Posts

Winding down...

The purpose of this blog was to facilitate your return to working after our semester and our lives were totally upended by the corona virus landing in the US. Given where we are in the semester, and where you are in your work, I think it’s time to wind it down. You’re welcome (of course) to revisit what’s here and to make use of it, adapt it, respond to it, etc., to the extent that any of that is helpful to you. In recent entries, I’ve been hoping to help you come to terms with the way in which this is your time , and there is ample time , still, for you to make your work as an artist. It should be noted that almost every time is a shitty time to be an artist. When times are good, everyone else is making a lot of money and has a lot of opportunities and rent is high and the appeal of just going with the flow and getting a Real Job is very seductive and everyone is talking about Real Estate and Stock Investments and very few people care about art. And when times are bad, everyone ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Day Is It?

For some reason, over the weekend I decided that I wanted to know how many days it had been since I’ve been more or less hunkered down in my house and, based on my calculations, today is Day 47.n That’s a few days shy of seven full weeks. Or...half a semester, which is a meaningful way of measuring time in my line of work (which is to say...I have a visceral sense of what that amount of time is). It’s less time than that that I’ve been writing these posts for you, but I am thinking about the ways in which these posts might function for you in ways that are similar to other devices I have been using in my quarantine life . Every day, I make myself a to do list. And every day I write out the hours that I plan to be awake in a timeline that runs down the right side of that page. And I check off the items on the to-do list. And I list the appointments I need to keep on the time line. Mind you, I don’t always get to everything on the list. And some days my list is more an exhaustive inv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Play in the sun

Use the sun in your work today. Warm up in its warmth. Make shadows. Distort shadows. Make shadow puppets. Observe the way it occupies your room and measure time by the trajectory of its shadows. Feel it on your face, on the back of your head. Move in and out of the brightness. Trace its arc in the sky. Until this evening.
Post a Comment
Read more

Struggling and conceptualizing Struggling

There’s an interesting article in Today’s New York Times about artists working in These Times. You might read it if it isn’t going to get in the way of your working. I’m interested in it because it acknowledges what we all know: that there is something that many of us experience as debilitating  in this moment. Living in a time when so many people are getting sick and our leaders are so totally lost and our futures all seem uncertain and the hideous inequalities of our cultures are all hanging out there...it’s easy for us to want to crawl up in a ball. Or go volunteer to do something that could actually help . I’m thinking about this on three ways—but there are (I’m sure) more than three ways to think about this. First, it was largely the failures of our culture to imagine, to listen well, and to respond creatively that got us into this. Those of us who have more finely honed skills in imagining, listening, responding, and making are really needed now. We may not be making ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Towards a Stride

You don’t have to be like me and it’s totally OK if you aren’t. But the best working for me comes when I hit a stride. When the shape of every day is kind of the same and I can lean hard into the dependable rhythms of waking, taking care of myself, focusing on my day, going to work, meeting my collaborators, identifying our goals for the day, taking our first shots at those goals, breaking, reviewing, discussing, trying again, perhaps turning to a new problem and working on that, working on it again, tending to some of the material aspects of the work, turning back to the hard work, perhaps trying to see what we’ve made, thinking about what I’ve just seen...and thinking about the day, making a bridge between today’s work and tomorrow’s goals...and then letting my attention go wherever it wants for a while. It’s the regularity of the working process that lets me take chances in my approaches, that lets me trust what my colleague David Brick calls “the black box,” my intuition...and th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Time Containers

Name the projects you are going to do today (“replace the Bundt-cake monologue,” “Outline the battle scene, “ “Build and test the airplane puppet” ... etc.) Each project wants to be achievable and specific and make a real contribution to your project. So “have ideas” is a bad project assignment. As is “fix second act.” Assign yourself an amount of time to contain your work on each of these projects: — build and test airplane puppet. 45 minutes. — replace the Bundt-cake monologue. 90 minutes. — outline for battle scene. 30 minutes. Allow yourself 5 minutes at the beginning of each task to size up the problem. If there are multiple ways of attacking it, take a few minutes to identify these (or some of them). BUT THEN PICK ONE method and use THAT. Save a few minutes at the end of the time period to “show” or “document” or “observe” what you have achieved. At the end of each period, just sit with what you did for a few minutes, before you move on. In this moment of reflecti...
Post a Comment
Read more

Making Warm Up

1. From wherever you are, connect to the outdoors. (5 minutes) spend a minute looking and seeing. Note the movement. Note the presence of natural forces. If you do this every day, you can note the differences. Listen. Hear whatever is there. Just spend a minute. You can close your eyes if you like. And you don’t need to identify the source of sounds, just take them in (let them in). Let the ambient sound be a one minute soundtrack. If you are inside, and you are able, open the window. If you are outside, you’re all set. Sense the forces of nature on your skin. Maybe there are things to small. Maybe there are air currents. Maybe the warmth of the sun. Just take a minute. Spend two minutes attempting to synch your own rhythms and impulses with those of the outdoors. Breathe with the world. Hum to it. Maybe even sing with it. Let yourself move. You don’t need to “dance” but let yourself move with the world. You’re a part of it. It’s a part of you. 2. Follow any impulse that occur...
Post a Comment
Read more