On August 25th I burnt over 700 pieces of art, two days later I gave away 200 pieces, now all I have left is my most recent piece and this is the process of how came to decide to do this.
The point of this essay is to talk about how my heroes led me on a self-destructive wild goose chase for knowledge, during which I became so obsessed with the concept of improving my ability to control my place in the world that I lost sight of what it actually meant to be free. This story is about how easily this search for control can become addictive. This essay is a cautionary tale for any would be fine artists who never went to art school, but instead relied on their belief that they were somehow more special than anyone else, an essay which I can only assume will fall on deaf ears, or will make me look foolish, but an essay I need to write for my younger self never the less.
I started to realize that I wanted to cleanse the slate at the beginning of 2022, but the process of knowing what getting rid of it all meant has been an ever evolving concept, even now after it’s all been finished I still wonder exactly what it means. Initially the intent was to solidify all of the art into one project; a chain which could be pulled through a camera shot in an orderly fashion. To create the chain I started off by organizing all 900+ pieces into chronological order, then I hole-punched every piece of paper at least twice, once on the top and one at the bottom, finally I connected each piece together by tying 3 inch strings in between the holes. This took about two weeks of constant labor and all the while I was flooded by thoughts. Trying to organize the work chronologically had me warry of my own ability to discern my history, hole-punching each piece left me feeling like an executioner, tying the knots had me realizing just how easily satisfied I am with certain menial tasks, and continually there was the question of what any of it meant. Later I would come to terms with the fact that the meaninglessness of my art was the meaning behind getting rid of it, and though this thought had crossed my mind, I didn’t truly believe it yet and because of this inability to be satisfied I started to become frustrated, which brings me to the real reason I did this and why I’m writing about it now. I did this so that I could potentially convey to a future version of myself that art without intention is meaningless, no matter how much meaning the creator sees in its ambiguity.
Knowledge has always been a tricky subject for me. As soon as I began learning how to read I was diagnosed with a significant case of dyslexia, as a result I resented the world around me which was so heavily defined by education, and it was my impression that the world couldn’t help but resent me back. In today’s age of political correctness it would seem to me that there is only one unacceptable handicap left; to be dumb. Laziness is the true reason why society disdains those who aren’t aware, yet there is no way to effectively discern a lazy child from a child who can’t keep up, and despite being labeled as dyslexic I still had teachers telling me to my face that I was dumb. This could be due to the fact that I was attending a very strange, nun run Catholic elementary school, yet no matter how flagrant these nuns were it didn’t make what they said any less true in terms of societal standards. My dyslexia made me see the world differently than any one I knew, I was dumb on the outside but inwardly things made sense and I just lacked the ability to convey this. I felt like an outcast with no ability to communicate and as a result I began having incessant suicidal thoughts as early as second grade. I didn’t feel dumb, I knew that I still had something I wanted to offer to the world, and at the age of eighteen I finally saw myself in art and literature for the first time when I encountered Jack Kerouac and Jean Michel Basquiat. Looking back on these two men I see now that they were only explorers brave enough to build their own paths but at the time I saw them both as a nothing less than heroes.
Basquiat showed me the beauty that could be reached through ambiguity and chaos, while Kerouac showed me the practice of appreciating society from the outside, and both together introduced me to a world of art which I had never known about. Within months of having learned about this new type of life style, nothing became more important to me than figuring out what it was to be free to express anything and everything in this same all-encompassing way. How to explain to the world “fuck you” while also being able to say “I love you”, discovering what history I lived while being appreciative of others, and always in pursuit to expand my ontological borders. Despite the fire that these creators had ignited inside of me the romance of their lives had taken on much more importance than the practicality of their efforts, and as a result it’s hard to know just how much I was actually learning. Poems in particular seemed ever tantalizing to me; I listened to certain poems on repeat hoping to derive some sort of meaning through repetition alone. I listened to both “Howl” by Allan Ginsberg and “the Wasteland” by T.S. Elliot dozens of times, and it would seem now that I did not heed the warning of “Howl”, and I don’t believe I ever came close to understanding “The Wasteland”. I listened out of fear of keeping up with my new intellectual influences, I listened to discover more of what Kerouac and Basquiat had brought me in the first place, and I listened with the self-righteousness of someone who had felt scorned by the world with the intention to make things right. I was aware of the reasons, but what I wasn’t aware of was just how much this path was fueled by addiction and a desire for power.
I didn’t realize it at the time but what I was looking for was inner peace and unfortunately I was looking anywhere other than in. I was suicidal before I began my quest for ambiguous knowledge, but after two years of searching I had become self-destructive, embodying heroes like Bukowski through binge drinking, becoming addicted to coffee as a means of allowing for constant intake, and ultimately embracing isolation and rejecting anything which didn’t fit my flimsy conceptions of intellectual taste. I dropped out of college in 2016, and several days after my twenty first birthday I tried to kill myself.
The following 5 years could only be described as miserable and frantic. I would spend the majority of this time exploring many different avenues of self-improvement such as: several, week long fasts, attending seminars lead by individuals such as Tony Robins, two different types of nero-feedback programs, training for a marathon, long term psilocybin micro dosing, EMDR therapy, various talk therapies, taking several months of sobriety at a time, and of course the occasional visit to the psyche ward. None of these things ever really seemed to help me past their initial novelty phase, and even in the sobriety I failed to see that I was still just as addicted to the stress of coffee as I ever was to anything else (now I am sober of everything besides weed). During this time I would also attend three new colleges, twice for computer science (which was what I initially dropped out from), and once for philosophy. I only took two art classes over the course of these brief visits; I had never lost my fear of keeping up with societal standards, so when it came to choosing a type of education I couldn’t help but defer to my parents who had no respect for art school and would not hear of me going to one. I should have been strong enough to stand for what I believed in despite my fears, but I still had my own pretentious beliefs about what was worth learning, and as far as I was concerned I always had my own curriculum going in my reading.
Throughout these psychological experiments I continued to create, and in many ways my drive to make art was the only addiction I wasn’t accepting, even my love for coffee and weed had been replaced by a quality assurance measure to insure that I was in the most ideal state for creating. What began as conscious exploration into a stressful life style had become stress for the sake of not knowing how else to be. Every day I woke up in fear of how much I could get done, and I trusted that fear above all else. I never stopped to consider what it was that I was trying to get to, and even though most of my work repulsed me, I still couldn’t help but feel as though the repulsion was just part of the process. Technically I improved, but my patience was none existent, and because of this my art not only stayed repulsive to me but also inconsequential to the world. The addiction to stress was self-perpetuating, and had me blind me to the truth of how little I was actually discovering.
Meditation was always something I had had interest in yet lacked the know-how to execute. One of the problems with the Buddhism I was learning at the time of starting this journey was that the mindset was based around learning from desperation/failure, and as a result, encouragement was essentially none existent from a mentor’s perspective. All I knew of meditation at the time was that one should clear their mind, years later would I hear Allan Watts explain that this recognition of futility to do so is the point of the exercise. Only once one learns to accept the constant chatter of their brain can they begin to learn how to love that chatter unconditionally, I did not understand this at the time and as a result my initial experiences with meditation were nothing short of self-abusive, and it wouldn’t be until I was 26 years old that I would begin to study transcendental meditation and I would finally understand what it was that I was supposed to be looking for and it was only then that I finally started to change for the better on a fundamental level.
TM is a mantra based meditation predicated on the use of a sound which theoretically should never be heard outside of one’s mind, and thus the mantra becomes something of a pavlovian key to instantly access the desired state of meditation. TM was an extremely effective initiation into meditation for me, but I still had much to improve upon. Over the first couple months it was difficult for me to make it through 20 minutes without feeling the meaningless compulsion to check the clock, and if my phone ever vibrated you know I would absolutely need to check it. Eventually these distraction became trivial though, and it wasn’t long until I could do forty minute sessions easily, but in my day to day life I still dealt with extreme amounts of stress and ultimately meditation still felt like a chore to me. Meditation with TM felt almost exactly like jogging, I could feel that it was healthy for me, and I knew I was getting better at it, but in the end I had only added one more job to the load of work that I was already overwhelmed by. I still had much to learn about meditation, but with TM under my belt I finally became aware of the words I was needing to use in order to describe my art; words like “stressful” “chaotic”, words I didn’t want to associate my work with, but words I had always associated with the intensity in my soul, and ultimately using meditation I realized they were only words, and that my thoughts were only thoughts.
Maybe it seems strange to consider Basquiat or Kerouac to be tranquil, but in my eyes they were, whether it was the colors in Basquiat, the themes in Kerouac, or just the fact that these creators were such a clear reflection of myself, I found peace in their work, and this peace was what I wanted to embody in my own (I think my earliest works reflect this peace that I’m describing, but I lost it somewhere along the way). So I decided that from then on I would embody the words that I wanted to be able to use, while in the act of creating, and with this I began creating my mandalas. This shift of course only made me feel literally better while working due to allowing myself to drop so many of my rules, but the result was that of feeling like I needed to learn to draw all over again. Three mandalas in and I realized that size was no longer a limiting factor for me, and with this I realized the core of my particular ambiguity; that of effort. Effort had been the one consistent influence in my work, and yet I had always been too hasty to fully tap into its qualities. Many of my drawings involve atlas like humanoids holding up little forms of civilization, and they were always me. Facially featureless, wearisome and emaciated, but strong and enduring. I don’t think I was either happy or sad during this period despite my outburst, I was merely a body, I’d still want as a body wants, and protest as a body does, but ultimately everything besides work was the equivalent of quenching a thirst. Now I see my art as totems of strength, testaments to the hours I’m willing to spend to create something I believe in, but before this they were only scraps of spiritual nourishment.
Later on I would learn a new style of meditation which truly showed me the bliss I had been looking for, and interestingly it was an extension of what I had previously learned to do in my art. Shifting awareness away from what you think is important and honing in on what is the most essential, or in other words, realizing that you are not your thoughts and paying just as much attention to breathing as one would to thinking. In many ways this was very similar to TM, only this new style encouraged freedom, and encouraged a pursuit to feel abundant, a concept which I had previously conflated with wishful thinking, or I had heard that Zen was about feeling nothing at all, but now I knew the feeling of joy to be scientifically proven to be beneficial to the body.
People often worry that I judged my work too harshly when I tell them why I’ve decided to give it away, all I can say is that I gave the pieces the respect they deserved. I may have felt like an executioner while hole-punching them, but now I understand that no matter how special they may have seemed at some point, in all their infinite capacity for potential in their ambiguous nature, ultimately, and always, they were only objects. Even now I feel a twinge in my heart while saying this, and I feel as though many will reject what I’ve said outright. So to those of you who would claim that every piece of art has an individual soul, I urge you to check your attachments, they may be getting the better of you.
I doubt there are many artist as naïve as me to create art with no intention for so long, and someone as blind as I was probably wouldn’t appreciate what I have said anyways. ‘Ignorance is bliss’ was a deathly fear of mine, yet I was ignorant and terrified anyways, and I have a suspicion this is not an uncommon ideology/fear for young people to have. Otherwise I might be preaching to the choir, but if any of this has resonated with you, if you’ve ever encountered a seemingly endless search for something, if you have become obsessed with the ontological, or if you simple never feel as though you’ve done enough, I would recommend looking inwards. I lived this mistake for almost my whole life, and I burnt/gave away all my art to prove how strongly I feel about what I had found inside myself, so please consider this before you continue to make the same mistake.