The being and thinking and doing are opening up.  A breakthrough.  Protecting my time (and 24 million other things) has opened up to new ideas for work.

Saturday I visited  the Reanimation Library Midtown Branch at MoMA.  I found I used it like a library rather than a workshop, and settled into The Rural Studio, a book on the architecture of Mockbee.  His work and impact were (and are) profound, how he integrates creative work with layers and layers of helping.  Paired with The Power of Limits, architecture has come forward without any real intention on my part, and helped me push through.

I know what to do, and it feels like it will absorb and move everything important I've been struggling with, hurt by, and pissed off at for years now.  Thank God.

I'm uncomfortable with how I left this journal, as I've muscled myself out of that flatness (no exaggeration), largely thanks to daily writing - using pencil on notebook paper.  It suits me better in some ways, including and maybe especially the physical experience, and of course the privacy.

Daily writing is impossible with the semester under way, but I've set better limits to protect weekend time from student e-mails and, to the extent I can, schoolwork.  I start my Saturday mornings with my paper, pencil, and coffee.  Today I want to capture my handwritten words here, exactly as written on page 41, and align my public self  more closely with my private self.  I wrote:

Just opened my new book, The Power of Limits.  Scanning, flipping through, I arrive at The Greatness of Little Things (p. 123).  Of course I stop, and in reading, "bump into" Zen Buddhism, Golden Mean, music, haiku (this, in two pages).  Drew me back to Introduction to Architecture at UF, where I learned about the Golden Mean and have never forgotten that (or recalled anything else from the course).  I have been telling students about carbon paper.

My trajectory has felt so meander-y, and to the extent it has been, I pay the price (e.g., no PhD).  At the same time, the patterns and connections all point to something coherent (or at least coherent in its vagaries).  My struggle, which has become increasingly clear in and since art school, has been to locate ways to integrate in my life what is integrated across the universe.  Or, to find an existing coherence (which I seem to be doing) and get it out of me into the world.  It's so subtle, yet I'm wanting to make it powerful.  The subtle mark is too easy for me, even though it does everything I want.

Some backstory:  Last weekend I took a keyboard apart (thanks, Mo and Adrian) to make a collage for my nephew Daniel.  That opened the floodgates (mine are small, of course), and the ideas that started coming are very much about integration - not in the universal sense of the journal references but in the possibilities for my work, which should connect with the universals if the work achieves what I'm after.  (I'm sure I'm drawing distinctions that don't exist, in my endless restating of the obvious to get to what's just beyond my reach.)  I've been researching and attempting haiku.  My other new book is The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (thank you, Justin); her stories have the economy of haiku.  All this to say that I keep bumping into a collection of objects, ideas, and processes that is all the same, or leading to the same.  It is a relief and a comfort, and explains my frustration at making work that gets at what I'm after.  I do have ideas, so now I'll turn to them and hope for the patience, the time, and the tenacity to pursue them.

The flatness of last night's post troubles me; just as my work escapes flatness, I seem to be embodying it.  Despite my self-cajoling, I'm struggling to summon enthusiasm for much of anything and instead am acting as if.  It's more or less successful in that I'm meditating, running, in the studio, and accomplishing the necessities.  The imposed structure of teaching may command my time and attention, but it also helps me stay psychologically organized.  With less time to slosh around in my own thoughts (or slosh around at all), I seem to have more energy and a more positive outlook.

The semester finished before Thanksgiving, and once again the break has enabled me to get back to work.  I'm making new sculpture for the first time since 2007, before the Troutman Street loft vacate.  I'm using painted wire discards from 2007, which is a nice piece of continuity.

Liz Sweibel, Untitled, 2011
Thread, wire, paint

(It must be said: I gave it away last semester - gave too much of my time - and am resolved to set better boundaries.  Reading and answering college e-mail on weekends is self-sabotaging, and something I entirely inflict on myself.  The experience of being needed is so seductive!)

Liz Sweibel, Untitled, 2011
Thread, wire, paint

My friend Lisa Tubach visited last month and posed the right challenges.  Much of my work, including the pieces above, cuts right to it rather than remains in question for long.  It's opened and closed in a single session, avoiding extended uncertainty and discomfort.  So I began a more open-ended exploration:

Liz Sweibel, Untitled, 2011
Thread, wire, paint, paper, graphite

It doesn't feel so pat and I'm not even sure I like it.  I know I don't recognize it in the same way as I do the two above.  Extending the materials (even just to paper and pencil) opened the process to more possibility and anxiety (I'm so easily overwhelmed!), but I see that willingness as a good sign.  I'm not dead yet.

Also important:  the most authentic, realistic strategy is for me to prioritize exhibition opportunities outside NYC and residency opportunities around NYC.  It's a relief to see that clearly.  I've again made my home studio more functional and engaging.

Getting older - feeling older - is coming to feel like time is running out for me as an artist.  The distance between my daily activity (mental, emotional, physical) and my vision for myself (rooted in history, not fantasy) feels so great that bridging it seems ever harder.  Every day I push back against this thinking, with occasional breakthroughs, yet it's thick.  For instance, this summer I decided to sublet a studio rather than apply to residencies.  Actually getting to a residency is so problem-ridden that spending time on applications (especially with little new work) seems wasteful.  Better to get a space to make new sculptural and installation work, then use that to create opportunities down the line.  Another idea:  to build a miniature installation site I can develop in my home studio, and use the documentation to change the scale.  Like a maquette, but since I work small, who knows?  I do like this urge.

Obviously, I'm not without ideas.  What I am without is time.  This will shift with the end of the semester (mid-November), and I must shift everything else with it.  I've actually been wishing I were a writer!  I spend so much time writing and love it, but the gap between what I can say in words and what I can convey with my work is unbridgeable.  In "'Evidence' Revisited" in a long-ago issue of Art in America, Carter Ratcliff wrote about the impossibility of reducing art to words.  Nor can I elevate my words to art.

It's been hard to come here to write, not just for the usual reasons, but because I've been trying to find a way to express my disappointment with the exhibit.  It has to be said.  The gallery was basically unprepared, noncommunicative, and uninvolved.  It is a weak, uncurated show.  I did the best I could with minimal direction, a space entirely wrong for my work, and scarce time, but am eager for it to be over.  I'm not promoting the show, and am fighting embarassment because I feel responsible for the gallery's shortcomings.

While I was excited by the openness the opportunity seemed to offer, my dealings with the gallery turned that into a point of vulnerability.  The install time was so rushed by the gallery's delays in preparing the space that making work on-site became impossible; I ended up pulling older work into the exhibit. The work is fine; the presentation is not.  I could have done something new and exciting with the space had I any sense of the gallery's vision for the exhibit and some lead time.  A big, lost opportunity.

I've been deep in the semester since late August.  It's been easy to draw strength from teaching and so I've kept my focus there (and by necessity, given my work load).  But when I peel that back, I am again questioning how my work should go into the world.  While the drawings are still active, I'm thinking about video.  Having the freedom to make work for the Internet and self-curate seems like just the thing now.

Yesterday, on the street, I saw a woman hitting her son (or grandson) with her umbrella while she yelled at him.  He was about 13 and apparently had mouthed off.  Feelings I've been keeping at bay (or letting work blanket) surged up.  I was horrified and wanted to intervene.  And in the end?  I went on my way, deflated by the tragedy and thoughts of this young man's future.  There's cultural differences operating, but I cannot understand how any thinking being could believe that violence is going to make anything better.

Revealing the Ordinary

Tomorrow I begin installing Revealing the Ordinary at Gallery Korea, amidst an enormous amount of busy-ness and tumult.  Natural disasters (an earthquake and Hurricane Irene), a bathroom gut renovation, and the start of classes (I'm teaching five plus a seminar plus mentoring plus an administrative role plus ...) have fostered a dense environment where all my energy goes to meeting my essential commitments.  Installing this show feels like - and requires - moving into another world, and I am using this evening to settle and open my pores.  One evening!

Turns out the exhibit is much more open-ended than I knew, as the curators have invited me to bring all the work I submitted and other work I would like to include for their consideration.  I will be designing the exhibit independently and able to do the site work that will help snap the exhibit into the present.  With only three artists in the show, I will have a generous space.  The quality and nature of this opportunity are sinking in.  Tomorrow I get to work in real space and make new work that will be seen.

Part of what's snapped me to attention is learning that my dear, dear friend Maysey Craddock has an opening the night after mine at Nancy Margolis Gallery and will be in town from Memphis.  She will be at mine and I will be at hers.  I only learned this yesterday, and it has drawn a quick line from my present absorptions to the time when my work had my full attention - in graduate school with Maysey and before and after those years.  That's not been the case in awhile, and her presence and faith in me is, for lack of a better word, inspiring.