Relationships, Community, and their Shadows
Thanksgiving week...
I don’t really know what to say for this week. It started out a bit frantic with the first signs of functionality in the studio. I had no running water or kiln-power, but the wheels would turn and the lights were on so I started throwing a couple things. Throwing is drug-like in its ability to quiet the mind. This can be great, but that quieting can also be an escape from practicalities. It was a damp beginning of the week, so the mug bodies that I made didn’t dry out enough to try putting handles on them Tuesday. I wrapped them up as well as I could and left Tuesday night to join my family at the beach for the holiday. Tomorrow I’ll see if there’s anything to salvage from them.
I’m a real fan of audio-books. I was read to a lot as a kid and I still find it incredibly relaxing to have a story told to me. The drive down to the beach Tuesday night came after a day of waiting for the shop sink to be delivered so I could leave it for the plumbers to install Wednesday morning. I spent the day fixing up the apartment and studio. On the way down to the beach I listened to several hours of Infinite Jest. I had tried listening to it in the studio a year or two ago and hadn’t been able to get comfortable with the claustrophobic intensity of the first two sections, which involved a non-verbal genius tennis player’s trial with school administrators to defend his right to a college scholarship, and the obsessive and panicked preparations for a weekend-long marajuana binge. Driving through the night in intermittent downpours, with a carousel of studio thoughts rotating around in my head, I felt ready to return to it.
About halfway through the trip I got an email from my friend Aidan responding to an email I had sent him about my interest in a particular aesthetic of vocaloid music in which “virtuosic” elements of singing, like, really high notes, or very fast speech tend to have a melancholic feel to them. Where in human performance there’s often a feeling of triumph, transcendence, excitement to doing something really virtuosic, in at least some vocaloid music (where a voice-like synthesizer is doing the singing), these are the most vulnerable, tragic/melancholic moments. And this feels like it comes partly from the invulnerability of the vocaloid itself. It doesn’t struggle to sing high, fast, complicated things. And in this lack of ability to struggle, it reveals its inhumanity. But, at least in some of this music, that reveal doesn’t read as cold, harsh and mechanical, but actually vulnerable and tragic. I’m not really big on lyrics or analyzing lyrics in music but Aidan pointed out that Po-uta’s Humansongs really characterizes a relationship between a vocaloid and a human in a way that gives words to this feeling and explains its causes a bit.
Here is one of the songs I've been particularly obsessed with recently. I haven't yet looked at the lyrics but I started seeing them when finding this youtube version of the song and I think I'll have to look into it more closely.
I’m sure Aidan has some more positive reads on these things, but I’ve been thinking about the position of the vocaloid as something that we make to make sense of and inhabit a sense of personal isolation from humanity. Like, “I feel cut off from the stream of human emotion or collectivity or whatever, so here are my feelings presented from the position of something aspiring to be human but knowing that it’ll never quite be Human.”
I’ve been really into Susan Sontag the last year or so. She’s someone who knows the melancholia of feeling always outside looking in. Among the many places she finds the feeling is in the 19th century character of the consumptive. Characters with consumption (tuberculosis) are tragic geniuses with their candles burning too fiercely: all flushed cheeks and wild temperaments. Their days are numbered and their fates sealed. In that, they are separated from the ordinary flow of life, already half claimed by death.
In the dark mini-van with Aidan’s new vocaloid recommendations blasting and the gloomy sub-basement marajuana dens of Infinite Jest’s high school tennis academy sitting heavy in my mind, I was thinking about all these figures lost (or simply told that they are) outside the flow of life, distanced by a closeness to not-life in the form of death or virtuality. I was appreciating the emotional depths that they have given me access to, and maybe also feeling a bit strange about my relationship to them. Sontag was writing about TB in the context of arguing that we need to stop seeing illnesses as symptomatic of (or even payment for) certain characteristics, and instead see them as simple medical facts. The character in Humansongs is isolated outside of the flow of human life, trapped infinitely trying to become human in order to be closer to the person who made it.
I was talking some throughout the week with my friend Jiwon, who just had a show of his work in his hometown. Jiwon and I worked together a lot through our MFA and are interested in many of the same things. I wrote an exhibition text for his show and I’ll try to describe a bit of his work again here. Jiwon is interested in relationships with objects. More narrowly, his work focused on his relationship to the things in his domestic space: duvets, home-printer, kitchen utensils, bathroom. While we all recognize at some level that we have relationships with these things, you could characterize those relationships as quite light, or maybe you’d say one-sided. You might simply say you use the toothbrush or the duvet.
When I think for too long about Jiwon’s work, it makes the world feel terrifyingly immense. Like when you visualize zooming outwards from your body to your house, the street, city, country, continent, planet, solar-system, galaxy, etc. all while holding the pinprick of yourself in that expanding map. But it’s not spatial distance that Jiwon’s work makes me think about, it’s a type of conceptual distance between objects.
Most of the time, when people try to talk about relationships with objects, they either humanize the thing, – try to give it a name and a personality, maybe paint some eyes on it – or, they talk about interdependence, how we mutually construct the world with objects, creating webs of relationality or other such academic, vaguely spidery/mushroomy metaphors. But Jiwon doesn’t really try to do either of those things. Both of those things try to pull objects in, to insist on closeness, understanding. During our first year at Goldsmiths, Jiwon tried to do some of this with his printer. He sent out probes in the form of paintings, emails, printed documents, trying to find some basis of commonality between himself and the printer. But, by his own account, he failed. Jiwon then focused on the bathroom we shared when we lived together during our second year. The paintings he produced are both incredibly familiar and domestic and enormously cold and distant. That cold is like the near 0 warmth coming from the light of a distant star. Jiwon emphatically believes in the identity, (maybe the “sactity?”) of the objects we live with but he is totally unwilling to pretend that he is any closer to understanding or articulating the identity of a thing from its own perspective than I am to feeling the warmth of that distant star. Between the boy in the bathtub and the burger on the toilet seat lies an incomprehensible distance. But it is a distance that I’ve learned to feel, to have a sensorial experience of, through Jiwon’s work.
I want to keep thinking with Jiwon and his work. I love it, and also, I am interested in similar things. Jiwon accepts the distance between things with a grace and a lack of tragedy and melancholy that I really admire (his show had the beautifully pragmatic name “How to Live with Things”). He can reveal the distance between things while still maintaining the careful appreciation of an orderly domestic space and here I am feeling melancholy over the artificially constructed almost-humanness of vocaloids and the literary terminally ill!
We’ve talked about doing an interview and a longer-form writing project. More chances for me to revel in my fanhood/friendship. I’ll share more on that when it happens.
I haven’t gotten very far into the week and it’s already past midnight of the next week. Well, in many ways I think I’ve been working backwards from the source material for this feeling of the center and the margin that’s been in all the above. The real core of that feeling over the Thanksgiving week was in the different human groups I moved through. My family has been going to the beach with several other families and renting a house together for the last seven years. Many of the older generation have turned it into a month-long communal living experiment which seems to be going very well. Then thanksgiving comes at the end, and the younger generation comes in to add chaos and commentary. Maybe it’s just the specifics of the times in some ways (the older generation transitioning into retirement, the younger into (eek!) the workforce), but a melancholy-tinged nostalgia always feels sort of present at the beach. The melancholy is the feeling out from the center, looking in from the shadows. The nostalgia is recognizing that the center that I’m thinking of is not there, it has moved somewhere else, or I have, and now it’s something that exists only in the (well, an imagined, projected, idealized) past. It’s in the balance between collectivity and isolation. Living so close together, you really see the distance between people, the ways people aren’t the same and the real and constant labor that goes into maintaining those relationships, like constantly repairing crumbling roads (or in the case of an artwork I did on the subject, carrying a couch across a city).
At times, that feels exhausting and ultimately alienating, kind of artificial, like the fact that it requires this labor makes it feel unnatural and therefore morally imperfect to maintain these relationships. And, often, the maintenance requires you to subdue, exaggerate, put on different characteristics that feel like they pull you away from yourself, creating a whole meta level of self-isolted-from-self melancholy to the experience. And the fact of the relationships with family and deep childhood friends being so deep and essential to my character makes the practical need of some performance of sociability feel even more compromising. Can you hear the vocaloid straining against the chains of their almost-human, all too almost-humanness yet?
To be fair, I’m leaning into the melancholy pretty hard. I don’t want to give too much of an impression that I felt dominantly alienated and melancholic throughout this Thanksgiving (or that those feelings are particular to this trip and not symptomatic of my haunting by the ghost of Susan Sontag). I won’t try to tie this all up too nicely in a happy human-positive package, but, to point to the couch video again, I recognize that the aesthetics of sullen, consumptive melancholy have an equally absurd, equally true, bright, challenging counterbalance in embracing the maintenance of relationships and the sincere performativity of identity.
Thanksgiving week had two more social moments to it that were quite meaningful. The first was a trip to visit my partner at her family’s Thanksgiving celebration a couple hours down the road. She’s been away in Ireland for her own MFA adventure the last three months and this was a much needed reunion. Perhaps we were both straying into being semi-tragic vocaloid almost-humans through each other’s phone speakers. Seeing her in the context of the multi-multi generational Thanksgiving tradition that has shaped her and so many of her cousins, aunts, uncles, great aunts/uncles, grandmother, etc. was so stabilising. Their family has a particular fondness for the Woody Guthrie song “Can the Circle be Unbroken,” and that lyric is on the headstones of many of theirs who have passed (or more emphatic “the circle will be unbroken”).
And then I stopped by Tuscaloosa and saw a family of friends who have been with me and my brother since middle school. They live on the other side of the country now and we’ve been apart for many years. I’d say we’ve drifted apart some but that feels like it only describes the topmost layer. The layers under that were created through the immense effort of adolescence, and, whether they be called scars or bonds, they don’t seem likely to fade, or to have any trouble conducting love.
So I guess the theme of this week was relationships, community and their shadows. And that journey has deposited me back in Atlanta to continue building a new set of communities bonds and practices.
I am so grateful for all the relationships discussed here and particularly for Ivy, my partner, Ben, my brother, my parents and their doubles among the beach group, and the Huryns.
Fragments from a fragmented week:
Control and routine were big thoughts this week. There’s been so much moving around and a good bit of angst around work as well (work as in the part time service job at a restaurant, not the pottery). I’ve been driving most days. Once to Tuscaloosa and Huntsville, once to Weaverville, North Carolina and most other days around the metro Atlanta area in search of different FB marketplace deals on shelves, tables, etc. It’s felt like a bit of a scattered week and that has certainly taken its toll on my ability to form coherent thoughts here for my intimidating audience. So here are the fragments just arranged chronologically from the week.
While last week’s blog makes mention of the anxious, slow, prideful processes involved in starting up Atlanta Studio Pottery, it doesn’t go into many details. Today I feel much closer to all those details. Yesterday I crisscrossed Alabama with my brother, picking up a car in Tuscaloosa, driving it to Florence and then driving back to Atlanta. Today I drove all around Atlanta looking to get the lighting cables repaired for the minivan trailer hitch so I can go get a kiln on Wednesday from North Carolina. There have been lots of little talks with different friends and mentors about design work for the pottery, Chinese teaware, collaborations, etc. I’ve also started what feel like the first moves in making the pottery somewhat public: this blog and a dedicated instagram account. As I think back on all of this, there’s a spectrum of feelings that all have to do with themes of control, privacy, and visibility. I’m going to see if I can think through some of that more clearly here.
One layer of what I’m thinking about is the actual space of the studio, its tantalizing, hypothetical presence (now waiting on insurance to be able to move in) and its inverse in the public/everywhere else world. A lot of artists think about this dynamic of studio vs. world. Some are deeply committed to the studio as a semi-sacred space of privacy and contemplation. And of course then there is an opposite side of people who say the studio is like a tomb or an isolating prison when seen as something separate from the world in general. This conceptual debate is at least somewhat separate from the practical needs of certain artists and craftspeople to have dedicated equipment which requires a physical space. Painters are a good example of that: really, the material needs are quite limited, but some worship the studio space while others shun the idea of one. The issue then comes down to the value of an “isolated” space as a stage through which material needs to move to turn from ideas, paint, clay, garbage, nothing, etc. into “art.” Or, to focus more on the artist, a private space in which their influence is ostensibly the major factor. I don’t mean extreme factory precision level control necessarily, but possibly that. In the studio, you can control the amount of control you have, you can let in as much or as little chaos as you want. That ability to control the conditions in which you work strikes me right now as the major conceptual feature of the studio. And I crave this control deeply.
The theoretical musing was put aside for a couple of days. I drove up to North Carolina, to Weaverville, on Wednesday and collected a kiln from Sue and Randy Hintz. They are at the tail end (though not quite done yet!) of a thirty year career in production pottery which is winding down in the difficult aftermath of hurricane Helene. It was interesting hearing about all the late stage musings of people at a different part of a similar path to the one I’m on. Many of those musings on control I’ve been having have had to do with the sense of a new and unknown set of parameters that define the contours of “starting a business,” and a pottery. So much of it feels like it comes down to individual decisions, made in isolation from many options and without anyone telling you what the “right” option is. But partly, the last week has been making me sense that there are certain determining factors that I’m just not used to being attuned to in quite the same way. Sue and Randy made their decisions on how to set up their studio based on a unique set of interests and abilities. Sue loves crystalline glazes and Randy worked as an engineer for many years and now does woodworking within the business with his wife. The rhythms of their work are defined by a different combination of curiosity and practicality than it would be if they did not work for themselves.
A friend recommended I read Derek Sivers Anything You Want recently, which charts his experience making and running the company CD Baby. One of the ways of thinking Sivers recommended is to construct your business as your own utopia: to build it as a microcosm that articulates how you think the world should work. I’ve been thinking with that a lot recently. It has a bit of the tone that I’ve found all over in my (very) short time reading books about starting businesses, easily self-assured from the retrospective position of success, and I don’t know that “utopia” exactly fits all businesses. The artist perspective in me is so used to thinking from a critical, participative, observational position. I’m used to looking for connections and ways in which I am implicated, doing the work of connection, rather than articulating something I can see as discreet and self-contained like a utopia. But art has different needs than a business. An artist may well have to think about how their work relates to and connects to the world. One way of reading art might be to say that artworks make individual arguments about how the world is/should be. It’s impossible to contain them, to make them not talk about the whole. But businesses participate in the whole from a less detached perspective. They are little discreet elements within the whole. Their purpose is participation, not commentary.
I’ve been buying a lot of things this week. I feel like I’m haemorrhaging money in an impossible way. And yet, these have all been entirely necessary and even responsible purchases for setting up the pottery. As the material things have collected (kiln, wheels, glaze materials, clay, etc.) and the space has begun to fill, it has started to take on a momentum of its own. It isn’t a path defined by a clear curriculum or career path, but it is something with inertia. This inertia is the cumbersome counterweight to Silvers’ somewhat light and breezy sounding “anything you want.” What I am making “whatever I want” out of has its own demands which seem to push up against any utopian aspirations I might have. But this might just be the wrong way of thinking about it. In order for the utopia to be something more than a no-place, it needs that weighty material stuff to fill it up.
I’m beginning this weekly blog to reflect on and keep track of the things going on in my life. I’ve kept a journal since high school, but I often come up against uncertainties as to why I’m writing in that context. Sometimes the writing feels purely cathartic in the moment and helps to give rhythm to the day. Often it helps me process and reflect on things that have been going on. I used to try to maintain a documentary approach and would be pretty meticulous about making sure to go through all the things that happened in the day. But recently it’s been a lot more abstract. I’ll focus in on something that happened and then burrow down into all the details of what I think about that thing.
One current of the shifting, changeability of my relationship to journal writing has always been the extent to which it is a private thing. I can never entirely shake the feeling that it isn’t an entirely private thing, that the act of writing it invites some idea of a reader. But sometimes that reader feels closer than others. Sometimes that other is a future version of myself, or some less articulate inner self that stays quiet but reads, sometimes it’s a friend, a partner, or a stranger.
Developing a writing practice that does some of the same things – reflects on things going on in a day to day way – but that is public, shifts the question somewhat. I may still have all those abstract readers in mind, they may still be addressed by the writing, but the deeply rooted fear (?), that nothing is really private, that any writing is going to find a reader that is not the person writing, that’s addressed, maybe put aside by letting the writing be totally accessible.
To jump right into it, the main thing that has been occupying me recently has been starting a pottery studio. This will be a one person production studio making porcelain work, at least at first. I moved to Atlanta a few months ago with my brother wanting to have some sort of art studio in which to process and move forward from my time as an MFA candidate at Goldsmiths. Within a couple weeks of getting here, I started being obsessed with the idea of opening a fully fledged production studio. The idea was very strong in me. It would keep me up at night and I couldn’t walk by an empty storefront without looking for a “for lease” sign and thinking about how it might work as a pottery.
This period lasted through until I actually started fully committing to the idea and working out what the details of realizing this plan would be. This past week I’ve been thinking about that transition a lot, wondering if I lack the enthusiasm needed to really sustain the project as a business largely because I miss that enthusiasm that started out the whole process. The feeling that has replaced the feverish enthusiasm is a mixture of frustration, anxiety, and pride. The frustration and anxiety come from the slowness of the process. A lot of the early enthusiasm was tempered by the slow, slow process of actually finding a place to lease and thinking through what it means to be responsible for a lease, for the cost of a kiln, wheel, and all the supplies that go into running a studio. The pride comes from actually tackling these issues, reaching out to people who have equipment, looking at different potential properties. It doesn’t feel like an unmanageable or unhealthy mix of emotions when doing something new and interesting which requires a different type of independence than anything I’ve done before. But it does feel very different from the initial emotions that drove me to start this project in the first place.
One thing that I often think about/notice in myself is how emotional responses often overlap each other. What started as a reaction to one thing might only become felt much later and have lost its relationship to the thing that started it. In this case, the emotional intensity I attached to wanting to start this pottery, retrospectively, feels at least partly to be the result of a more general sense of aimlessness, idleness, need to do something that had been growing in me for the last year or so without a sufficient outlet. Does tracing the emotional history of this desire to start a pottery diminish the intensity and the validity of that specific desire? Do I worry that the pottery itself will not be able to hold my attention because it is just a scape-goat for a generalised crisis of identity that comes with ending school and no-longer having the clearcut sense of direction that education offers? I guess the answer is, at least somewhat, yes.
I don’t necessarily want to try to make a happy flip side sort of thing for this. Like, “but if the emotions associated with doing something lag somewhat behind, then now you are feeling a truer version of what it is like to tackle this project. And it certainly isn’t bad, it’s stretching into new tasks and ways of relating to the world… etc.” Yes, that’s there, of course, I don’t feel that this is a wrong decision, I am excited about it and deeply committed to it. But that negativity, the scape-goat for a generalized crisis thing, is an important thing to build into how this pottery develops.
Narrowing down has always been a really hard thing for me. I find it difficult to see a project through to completion, often for the really disheartening reason that I stop believing in it after a certain point. It’s not that it is too hard, but that certain very convincing inner voices start pointing out the general uselessness of whatever I’m trying to accomplish. And, maybe more importantly, certain other inner voices start shouting very excitedly about this other, different, more valuable and interesting thing which is far more worthwhile than whatever hollow shell of an idea I’m currently working on. When I realise I’ve been had, the Elliot line “distracted by distraction from distraction” gloats around my mind for a while.
One way that I hope this project will avoid being cast aside is that it simply can’t be. It is too big, I’m too responsible for it. It isn’t on a few sheets of paper or a hard drive, it’s a lease agreement with long term obligations and several thousand dollars worth of equipment. It exists in a different sort of ecosystem than projects done as a student. The scaffolding that any institution provides isn’t there. The scaffolding is whatever I make of it. And so, another form of scape-goating, that of blaming the institution for whatever tragically never comes to fruition is not available.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that as with probably almost every business ever started, there is an immensity of barely articulable hopes and dreams behind this one which are being fit into a ceramics shaped box. All hopes and dreams, if they are to materialize as anything other than words, must be fit into a box of some kind. They must go from being limitless to concrete, solid, singular. And maybe there is something about personal identity within that as well. Educational spaces are a place of formation, of becoming something solid and specific, but, at least in my case, that process feels significantly incomplete, as I have maintained a critical and speculative distance from the “art world,” the “craft world” or any form of professionalized space in which I might feel that I could take on an articulate, legible presence.
The specific ceramics shaped box that I am putting this mess of self-realization into is entirely my own. I am getting to create its shape and possibilities. But alongside the practicalities of the outside world which structure the challenges, joys, etc. of working in this form, I want to stay aware of this inner anxious energy that is very much present at the start of this project. Not to dwell on the negative or to undermine the validity of the pottery, I want to stay aware of the ways that this ceramics shaped box is less container than it is a siv. Yes, the work is valuable for its own sake. If I didn’t think that, I would be doing something else. But that shouldn’t be the end of the story. The work is valuable as an expression and exploration of self, as a way of developing a way of living and interacting with others, as a way of taking on a set of responsibilities which force me to create real, material things and avoid the endless distraction.
So this pottery will start as something very practical. It will be based around a functional range of pots thrown to consistent standards. I will run it based on the models I’ve had the luck to experience training in London and Jingdezhen. But it will not be a rigid thing. It will be aware of its origins as part of a more abstract need to shape personal and creative energies. It will give shape to those energies and also be constantly reshaped by them. While my training has inclined me to more “quiet” sedate pots, the pottery itself will be as experimental, noisy, and flexible as it needs to be to continually explore and give voice to that constant, gnawing, distractable search.