I’ve felt a certain discontent that is in one way indescribable with my current (or, rather currently, past) situation of being positioned in the world as an artist. Why, one may ask? An artist is free to do anything, correct? No, I would contend.
As an artist one has certain obligations (as with any other position in society) that seeks to confine and conform the members of said sect to certain societally defined precedents for that group. For example. Artists, in one way or another are expected to be somewhat irregular in their behavior, somewhat different, somewhat outsider and that immediately places them outside of the larger social group. This displacement weakens whatever stance the artist takes or claims they wish to proclaim or actions they wish to initiate. Certainly artists are given a freedom of “creativity” and “expression” that is allowed to almost no other groups of people, but with this freedom comes disenchantment, and disregardability. Some may argue that artists can be anything they would want it to be and they don’t need to be confined by standards and labels AND… furthermore; artist’s are the ones that change society and open the eyes of everyone else. I would argue, why hold on to the label of artist to be allowed to do what you wish to do? An artist’s path today is shaped by, among other things, apprenticeships, internships, fellowships, scholarships, residencies, and more. I say: get off the “ships” sailing on those perilous “cies” and FUCKING SWIM. And possibly scuba dive a bit. Because what happens when all the ships sink and you are left with merely your fellow wo/man? You won’t know how to swim and everyone will be fighting for the few lifeboats and vests on this ships that “even God himself could not sink” and you’ll be singing “my heart will go on” to no one but your frozen partner that you then push off into the icy waters and retire to a bourgeois New York when you are saved and revist your past once right before you die.
I’m just saying, why be a passenger aboard the Good Ship Art when you can just shift your entire mode of thinking and realize that all along you could have been the Lisa Frank dolphin, swimming along happily and fucking to your hearts content and jumping over rainbows and shit?
So I went over the deep end a bit with that metaphor (har har). But seriously. Why the fuck DO you want to keep being an artist?
