MANIFESTO
2017
I make art because I’m confused and it is a way of finding clarity.
I make art because I’m alone and it is a way of finding relationship.
I make art because things get ugly fast around here and it is a way of apprehending glory.
I make art because ugliness in art is far better than ugliness between living beings.
I make art because nothing is simple and even making apparently simple or “direct” art can be a way of embracing and revealing complexity.
I make art because most of my spiritual mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers have made art.
I talk with them through the language of art, even the ones I’ve never met like Ana Mendieta.
I make art for both self and other.
Art-making protects solitude just as it creates communities and the spaces for productive conversations.
Art-making is my non-alienated labor and has intrinsic value outside the marketplace and concerns of prestige or lack thereof.
Art-making is contingent; we are always vulnerable. It is a rare and precious set of circumstances in which one can develop fully as an artist, and being a genuine artist is usually hard-won.
I make art as part of the struggle to become more and more genuine in a world that often rewards the counterfeit or proxy.
I make art because it is both reality and illusion, and just as in life it can be hard to tell which is which.
Art-making digs into layers of truth and illusion and excavates them, revealing both their overlap and some crucial distinctions between them.
Art is always a collaboration of some kind, and prompts me to discover possibilities for new collaborations.
Art-making is a training in courage and promotes dignity for my overly apologetic or doubting self.
Art-making is raw and vital, visceral energetic expression.
Art-making carries the hopeful energy of creativity.
Art-making is an exercise - and defense - of freedom.
Art-making is imaginative and activates the part of myself that is visionary.
Art-making can be clumsy and there can be great fun in fumbling around a bit.
Art can tolerate my perfectionism but gets its revenge on me by always being flawed.
I make art so I can learn to make better art.
I make art because it naturally elicits feedback and sooner or later I'll come to realize how my art functions and how it fails.
Art-making benefits from a sense of humor, and grows my capacity for laughter.
Some failures aren't funny. Art is high-stakes.
Art-making is problem-solving.
Art-making fuels endless learning.
The inventions of artists point me to my capacity for resourcefulness.
Art-making is touch. Intimacy with the real.
I make art because hands have intelligence.
Even as technologies become more and more elaborate and sophisticated, it comes down artists to use them in ways that make human life richer and more meaningful.
Art encompasses both continuity and change, and comforts me with familiarity even as it challenges me to see, think, or feel differently in what might amount to some crucial shifts in my worldview.
Art-making is primordial.
We are embodied, just like art, which is an act of embodiment.
I make art because it both is and isn't I, me, or mine. It involves processes of identification and letting go that deepen and widen me at the same time.
I make art because I’m forging an ongoing friendship with being.
It can get rocky sometimes.
Sometimes, what seems to be amazing art from my perspective is a piece of shit to another. Or the other way around.
I make art because everything is relative, and art does not deny this fact but corroborates it.
I make art because in fact, I am not alone.
I make art because, in fact, I have some clarity. Making art serves to increase that, even if the clarity that comes regards what I don't know.
I make art because it bridges certain divides, like between then and now, or here and there, or you and me.
I make art because it is actual concrete evidence of forging an ongoing friendship with being.
Whether we love or merely tolerate, and whether we agree with or challenge what artists do, art persists.
It just gives and gives and gives.