O, that I were a glove upon that hand

Looking in on a gallery opening at the Vermont Studio Center on a cold winter's night.

When I am feeling daunted by the uncertain road ahead to “artistdom,” I often look to artists I admire and am reassured by the stories of how they were able to make it work. Clare would question my logic in this. Clare, who is quoted in her sister Noreen Malone's Atlantic article, ‘The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright,’ has some IM insight that begs a closer look:

CLARE: ok, you know what i always think about when i think of our generation? i read the david brooks book, “the social animal” and while it was only mediocre, he had this one really great bit that really stuck with me—the Greek ideal of “thumos”, which is the lust not for money or success (in the conventional sense) but the lust for glory


we want glory through our ideas-we want to know we matter 


(10:33) the cold truth is that not all of us are brilliant


we are not all big thinkers. Not everyone’s TED talks will change the world


some of us will just dissipate into the ether


(10:34) but it is the digital connectivity, that proximity to these people, that makes us think that perhaps we will succeed as well

We might not be able to get our hands on everything we dream up, but we can get our eyes on it (Romeo-style). Our idols and their creations are more accessible than ever. So what I want to know is, with our all-access passes to stellar minds and their accomplishments, are we any closer to achieving personal greatness in our own fields or do the examples just serve to taunt and tease?

I do think that the insights that we are privy to via social media can be useful in giving us a leg up in terms of technical know-how and career advice. Its advantages are clear if you think about the opposite extreme. Imagine trying to become a painter in the renaissance if you weren’t accepted into a guild. You wouldn’t have access to training, travel, mentorship or materials. Apprentices of master painters would have all the resources and you would be out of luck. Whereas, in this day and age, you can teach yourself just about anything you can type into YouTube.

In this way, the playing field is somewhat leveled. But are more people going to do something inventive with the surplus of resources? Or is the internet chatter just going to cancel itself out -- a bunch of white noise -- with the usual small percentage of unique voices standing out above the rest?

Sometimes it’s painful to read firsthand accounts of startups and starlets and artists who have hit the big time. We don’t just know them from their rare public appearances anymore. We get to read their daily thoughts, become familiar with their shorthand and receive messages from them on our personal phones. The illusion is that this brings us closer. But the major-league baseball player that my friend follows on twitter is not invested in her. (Sorry girl! He’s just not that into you.) There’s no reciprocation.

Tantalus wanted in with the gods. His father was Zeus, so he was above your average mortal stock and got a dinner invitation to Mt. Olympus one day. In order to impress them, Tantalus sacrificed his son and served pieces of him as the main course. When the Gods found out what he’d done, they were repulsed and banished him to the special part of Hades reserved for really bad guys. He was forced to stand in a pool of water underneath a fruit tree and for all eternity be tantalized by their proximity. Whenever he reached for a fruit it would move just out of his grasp and when he bent down to drink, the water would drain.

I realize this is a downer metaphor for reaching for the stars, but I found it useful in fleshing out Clare’s observation. Personally, I am optimistic that our proximity to great things will wet our palates (and palettes), spark some healthy competition and connect us with other people thinking similarly. For instance, I have developed the (hopefully not too annoying) habit of writing people whose work inspires me and thanking them for making awesome things. It is pretty easy to find email addresses and many of them write me back and are supportive of my work. This doesn’t mean that they impart any special success potion, but I do find it affirming and energizing.

A failed video project in which an apple did not spectacularly explode. (Don Hershey and Erin Fitzpatrick at VSC)

Most of the people that I hang out with are involved in some form of art, music or writing. Even though they are from all over and have very different backgrounds, they do have a certain type of ambition in common. As Clare writes, they’re not after nice things or being famous for the sake of being famous. But I think it’s safe to say that they’d all like to make something kickass and have people know it and benefit from it. They want time to spend producing and time to spend enjoying the things that their friends produce.

My friend Erin Fitzpatrick from the Vermont Studio Center has been doing an interview project that might shed more light on the subject. It’s still in the beginning stages, but stay tuned on Fitzbomb.com to hear about how creative people have responded to her polarizing question, “Do you want to be famous?"

Teaser image of an upcoming video project about rituals.

Topping Out

Twice-bundled, pre-cut trees.

Ours is not a culture ruled by ritual, but it’s fun to play out the few tattered traditions that remain, those that have hung on despite our penchant for utility and speed. In my experience, they are usually ghosts from a childhood of church-going, nostalgic reconstructions of the past or simply old habits dying hard. My family embarked on one this morning -- hunting for this year’s Christmas tree.

When I was very little, this was a whole day affair involving tractor rides up and down hills of differently spiked firs and pines. In later years, it was a heated argument between my brother and me over the pre-cut trees down by the lodge. We were supposed to alternate each year as to who made the final decision. But, without fail, we could never quite recall the outcome of the previous year. The debate would involve bribes, blackmail, hand-to-hand combat and the parent pity card. It would usually end in tears and one or both of us running off into the endless rows of trees. Today, we made a pact before we left to agree on something as fast as possible, regardless of quality. (What? We're busy!) So we chose a rather ungainly looking mammoth of a tree, fed it through one of those shrink-wrappers, bungee-chorded it to the car and had erected an eleven foot fraser fir in the middle of our living room in less than an hour.

I’m happy to carry on a tradition with pagan, Germanic roots. But it has evolved so far from its pre-Christian beginnings, when the purpose was to show tribute to the tree spirits, that the communing with nature aspect has all but disappeared. When people first started decorating trees, they were not cut down, but ornamented where they stood, so as to preserve their divine inhabitants. Many Scandinavian and Germanic rituals involved trees because the forest was the dominant element in their landscape and they relied heavily upon it for shelter and heat.

Unrelated to the solstice, Saturnalia or any other winter festival, the ancients also had the tradition of mounting an evergreen tree on top of a completed wooden structure. As the last beam was put into place, a tree would be hoisted up so that the spirits of all the timber involved would still have a place to occupy. This ceremony, called “topping out,” is cause for celebration for the workers and has also migrated to the States. I like to think of the tree towering over our couches as topping out the year.

Pixies Prefer Pixels

As I was looking to Kalan for an image to represent Occupy, New York Magazine was busy casting him for a much bigger role – the poster child of a generation. The article -- “The Kids are Actually Sort of Alright” -- came out this month in NYMag with him on the cover and laid out the lot of American twenty-somethings. The forecast by Noreen Malone, herself of the Millennial generation she was analyzing, was cloudy with only the thinnest of silver linings. The pessimism was amplified by its proximity to the article “P.S. The world is ending this Friday.” More than the many statistics about joblessness (which fail to shock me every time) I was interested in the psychological diagnosis that was offered of us big kids.

We are: idealist, self-confident, floundering, hopeful. Despite the overwhelming circumstantial evidence that says we will fall short in all of the ways that our society usually measures people, we believe that we will succeed in accomplishing our aspirations – abstract and sweeping as they may be. We are alienated from the things we use. We live in a country that doesn’t make many things anymore, so we channel our impulse to create into crafting useless objects like art, crocheted reindeer and blog posts. We may be unemployed but we are culturally wealthy. We have more free, communal resources for communication, entertainment, news and production than we can use. We need less physical paraphernalia because of this. Our valuables are as small and portable as 1s and 0s. They are as transient as we are and as intangible as our goals. Sure it sounds a little like a hokey astrological reading. “You are passionate and headstrong. An unexpected visitor leads to financial gain on the second of the month.” But some of it rings true.

Let’s give our collective character form for a minute. Let’s call him/her Peter Pan. Now perhaps it is easy to see why Kalan fits the bill. A street performance artist, a transient traveler with his band of (lost) puppets, often outfitted in a costume of tights and secondhand ornaments. More oriented toward adventure and stories than a “grown-up” career.

Our generation is playful with gender. Our ideals of masculine and feminine beauty are conflating and more of us are curating our own gender from a combination of traditionally male and female traits. We have all of the sexual freedoms in the world but we are not necessarily using them, perhaps out of narcissism or because we value documentation and analysis over the experiential, or because the old ways of fitting together don’t feel right anymore and it will take time to craft new choreography.

There is a refusal to grow up and settle down with one city, one job or one partner. The Occupy movement has also brought out our drive to fight the pirates. (Those that take more than their share.) Not because we want to take their places but because we want to see the end of pirates altogether. Our fashion has embraced an aesthetic of the cast-off and castaway. To top it off, we can traverse our world in seconds – carrying messages, surfing currents of information and gaining great perspectives from our height. It’s just that, instead of fairy dust, our pixies prefer pixels.

Some new works on mylar that may or may not have anything to do with the above:

Study for Sleeping Beauties, 12"x15"

The DJ, 12"x10"

Performance, 10"x15"

Spilt, 10"x12"

Your Place or Mine, 12"x15"

Melon Morning

I just finished up a month long residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson Vermont. The light coming through my window this morning lit the curtain up like a ruby and splashed the walls with melon green and yellow. Sometimes, like writers record snippets of overheard conversation, I collect colors.

Sleeping Beauties

Laini and I emerged from the Fulton Street subway and turned in slow circles, not sure which way was south with the sun directly overhead. A mailman stopped his cart to ask us where we were headed. “Occupy,” we admitted. He gave us directions to the park and we were off. “If you get a chance,” he called after us, “tell my daughter to come home.”

It was smaller than I’d pictured. I’ve heard others say the same. It’s expanded in our minds through its replication in the media, the kaleidoscopic documentation of each event and the seeds it’s scattered across the globe.

The core group – the sleepers – was an even smaller bunch. You could easily see how much space each one occupied. Their footprints of concave bedding, nested with a small pile of belongings were clumped around the park. They set the example that people could live with little. This was mid-October and the sun was out boosting moral. Although, temperatures have certainly dropped since then and the nights must be brutal.

Tents are outlawed in Zuccotti Park, so I wandered through a blue-tarped terrain that was composed of any shelter or support that couldn’t be labeled as such. I was reminded of the time I spent volunteering in the Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina. Ours was a tent village in a parking lot with its own self-sufficient infrastructure including facilities in a gutted school building. Outside of these one-block worlds, the environment is entirely different – wasteland or bustling financial center. Inside Zuccotti, the mood was festive, like a music festival campground. Each of the protesters seemed to adopt a role to keep the community organism sustained. A women collected trash. Bins of books were up for borrow. Ben and Jerry themselves set up an ice-cream stand and dished out highly-photographed offerings. The occupiers spent their days working, but in a non-Capitalist sense. They would organize events, participate in protests around the city, repeat and amplify speeches, and even perform puppet shows on the subway. Just being present was productive.

Jerry.

The puppeteer was Kalan, a friend from Oberlin who had often ruffled the feathers of our school, which considered itself unable to be phased by liberal antics, with his performance art. He told me he had been sleeping at Occupy with a few breaks since September 10^th. When I asked him how he was doing, he lifted his head slowly and looked at me with big, glassy eyes. “I’m very tired,” he said.

Chilling with Kalan.

As I weaved in and out of bodies and boxes and bold-lettered signs, I was struck by the intimacy of the space. Without being able to cover themselves fully, the protesters were in a vulnerable position -- belly up in the middle of a city known for chewing up its pilgrims and spitting them out. There was no private space and the site was a magnet for public viewing. Nights they had to fight off cold and city noise for sleep, so many caught mid-day naps when they could. Curled up in the sun, they were the ultimate peaceful protesters. Powerful in the satyagraha (Ghandi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance) sense.

Walking around to read the slogans and pick up the pamphlets meant that you were also stepping gingerly over the arm of a sleeping teenage girl or brushing up against two boys curled up in each other’s arms. The sleeping beauties imbued the space with a seductive charm. Some slept underneath their posters, asking to be documented. Unfortunately, the intriguing layout lured media leeches as well as supporters. Kalan and his friend told me that they had recently been photographed by a British tabloid that claimed the closeness of their bodies was evidence of public sex and drug use on Wall Street. I managed to find the article and the photograph online. But reading the slanderous accusations didn’t sully the beauty of the image. Despite themselves, they had circulated a photo that radiated the pleasure of togetherness and the peace of simple living.

Headline reads: "Sex and drugs on tap, who says it's not a political partaaay?"

Persephone Down Under

My apartment in Berlin on one of my last afternoons.

The trees are shedding leaves -- cutting their losses -- as the temperature falls and winter storms roll in. These skeletal trunks have a better chance of standing ground against the pileup of heavy snows. With fewer attachments, the burden of the world is easier to bear. Animals, too, pare down their lifestyles. They take to a simpler, stationary mode, conserving resources. It’s hibernation time and what better place to burrow than a small town in northern Vermont, where the local food shop is well supplied with this season’s maple sugar haul, the woodpile is high and the whiskey is stocked.

I am sitting in my studio in Johnson, looking out over the red mill-turned art space and the river. The morning sun is bright as spring water is cold and bathes the town in cool silver, rather than golden, light.

In thinking about the turning of the seasons, the main changeling that comes to mind is Persephone. An over-sheltered child, her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest, kept her separate from the riffraff of Mt. Olympus. She spent much of her childhood alone, using earth’s topography as her playground. One day, while picking flowers on a hillside, the ground opened up in front of her and she was pulled down to Hell by the king of the underworld. Hades forced her to stay by his side and rule the dominion of the dead. Much to her surprise, the role suited her and she grew into a strong and confident queen. Old friends that visited her there were taken aback by her severity and serenity. But her mother was hysterical with grief and caused a devastating draught. This forced the hand of Zeus, Persephone’s father. He brought Persephone back up to the light. But before she left, Hades fed her a handful of pomegranate seeds. The fates had long ago decreed that anyone who ate or drank in the underworld was doomed to spend eternity there. Therefore, although the lands flourished when Persephone rose to greet them, they retracted again in the winter months (one for each seed) when she returned to claim her thrown in Hell.

Many of our life patterns are cyclical. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the process of making art works in the round. For me, the yin-yang of experiencing and recording keeps my gears turning. First, there is a period of living fully -- gathering new experiences and perspectives and sensations. Then, there is a period of digestion, reflection and, hopefully, birth. (Or the other way around because this is a chicken/egg type of thing.) This Vermont season is a time for patience and production. A lot of looking for reflections in blank surfaces – the iced-over river, notebook paper, white canvas.

My studio at the Vermont Studio Center where Jeff and Don are gearing up for the Halloween festivities.

They're ready now. (Photo by Erin Fitzpatrick)