Colors at Cranbrook
writing about following Jennifer Moon around as much as I could to find out how one artist developed having non-art hobbies.
And also one of the topics I felt compelled to write about was going to be about how contemporary artists seem to be living in a time of 'therapy' and somehow I was going to tie that in with reflecting on/reviewing/critiquing Mark Allen’s “How To Make an Interactive Work of Art, For Beginners”
It maybe would have something to do with how it felt outdated as advice for young artists today… It's hard for me to imagine any young contemporary artist making a numbered list sincerely... maybe it seemed oversimplified and somehow didn't take in account the artist block that I feel is very real...
but since I can tell that my main points would have run on the negative side, or it would have projected some surface stuff that says more about me, that's not the story I want to own.
I can admit that what I feel is more akin to simply jealousy of someone who does explore what there is to explore, and why even appear as if I'm punching down (although I wouldn't have written it like that, but it could very well be read that way) when this space and other artist spaces in LA are closing, or have been closed, and it seems almost everyday that someone is discussing the void left in Machine Projects wake. (also I'm thinking of Haruko Tanaka, and other friendly artists that I can't believe are not going to just be around...)
Ok I'm sorry, I forgot where I was going with this. Oh yeah, this is a blog post about how I didn't get around to a blog post...
So something Meghan Gordon said to me while helping me with my art portfolio was that there wasn’t enough of MY voice in it. And that my work usually finds a simple conceit, yet it has a lot of depth... I'm also trying to get myself back into the joy of reading, and from the first pages of Adrienne Marie Brown's Emergent Strategies (shaping change, changing worlds) book, there's this bit about depth and improving our metrics for recognizing what has value:
"We would understand that the strength of our movement is in the strength of our relationships, which could only be measured by their depth. Scaling up would mean going deeper, being more vulnerable and more empathetic." P. 10
So I'm thinking about posting Mark Allen’s voice, his light-hearted writing, specifically the footnotes to the book that was published about Machine Project, because I really liked the candid details that really tell you what it meant to him, and what he really thinks (beyond just a list). One can sense the depth, the wear and tear of that floor, the mechanisms that whirred in that space, but also whirring in their heads, between the ideas of people, in the e-mails...
Although I’ve kind of met him, I honestly would have had no idea that he had this particular voice in him, that he was the creator of the famed Machine Project. To me he was just the partner to Emily Joyce, the guy who seemed like they must have a lot of free time because they seem to make a lot of free posters…
So this is just a long introduction to a lot of short posts that I’m about to put up on the blog, that I’m not the author of but they sound like something I'd say in a parallel universe, and it’ll blow all of my previous years out of the water in terms of “looking productive” if I can't subconsciously not reflect on it in a negative way. But really it’s in celebration of Mark Allen’s interest in accessibility, by… making his super interesting *footnotes more presence, taking the tiny red words and giving them the gravity that I think they have all on their own as inspirational snippets of projects facilitated, made and completed.
Glad I didn't actually try to write a lot more anxiety-ridden but 'original' content, this is wayyy more interesting. It's the stuff that's already in the world, that could have been just a tad more accessible.
--- --- ---
* And I can’t believe that you can still just search "specific sentences" in quotes and include type:pdf in the search bar and poof. The thing I was JUST ABOUT to re-type by hand exists right there in all of its glory ripe for the copy pasta:
http://www.headlands.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/allen_m_hello_2017.pdf
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