How Dare I Blog On My Blog - Tumblr Posts

I know that I almost never talk to my followers, and that's because I'm kind of a reclusive person who has a lot of difficulty talking to people online. I just wanted to say that some of you guys have been following me for a really long time, and you're still here, and I really appreciate that. Thank you.

Life update. I am teaching now. I am officially a university art teacher. I am teaching drawing, three different classes of it. The first class went okay, but the subsequent two went very well. Teaching is way more terrifying than taking classes ever was. Here's hoping that I don't ruin everything ever. I've got people believing in me.

Brief update: the artist in residence is letting me use half of her studio, so I have a place to work now. Sweet blessed work space.

This is my life now.

A self-indulgent midnight post about how cute my dog is.

I got my new hockey skates and immediately cut myself badly and had to go to the emergency room. 6 stitches later, I am still laughing at how ridiculous it is.

Thanks for following me, guys.

I’ve been thinking a lot about art and success and the way that we’re trained, in a way, to be insecure about our inadequacies. There’s very much this idea that if you’re not on your way to becoming the great leading artistic visionary of our era, you’re wasting your time. I would like to say I’m above this line of thinking, but I’m really not. I have insecurities and frustrations and annual artistic crises-of-faith at a pace of what seems like twice or thrice a year. 

But, I don’t think that artistic success is a make-it-or-break-it proposition. Doing well enough can be a form of success. I’m not exhibiting work on an international scale (although I’d like to be), and it feels like I’m laboring in obscurity a lot of the time, but I’m actually working in my industry (as an arts professor) and I have my own studio. 

I’m not solving world hunger and I don’t live in a Japanese RPG world where there can be only one chosen one. I’m making objects of aesthetic intrigue. I’m not where I want to be at the moment, but I can be patient and keep working away, and if I never quite get there, is it really the end of the world? 

I'm thinking about making a huge post on what artistic concept is and how to develop it once I am done grading finals. I'm getting a bit (read: massively) tired of it being treated like a nebulous and mysteriously mystic thing, by students especially.

Something on my mind for all my students who follow my blog, and to anyone else who finds it meaningful:

Don’t let anyone else tell you what you have to like or care about. Don’t let other people determine your tastes for you. It doesn’t matter if it’s other artists or teachers or parents or people in places of authority. Your interests are your own. As a younger person, you’re often going to go up again the tastes, tendencies, cultural biases, and indoctrination of people, particularly older people, who believe that your youth means that you don’t know what “good taste” is. 

Your tastes develop over time, yes, as you deepen your interests and delve more thoroughly into the stuff that interests you. That’s the keyword there: YOU care about it. You are the up and coming taste-maker. It’s not your job to make art history categories for what you make; art historians went to school for a long time for that privilege. 

If you’re in a class or a program and you’re butting heads with teachers telling you that your interests are worthless, that’s hard. You have my sympathy. I’ve been there. You’re not getting the direction you need to really find your own footing. I promise you that it will get better if you don’t let yourself get discouraged and you make time to pursue your own interests away from the piercing eyes of insecure instructors. 

Your choices do not need to validate their choices. If you don’t want to go to grad school right out of college, don’t go to grad school. If you don’t want to be a portrait artist, don’t be a portrait artist. Make work in class to get by and in your own time, try to take what you’ve learned and apply it to what actually gets you excited. If you’re in a fine arts program and it feels like everyone around you hates illustration and comic books, but those are your lifeline to feeling a sense of joy, don’t let those people trample all over that. Make your own work and treat it like a quiet rebellion. 

Teachers are people too, and sometimes, they can be petty, judgemental, or closed-minded. Their authority doesn’t make them right.

Studio stuff is suspended for a while, and has been. I got another bad infection right as soon as finals were finished, and after that, a serious family emergency came up. A member of my extended family has stage-four lung cancer and is, in all likelihood, going to die sometime within the next year. Things have been a bit chaotic here. 

I’m trying to get back to it, but in some ways, I also need a mental vacation. I started making Japanese ricebran pickles, nukazuke. They are delicious and healthy. I’m planning a post saying that I am open for portrait commissions. Been reading books, that sort of thing. As artists, we don’t always have to be going full-on, especially when there’s other things going on in our lives. 

I have beautiful children.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. It really helps me see where you’re coming from.

As far as the gallery or museum itself is concerned, it IS a strange and alienating place. It’s weirdly reverent yet antiseptic, has an odd dedication to silence and in grad school, people more pretentious than me would refer to it with such terms as “the temple of art,” where one would demonstrate and exercise “the praxis.” 

I can definitely see where you’re coming from. It’s like a cult of space that expects everyone outside of their sphere to worship their obtuse god. With some artists, it’s worse than others, leading to a level of opacity that’s infuriating to behold.

For me, art of any kind is about communication. It’s about having a conversation with your audience, and playing games with them. It’s part game of pretend, and part mind-game. I can blather endlessly about art, so I’m gonna put the rest of it under a cut.

I got into making installations from a background halfway in theatre and halfway in comic books, video games, weird internet culture, and animation. I wanted to tell stories. The reason I’ve ended up here is because of experiences with art very similar to what you described: a feeling of alienation, or of being in another world.

One particular work was The Coral Reef by Mike Nelson. Every person I have ever met who has seen the work found it deeply horrifying on a visceral level, but I found it to be one of the most exciting things I’d ever experienced. It was like I was exploring the dark dens of alternate reality that you’d only find on conspiracy threads on places on Something Awful.  It felt more raw and more real somehow; the things around me existed in the flesh and my experiences were in direct reaction to them, rather than a two-dimensional abstraction of the thing.

As a medium, it was a very exciting way to communicate an experience or an atmosphere. There were more possibilities that I had felt no one had tried before, or that I hadn’t seen. The novelty of it excites me.

The stories I wanted to tell were about being isolated, alienated, or faced with the kind of uncanny that makes your ears ring, yet at the same time, I wanted people to be curious in spite of discomfort. I wanted to move people from one world to another by walking through a doorway. They’re dark stories, with monsters, and dark empty places, but instead of drawing a frightening or uncomfortable thing and trying to figure out ways to make it inspire that feeling, I decided to go at it from the other direction. Make the right environments, and people will imagine their own horrors.

I want people to create their own versions of those worlds. I don’t want my hand to be the hand of god. By imagining or experiencing something for themselves, people become owners of that thing. It also offers me to indulge my secret desire to be an evil mad scientist by conducting harmless little experiments in psychology and behavior. For me, studio art made a lot of sense. It’s already a strange little alternate dimension. I just shoehorned myself in there and since then, no one’s thrown me out.

That said, I find that the work I make doesn’t represent the vast majority of people who do installation and performance. The work’s a bit more sideshow and spectacle than some people would prefer. 

What it comes down to is that I would like to believe that despite making art to terrify, I am not a terrible person. I want to create an experience that someone will remember and consider later, ask questions about, and yes, possibly be afraid of if that’s their genuine response. The idea of the work not communicating frustrates me. The work somehow being tied eternally to me and my own motivations transcends frustration itself, because I am not the point.

Please, if you’ve time, I’d love to continue discussing this. It’s evident that you are a both a person who thinks about things and a person who enjoys art, so I’d like to know more about some of the qualities of the art that disturbs you or of the work you’ve enjoyed.  

Hey Marissa. Addressing someone online that you've never spoken to by their offline name feels like a tremendous breach of manners, but we'll go with it. I'm an installation artist who builds weird art in contemporary gallery spaces. I also teach at a university situated in the sunny shit-slice of hell that is the American Southwest. I follow you and your art because you seem like a sharp, funny, articulate, and critical person who makes interesting things. [part 1 of 6]

We also have a lot of interests in common, which makes you one of those people I’d love to talk to about art and other interesting things. That said, I’ve been trying to ignore for weeks now how much your post on contemporary art spaces really bothered me. Every time I do, something else reminds me and it comes roaring back. Maybe it’s the bit where you called it alien and inhuman. 

You’re entitled to the experience, and you certainly don’t own anyone an explanation for your opinion, but it felt really frustrating and dismissive. The contemporary art world definitely isn’t immune or protected from criticism; it needs more intelligent discussion and a lot less bad writing. However, I spend more time than seems fair justifying and explaining what I do to the public at large.

I’ve also spent years defending and advocating cartoons, illustration, and pop cultural art to the academic art world. I suppose it feels like a betrayal in a way. It’s an unfair jump to conclusions to think that because someone is smart and has similar interests, that those interests would extend to the kind of art another person is passionate about.

You’re a person who likes art, and I don’t know whether or not I’m overreacting without more discussion and context about what it is that you find exactly so chilling. It felt harsh the first time I read over it. I let it sit for a couple weeks and while it mellowed, it still hurts my feelings in a way I legit cannot figure out, other than the implication that my choice of art mode makes me inhuman. Can we talk about this? I need to know more, and I need clarification. 

Signed, an alien attempting communication via a man-shaped doll made of pink housing insulation. Footnote: the first time I read through the post, I somehow got the idea that you were talking about an installation of a fuzzy pink house MADE of insulation, which would be a superior piece of artwork in a lot of ways.

This is nice. I like this. Thank you for sharing your feelings.

To start: Your feelings are totally fair. While I’m capable of presenting my opinions gently, I like to take exaggerated stances for entertainment. If I say something that hurts someone’s feelings, that’s completely my responsibility. None of that is on you. I think what you’re seeing and feeling makes perfect sense.

So yeah, I wanna assure you that my view of fine art is secretly much more nuanced than I presented in this post. I like going to museums and I can name times when I, too, have been known to defend studio art from the common criticism of “my kid could have done that”.

If that didn’t help, here’s a longer “me me me”-type answer:

Keep reading

Godzilla

Disclaimer: I am a daikaiju-sized Godzilla fan. It’s a sibling tradition for my brother and I to see Godzilla films together, and we have seen literally all of them. When I say all of them, I’m not talking some boxed set with maybe five to ten films in total. I  am talking all 29 Toho productions and both American ones. My favorite are the original from 1954, with a bit of a tie between the Return of Godzilla from 1984 and a couple of other Heisei-era films, primarily Godzilla vs Biollante, Godzilla vs Mothra, and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II. I also have a soft spot for Final Wars, because it it ridiculous and fun. 

I like the ones where Godzilla is treated like the inhuman and chaotic walking natural disaster and vector for tragedy that he truly is. Godzilla is a walking metaphor for nuclear tragedy; he is not and never has been a good guy. There’s a lot of goofy Godzilla films, particularly during the Showa era. However, it’s important to keep in mind what Godzilla IS and where, culturally speaking, the concept comes from. 

I really, really hated Legendary Godzilla. I left the theatre feeling like I’d been robbed, and I felt like if that was what American audiences and fans expected from and loved about Godzilla, that we were operating from profoundly different understandings of the character. I don’t watch Godzilla films to watch a good guy. I watch Godzilla films to see a monster who you only hope will get tired and leave after he fights the other monsters, because if that guy has a second wind, you are absolutely screwed. I especially don’t go to Godzilla films to watch a two hour long Call of Duty cutscene featuring cameos from Good Guy Godzilla. If that’s what you like, that’s fine. You’re entitled to your opinion. I just disagree. 

On the other hand, I’ve seen Shin Gojira twice now within three days. Both times, I’ve left the theatre feeling downright euphoric. For those of you who don’t know, Shin Gojira is clearly a “new” Godzilla whose purpose is to talk about the Great Tohoku Earthquake, tsunami, and ensuing Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster through the lens of a monster movie. It’s far closer in spirit to the original than nearly any other Godzilla film. I’m not going to offer spoilers, but I will say that to those people familiar with how the Fukushima disaster unfolded, certain events and shots in the film are chilling. It’s raw. When Godzilla does get around to his prerequisite rampage, it doesn’t feel like an exciting fireworks show. It feels like genuine tragedy. I didn’t cheer. I worried for the human characters. It was a well-directed film with intelligent directorial choices and a script that pointed a laser at recent national trauma. I felt like it was well-paced, and other than some incredibly corny English language dialogue (did the writer run those lines through Google Translate?), I have no real complaints.

If you like a Godzilla who represents human loss and human tragedy, you will probably dig Shin Gojira. If you like your Godzilla to be the kaiju equivalent of professional wrestling, you may not. That’s my two cents. 

micdotcom:

Hillary Clinton sends a hopeful and gracious message in her concession speech

Had a studio purge today. I’m throwing out five big bags of old art that’s unsellable, embarrassing, low quality, or I simply never want to see again for other, more personal, reasons. I have held on to a lot of things for a long time; some of that stuff is over a decade old. Doing this feels healthy. Part of the reason I’d kept a lot of it was that I wanted to see if my opinion had changed. It hadn’t. If anything, I disliked it more now than when I did it initially. I’ve got room in both my head and my space for new work.

Here are some sculptures from antiquity that fill me with delight.

1-3: The Guennol Lioness (aka Beefy Furry of Old)

4: Alabaster statue of who is presumed to be Ishtar, goddess of fertility, love, war, sex, power, and destruction, as well as the planet Venus. 

5-6: Sumerian couple. Anime is forever. 

7-8: Reaction images.

9: A Hylian shopkeeper.

10: The Emperor Constantine, lesser known Disney prince. 

The great thing, humanity has been able to create pretty accurate, representational art for a long time. It’s possible these were stylistic choices. 

I wanted to do one of those “2016 art in review” things but my work doesn’t fit nicely into monthly boxes. Sometimes, works take months to finish. Sometimes, I did a lot of important experiments that haven’t led to successful results but were very informative and educational. So in lieu of that, I am going to instead do a review of “Art Things Rebecca Did During 2016″

THESE ARE THE ART THINGS REBECCA DID DURING 2016 IN NO PARTICULAR CONSECUTIVE ORDER

SCULPTURE CATEGORY! 

I started making collector’s market style figurines, starting with Sans and Papyrus from Undertale. In progress are some of the cast of Problem Sleuth and the Midnight Crew, and completely finished is my own character Weirdo. Finished, anyhow, until I accidentally knocked her off a table and now I have to repair her. That’s sculpture!

I also recast an older sculpture with kind of a touchy personal history and decided I would make the best of it. It’s much cooler than it used to be, although it’s still in progress.

Speaking of casting, I taught myself how to make molds and cast resin in a way that didn’t end in tears and disaster. I’m not where I want to be with it but I’m better than I was.

And since I was making molds and casting resin, I decided to make a Metric Butt-ton of Shiny Plastic Cephalopods. Sorry they aren’t for sale yet; some of them didn’t react well to my mad science and started leaking a sticky black ooze after about two weeks.

I taught a workshop on anatomical ecorché. It was an adventure.

I completed one of the first totally new pieces of sculpture that I’ve created since grad school. It was a reiteration on a work I made while I was still in grad school that was never quite as good as I’d wanted it to be. It took six months because it was too full of experimentation, but now I think the process will be more streamlined next time. 

I designed an entire product line of Revoltech or Figma-style ball-jointed action figures featuring a large variety of women with different body types, as well as the revolving mechanical ball joints they will use. They’re in the process of being sculpted. It’s not done because it’s a big project. I am personally making a projection of 2017-2018.

PRINTMAKING CATEGORY!

I taught myself two new kinds of fine art printmaking, screen printing and polyester plate lithography. This is one of those things with lots of experimentation and no quality product as of yet, but there will be soon.

I made a big ol’ woodcut that’s 2 feet wide by 4 feet tall. This is a test print. I’m printing the edition over winter break.

I started doing drypoint etchings for the first time since 2009, but on plexiglass this time, and that’s been more fun than should be allowed. Art is more fun when you get to do it on your own terms. No pictures yet. Just wait for it, I got special graphite ink so the prints look like pencil drawings.

I have a lot of neat limited edition prints planned for 2017; watch this space.

I started selling open edition prints in my shop. And a couple people bought them! That was exciting.

I recently got my studio rearranged so that I can use my professional inkjet and my plotting cutter. No pictures because it’s not that exciting, but I’m excited because hey! I can do more!

DRAWING CATEGORY!

I did more figure drawing. That’s always an awesome thing because a: it makes me happy, and b: it makes me better at drawing. 

I did Inktober? I know, I’m still surprised. But there’s 31 ink drawings, and I’m pretty sure I’m the one who did them. Some of these might get to be prints, watch this space.

I did a couple of other random drawings that I’m pretty reasonably happy with but they didn’t belong to a theme or anything. Here’s a dead bird done in fountain pen.

PAINTING CATEGORY???

I did 30 paintings in a month. As someone who doesn’t really consider myself a painter, that was a surprise. I have no formal training in it and the bulk of my painting experience is purely digital from back in the “I want to be a concept artist” days. I suppose my not-a-painter card has been revoked, because I actually decided I really like the paint I was using. I have plans to smear more colored mud on more surfaces to create more images.

I did some other paintings too, both digital and analogue. 

GENERAL STUDIO STUFF CATEGORY!

I made a logo and have been working on a lot of brand identity. 

I opened a shop! Here it is. I need to put more stuff in it. Soon. 

I actually started keeping track of the financial business-y side of things. That’s not visually stimulating so there’s no pictures, but it’s important, so I’m mentioning it. 

I also started doing research on teaching private art lessons and workshops in my studio, which I just found out I’m able to do with my insurance, so that’s something that I hope I get off the ground in 2017.

SO IN CONCLUSION:

I was feeling pretty crummy last night because it felt like I didn’t accomplish everything I wanted to accomplish, but it actually looks like I did a lot? All of this was in addition to my teaching job. Funny story, but teaching at a university takes up a lot of my time. I taught two new classes that I’ve never taught before, too. 

A lot of people have said 2016 was a dumpster fire of a year. In a lot of ways, it was, both for me personally and for society at large. Societally speaking, I can’t see 2017 being a whole lot better. However, my goal and hope for next year is that some of what I’m doing will actually start to get off the ground. Here’s to that.

someone stop me.