question not as a means to an answer

I think, as an artist, that questions must be asked, but these must be the right questions - useful questions. Questions not necessarily involving answers - those kind of questions seem like ultimatums, and art, for it to work out over the course of a lifetime, can't be dammed up by some ultimate. Ultimates are illusory. Every line drawn in the sand, throughout history is crossed or outflanked or the wind blows the line away.

I think a useful question, one that I have been considering for over a year, is the question What kind of artist am I. It may seem odd that after 35 or more years I ask this question. I don't think the question ever goes away. I've 'fallen in love' with various artists and styles over the years, but the replication or homage is not Me. Certainly there is a MeNess lurking within those works - an inescapable Me, no matter how I feel like submerging myself - or confusing myself with another. An Other - the one for whom, as Lacan points out, we do what we do - construct the ego we construct.

I find when I paint - even though I revel in my free spiritness, my sense of experimentation - I encounter resistances: Things have to be a certain way. Other things I feel difficulty talking about. So I ask, What kind of painter am I; What kind of drawer am I; What kind of artist? And the metaphor I use is athletic: not everyone is a fastball pitcher or a starter or a closer. We all have things our bodies want to do - but we fight them. Like the character in No Time for Sergeants who insists that he be an infantryman - there is a tunnel vision. Sometimes teachers and society enforces that tunnel vision: I once had a teacher tell me my work depended on nuance - he didn't mean it in a nice way. His implication was that I was not a power pitcher, as it were, and therefore my achievement was suspect. He was probably right that my work depends on nuance. But what would it have been for me to force myself to be a power pitcher? as it were.

RA Dickey discovered he was a knuckelball pitcher. He didn't want to be that at first. No one wants to be that (well actually I did - watching Niekro pitch when I was little - but I was an outlier); or no one is encouraged to be that. Scouts and teachers aren't looking for that. When you are the outlier, a series of fortuitous events must conspire in your favor. In this way the scouts' prognostication, "these kind of pitchers don't make it" is fulfilled - they make sure of that. "Only power pitchers need apply." If you are a power artist, Or if I were, then perhaps there would not even be a question. The problem arises when someone tries to be The Power artist. What natural inclinations and tendencies of their body have they set aside. Perhaps they will succeed - like natural left-handers forced to conform to right-handedness. 

I have no answer, only the question, which I think is a very good question, the working out of which portends better and truer work. It doesn't lead to success, per se - that is the heaping up of piles of money or positive reviews. The false answer is perhaps preceded by the word Need - I need to do this, I need to paint this way, I need to get this recognition. The question of need implies the giving over of artistic agency to the judgment of An Other. That is ultimately a condition of frustration. I don't need - I think my painting needs the ferreting out of needs - or desires the ferreting out of needs.