Working for change
This space called at first The Studio and then In The Studio was originally for a kind of conceptual art. I was not painting or drawing or making animations or sculpting like I am now at the time and was just interested in cultivating an immaterial practice of transformation, inner transformation. The idea of it really appealed to me and there was a great feeling of newness to it. I realized later that it just wasn't enough on its own. I wanted to make some thing or things. There was no audience that I was aware of for this immaterial art, way of understanding, growing, changing. Not that there is an audience now for my paintings and so forth. I want to be honest with my work, for it to come from a place of authenticity. I always thought of myself as an experiemental artist. I did work at the fringe, not so haywire that it would not register anywhere, but actually thinking back, the stuff that was more traditional in nature got far more viewers. I am interested in viewers, in an audience, in impacting lives.
I just listened online to Vito Acconci talk at the Hirshhorn in an intimate dialogue with a museum person there, a curator or director of some kind. He was on his same bent about not being an artist and how he is not intersted in viewers but users. There is something that speaks to me in his anti-establishment sensibilities. They are similar to the ones I had been pursuing in my art prior to my breakdown. Never the less, I have gone a long way to just be happy to be able to make a painting. To stick with that right now feels like a good thing to do. I hear what Kapoor is saying about stretching the boundaries of what art can do and be and to Acconci being an architect rather than an artist and it all seems relevant and purposeful, yet for me, I easily lose sight of the whole creative process without the concept of art as amorphous and mercurial as that can be.
I was thinking recently about my 3:33 pieces I had up on this site at one time. And I started going down that road of "am I making the right decision" honing in on the Spirits, Souls and Ghosts through painting and drawing and animation and sculpture. I mean yes there is so much possibility with materials and art paths but I have been at the chaotic, tumultuous, despondent desert-like end of so many methods that I have felt blessed, limited yes, but with a chance for an identity. I can't be Acconci. I can't be Kapoor. I can be Keppel. I can make that name mean something to myself again. That after all is what this is all about and for though I desperately want it to mean something for someone else, the journey I am on, like everyone else, is that of an individual.
I don't think I have the balance to try and continue to think so far outside the box that nothing at all registers, that I become hopelessly lost in my own thoughts and desires. I write this after all with others in mind but it's just that I cannot be sure that many if any will read what I share here.
Keppel, a maker, an artist, not a worker but someone who makes work. That is what I really want to be. With what I make have something that is work, soul work, for someone else. As in the viewing of a piece of artwork. Yes, I am talking about myself in the third person. I think it can be very healthy to do so to gain perspective. To try and glimpse what it is, who you are.
It's extremely tough not having a show. I wonder, will I, would I be happier after having a show of these paintings and drawings and animations and sculptures. Would I be? Would it take me closer to what it is I want to be? I think even if I felt let down after I would feel happy that I carried out an actual show of my work. My work.
