What is an Artist?
At the start of wanting to make anything, I feel myself in my mind diving into light liquid. It normally feels like a snap, a bounce, a fast motion with ripples. There’s no pattern in how the desire to be creative starts, but I know how it goes once it starts.
It’s like: something falls, clicks, moves and there is a need to make the first thing, Sometimes there’s a plan first or sometimes I just make the thing in full. It then waits untouched for a while, very often when it is revisited there’s a realisation that the first thing wasn’t the thing trying to express itself, The thing to express is something around it and enveloping it, but not it.
Yesterday a Youtube video on twee prompted fervid embarrassment as I deliberated whether my 2010’s wardrobe and indeed elements of my personality could be read as twee. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is overanalyzed, stale, obsolescent, but I’m reminded of the trope a lot. Not really from people who engage in ‘cultural criticism’ but from well-meaning individuals who want to draw a physical comparison to characters they valence as charming, often in split-second subconscious decisions. People who’d like to remark on my interests perhaps to exalt, trivialize or just make conversation will sort of assign me a flavor of the MPDG chip brand.
F NO I DIDN’T MEAN TO I JUST GOT BANGS CUZ MY FOREHEAD WAS SO SMALL I HATE HER A LITTLE TBH ME AND MY BEST FRIEND WE HUNG OUT EVERY DAY SHE WAS THE SELENA GOMEZ TO MY DEMI LOVATO THE PARIS HILTON TO MY NICOLE RICHIE SHE’S STILL SO COOL
In following the murmurs of cultural analysis prompted by that video, and by a desire to figure out the reality of my style and relationship with beauty in the 00s to 10s, I ended up with 1,980 words on a Pages doc. This was writing about personal tension with twee, the feels-good-bad-resentment of achieving likeability or positive external perception at the cost of that perception being relatively hollow or incorrect, how I grew up in relative cultural peripherality but always had an ear against the wall of the room where ‘the culture’ was taking place.
A PHOTO IN MY HOME STUDIO CONTAINING: (1) SELFIE IN A MIRROR GIFTED TO MY SISTER REGIFTED TO ME (2) A FAN FROM MUSEO DEL PRADO FROM MY HUSBAND BEFORE HE WAS (3) A MILLENIAL LIPSTICK SHADE VESPER (4) TROPHY LOVINGLY GIVEN TO ME BY MY FRIENDS FOR MY COMMITTMENT TO FAILING AND LAUGHING (5) RATBURGER CASE GIFTED TO ME BY A DEAR FRIEND SORELY MISSED NOW DEAD 3 YEARS (6) CHERRY PASTILLES FROM EATALY WITH THE GIRLS
There wasn’t just writing, there was also a spectrum of ingenuous-innocence-artifice to astute-worldliness-substance where I placed characters like Taylor Swift, Alexa Chung, Margot Tenenbaum, Summer Finn, Zooey Deschanel, Ramona Flowers and Clementine Kruczynski on it.
Old photos of myself from 2003 to 2018 were analyzed, I picked apart my clothing, hair, what people told me about my appearance, and fashioned my personality as a mega-club within which entry to various themed rooms was possible.
My ‘fashion choices’ reflected which room had the loudest music coming out of it on the day. There were several paragraphs where I tugged at the seams of gender and presentation and found not much more than it depends, it varies, I don’t have consistent answers, I’m a girl woman woman girl. It was an attempt to situate myself inside / outside sub-or-culture(s) knowing I was never in them.
Lorem Ipsum... IN MY BRIGHT TEENAGE BEDROOM BEING NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS BEING EXACTLY LIKE OTHER GIRLS I PAINTED A MURAL ON THE WALL SAYING ‘life is as good as you make it’
This meretricious scrutiny of my experience didn’t make me feel like I had dived to the bottom of the pool. I meant everything I wrote but it was not what I wanted to explore. What was the point of analysing my past relationship with beauty, clothing or pop culture? What was the writing supposed to be about? What is an artist in a world where everyone can make everything but not everyone can make that thing? Is it about being a mirror to your times? Is it about expressing yourself? Is it venial or lazy to ask questions and not answer them?
It’s like: something falls, clicks, moves and there is a need to make the first thing, Sometimes there’s a plan first or sometimes I just make the thing in full. It then waits untouched for a while, very often when it is revisited there’s a realisation that the first thing wasn’t the thing trying to express itself, The thing to express is something around it and enveloping it, but not it.
Yesterday a Youtube video on twee prompted fervid embarrassment as I deliberated whether my 2010’s wardrobe and indeed elements of my personality could be read as twee. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is overanalyzed, stale, obsolescent, but I’m reminded of the trope a lot. Not really from people who engage in ‘cultural criticism’ but from well-meaning individuals who want to draw a physical comparison to characters they valence as charming, often in split-second subconscious decisions. People who’d like to remark on my interests perhaps to exalt, trivialize or just make conversation will sort of assign me a flavor of the MPDG chip brand.
In following the murmurs of cultural analysis prompted by that video, and by a desire to figure out the reality of my style and relationship with beauty in the 00s to 10s, I ended up with 1,980 words on a Pages doc. This was writing about personal tension with twee, the feels-good-bad-resentment of achieving likeability or positive external perception at the cost of that perception being relatively hollow or incorrect, how I grew up in relative cultural peripherality but always had an ear against the wall of the room where ‘the culture’ was taking place.
There wasn’t just writing, there was also a spectrum of ingenuous-innocence-artifice to astute-worldliness-substance where I placed characters like Taylor Swift, Alexa Chung, Margot Tenenbaum, Summer Finn, Zooey Deschanel, Ramona Flowers and Clementine Kruczynski on it.
Old photos of myself from 2003 to 2018 were analyzed, I picked apart my clothing, hair, what people told me about my appearance, and fashioned my personality as a mega-club within which entry to various themed rooms was possible.
My ‘fashion choices’ reflected which room had the loudest music coming out of it on the day. There were several paragraphs where I tugged at the seams of gender and presentation and found not much more than it depends, it varies, I don’t have consistent answers, I’m a girl woman woman girl. It was an attempt to situate myself inside / outside sub-or-culture(s) knowing I was never in them.
This meretricious scrutiny of my experience didn’t make me feel like I had dived to the bottom of the pool. I meant everything I wrote but it was not what I wanted to explore. What was the point of analysing my past relationship with beauty, clothing or pop culture? What was the writing supposed to be about? What is an artist in a world where everyone can make everything but not everyone can make that thing? Is it about being a mirror to your times? Is it about expressing yourself? Is it venial or lazy to ask questions and not answer them?
For three months now I’ve been trying to get my hair cut. Julia Fox talked about dreaming of “living off grid and like pumping water from my own well having the solar panel I know, it’s like that’s like how deep I want to go, like that’s what off grid is though, it’s like you have a well in your property and you have solar panels and it’s all solar energy maybe there’s like a like middle ground or Upstate New York, I don’t know…”.
My home is between two lakes, two forests, several fields, moss, so green, foxes, big city roads, stabbings, city buildings, nobody comes here, but all people are here. When I want to be in the city I am, but I am never in the city if I don’t want to be. Most days I’m making things in my home studio. Trying to get my hair cut or my nails done is like trying to push wrong poles of those two giant oval magnets together: it repels. I don’t think about other people getting their hair cut or nails done, my husband has clockwork haircuts on the cycle recommended by the barberess.
ONE TIME I HAD MY HAIR CUT IN THE CLUB THE UNDERCUT GREW OUT WEIRD AND BRIEFLY I HATED IT
Last week in Paris I walked by a nail salon I’d read so much about with an image of mignonne piano nails done a while ago I wanted to repeat but I can’t do it! It’s not about trying to find a different kind of beauty, nor about growing my hair.
It’s not about resistance or existence or complying with or subverting beauty standards; as much as those are omnipresent gates around the woman-building in my mind. It’s the absence of meaning, my appearance is off-grid, but it’s not really because it doesn’t know about a/the grid. I’m not trying to obfuscate, but it’s dawning on me that sometimes the absence of understanding is what you’re supposed to get. The twee video embarrassed me when tension in beauty was made visible because that tension wouldn’t have existed if my focus was was the space between and around dressing a certain way, or not doing my eyebrows or my hair.
It’s about the hypocrisy of writing to better understand my life and fashion choices and rightfully claiming cultural peripherality but placing culture at the top, in the center, then building out theories of why and how I parsed status markers or coolness in the 00s. That’s not really why those choices were made. To pretend there was consistent meaning behind wearing polka dots, tea dresses, having long hair and bangs would be dishonest. To center the culture is to pretend there was no play. To center the culture or my environment, or whatever I was reading or watching is perhaps the only way I could’ve learned what I liked wearing or why I liked it. To understand myself from that place helped me understand past subversion, approval, exclusion. Simultaneously the process of clarification from the center obscured some truth in my relationship with external expression.
In selling my art (coming soon, I urge you to start saving) some kind of beauty either un/conventional undeniably furthers commercial success. Virality is almost guaranteed through looksmaxxing. I’m not saying I won’t, I’m not saying I will.
There are barely any areas in my life requiring suppression, editing or refinement of the self. My lifetime commitments are made in that the people I want to be around for the rest of my life are already there. There’s no workplace I need to bring a partial self to. I feel drawn to propelling and enabling fundamental change in the lives of a handful, Beyond the initial, sizeable dopamine hit of being well-liked, there is not much value in mass appeal.
I came to play. For now my physical avatar has to explore the absence of meaning as much as presence.
Questions for the culture:
My home is between two lakes, two forests, several fields, moss, so green, foxes, big city roads, stabbings, city buildings, nobody comes here, but all people are here. When I want to be in the city I am, but I am never in the city if I don’t want to be. Most days I’m making things in my home studio. Trying to get my hair cut or my nails done is like trying to push wrong poles of those two giant oval magnets together: it repels. I don’t think about other people getting their hair cut or nails done, my husband has clockwork haircuts on the cycle recommended by the barberess.
Last week in Paris I walked by a nail salon I’d read so much about with an image of mignonne piano nails done a while ago I wanted to repeat but I can’t do it! It’s not about trying to find a different kind of beauty, nor about growing my hair.
It’s not about resistance or existence or complying with or subverting beauty standards; as much as those are omnipresent gates around the woman-building in my mind. It’s the absence of meaning, my appearance is off-grid, but it’s not really because it doesn’t know about a/the grid. I’m not trying to obfuscate, but it’s dawning on me that sometimes the absence of understanding is what you’re supposed to get. The twee video embarrassed me when tension in beauty was made visible because that tension wouldn’t have existed if my focus was was the space between and around dressing a certain way, or not doing my eyebrows or my hair.
It’s about the hypocrisy of writing to better understand my life and fashion choices and rightfully claiming cultural peripherality but placing culture at the top, in the center, then building out theories of why and how I parsed status markers or coolness in the 00s. That’s not really why those choices were made. To pretend there was consistent meaning behind wearing polka dots, tea dresses, having long hair and bangs would be dishonest. To center the culture is to pretend there was no play. To center the culture or my environment, or whatever I was reading or watching is perhaps the only way I could’ve learned what I liked wearing or why I liked it. To understand myself from that place helped me understand past subversion, approval, exclusion. Simultaneously the process of clarification from the center obscured some truth in my relationship with external expression.
In selling my art (coming soon, I urge you to start saving) some kind of beauty either un/conventional undeniably furthers commercial success. Virality is almost guaranteed through looksmaxxing. I’m not saying I won’t, I’m not saying I will.
There are barely any areas in my life requiring suppression, editing or refinement of the self. My lifetime commitments are made in that the people I want to be around for the rest of my life are already there. There’s no workplace I need to bring a partial self to. I feel drawn to propelling and enabling fundamental change in the lives of a handful, Beyond the initial, sizeable dopamine hit of being well-liked, there is not much value in mass appeal.
I came to play. For now my physical avatar has to explore the absence of meaning as much as presence.
Questions for the culture:
01. What do you care about more, the question or the answer?
02. What does it feel like when you get the answer?
03. What does it feel like when you don’t?
04. What is beautiful to you in other bodies? Why?
05. What is a girl? Why and when is a girl a woman also?
06. Which parts of this webpage annoy you? What do you like?
07. Charli xcx isn’t on the cover of her latest album. In the Brat album cycle how does she engage with the “constant demand for access to women’s bodies and faces”? Is reaction to the album cover sexist or symptomatic of mass oversimplication? Does it matter? Who cares? What else could she do? Why am I not writing about it?
I’m turning 29 in a week!