Deborah Fisher

Just Looking

I like looking at art as a consumer instead of as a maker. As a maker, I looked at more art faster, sorting rapidly into Useful and Not Useful at twenty paces. Yesterday Joel and I did the Whitney, the two of us looking at art together for the first time since we both decided to do other things than art, and the experience took hours because the question surrounding each object had nothing to do with us. Instead of cruising the galleries as if we had a stopwatch running, making snap judgements about that handful of things we could do something with, we actually parked in front of each object and wondered why it existed at all. Why we should be looking at it. What it's here for. What this experience even is.

Turns out the experience of looking in this way is deliciously open, almost gravity free. Time really does go away when you're not approaching art expediently. You really do feel stuff. Make discoveries. I had always relegated Hopper to Interesting, But Of Limited Use bin, and so each Hopper experience I had under my belt before yesterday was cursory. I like the inside-outside peeping tom thing he does, and have always included an image or two of his work when lecturing about space. He's a good gateway to Barbara Hepworth in a beginning sculpture class, because everyone gets Hopper and because oddly enough we live in a world so full of imagery that it's easier for a lot of students to see what you mean by the word "space" in an image than it is in a thing that takes up literal space. These formal ideas about Hopper have pleased me. But I did not understand, because he had always been Of Limited Use, how awesome it feels to stand in front of these works and feel your body create the sensation of the outside of the building, and the view in, and delight in the stolen reveal of naked flesh, or upturned ass, or pensive thought, in this way that really does simulate or represent Hopper sharing his private moment with you and you alone. I can't get over the fact that this representation of intimacy works in a crowded museum. And I don't even know what to say about the Paul Thek exhibit, because I have always found him Useful and so knew how great this work makes me feel. The difference between just enjoying Thek and using him is impossible for me to put words on just yet. Maybe there's no need.

I don't quite have a language for this shift in my own perception, which I may or may not want to keep documenting. And I don't quite have a way to talk about what looking at art is for or like now. Looking has become luscious and shloopy and open ended, and I think of writing as a way to focus, and I don't know what to focus here yet. What I do know right now is that I apologize for teaching art appreciation classes before this experience. It's as if I decided I was qualified to teach a sex appreciation class because I go out and have sex constantly and therefore obviously know everything about it. But I didn't even see that my practice is limited to quickies in bathrooms and the back seats of cars.

Welcome To The Next Level

So, in aikido I've been focusing a lot of energy on being thrown well. I've been trying hard to listen to what is actually happening and respond to that instead of checking out and either throwing myself or leaving myself behind. Particularly because I am newish, working from this point of view involves investing attention in the person I am working with and forgetting myself a bit.

The instant benefits I get from this focus are going to sound repetitive to the dedicated reader. In the process of getting a BFA and MFA and building an art career, you are expected to focus relentlessly on yourself and your vision, with no simultaneous humility-building activity like submitting to the rigors of a craft or technique. As a result, your ego can at first become swollen and distended, and eventually grow into a malignancy that blocks your sphere of action, and even your field of vision. Anyone, talented or mediocre, who leaves this system winds up having to either excise or embrace this massive ego-fortress that the MFA Industrial Complex has helped them build. Even though shrinking one's own ego feels nothing less than absolutely fucking impossible, I do honestly believe that most people* are going to find it easier to get over themselves than they are likely to find anything truly interesting for other people from within that deep space inside themselves.

I train because I really need to submit to a humility-building activity. I need to be wrong a lot, I need to be in an environment where rank is much more important than ideas. I need to be where you are a beginning student for many years. And in that environment, I need to organize myself around listening. That's my homework. It's good homework for me. I really do feel happier and more creative. I've stopped hating art because my ego can handle looking at it now. Who knows what lies on the horizon? Life is great!

So here's a new wrinkle. It turns out that the next thing to work on is this clear and understandable bias I have against me--what I am doing and what I need. Because of my homework, I tend to focus too much on accepting what is happening externally and working with that, even when it means that I am sacrificing my own learning and power. A couple of weeks ago I was training with someone who's all about generating power. And I like power and have this listening homework and it's really hard not to get all whooped up when I am training with someone who wants to go fast and hard. So I was getting super sloppy when it was my turn to do the throwing. I was a huge chemical reaction to the stimulation of being thrown hard. I kind of forgot that fifty percent of the time I'm supposed to be focusing on doing the best technique I can to him.

Ruth, a teacher that I slightly idolize who is in the video above, stopped me and said that if I need to slow down and understand the technique, he will adjust. And it was true, and it seems like such an easy thing, but it's a really difficult switch to flick! I listened for four turns, and reacted as cleanly and openly as possible to what he was doing, thinking about myself in terms of safely accepting it. In these four turns I got thrown so hard that all I wanted to do is throw him hard back. And then I stopped, took a breath, absorbed his first attack, which was intense and fast, and instead of reacting to that, tried as hard as I could to move slowly, put my mind on where my body should be

(in this case, sliding behind him so that I can see his shoulder blades)

and keeping my hands, which have his neck and his elbow, in front of me. And not thinking about him at all beyond that. Thinking about me. Where are my hips? Are my hands connected to them? Do my feet have a strong connection to the mat? Are my shoulders relaxed? Am I standing up straight?

Now, let me be clear that this is very easy to write and next to impossible to consistently do. I don't want to leave you thinking that I can enter some zen state when someone tries to punch me in which I calmly turn my focus to my own actions and allow the attacker to disappear. The founder of aikido said "not to look at the attacker, not to look at the weapon. You should be looking like you are looking at a faraway mountain." But there is video of one of my teachers who trained with O Sensei kind of snorting as he quotes this and saying that this is an attitude that develops over many years, that it's an attitude you develop manually.

This resonates with me because everything true I've ever learned I've learned with my hands and body. And while I emphatically did not manage to slow down this powerhouse partner, I did get this amazing glimpse into what I was doing. And I saw the fork in the road, and saw what I should be trying to do to move on to the next part of this journey or whatever. I didn't realize before this that I was entering practice on the attacker's terms. I was thinking about how fast he was coming at me, how hard he would be to throw, how hard I wanted to throw him because I desperately wanted to "listen," and v. 1.0 of "listening" meant "keeping up."

*Not all people! I've been looking a lot at Brody Condon's performance work lately. He operates like none other from the inside of this ego-fortress, and should keep doing the fucked up shit he's doing, even though it's sometimes kind of wrong.

I Found Your Blog....

I think that the first sign of real success as a blogger is having to deal, in the real world, with people that you really don't want reading your blog coming to you and saying that they have read your blog. This has been happening to me more and more lately, in part because I am just doing more things that make people want to google me before I show up and in part because I am moving around a lot laterally and making new friends. For many years, this blog has been by an artist and as near as I can tell, for about 100 other artists. Now it's kind of all over the place, as am I. And so it sits here on the internet, a record of new ground covered haphazardly. A long-ass digital skidmark that stretches from here all the way back to 2006.

There are lots of reasons to be cool with this. I think the posts I've done about moving away from art have helped some people feel less guilt or anxiety. And the posts that I've done about aikido are probably boring as hell to non-MA geeks, but have helped out my daily life as I figure out how to live a little differently. This is what a blog is for: it's a platform for peer-to-peer generosity, and for putting who you want to be outside yourself, so that you have no excuses. But as both the writing and the audience broaden and I move away from the court-jestery role of artist, in which I am fundamentally powerless and the only authority I have is to say whatever the fuck I want, the Grand Theory of Blogging stops being theoretical.

The Grand Theory of Blogging states that there is nothing to hide, that all the fun stuff--opportunity, interest, connection, cool projects--grow out of the generous sharing of oneself, and that it is fundamentally diminishing to attempt to protect your privacy in a world where everyone has access to everything anyway. In other words, I am already googleable. Since that's true, the most powerful thing I can do is ensure that the first thing you find when you google my name is me. If I am putting my real me out there, then I am narrowing the gap so that I can be helpful to you and connect. While I am at it, I can also set some expectations--for example, don't expect me not to swear and don't expect me not to tell you the truth, even if the truth is a difficult one. I leave you with a clear sense of who I am that is more than a resume--that is more about what drives me than what I have done.

The only person I don't want reading my blog is the person who reads it and tells me that they "found" it like it's a dirty secret. This person is concerned that it is overly tender, and worries to me about how much I am putting out there. When I am in that conversation, the Grand Theory stops being something that I believe or say, and has to become something that I actually enact or apply. My first stabs at application have focused too much on how this person is missing the point. I've been explaining that this accusation of tenderness is absurd, that the content of this blog is actually considered, that there are a lot of things I only write about privately, that I am a huge fan of boundaries, that I'm not Jennifer Ringley. That's just arguing. It turns all that presence I've been working to build into distance.

The cool thing about the Grand Theory is that it is the device that makes this kind of arguing unnecessary. In this conversation in which I am being accused of tenderness, I am standing fully before a person who, because they have read my blog, knows how I can and cannot help, who I think my best self is, how I struggle as we all do and how I specifically aspire to overcome those struggles. The conversation started because that best foot is forward: I am a truth teller. I admit my mistakes. I have a specific trajectory and a way of organizing my world and making it meaningful. I have limiting habits of mind that I work to catapult over. Because I am a known quantity, I actually have the luxury of shutting my mouth in that moment and listening to what that person is telling me about who they are and, in this specific instance, what they fear.

Ukemi

In aikido, there's the person who throws and the person who is thrown. I've been working on being thrown better. It's called ukemi . It's mostly about listening to what the person who is throwing you is actually doing, and responding to that in a way that keeps you safe. You don't want to bail or throw yourself or anticipate--you want to just let the throw happen to you. You want to face your partner and look at them the whole time. You even want to look at them instead of looking at the mat, which is where you are going, and this is really hard to do. You want to keep being present and connected without resisting. You want to relax. A lot. But not so much that you lose your core strength or integrity. And you want to balance all this giving and allowing stuff with a lot of boundary and protection stuff. Definitely keep your mouth shut. Stay upright--don't lead with your face! Make your partner take your balance instead of just giving it to them. Don't leave any room between your face and something your partner can hit you with, like their arm or shoulder. Turn your head to protect your adam's apple. Look for openings. When it's time to go, get yourself low to the ground first. Keep your head off the mat. Once you are hitting the mat, the goal is to do it quietly, without slapping your feet or your legs (or kidneys) unnecessarily on the mat. There are people I train with who slide out of a throw like a snake sliding out of a tree. I am definitely not yet one of those people.

There are practical benefits to this focus. Fifty percent of each class is falling down, and the tiny injuries have been piling up. I've got sore knees, cricky-cracky elbows, pulled muscles in my ribs (ouch!) and legs, and the more conscious I am of how I am falling, the less old I feel later. But there's more to it than that. Being thrown well is a function of listening to what's actually happening, so that you can avoid throwing yourself harder than your partner intended, or worse, underestimate the force and leave part of your flesh behind.

There's a depth to that listening part, to understanding that there is a gap between what is actually happening and what I think is happening. And this depth is soothing because I am such a beginner and spazz, and am still often flummoxed. I feel like I am never going to stop being told that I am moving from my shoulders instead of from my center. I don't know when I will stop moving backwards on accident during this one technique that depends on moving consistently forward. I am getting really used to being told that I am sticking my butt out, and it's getting easier to laugh at the fact that the one technique I can't stick my butt out for is the one technique that requires it.

Training your body to do what your mind wants is a sometimes humiliating process in which what's most interesting are these disconnects--these gaps between what you know and what you do. I began making sculpture because I found so much comfort in the way the world outside your mind is unarguably what it is. The wall is bearing a load or it is not. The weld holds when you beat it with a hammer or it doesn't, and nothing you can say makes it otherwise. You can have an idea in your head, but you will make the sculpture that reality will allow you to create.

The limitations of thinking sculpturally have on this blog become a litany. Depending on the physical making of the physical world to tell you what's real creates artistic needs that nobody can sustain forever. Looking exclusively at the relationship between human and built object avoids all this meaty territory in which we really do make reality with words and ideas and interactions. The macho persona a sculptor (well… this sculptor anyway) creates is more about hiding and fear than it is about exploring. Strength is always a limited resource. Blah, blah blah.

But there is a doorway here. It's entirely possible that I am a better artist than I think, and that the kind of art I should be making hasn't happened to me yet. Not in a way that I've been able to listen to.

Jackass and Context

I saw Jackass 3D last night and laughed so hard that my stomach muscles hurt this morning!

Jackass has been art appreciation curriculum for me for a long time. When attempting to explain contemporary art to non-artists, I usually start with (a better version of) this clip of Dave England shitting in a display toilet in a hardware store. I do this because it grounds us in the abject, crappy world of contemporary art, and because Dave England shitting in public is really easy to have an opinion about. The biggest hurdle non-artists face when looking at art is the culture of head-nodding that pervades art and blocks intelligent discussion. Non-artists see more clearly than artists that there's something scammy about galleries. You can put just about anything in a cavernous, empty white room and guard it with a cadre of serious-looking white girls in pointy shoes who look right through you, and when you do that you make that thing into something that everyone has to find very important, even if it's actually stupider than Dave England shitting in a display toilet in a hardware store. The fact that Jackass is an MTV product and not a Gagosian product has, if you'll permit the pun, a laxative effect on discussion. Students are compelled by the act itself to ask why? The second question is usually how, and whether or not they personally could usually follows that, and imagining what it must have been like to be the store owner or a patron follows and suddenly all the defensive "I could do that" walls that kids in a mandatory art appreciation class throw up are tumbling down and everyone in the room is experiencing something intense. It's either revulsion or admiration, but it springs out of empathy for the artiste and is at the same time relentlessly focused on whether or not the gesture works.

Once that orientation of empathy has been dialed in, all these other performance art videos become relevant, and they become a foundation upon which it is possible to head out into the galleries and actually talk about a lot of different kinds of art, from the perspective of empathizing with the individual artist and his or her quest, and whether or not that quest works for the students:

But it's interesting that if you try to show Shoot first, or Vito Acconci spitting into his hands, or even Bill Wegman's early work, you'll get blank stares. It's a function of context, but I don't think that this is simply about Jackass being a known quantity. Johnny Knoxville begs for empathy in a way that Abramovic, Burden or Acconci simply assume, and that a contemporary example like Ryan Trecartin simply demands.

I don't know whether begging for empathy is about MTV needing a different product than Mary Boone because it serves a different market or if it's about a humility that is inherent to the Jackass crew. I'm assuming that the pressures of one context are simply different than the pressures of another, and that this difference demands different mindsets. And I have no idea whether this makes Jackass better or worse as art. But it's a consistently useful lever.

What Did I Expect?

Most of my adult artistic life I've been thinking a lot in terms of increasing my self awareness, limiting pain, being happier, figuring out how to live. My graduate school career was so fruity. I learned how to meditate, got lost in aikido, stared into the ocean, swam with dolphins, fell very deeply (and abidingly) in love. These fruity pursuits are all still incredibly important to me, I have followed up on everything but swimming with dolphins. Kim MacConnel, artist and yogi, sat me down once and told me in a very no-bullshit voice that my spiritual or life path was at cross purposes to my career, that art and enlightenment are directly at odds, and that I had a big choice to make.

Well, I don't know anything about enlightenment, and sitting in my UCSD studio in 2001 it was way too easy to point to Kim's own substantial career and dedicated yoga practice, label him a hypocrite who wanted to fuck with my happiness and kick the man off my committee. But he was deeply right. He told me that art is a function of attachment, and this, for me anyway, is true. Artists I understand make art because the experience of this surrounding world is intense and important and desperately needs to be shared. What I've been prioritizing for the last eleven years or so is attaining a certain amount of detachment. I want to get over needing to be strong and exchange that strength for a different kind of power that comes when you can walk away, or stop thinking about something, or let go. I've tasted the incredible leverage that comes with detachment, and for the first time I seem to have attained at least a little bit of it in just about every aspect of my life, and of course you're staring at the biggest remaining attachment I have--my need to understand it all in front of an audience.

I write because the sensation of detachment feels lazy, and at times indefensible, and this sensation of indefensible laziness scares my puritanical self more than anything I have ever done. But you always get out what you put in, and this sensation that I am feeling on my sofa in the middle of the afternoon right now is what I've been working toward for a really long time. It's still entirely possible of course that Kim is wrong and that there is such a thing as an art of detachment. But I don't see or get it, and I have to go ahead and commit anyway. I need to trust that I've made this choice.

The Alchemy

So yesterday I went back to Chelsea for the first time in a long while, and this snapped a lot of things into focus. We started at the Roxy Paine show at James Cohan, and this is going to sound so obnoxious but it was soothing to see that I am not leaving a void in the conversation by stopping production. Roxy is basically saying what I want to say as an artist, and is doing it way better than I was because he so obviously needs to do it. His work is wound like a spring, brimming with relentless intensity and questioning, ruminating worry, doubt and anxiety. He's definitely not having fun, but he is obsessed. He's saving himself. He needs to turn that shit into a gift or he will drown in the cesspool of his own consciousness.

This existential alchemy--spinning angst, narcissism or fear into someone else's enthrallment or delight--is what turns art into art. It is the very definition of vulnerability to turn your most destructive thoughts into a gift, and I am always humbled in the presence of it. I have been using a lot of different lenses to describe why I don't make art anymore and they are all kind of true, but it really does boil down to the alchemy. Yes, yes, yes. I was mostly making art to prove that I could, and to create an identity and escape my own fears, and those are not sustainable motivations when you're self-aware. The MFA Industrial Complex does professionalize being an artist in a uniquely demoralizing way that feels masochistic to both understand and participate in. I really did use art to hide more than I used art to discover, and there's a lameness in that, blah blah blah. But you know, the bottom line is that for me art stopped being a live-saving alchemical gift and turned into a grueling litany of transactions and chores. I don't mind doing transactions and chores, but not for others at my own expense. No wonder I was angry!

I probably should have gone to look at some art sooner, because I really have been sitting here for two years thinking that the alchemy itself is probably bullshit, and that's been making me feel so jaded and empty, and it was unnecessary to put myself through that, to go that far. What a relief to remind myself that art is more than a shitty value proposition; a great way to throw away twenty years of your life while still feeling "busy;" a hotbed of young scared kids in skinny jeans desperate to be heard!

There is still something there, and I feel five hundred pounds lighter because for the first time in my life I am looking at it without my own killing thoughts

(garden variety desire and ambition, really)

getting in the way.