A gallery of monsters

If each of us drew our own body as if by dictation from our own internal perspective, we would produce a gallery of monsters!

— from The Sexual Life of Catherine M., by Catherine Millet. 

I'd been planning the third major sculpture for months. (Peter was my first; the second was my tree lady.) I wanted to develop technique. I wanted to stretch beyond what I'd been taught about form. I wanted to create art.

This project had purpose. A self-portrait. I established some objectives.

1. It had to look like me. At least in its early stages. I would allow for it to morph into something more symbolic, expressive, a distortion of me. But its basis had to have sufficient me-ness that I could not deny to myself that it was me.

2. It had to express joy. Pain is easy. It's unique, powerful, exquisite. But Tolstoy was wrong about happiness. Happiness is also nuanced. And it's difficult to express artistically without being saccharine or facile. I needed to preserve something joyous, but I needed to find it first. This was a pandemic project, after all. (I considered some secret joy, some orgasmic expression.)

3. It had to represent me symbolically. It was at this level I thought art manifested. I wanted it to be a self-portrait from the inside out. Maybe my brain spilling out. (What do my migraines look like?) Maybe my head split open and my brain obviously set wrong. Maybe in place of my brain, my heart.

This is what I thought about throughout the summer of 2020. I procured materials, I waited for winter. I broke open the package of clay in early November. It was US election night, I had the tv on, I needed art to counterbalance reality, I wondered if that made my art a political act.

For a few weeks I obsessed over cheekbones, the angle of my nose, the whorls of my ears. And then, quite unexpectedly, I fell in love, or something. I felt both seen and not yet fully seen, and that it didn't matter whether I was seen or not. Suddenly seeing didn't matter, feeling mattered. I thought more about seeing, without actually seeing.

Very coincidentally, I'd started reading John Berger's Ways of Seeing at about that time:

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. [...] 

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

Love didn't last, but I had projects to keep me busy. I kept thinking about how I was seen, how I saw myself. I started seeing outside myself, in a way that I hadn't in a very long time. Among all the ways of seeing, I started seeing my way.

I learned how to handle clay, maintain its wetness. I learned how to work it when it is hard (the work of carving). I learned how to perform a lobotomy. I learned about shapeshifting. I can point to this sculpted portrait's objective faults: the face too flat, the ears too big, the mouth too thin. Too unfocused. Too ambitious. Too inauthentic, even if conceived in an authentic kind of way. 

I studied my perception of myself. I created a very long neck, not because it was realistic or particularly aesthetic. Likely this was a subconscious expression of the distance between my brain and my body.

I failed on all three objectives. (Except maybe the first. And the second and third.) I lacked patience, persistence, and discipline. (But this project served its purpose.)

I am listening to a podcast in which is discussed the drive to create beauty out of pain (and I think: beauty in ugliness and imperfection — wabi-sabi); how Leonard Cohen makes you want to die and spread your legs at the same time; how obsession with a thing is often an obsession with what the thing represents.

I am learning to refocus on form. Art will manifest itself somehow through clarity of thought. I am learning to be naked.

To be naked is to be oneself. [...]

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.

To be naked is to be without disguise. 

This morning, I woke up and looked at it anew, and I smashed it.

Time to start again.