So my Public Art project has generated a response faster than what I was expecting, which is a nice surprise in the series of nice surprises I've been getting. The project does have its flaws, mostly on the production end, but other than that, it's a project I'm willing to continue until it is actually done. This means that I'll need to get a computer ASAP if I want to update my site post graduation.
Okay, cheap plug over with. Time for the actual entry at hand.
Jason has, one again, taken the role of a sadistic Game Show Host and has asked me what I was hoping to be the last question so he can help me figure out what I should write and how to do my paper right. You know, seeing how I hit the mass reset button on everything and have yet to send my teacher a revised artist statement of intent and all that good stuff.
And now, for one million dollars and the admiration of the local art community, the question is: How is this project and your blog similar?
The question isn't so much "how" as much as it is "Are they." And the way I see it, they really aren't all that similar.
My blog and all my entries in here I see as a vain attempt to communicate to an otherwise silent person. It's more similar to that one nut in the neighborhood that sits out on their porch and talks to themselves because they have nobody else to talk to. (Or at least, that was the case before recently.) Here, I don't have to edit my thoughts because of something like a social taboo or trying to make sure I come off as who people think I am. I can be as perverted or sexually frustrated as I want to be. I can be as honest as I feel I can get away with given how I feel. Most important of all, I don't have to worry about someone interrupting me half way through a thought and derailing my train of logic. That's happened so many times before to the point of nausea. In fact, that is what normally kills my thought process. If I tried to answer the questions I've been asked in person. chances are really high nobody would let me finish my train of thought. They would interrupt me as soon as I took a breath, a sip from a drink, or a pause to think about what I just said.
This project and the drawing process is an escape, as I've stated many times before. I'm not looking to process my ideas in a setting where I don't have to worry about a cow standing in the middle of the tracks. (God, for someone that doesn't drive or have many mass transit options, I sure do use a lot of automobile and train analogies.) If anything, I'm the cow ON the tracks saying "screw you, you'll wait until I'm done or find another way around me" to both any train of thought I may have as well as to most external social stimuli. I just want to draw because it helps me feel better.
The argument can be placed that both the blog and the drawing process make me feel better. The blog because I can say what I want to say without fear; the drawing process because I end up feeling better about whatever it was that made me upset enough to want to leave reality for even five minutes. And that's a valid argument, but the only thing I see similar between the two with this argument is the end product as far as how I personally feel about things. Not so much the wall of text or the paper with a pen doodle on it.
I guess the Zen of my answer to the question is this:
The blog lets me actually think things through, be them simple minded idiotic thoughts--like what I want for Christmas or what I think about some cute guy I see--or really deep critical thoughts--like the questions I've been asked on the project or other things that may be on my mind mostly during bouts of depression. It is an exercise of my mind and how to communicate in the written sense since I fail at communicating in the social sense.
The drawing process lets me turn off my brain for a moment. I don't have to think as hard about anything other than where do I want to put this next line and does the image look cool or not. I'm not worried about character design, nor am I worried about the overall image once it is finished. I'm just enjoying the moment of creating something unique to my own aesthetic appeal.
The only thing the two have in common with each other is the fact they make me feel better in the end because both help me release a tension that drove me to one of them. Other than that, they are just like apples and oranges. True, they are both fruit, but they are different types of fruit with different tastes and textures.
1 comment:
Jon,
I have to confess that Jason asked me to read your blog. And now I am not "an otherwise silent person" because I have found it fascinating and stimulating.
I had not thought about "this project and your blog [being] similar" except that they are both ways of your expressing who you are.
This word escape keeps overshadowing everything but it seems to be a slippery word. This time it seems to be a way of not having "to worry about someone interrupting me half way through a thought and derailing my train of logic." You can just say -- see what I am doing and see what I have done. Draw your own conclusion!
Communication takes place in many ways and there are good and bad points for all of them. You really do well in the written approach. But you seem to have written yourself off in the social sense. I want to tell you that there is hope, big hope. When I was your age I had the same problem. During those years I saw a psychiatrist. The only thing I remember his saying was that I should get out and socialize more. Well I did but it was twenty-five years later before I really did it but then I did it in a big way, more than he could have imagined.
A young photographer who has just started Columbia College Chicago wrote that he felt that one should just "not care" from time to time as an educational tool. I think that he probably means who you mean by "turn off my brain for a moment" when you engage in the drawing process.
Follow my fingers
and enjoy the drawings that
help me feel better.
If one is not driven to art, it is not art.
Robert
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