Before I write anything else, I will cop to the titular reference to Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own“, which I first read in high school as a teen who shared a room with her brother in an inter-generational household.
Without much preamble regarding how this is related to that, I’ll just write, and perhaps you will discover how on your own.
The last time a made a new post on this blog of mine (yes, it’s absolutely a blog), was in 2017. It was a “work-related” post, promoting an exhibition that I was going to be in. It was a good exhibition, a good opportunity, and good work, but the week the work was due, I sat in the yard in the middle of the afternoon with a glass of wine and a portable speaker playing baroque music, and cried from stress.
Certainly, some of the stress was mine alone–from the demands of my job and practice (most specifically at that moment, one of the show’s deadlines), but a lot of it was relational. Relational. Yes, I’m taking that term used so freely in art, a term used so easily to describe the web of influence and affect between an artwork and its audience, and using it to describe my life. I could say “emotional labor”, but I recently encountered a post (that I cannot recall the name of, nor the site that published it–and I’ve gone through my browser history to try to locate it, even) that made an excellent criticism of the application of the word “labor” to something as complex and inherent as emotions. If there is emotional labor, then there are emotional laborers–contractors, freelancers, etc–all a commodification of hierarchical human relationships. It’s pretty ugly to think of that way, so I’ve begun to rethink it. Hence, relational.
The relational demands of my life have increased steadily for the past several years. I’m not going to explain in more detail, because a lot of those demands come from people that I love, and in a very serious way, that relationship is just between us. Me and them. Not you. But you must know what I mean, as we all have relational demands imposed upon us from all categories: family (progeny, progenitors, spouse/partner and siblings), friends (the good ones, the great ones, the best ones and even the fake ones), and work (customers, clients, students, bosses, co-workers, office politics, gig-economy self-promotion, etc).
The art world is particularly demanding, as a relationship. I’m not interested in expounding upon that right now, but I offer you this aside instead (so many other people can and do say the same things as me): “Everything is Work: Summary on Performative Discussion about “burnout” “.
Teaching is also extraordinarily demanding, relationally, and though my adjunct job is very low paying for the amount of hours required (the real requirements of the work, not the contractual ones), it also happens to be something that 1) recharges me and feels meaningful, and 2) is a reliably consistent (if also poverty-wage low) base income for a two-artist family for about 9 months of the year.
With increased relational demands, I had to refocus. Cocoon, sometimes. For an introvert, relational demands are extra-demanding, because they are social demands. This means that my love relationships (family), and rewarding-but-low-paid-work (teaching) were prioritized, while the less-necessary social and unpaid-work (making art) demands were shunted to the bottom of the attention list.
I also kept telling myself that I wanted to redo my site template, which is a giant pain in the butt, and is something quite easy to put off.
Now, however, I’m tired of feeling that I don’t have a voice outside of my home and workplace. At the same time, I still don’t have room for new relational demands, because my old ones continue to increase.
This next series of thoughts may seem to be tangental, at first (they address social media).
People, and the way people engage with each other, really have changed due to social media habits. Not merely the near-constant attachment to the phone (not my thing, honestly, but nearly everyone else’s), but the way that various social media apps shape our ideas of 1) how we think about and present ourselves, 2) how we engage with our community and the world, 3) how we measure our own and others’ level of activity, engagement, and renown, and 4) the amount of attention we are able or willing to give to the reception of meaning.
My students, more and more every year, think of success as an increase in “followers”. They also cannot seem to think of roles for themselves as other than consumers. Like the concept of emotional labor, these are hierarchical, commodified ways to perceive oneself. When you see yourself as both brand and consumer, how can you possibly see others around you? How do brand/consumers engage with one another? It seems a strange and shallow way to be a person to me.
At this moment, my daughter would be tempted to read my above paragraph as if I am a critical “old person”, making the endlessly boring type of observation that old people make–‘we didn’t have smartphones growing up, blahblahblargh’. She can’t hear the care behind the comparison, really, because it seems like every adult has some type of platitude to offer regarding then and now.
So, thinking about now and now, it seems to me that it is taken for granted by almost everyone that we somehow need to live our lives through some type of technological filter. I’ve observed that people select a favorite filter (app), and defend it quite ferociously. When I criticize Uber, people tell me that they need it, or that it is more convenient than, say, walking. When I criticize Airbnb, they say the same–they couldn’t go anywhere without it, because they couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel (I’m not certain that’s true, but that’s what they say). When I criticize Instagram, I am told that everyone is on it. When I criticize Facebook (usually within Facebook–but which I don’t often do, as it is my preferred technological filter), they scoff, as if no-one of note uses Facebook. These defenses are the defenses of commodity, of supply-and-demand, of market-based need and status within a gig-economy. These costs are costs that only take the needy self into account–they don’t consider larger labor or regulatory issues, they don’t consider the web of environmental costs, and they aren’t honest about the possibility of complicity within a gross, exploitative system.
The truth is that we’ve been systematically conditioned to believe that we need these things, by a bunch of shady, humanities-degree-lite technology companies. Kids (my own, the ones I teach, yours) can’t really be blamed, as they’ve grown up within it. They can learn to be critical of it. People my age, however, have been suckered. We grew up without this, and yet we’ve chosen it, and now use it to define ourselves.
Back to the idea of a site of my own. My website is a blog. Blogs are out-of-date. No-one reads anymore, I hear. Few-people look outside the gated community of their preferred apps to find new content–if it doesn’t show on their feed (located within a private company’s domain), they don’t know it exists.
I use Facebook. Yeah. I like it. I can use it in a browser, which limits how much it’s able to learn about me, and allows me to use a full-size keyboard, ergonomic mouse, and large monitor. I don’t actually use it to talk about myself very much. I’m not sure people realize that. Folks are conditioned to think that a social media post is a post about identity, but for me, the things I post on FB are mostly articles about conditions in the world, extensions of the thoughts of others, with some commentary.
What I don’t post on FB is anything like the first section of this post–an admission that I cried from stress. You’ll never see that there. Ironically, if I write it here, though it has the capacity to be accessed by anyone who comes to my site, I feel that it is less likely to be read. This space feels private.
And it is, in key ways. My husband and I own and pay for the server space that this website is hosted on. The way the site looks is a template that I tweaked (and will tweak again). It is not a free site requiring me to host advertisements, there are no content moderators or overseers, there is no word-count limit (to the dismay of some, likely), and it is not part of a social media network.
I’ve been saying, for a while, in person and via social media, that personal websites are the answer to the problem of social media. We can go back to the idea of the internet as a place of wild, discovery. It’s always been commodified, though–I think the internet had about one minute of public existence before banner advertisements came into being. Still, with coding skills and your own paid hosting, you can do anything you want.
We don’t need to use apps. The more we convince ourselves that we do, the more possibilities for expression we’ll voluntarily lose.
You don’t need to use Airbnb if you can’t afford a hotel; you want to, and the cost is gentrification, decreased housing availability and rent that’s too damn high. If you’re young and able-bodied, and the weather is good, you don’t need to make a convenient ride-share trip (different than a necessary going to work trip!); you want to, and the cost is the erosion of labor protections, increased traffic on the roads, less money given to public transit, and an increase in pollution.
You don’t need to use Instagram or Facebook, you don’t need to have followers and subscribers–except that in the art world, you do. People (curators, collectors, fellow artists) barely do the work of research anymore. They wait for their feeds to deliver to them (via algorithm) new information, art they’ve never seen before, things they want to buy, whatever. Typically, it’s on Instagram, which I find to be a gross platform (a rant I’ll save for another day). There are, of course, costs to using social media apps, as well as costs for not using them. Both are steep.
I have so little interest in commodifying myself. I miss the freedom of an independent, non-networked blog, especially as compared to social media. It’s work to maintain, of course. I’m still going to use Facebook, because it fulfills different needs (I find so many articles there), but I intend to do more here. Whatever I want.
Now I’m going to try to tie these thoughts together. While I retreated from non-essential public engagement because of increased relational demands in my life, the world changed. It was already changing. It’s still changing.
I’ve found myself un-meshed with the majority of people in the art world. They haven’t seen me, and I suspect that some have forgotten what I look like. It’s an unpleasant feeling. However, I’m not interested in playing the games or taking up the roles that would be required for me to re-mesh. Mainly, because I don’t share those values.
I don’t value Instagram, for example, so people who only use that won’t be able to know anything about me. I don’t value art events which remove me from the people who need me during moments that they need me to be around, so weekday evening events, which are prime spending-daily-life-with-family-hours, are not something that I will often be seen at. The cost is something I’ve been paying for at least two years already now: a measure of invisibility within the art world.
I do value, and have, ever since I was introduced to her work, the way Virginia Woolf describes the totality of a woman’s life–the light and textures in her home, and the small yet voracious calls upon her time and attention, by people who often don’t even see her self.
Similarly, thinking about how my relational choices marginalize me as an artist, I value Adrian Piper, and the lightning-bolt-like effect her essay “The Joy of Marginality” had on me when I read it for the first time in grad school:
I think my work very definitely is marginal relative to mainstream art-certainly in form, content and marketability; but in my strange world that’s evidence of quality and significance. The margin is where much of the really advanced, exciting, original work is being done-by artists who are critically distanced from the status quo both politically and aesthetically; who see the mainstream clearly because they’ve been excluded from it while having to navigate through it; and who are unwilling to accept the narrow range of aesthetic options validated by the mainstream.
And:
Every foray into the mainstream reminds me how saturated by money, power, fashion, and social status it is . I find most of the work I see there monotonous, formulaic and deeply boring. Surely the inflated theorizing of much recent art criticism is inversely proportional to the interest and significance of the work it occasionally mentions. The values and practices of the mainstream would have to change very radically to make it a club I’d want to join.
I don’t presume to think that just because I’m marginalized by choice and habits (especially as compared to the deep marginaliztion that is experienced by people of color within a mainstream, white sphere of influence) that my work is somehow better than others. What I do get from these two quotes, though, is both a sense of reassurance and of hope.
Her quotes remind me that I’m choosing what I value, not choosing in reaction to what I don’t value. If choosing what I value has a cost, so be it. Until there somehow isn’t a conflict between what I value and feel I need to do for both myself and the people I love, then I suppose the art world won’t feel that I am present within it. But that, importantly, is not my fault.
From Woolf:
So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark streets I pondered this and that, as one does at the end of the day’s work. I pondered why it was that Mrs. Seton had no money to leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind; and I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had seen that morning with tufts of fur upon their shoulders; and I remembered how if one whistled one of them ran; and I thought of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society .