I QUIT (2007)
Pleased to Announce (2007)
I know, I know: you can't quit being an artist, people tell me that all the time. Most of them aren't artists themselves, so I wonder how they know so much about it. All I can do is say that I'm trying, I'm giving it my best shot, and that time will tell, we'll see. It shouldn't be that hard since I'm so experienced at quitting things: a marriage, drinking, smoking, some things more than once, you'd think it would be a snap. But quitting art is different, like saying I'll quit having brown eyes. My eyes are in fact fading to green, so perhaps I'll eventually make good on my promise to Retire from the Practice of Art.
For my 60th birthday a number of years ago, I made official announcements of my intention to quit. I am of course in good company: Tolstoy and Duchamp come to mind. Quitting sounds simple enough, but like so many simple things, it isn't easy.
Some folks who read my Retired piece --- first exhibited in 2008 and now posted on this website --- laughed, and I can see why; it has some humor. At the gallery I overheard someone say, "But she means it," and he was right: I did, I do. It's funny, yes, but it is also serious and true.
* * *
I retired, the first announcement said, to practice prayer and wishful thinking. This could, and maybe should, take up all my time, and I need to do more of it.
I quit to practice ballet, an easy one, since I make the five foot positions with an occasional plié thrown in as I wait in line at the bank and grocery store. I am in third position as I speak. I call it exercise, but I will never be seen in a leotard, never, ever again.
For my 60th birthday a number of years ago, I made official announcements of my intention to quit. I am of course in good company: Tolstoy and Duchamp come to mind. Quitting sounds simple enough, but like so many simple things, it isn't easy.
Some folks who read my Retired piece --- first exhibited in 2008 and now posted on this website --- laughed, and I can see why; it has some humor. At the gallery I overheard someone say, "But she means it," and he was right: I did, I do. It's funny, yes, but it is also serious and true.
* * *
I retired, the first announcement said, to practice prayer and wishful thinking. This could, and maybe should, take up all my time, and I need to do more of it.
I quit to practice ballet, an easy one, since I make the five foot positions with an occasional plié thrown in as I wait in line at the bank and grocery store. I am in third position as I speak. I call it exercise, but I will never be seen in a leotard, never, ever again.
Doing stand-up comedy is the hardest one of my retirement goals since these days I don’t find too much that falls under the heading 'Funny.' My jokes and punch lines tend toward the realities of aging, and while they are occasionally hilarious, they aren’t what I want to announce to the world, or even to a husband who is, so far, my only audience.
But quitting to devote myself to unwanted hair-removal always gets a laugh: it’s a full-time job, I add, and the middle-aged ladies cackle.
Practicing amateurism is the easiest one of all, and I wonder why I didn’t think of it sooner. Almost everything I am doing these days fits under that label. I will have two shows of photographs soon, and while some may call the photos art, I don’t: I’m not a photographer, I’m an amateur, a person with a camera, a person who walks and looks.
Every day I walk and look and listen in our neighborhood in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico, and that comes pretty close to doing International Espionage, another retirement ambition. Strangers have accused me of being a U.S. Marshall, a CIA agent, and a tax collector when I'm seen snapping photos of/near their houses or buildings. Unrecorded, I overhear screaming fits and witness near-violence, often without leaving my yard.
The things I learn by eavesdropping at My Office --- a palapa bar across from the beach --- could fill a book on subjects ranging from American politics to doing business, legal and not, in Mexico.
I “eaves-look,” too, and use my zoom lens a lot, invading privacy without hesitation or remorse. If I could choose a superpower, it would surely be invisibility.
But quitting to devote myself to unwanted hair-removal always gets a laugh: it’s a full-time job, I add, and the middle-aged ladies cackle.
Practicing amateurism is the easiest one of all, and I wonder why I didn’t think of it sooner. Almost everything I am doing these days fits under that label. I will have two shows of photographs soon, and while some may call the photos art, I don’t: I’m not a photographer, I’m an amateur, a person with a camera, a person who walks and looks.
Every day I walk and look and listen in our neighborhood in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico, and that comes pretty close to doing International Espionage, another retirement ambition. Strangers have accused me of being a U.S. Marshall, a CIA agent, and a tax collector when I'm seen snapping photos of/near their houses or buildings. Unrecorded, I overhear screaming fits and witness near-violence, often without leaving my yard.
The things I learn by eavesdropping at My Office --- a palapa bar across from the beach --- could fill a book on subjects ranging from American politics to doing business, legal and not, in Mexico.
I “eaves-look,” too, and use my zoom lens a lot, invading privacy without hesitation or remorse. If I could choose a superpower, it would surely be invisibility.
And, of course, preparing for The End started this whole thing as we downsized our living space from 4000 square feet to 1000, shredding files and papers, taking paintings off their stretchers for long-term storage and eventual destruction, selling anything that anyone might want, and giving lots away, no strings attached. If I do this every day for the next 25 years, maybe, maybe I’ll have my house in order by the time I die. (Don’t count on it.)
* * *
Forty years of art-making have hardened into habits that don’t disappear on command. At first, just to keep my hands busy, I taught myself a single crochet stitch so I could make purses out of used plastic bags. Each one requires 80 bags cut into 800 loops, absurdly labor-intensive work that adds up to ten hours of effort for each purse. The results are satisfying and popular, but they sure aren’t art, not the way I define it.
I still talk about Art, capital A, to college freshmen for several hours a week, and there is no better or more life-enhancing topic. I edit books I wrote in the 20th century, making their tone more accessible, using simpler words and presuming nothing of my young readers. I invent projects that use the same processes that my serious art required, ones that I really miss: solitude, attention, self-abnegation, mental preoccupation. I fill journals with observations, I read and take notes, I list the stories I intend to tell, and set aside the photographs that provoke memories. Ideas keep flowing, but I resist them, they make quitting that much harder.
I play around with easier forms and media, digital ones that leave less evidence. I spend hours making little lessons about scale or color or other important topics, fun and creative projects that are about art, but they aren’t art, not even close.
* * *
In the preface to My Dinner With André, André Gregory talked about the typical evolution of an artist. In her twenties, he said, the artist learns about her medium and craft; in her thirties, she acts on all she’s learned, all she knows --- and she knows a lot --- with enthusiasm and energy and fearlessness. Then, if she’s lucky, she realizes she doesn’t know much at all. So she pulls back from the work to consider the important questions. Again, if she’s lucky, she only asks the questions, so that in her mature years --- her 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond --- she brings to the work what she has learned: a few answers, perhaps, but ever more questions about the work:
What is the point?
What is its purpose, its function?
Is it important, relevant, or useful at this moment in history?
Do I need to do it?
Who cares?
I keep a quote by David Letterman next to my desk. “I just wish I cared more about this,” he said more than once, and I know just how he feels. I care about art, about Art, no doubt about that. It’s the need to do it that I’ve lost, the desire. What little ambition I had is gone, along with the requisite energy, and my ego is almost tamed.
Instead I crochet endless purses out of plastic bags; I make a new house; I host garage sale after sale; I seek new homes for old art; I take long walks with a camera; I write funny stories; I cook elaborate foreign dishes that take hours of preparation; I read and read and read, and discover how many great books there still are.
Soon I may have to start helping the poor.
I keep reminding myself of those great artists who have quit with style: Marcel Duchamp, before he was forty, mister smarty-pants, and the elderly Leo Tolstoy, full of social conscience and moral authority. I try to keep a good-natured and uncritical attitude when I see all the stuff made as art by folks who, I think, might be better off giving it up, laying it down, calling it off. Mostly I just try to keep busy, inventing projects and crafting things of little consequence. If you want to call them art, go ahead, but I’m saving that word for those rare things that really, really matter.
Tolstoy quit his art “in order to live,” and that will be my goal: one day at a time, forever, simply living, amen.
I play around with easier forms and media, digital ones that leave less evidence. I spend hours making little lessons about scale or color or other important topics, fun and creative projects that are about art, but they aren’t art, not even close.
* * *
In the preface to My Dinner With André, André Gregory talked about the typical evolution of an artist. In her twenties, he said, the artist learns about her medium and craft; in her thirties, she acts on all she’s learned, all she knows --- and she knows a lot --- with enthusiasm and energy and fearlessness. Then, if she’s lucky, she realizes she doesn’t know much at all. So she pulls back from the work to consider the important questions. Again, if she’s lucky, she only asks the questions, so that in her mature years --- her 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond --- she brings to the work what she has learned: a few answers, perhaps, but ever more questions about the work:
What is the point?
What is its purpose, its function?
Is it important, relevant, or useful at this moment in history?
Do I need to do it?
Who cares?
I keep a quote by David Letterman next to my desk. “I just wish I cared more about this,” he said more than once, and I know just how he feels. I care about art, about Art, no doubt about that. It’s the need to do it that I’ve lost, the desire. What little ambition I had is gone, along with the requisite energy, and my ego is almost tamed.
Instead I crochet endless purses out of plastic bags; I make a new house; I host garage sale after sale; I seek new homes for old art; I take long walks with a camera; I write funny stories; I cook elaborate foreign dishes that take hours of preparation; I read and read and read, and discover how many great books there still are.
Soon I may have to start helping the poor.
I keep reminding myself of those great artists who have quit with style: Marcel Duchamp, before he was forty, mister smarty-pants, and the elderly Leo Tolstoy, full of social conscience and moral authority. I try to keep a good-natured and uncritical attitude when I see all the stuff made as art by folks who, I think, might be better off giving it up, laying it down, calling it off. Mostly I just try to keep busy, inventing projects and crafting things of little consequence. If you want to call them art, go ahead, but I’m saving that word for those rare things that really, really matter.
Tolstoy quit his art “in order to live,” and that will be my goal: one day at a time, forever, simply living, amen.
