"Waiting (for Meaning)"

I saw the Marlene Dumas exhibit at MoMA, which includes the painting this post is titled after. The painting wasn't a favorite, but its title - and much of her work - resonated, maybe even more so because of my own pervasive angst and frustration. Her figures' eyes are wrenching. The emotion they hold, or don't, is potent, discomforting, tragic. Unsituated, her figures can be anywhere and everywhere, or nowhere. Her use of scale particularizes each figure's relationship with me. It is great work.

And it poked at something in me that's been a source of my work, one I now see has receded or been blanketed (resolution? exhaustion? refusal?). In an earlier post I wrote of my work separating from my autobiography. I think Dumas pushes me back into something autobiographical that's been cleansed from recent work - not a return to a historical narrative or a dredging-up, but the meaning I make and emotion of it in my present. Where the "nothing" pieces of 2007-2008 are calls to attention, perhaps the next question is, Attention to what?

A huge sadness for the world and for people - for our irresponsibility, cruelty, and failure to care - has been flooding me; no wonder Dumas went right under my skin. It seems time to allow that into what I make, which is to live with and in it. Life gets harder but more authentic when the blanket is lifted and despair stays close to the surface. To pull it back over me now would be cowardly.