I had kind of a frustrating conversation yesterday
Basically, I told someone that outside of the occasional auto-bio comic strip, I don’t really like to make art that is a form of self-portraiture; I don’t like art that is purely a reflection of myself. I feel like that’s boring and there are more important things for me to be saying than hashing to death every aspect of my life through various artistic mediums, and also it makes me nervous to do that anyway.
And they were like, “well, but you have to CARE about what you’re doing, how can you care about it if it’s not about you in some sense??”
And I just couldn’t seem to find a way to articulate that it’s possible to make art that comes from a genuine place and is reflective of an aspect of my experience but ALSO is about more than just me, because my experience is only part of a larger culture(s), history/ies, etc and is linked to many other experiences
And they just kept repeating “you have to care about it” over and over, like, how could you possibly care about something that doesn’t 100% revolve around you??????
This tendency to look at oneself as being alone, unique, unconnected to history and culture and other people - to see one’s own DECONTEXTUALIZED experience as the most authentic thing - really bothers me, and it bores me to death in art.
