I have recently gotten 99% through the admin that had been backed up since June, now with only ten current tasks. At last I am returned to the regular, normal 2-day backlog that everyone out of bed suffers.
After all my checking back and testing, it always offered the same amount of resistance to being set aside, like a new helium balloon, so I tied off the World of Admin inside my computer, and quit thinking about it. Only in this way can I sit in the studio with the work on this for-reals studio all-nighter, complete with delivery of dinner with planned leftovers for breakfast. I like Korean Stone Bowl dishes for eating 3-bite meals every hour while standing, regarding the work a little this way, a little that. The rice stays true to itself overnight, unlike noodles, which by morning become gloppy and jellified. Home kitchen this is easily remedied with frying low and slow to crunchiness in a skillet, but I’m working in the studio, and I’m saving my plug-in electric studio skillet for the apocalypse.
the work is the space, the hang between inhale and exhale, the neitherhale, when I haven’t already imagined what they look like. I shine the light into the site, what do these glass pieces do in the space? the specific walls and ceilings and overhangs and passageways that transform a location into a site? Everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be. Where does the light go? I ask, and then a blinking slide show of possible iterations of each optic flashes on the seein’-wall part of the mind, where words won’t get you anywhere. all on its own accord, one of them pops out of the lineup as obviously the most possible to actually do. because outside all these lofty considerations, it’s countdown to zero before I begin to place the piece in the room. step 1.
Letting it be written rather than writing it, ordered by a consciousness I intentionally loosen with meditation, seeing, letting go, Unknowing more like pin-the-tail, less like enlightenment.
Suddenly I understand the Codex Seraphinianus, for when the work has to be Everything. the work continues to list itself: Grants and All There Is To Apply To; Brazing inside the studio; Heatsinks; Lighting characteristics; Shows coming right up; Suspending the revival yurt from 17′ ceiling; Unpacking glass; Writing; Having coffee and seaweed at 9 pm wondering which of these aspects will float to the surface for attention next. I default to the making, and the revivifications, everything else can be done by another at another time. I am Parenting; Making; Seeing. Stringing wire segments together with wago clips.
panels in front of the windows and brazing and welding, welding?! things, OBJECTS?! I am going to make objects now? maybe. I am solving for auditory and visual privacy
I am listening to the machine, like, machine I burned all my chips, i have no entrée, i’m on my own path now, it is what it is.
I keep moving, filling the tasks and orders like someone else’s fries, minding as much as possible and sticking to the plan even when not possible.
facebook, my only hangout buddy, is starting to talk to me more in terms of yoga pants and 30-day aura-cleansing workshop opportunities. These, it figures, are what this artist needs.
your trip is around the corner, machine tells me. all my tasks are about getting ready. all my doings are holograms of my overarching habits.
the rest is unwritten, unforeseen. the forwardy is still churning, except I hadn’t envisioned what I am creating. i haven’t wanted to capture it with my inner vision. i have confined myself to the practice of getting only today right, before I envision futures. Today will take several more weeks. and then, this summer… the days ahead of me.
My eyeballs turn the image upside down, i’ll have to go back for it later. I was walking the creek in the woods yesterday and it was beyond muddy, all two days before the first green flecks burst the brambly winter, we stepslid, and I recalled the physical how-to of snowboarding when a creekstone took me riding slow motion a little ways down the bank.
I came to tell the page, I’m still on charrette, don’t think a trip to Kentucky up and back broke my stride, or that two shows broke my stride. Stride in place, did you see me fail to apprehend a male over the age of nine years old to accompany me to The Who? which was of course, the best thing to happen for son and me. Stride in place he is tucked away in his schoolnight bed, and I am pouring my caffeinated fresh brew of yerba mate, green tea, and korean red ginseng, with dramatic magic show music in the background, Pretty Lights, dark as the sky.
The flood of divorce when drifting apart is palpable and measurable in close increments of losses, events and articles of clothing, no one’s gone past the horizon yet, smaller away, sloshing in the wrong direction.
In comes the newsflash that the Crystal Seeing event this Friday is taking place during the time and at the location of the Trump Rally (10,000 visitors expected) and protest (3000 expected). right in the middle of that. One World, machine reminds. right…right… i knew that, i was just testing you. Love and Fear…
later
trump cxl-ed
the degree to which I don’t stick my head into the world even to see what’s going on, I don’t let it get that busy in my head. so many great social engineers can have at it, I live a primary experience, mostly of making, I stay away from the dramatic narrative called “news” which gets further misunderstood to be “reality.”
Site and time set certain parameters, and if mastery is anything, it’s preparation for coping with possibility.
Used to be, with Art, you had to know a guy, or devise your own understanding based on highly protected Art specimens locked away from spontaneous encounter in glass cabinets, museums, and galleries.
teaching, I’d say, teaching too, incredulous, does it never stop, I loved it. My smile was in there, I wasn’t sure where I had left it. and how the light went on, I would say, ding ding like the iphone tibetan singing bowl app, number A) interacting with these young people is high energy thinking. and B) here are tons of my peers. I was shown the faculty lounge, where I’ll get a cabinet with my name written in cursive pen on a file tab sticker label created by the department administrator, along with the names of my admired colleagues. I am amazed and grateful to have a paper label in the company of their paper labels.
i sleep on it.
a sudden and drastic living space re-arrange, improvement, this is definitely After.
moving into the unknown. all the souvenirs through time convened in my living room now, a painting of a burglar by Sasha, a loose conglomerate of coincidental souvenirs tying the different phases of my past together like a Kaiser Soze story. A story weaving one phase of my life to another, lived and told, and sitting in the arranged altar to it, crammed with trinkets of je me souvienne. I rearranged everything, with respect to the whole collection, my experience of home, practical matters and aesthetics, and convenience. now it is maximally comfortable.
clear my spaces
clear my admin
put together Installation course
put together workshops
keep Kentucky project sailing
show up for next show
make artist talk for April 7
the work has called me for five years, six, 30, forty-seven
sssshhhhaammpoooooo it’s an artist log, thassol