Questions about the Project

When you ask me questions that are as complicated as the ones I'm about to answer, you can almost always be assured I'll bullshit half of my answer. If not, I always seem to offer a really good guess that makes sense in one way or another. Very rarely does a question come along that sounds complicated but is easy for me to answer. It's even more rare in the art world unless you've done your research or you are confident in your work to talk about it like you wrote the book on the subject.

It's been pointed out that the title of the piece implies an escape from reality, not so much an escape from a low self-esteem or a personal realization (though that could be brought up as well). But which is the expression of this escape: the drawings themselves or the act of drawing them?

This is one of those rare, easy questions you get in the art world. One so easy that the title answers it. These drawings are produced to escape reality, which means it isn't the final product that is the escapism part of the piece. It's the private performance of producing them.

I'm reminded of an episode of an old Saturday Morning cartoon called Recess. In the episode, the tomboy and usually aggressive girl of the cast of characters (there was a jock, a cool kid, a nerd, a fat kid, and a kid who came from a military family but was a wimp himself among the cast, in case you care) interrupts a group of kids drawing on the blacktop of the playground because they don't know how to draw a tree. Over the course of the fifteen minute short, you see a montage of how she aggressively scribbles and draws seemingly random marks all over the blacktop. Towards the end of the short, you find out she's been doing this for the entire school week, and they don't know what to do with her to get her to stop. Then, one of the kids that likes to climb the big toy notices something and tells everyone to climb up to the top of all the playground structures. Students and teachers alike climb as high as they can get, and what they see is a work of art fueled by aggression, frustration, and general angst. It's so beautiful one teacher suggests laminating the blacktop to preserve it. Well, to end the short, the school's sprinkler system turns on suddenly and washes the chalk drawing away just as soon as the girl finishes it. The students and teachers are disappointed and believe she is disappointed as well that her work was washed away. She replies that the only reason she did it was because it made her feel better, she didn't even see what the final piece was.

No doubt the episode was made to illustrate the importance of art programs in the school, but the episode does relate to my project. The act of drawing is the escape. Like the girl who didn't stop until she was done, the act of drawing is what makes me feel better. The act is the escape, and will always be that escape. This is a different kind of escape when you compare it to my other so-called addictions like video games or online forums. One is an altered reality I can get lost in and the other is an attempt to compensate for a lack of social interaction on a regular basis with peers of similar interests. But the act of drawing is when I can simply shut my mind off and not think about anything but what I'm drawing. I don't have to think about concept or final product or anything. The act of drawing just makes me feel better about myself and what is going on.

The second question isn't so easy. It's one of those concept questions that I hate answering because it causes me to over think. And when I over think, I end up undermining myself.

The question is this: By presenting these drawings to the viewer, what am I doing? Am I trying to bring the viewer into my escapism? Am I trying to make my escape a reality?

My knee-jerk reaction to this question is that it is impossible to bring the viewer into my world of escape. As much as we would like to think that you can capture intangible feelings on canvas, these drawings have nothing to do with the passion or frustration I feel from day to day. There may be hints of it alluding to a subconscious desire for all things cute, cynical, or even something about masculine insecurities. But the actual act that is preformed, the actual escape part of this project, is something I cannot display. Nobody can truly get inside my head while I'm drawing. There is no way to accurately depict it either in a video piece of me drawing with audio commentary or something to make it a video art piece. So how can I show my viewers something that is so ethereal that is refuses to take a physical form longer than how long it takes me to draw? Simply put, I can't.

So am I trying to bring my world of escape into reality? Again, my knee-jerk reaction is a "no." My initial reaction is similar to the first. The display of these drawings can't bring my world of escape into reality. The act does. If anything, these drawings are like souvenirs you buy from places you've been. You know, evidence of an experience. Displaying these drawings isn't going to bring my world of escape into reality so much as a key chain from Italy isn't going to bring Venice to my aunt whom I gave the key chain to. The same can be said about vacation photos and home movies from Disneyland.

These knee-jerk responses only lead to another question: Why display them at all? Why not have a performance of me sitting at a table drawing since that is the conceptual origin of the piece?

I would cite the Animation Tour they give at Disney World, but I was told that since the Walt Disney Company dissolved their animation department, that tour has been reduced to nothing more but a room with a video and then a walk down an empty studio. Gone are the days when you could watch the inner workings of an animation studio as they are working. But if that wasn't the case, I would ask if anyone reading this has been on that tour and watched one of the animators at work. It's boring after about 30 seconds. That's why I would never do a performance piece, and that's also why I consider the act of drawing to escape a private act.

This leads to yet another question: Why, then, am I making this private act a public piece? Not public in the sense that it will be out on the street for all to see, but public in the fact that someone besides myself will see the product. If the act of escaping is something that I claim to be impossible to show, why show it at all?

See, this is where I start to undermine myself. The only answer I can give myself is because I have to. The lowering of what little pride I have left because of an obligation to a class.

If this was any other personal piece outside of school, I wouldn't display these so much as I would turn the ones I liked into shirts and posters to sell on CafePress for little gain. If this was any other piece that I would like to work on, it would be posted here on my blog and then forgotten about once it fell off the front page. If this was like any other personal work, there is a high likelihood it would never get shown at all in the same way a personal work of art would be (i.e. in an art show or gallery).

But I've been pushed into a corner, and a cornered mouse has been known to bite the cat. These drawings, if I can meet my quota in time, is this mouse's strike back to the cat that has cornered me.