I have always kept a page nestled in my website title “Friends” that lists the links to the portfolios of my peers from school and beyond. I think that community is the lifeblood of any artistic endeavor, and so I make small motions to help nurture that sense of community, to convince myself that I am a part of it. This site is the third or fourth iteration of my website since I first made one after graduating from college, and I’ve carried that friend list the whole time. I haven’t updated it in years though, and the list is in sore need of modernization.
Earlier I decided to click through some of the links on the list. A sad but unsurprising fact is how many of the links are dead, directing to abandoned URLs. So many people I saw as friends are 404s now. I have been thinking of how to update my website during my winter break, and I’m not sure what to do with the list. Should I remove the dead links? A part of me feels like it’s a monument, though to exactly what is hard to say. Do I leave the link to say, “I knew them then”? To memorialize a time when these people still believed in art enough to pay for a domain? To make sure I don’t forget their names, our conversations, the influence we might have had on one another?
A sculpture professor in my program, Phil Listengart, told us on multiple occasions that only a quarter of art school graduates continue to make art in the years after leaving their programs. I have felt this factoid haunt me ever since, a specter on my heels, making sure that I don’t become a statistic. Positive reinforcement is a wonderful tool that I advocate for, but it doesn’t seem to work that well on me. For now, fear is the primary motivating force for me. Hopefully I’ll figure out a new fuel.
I have a bachelor’s in fine arts in Sculpture, yet I work with cameras and lenses and lights every day. It’s a struggle sometimes to even feel like what I’m doing is art, but I have to do something. I can’t join the 75%, not now, not after all this time.
During a shoot recently with a new friend, she told me that she felt she’d manifested the entire thing: finding a photographer that she got along with, making new pictures, collaborating with another artist to create something. My therapist has been trying to get me into the practice of making daily intentions. I find it difficult, as I find most goal-oriented tasks to be difficult if they’re too vague. Concrete, footholds, trail markers, yellow paint, flashing icons, guidelines: all attainable. For all my love of nuance and flexibility and the gray, the third choice, I really do struggle with openness of my own life. My father used to ask me what my plan was for one year down the road, five years, then ten. I could barely consider the next week.
I’m not where I want to be. I’m not fully sure where that even is. And yet, I am where I am. So, is this where I’m supposed to be? Stafford Beer once said that “the purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID).” When did I orient myself towards this life, behind the camera instead of in front of it? For all my dissatisfaction, why haven’t I put myself back in front of it? Beer might say that I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing, simply because I continue to do it. In the Matrix Reloaded, Morpheus says “what happened, happened, and couldn’t have happened any other way…because we are still alive.” Real life is heuristic, aspirational, simple and mysterious.
I don’t believe in magic, or ghosts, or tarot, or horoscopes (I don’t practice Santeria, I ain’t got no crystal ball). The Alchemist isn’t on my top ten books (or top 100 for that matter) and I don’t sing the praises of The Secret. But there is something to be said for keeping an idea at the forefront of your mind. I grew up reading anything I could get my hands on. We had copies of The Great Brain stories around the house. One of the anecdotes I always remember was how, when the protagonist Tom, the eponymous great brain himself, wanted to come up to a solution to a difficult problem, he thought of it intensely in the moments before he fell asleep. While he slept, his subconscious would come up with the solution. I have doubts on this technique’s efficacy (though some intellectuals swear by it), but the brain is a mysteriously efficient organ. If one orients their thoughts towards an idea consistently, then like a compass one is pulled toward the idea’s realization. I hope I like where I’m headed.
posiwid
manifestation
intention