About seven years ago, I was asked how decisions were made in my family.  I was leaving my marriage.  Two clear memories crystallized the whole issue and I could say without hesitating that decisions seemed to me to be inconsistent, compulsive, unexplained, autocratic.  I'm not a believer that kids should have an adult voice in all decisions or are entitled to know more than is appropriate for their age and rank, but I do believe their internal processes should be taken into consideration and treated with respect when decisions affect them.

When I was in fourth grade, I was invited into "fifth-sixth," which was a two-years-in-one class that combined the best and brightest from the four elementary schools in the area.  The hitch was going to junior high a year early, which was daunting.  My parents told me the decision was mine, and I took it seriously.  Riding with my mother in the car one day, I brought it up and said I still hadn't made up my mind.  She said, "Oh, we already accepted for you."

As I was graduating high school (I was 16, thanks to fifth-sixth), my father suggested I go to Europe between graduation and college.  While it was a cool offer, it came with no specifics, like how one did that or with whom.  I didn't have a clue, and didn't even know what to ask.  After some weeks passed, he told me the offer was off the table because I hadn't done anything to show I wanted to go.

In between those two events, my family moved from NY to Miami Beach (in the middle of tenth grade ... ouch), with little notice and no explanation.  I just thought my father wanted more sailing time and had come to an opportune time to leave the business he partly owned.  Well, he did want to sail more, but he was also in a bit of a squeeze and leaving town was the smart move.  Of course my parents couldn't share that with a 14-year-old, but the move came so suddenly and at such a pivotal time for me that the silence about why or that it might be hard for me left me feeling invisible and insignificant.

In making my work, I prefer decisions that are reversible, whether I can undo something or redo it. I tend to avoid setting up irrevocable, no-turning-back actions.  I relate that to these early experiences and doubts about my decision-making that I carry with me.  Also, nothing gets lost that way, which may be more to the point.  To make a decision that's irrevocable and erases other possibilities or existences is too much responsibility, too prone to regret or grief, too like the process that cost my family so much in Florida.

When I teach contemporary art history, I need to peel students off the idea that all art is self-expression in the therapeutic sense.  Yet the artist's self makes the decisions, and their patterns relate to something.  I'm reminded of Heide Fasnacht's comments about subverting the self, when I met her at Vermont Studio Center.  Do I do that?  Enough?