‘i think i wanted to be brave, that’s the simple answer to your question’

I think I wanted to be brave. That’s the simple answer to your question, “what is the motive?”

And I wanted to create from a place where I felt weak, but where I felt also a great deal of urgency….it was very important to me, the place from where I made that project--where I continue to make that project. 

It comes out of the space between, on one side, the message I’m getting that says “that’s not important, who wants to know?” “Nobody cares.” And on the other side, my own voice and quieter: “this is so important to me.” And there's a space, there’s a huge gap, between those two sides. And the side that says “that's not important. We don't want to know. It's irrelevant” is the professional world that I live in, where I experience this dismissal really intensely. It’s the world of career, success, and also public life, whatever that means.

So moving into that space is this “wanting to be brave.” Allowing myself to be seen and trying to do it in a way that feels okay to me. I would say that it's very instinctual, the way that I proceeded with that project. Not to say that it was easy, even though it’s “easy” in the way we have talked about elsewhere, but also so hard.

The format of the exhibition as a “long install,”’ and the organizing of a series of office hours around the work originated from a lack of confidence, but resulted in something being decentered. It took away the need to be legible. “Just come and I will explain it to you.” I couldn’t really figure out how to explain the project, to explain myself. Each time, it would come out different, and so I decided “you know what? I just don't know what this is, so if you come, I'll tell you what everything is.”

And by doing that, what was interesting is what came out of it, was just the things that were there.

And I think because of that, when people came to talk to me, they would do as much talking as I would, sometimes more. That was something I didn't expect, and that was meaningful. And I think it told me something. I think it tells us something.

It sounds like a big discovery in this process was the response people had in encountering the work, their impulse to reciprocate, to share back, to use that space for themselves to have an experience. I think this was possible because you were able to sit with the discomfort of sharing. In creating the office hours, you made a space where you actually had to walk into that discomfort. In therapy, we sometimes call this “opposite action,” where you notice yourself wanting to not do something, and then you do it particularly because you notice you don't want to.

Yes, psychological models. Models of how you engage with the self, the things you fear, the things that make you feel strong, frameworks for thinking about form and content--these are structures that you can play with. Being able to see how you react and what your natural instinct is and then understanding what your goals are, it starts to produce a terrain that defines you. It is your body. It is your psyche. It is your way of being in the world.

The word that gets thrown around is culture, creating a kind of ethos or culture within the group, which I think works for the self but also for the group as well, in the sense that culture is a medium for growth. But everybody has a slightly different set of vectors. So using some of these ideas from psychology is interesting because they allow you to map what is actually a very complex terrain with different areas of push and pull.

I think opposite action is particularly interesting because in order to move towards the thing your instinct tells you to avoid, you have to be able to identify what it is you want to avoid. The kind of exercises that we're doing in the group--the letter writing,  the engagement with the work, the looking inside yourself and asking yourself the questions--start exploring that work of understanding what it is you fear, what is the thing that you want to avoid. And then you can start wondering where that came from so that you can decide whether that is something you want to do an “opposite action” towards.

Do you want to talk a little bit about it in your work?