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.