Day 19 |
January 5, 1998 | Return |
1,776 Miles Today: 0 Miles |
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Roamer's
Rest RV Park Tualatin OR |
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| Treated myself this morning by snoozing through the alarm; not going for a run; then reading some Greek history in bed. I’m now treating myself to a beer while writing this. | Great music review on NPR: Martin Bennett’s "Bothy Culture," the Gaelic equivalent of Cornershop | ||
| Spent most of the day weblifying the journal, like yesterday. Got up to Day 12, though without all the pic-pages. | |||
| "Artist" defined | Made some progress thinking about Stuff. I can’t help but notice that I’ve been working on the journal and its web version, rather than drawing shells or some other suitably arty activity. So, I’m clearly more interested in creating rich information structures than pretty pictures. What does this mean for my desire to "Be An Artist"? Depends on the meaning of the term. I came to the conclusion that, to me, being an artist means following a personal agenda in the making of new, culturally significant things. The ‘things’ could be memes rather than, say, sculptures, but there has to be some discernible outcome: product, not just process. Having clear ownership of the result is also important. | "Dave Hickey would argue that equating art with cultural
significance is wrong; see the marginal quote on Day
12 from Air Guitar: "... [art] has no intrinsic value or virtue - ... in its ordinary state ... it is a bad, silly, frivolous thing to do." |
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| This definition includes a lot of science as well as a lot of art. The difference is, I think, that art explores the world of the self, whereas science investigates the world outside the self. I would place myself on a trajectory between the science and art fields of influence. | |||
| I also realized that I should spend more time on "hobbies". It doesn’t sound important and worthy, which is why I haven’t done it – doesn’t meet the "culturally significant" criterion. But it’s a private, low-risk way to re-engage with things I enjoy: recreational hacking, wood working, web pages. Since it isn’t intended to be public, there isn’t so much pressure to be perfect, nor so much opportunity for self-criticism to abort good ideas. | There is also the little matter of method; I haven’t thought this through enough to say whether or not the methods of the two fields are substantially similar. I suspect they are, in fact. | ||
| Amazing how much easier writing is becoming; these pages are flowing ever more freely. Writing my three morning pages every day is giving me more confidence to just let it go. And perhaps the beer I’m treating myself to is also helping! | The morning pages are a discipline recommended in a
wonderful book on artistic recovery that I’ve been working though (though I’m
always embarrassed to admit to reading such a stereotypically New Age personal development
tome): Julia Cameron The artist’s way: a spiritual path to higher creativity Tarcher Putnam 1992 |
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