The other night I drove out to my sister’s house west of Austin to be included in 4th of July activities, since I have been home by myself for a few days. After I arrived, my sister and I talked about our children, books we are reading, and the illustrations she has been creating on her ipadfor our joint art/poetry project we have been working on for the last seven months. Bill, her long time spouse, came downstairs talked a little about selling his trailer since he was getting out of the big stuff as they thought about selling their house of thirty years. Then we headed over to one of their neighbor’s homes for dinner and a place to watch the fireworks of the wealthy neighborhoods on the hillsides nearby.
It was a pleasant evening for Texas at the beginning of summer. The host was a sculptor/potter whose house, with multiple units combining living space with a studio space, and a guest house to rent out for all of the special events in Austin, like SXSW or ACL. An architect friend of my sister’s designed the house; she was at the party as well. It was a creative group. Food was served, wine was poured, the fireworks were to be looked forward to. Later, they dotted the sky to Ahh’s and oooh’s as the conversations continued beneath the jaunty explosions. Around 11, I sat down into a conversation my sister and one of her old fine arts instructor from the University were having. It was a pleasant conversation with talk of fellow students and the classes they were in together. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a fellow writer a few days before: how fun it is to talk about art and writing with people who actually create art and poetry and think about making art and poetry, and not about shaping it for sale. Bill joined us, told one of his goofy zen jokes and answered yes when asked if he were an artist too. Bill creates art from things he finds, a true bricouler. He has pieces in a downtown hotel, and some of the “stuff” he found appeared as sculptures on a wall in a layout of Architectural Digest. Bill makes stuff, and does not worry about it after that. But no one knew that, they just looked at him and his goofy jokes. Someone laughed and the old instructor said in what was almost dismissive, “oh, outsider art.” The conversation shifted as is the way with rivers and language; a couple of guitars were brought out as the fireworks slowed down; and a mixture of Robert Earl King and the Beatles almost became a sing-along: freedom in America. After the party broke up and we headed back to my sister and Bill’s house we talked about the people, and the time, more than thirty years ago, when we were at university when Donna was in that instructor’s art class.
The question always comes up when you are talking to writers or artists you haven’t seen in awhile: So, you still writing, painting, building those crazy sculptures, working on your stuff? There is always a fear at the back of that question that one will stop. That one day, after being beaten on for so long, you will quit. That the effort to turn one’s work into yourself, while resisting paying-work’s effort to transform you into drudgery, is often too soul wrenching to bear. So you quit. There is nothing wrong with that; art is hard, or is supposed to be at least. But the assumption is always, that you have quit, even when you haven’t. So, eventually only a few people know and even less care. And even when you haven’t quit, the seriousness of your art is questioned: have you gotten published, do you have show, have you sold anything, started/finished your MFA, have you won any prizes or gone to any conferences, retreats? The work itself is never the conversation. When I was an academic, briefly, at two points in my life: one in literature, the other literacy, the conversation always revolved around other’s work, or office politics; not the work you were doing, somehow, that was made to seem unimportant. It is the credentials of one kind or another, which are important, to a very odd degree. What sent me down this trail of thought was the almost dismissive tone in the phrase “outsider art:” an outsider without credentials. I think “artists” who cling to anything other than the work are more on the outside of art than the “outsiders.” The concern they have is on how they are perceived, not how they perceive the work (art) they do.
I am not sure why this bothers me so much. It is hard to continue to write and produce art as you go through your day to day life. You shouldn’t take out your artistic insecurities by attacking others who are just as lost in the struggle to create as you are.
(July 5-6, 2014)
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