How did it All Begin?

…although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing (It may be for example, that Sheila is one figure among twenty; but for our own reasons she is the one we have eyes for.) -John Berger. Ways of Seeing

What am I doing here? I’m a visual artist, not a writer, yet I feel a compulsion to look back, to see what it has all meant, to try to convince myself that it has been worth it, this artist’s life. But how does one go about the process of evaluating one’s own life? Why do it, even? Why bother going to the massive amount of trouble it takes of gathering up the pieces and the fragments of a life and then examining them? And if the decision has been made to do it, HOW do you go about it?

The exigencies of memory mean that you can’t simply recall at will a chronological report of what you have done. Maybe you just do a document dump, just open the box or the trunk or the chest and start tossing things out into the room, pausing once in a while to say, Oh, yeah, this, I remember this, here’s what I thought or felt about it. And if so, what about all the other shit you are tossing onto the floor? Do you go back and rake through that shit later, and fold it in to the story or do you sweep it into a corner so that later it can be tossed onto a fire and destroyed forever – turn it into pure energy? Some unholy force created it –some upwelling of random energy compelled you to make this thing, but why – to what end? For whose edification? Only yours? So why not turn it back into energy by burning it.

In the case of visual art this can be done literally. In the case of conceptual work that exists only as memory with a few tenuous unexplained threads connecting it to the physical world, what does that burning entail? Tossing out the threads – a few slides, fewer still words or notes. Is this curation? Editing? A final gift to whomever the original gift was meant for; a way of saying, “I know you have not spent any amount of time attending to the thousands of things that I have produced over the last forty years, so I am going to curate them for you – eliminate half or three-quarters or nine-tenths of them so that you might be tempted to pay attention to the other twenty-five percent or ten percent.”

Sheila

And to whom is this addressed? Even those closest might not be interested in all of this – wife, children, grandchildren that do not yet exist, closest friends. Who is it all for? Some imaginary future artist or reader or art aficionado? Some distant grandchild or great grandchild who himself or herself feels compelled to travel a similar path and might benefit from someone else’s fifty years of hindsight? In my own case, even my life partner Sheila, hands down the most affirming and supportive person I know, hands down the person who most believes in me as an artist, when I sheepishly admit to her that I am working on a memoir, is unable to control the subtle but unmistakable look of pain or pity or revulsion on her face. Even Sheila, in an unguarded moment, speaks of the self-indulgence or self-aggrandizement of memoir, questions whether anyone really cares about another person’s struggle. I just do not know who a project like this is for.

Yet, I plunge ahead.

Alone.

Leaving even Sheila behind.

I know that one day I will be able to send a message to her – a flare to show her where to find me -- and she will undoubtedly parachute in and, indulging me, will recognize this journey as meaningful at least to her, my ultimate audience.

I have my machete. I know I’ll encounter thickets and briars. I pack some food and water, a knife and a bit of rope. A few matches in a dry container and I plunge ahead into the wilderness, trusting that the things I find along the way will guide me, just as they have done for the last fifty years. I will come upon guideposts, I will encounter friendly scouts or outliers who suggest new directions or point to tracks that someone else has cut. But really, the thing that compels me forward is that I know that the discoveries I will make along the way will sustain me, nourish me, complete me in some inexplicable way, will make the journey worth having undertaken.

Does this mean the journey is being undertaken with no regard for an audience? Probably so. This thing that I had assumed was so important turns out to be a chimera. It hovers out there posing as the thing that will sustain you as an artist, probably because in your early years you knew that in order to keep going you had to have some way to get food and shelter and you imagined that an audience would help support you in exchange for what you made: book or film or performance or object. Or you thought about Marcel Duchamp pronouncing that an artwork could not be complete until someone other than the artist has experienced it. That one may be true.

But I can’t worry about Duchamp right now. There might not be much time. I have to go sharpen my machete.

It is time to go.