Deborah Fisher

Hope

For what it's worth, I have it. I got it when I truly gave up.

"Famous Artist" is not a goal. Not for me, anyway. It's a way to lie to myself about my own aimlessness and insecurity. A way to keep myself from doing anything that allowed me to feel pretty okay about it. Nothing could happen until I gave that up.

Truth

I thought art was a path toward finding it. And it is, in the same way Interstate 10 feels like it's all about Texas.

Art is fundamentally about lies and illusions, and when art is great the lies and illusions reference very special truths that you can't see any other way except through a lie. The first huge part of trying to make great art feels like it's about going and finding something deeply true--unleashing all your pearl divers on your existential depths and seeing what kinds of truths they bring back.

I am good at this task. I have a crack team of divers working for me and they find pearls all the frickin' time. What I am not good at is the art part, where I lie about these pearls and obscure them and trick people until they turn into pearls that people can actually see and use. While most art sucks because it's all lies and no pearls, I think the best crappy art sucks because it's just spitting out the pearls without any lies. Or as JP Gorin was right to tell me a million times, it's trying to make dinner out of the pots and pans.

On Conflict

This is where I train, a class with a visiting shihan who pretty much the same size and shape as me. I've been thinking about Osawa Sensei a lot lately as I come to terms with the fact that I am not 5'11" and 195 lbs.

This is demonstration footage. If you're going to watch one video, this one is faster and more fun. Just turn down the sound first.

It's impossible to just stop obsessively keeping your hands busy and go join the world all at once, so I've been replacing these uselessly laborious sculptural acts with a lot of aikido. This works because it pushes a lot of the same buttons sculpture pushed for me, while at the same time forcing me to get rid of a lot of bad habits. A dojo, like an artist's studio, is a secluded, constructed environment in which one suspends disbelief. I'm still bruised, sore and exhausted, I still do something gross and smelly and I still enjoy a set of male colleagues who appreciate my ability to be a little bit of an animal. My fragile ego is thusly swaddled. But I am not allowed to think that I am strong, not allowed to assume that I actually am the 195-lb guy who lives in my head because for the most part I am training with that 195-lb guy, and he is consistently taller and stronger than I am. It's my job to appreciate and exploit that difference, not attempt to obscure it with bluster, welding skills or gutter talk. I fail when I try to muscle and shove. I fail when I pretend.

Aikido is more than reality training wheels or a re-entry program after my journey in Innerspace. Each class is an hour-long ritualization of conflict in which a few basic concepts get hammered over and over again. Go to enough aikido classes, and you start seeing the whole world in terms of getting off the line of attack; dropping your weight; seeing yourself as part of a shape you are making with a partner; keeping your own structural integrity and creating space by extending your arms.

This is a useful lens. On a practical level, you stop standing right in front of doors that could open into you while you fumble for your keys. On a more metaphorical level, I'm finding that instead of being someone who evades conflict by retreating into a created reality, I can be a student of conflict. This transition could not have come at a better time. I happen to work in a rather hostile environment, and it's nice to see this as interesting and useful, not as a threat or a burden. I've been married long enough for the first big issue to surface, and I feel lucky to have some tools for negotiating it with more love than fear. My nuclear family has been pretty fucked up my whole life, and well, the drama continues. I appreciate the fact that I don't default to Deer In The Headlights about this anymore.

These are self-help lessons, and are not worth elaborating on. They are about the mechanics of me keeping my job, my marriage, my sanity. That's fine--it's a building year. But I see the potential for something more general to emerge out of this continued study of conflict because it's a way to be safely and consistently externally focused. When conflict is an interesting opportunity, a lot of the things I've been hiding from my whole life completely evaporate, and the playing field widens dramatically. To put this another way, I have no idea what I want to do, but I know that I want to be able to look at what's actually happening and respond usefully, in real time, without flinching and without turning away.

Enough With The Blame

A lot of this writing I've been doing about why I am not an artist anymore is about my pride, and tastes a little bit like sour grapes:

I am not an artist anymore because it's a stupid position of victimization to put yourself in. The value proposition sucks! Visual art is in such a mannerist phase--it's all about empire and not about innovation--it's not even culturally relevant!

I happen to believe that these things are true, and I can also see that my relationship to these truths is lazy and defensive. I feel stupid for following a path for twenty years that has, for me, very little integrity, and it helps a great deal to externalize that lack of integrity. To make it art's fault.

It's particularly easy to do this because art does lack integrity--because lack of rigor is the fucking point. Art needs to be frivolous and useless and deeply silly in order to do the voodoo that it can do so well, and so art necessarily attracts all manner of flakes and neer-do-wells and shaman wannabes and losers who couldn't hack college algebra. I can protest all day that I am not one of these people, that the problem with art is the way it works, not the way I did it! But we both know that this protestation blames art for just being art. Art did not fuck me up. Art let me come to it for structurally unsound reasons, gave me the freedom to develop an unhealthy, unreal set of patterns in relationship to it, and gave me just enough encouragement to keep me engaged when I should have grown up long ago. Did the MFA Industrial Complex help extend and legitimize this process, and is that an interesting broader discussion? Absolutely. But it's not the whole story.

Art school was the gun. I pulled the trigger.

All the people I know who are doing fantastic things right now are reaching out into the world and using everything they can as a tool to enable that inquisitive process. Art can absolutely be used this way--Banksy and the Yes Men are great examples. Art failed me because I used it to hide, to shape my identity and reality and reject the world I live in. A studio is a great place to cloister yourself and be who you think you want to be instead of who you actually are. I love thinking about structure and am quite a competent fabricator, welder and rigger. But let's get real: I am not interested enough in building things to endure daily grind of being a tiny blonde woman on a real jobsite. I've done this, and it sucked! As a sculptor I could indulge my macho fantasy self without any pesky credibility issues. I developed this ability to feel very busy, important and engaged when in reality I was toiling endlessly on stuff that just didn't matter for my own benefit--to prove who I am and feel less existentially adrift. My art's not inherently relevant to others because I was making it for boring, self-involved reasons. I was a closed loop.*

The art world helped me do this. It is a uniquely accepting microcosm that will (socially, not financially) embrace any masturbatory construction of faux importance you want to create and reflect it back to you endlessly and affirmingly. You can live your whole life as a moderately successful artist, surrounded by a hall of mirrors in which your debts are justified; even the most self-destructive decisions you make are unimpeachable; your terminal busyness and tactical approach to relationships is forgiven; your eternal struggle is honorable and the fact that you are completely out of touch is kind of charming and authentic.

It's always easier to see other people's mistakes than your own, right? So I first glimpsed the way art functions as a hiding place when I started working at Socrates, where I couldn't help but figure out that most artists are boring, frightened, self-obsessed, uncurious people that I did not particularly like. I can't count how many times I tried to chat with an artist by bringing up some front-page news item that everyone in a democracy should really know, only to be stopped me my tracks while my peer politely but dismissively explained that he is completely focused on his art, so he has no idea what I am talking about. Drinking at parties was a top priority. Favors and other transactions were the basis for not just friendship, but basic courtesy. Every single artist I worked with was incredibly friendly for the entire time I was useful to them. And I've been shamelessly, sometimes hilariously snubbed by about 70% of the artists I've worked with. Not intentionally, just because I wasn't useful in that moment.

It took me forever to see this tendency toward small, selfish dullness in myself. I assumed that I was the only nice person in a sea of assholes until I decided a few years ago to back away from a friendship with an artist that was too clearly about me tolerating her for potential professional gain, and her teasing and exploitation of that tolerance. This friendship sickened me on myself; it was the first serious reality check in a string of them for me. It was the first step away from art. Subsequent steps have been just as existentially distressing. I am not as curious as I tell myself I am. I think a lot in terms of me, me, me. I am obsessed with my image. It is increasingly clear that I didn't make art because I have some unique, inherently valuable vision. I made art because I was invested in telling a very specific lie about who I am, and because I didn't really know what else to do with myself because I am too insecure to just have a good time.

I know that my job now is to go ahead and fill my own days without shame or insecurity; learn how to look at the world instead of myself; work in a background position instead of having to be the author when I've got nothing to say; be in the world that actually exists instead of a world I create. But I don't yet understand the world that lies beyond what still feels like a nasty, raw set of lessons.

*This is not to say that amazing and completely self-involved art doesn't exist. The very best art does exactly this--it powerfully sucks a viewer into the self-referencing existential vortex the artist creates for her own fucked up little reasons! Bourgeois, deKooning, Kusama, Antin, Kaprow and Burden are the first names that come to my mind. It's just that 99.5% of the people graduating with MFA degrees, or even with gallery representation, are not weird, powerful or interesting enough to create that vortex.