I think about it a lot (every day multiple times a day), how to carry on and still plan and marvel in a world that is maybe not ending and I hesitate to say it is becoming decidedly more grim but is certainly changing in ways that are irreparable, painful, extremely ugly and difficult/impossible to ignore. This anxiety has reshaped my identity as an artist and as a queer person in the last few years. What exactly do you do?
It is easy to assert that it will only get worse, that the coming year will just yield more heart break, more decline, more damage. And there is evidence in your favor. Whether or not its minutia are fact, those frame your reality and that is fine. I spent this year thinking a lot about what exactly is useful from the time before this. It began with my own family history - what of that is valuable, how do I hold it and honor it and guard because much of it is under my protection. And then it progressed into what images of the planet as it is, as it changes are important to hold.
What is quotidian does not stay that way for long. I think that Schwabsky article also has me thinking about this too. TM Davy’s work of he and his friends spending summers together in the pool or in the ocean are not images that will look the same as we all move into future moments together. Their geography and characters will change. And what is astonishing is for some about that work I guess is that in 2020, after everything, after all the ideas and the revolutions and collective anger and grief (and sometimes joy) the most important images produced to represent what this moment feels like are banal and not extraordinary. They are about the slowness of time, that the gradation of the declines changes from day to day and it’s not good or bad - it’s just what it is. It is part of the experience, it is part of observation. But it’s that kind of stuff that is illuminated for me now in my own life and it’s what I try to cherish everyday and what I strive to cherish as an artist and a person in the future, regardless of it’s form. The contradiction of the continuity of those images and their inevitable discontinuity and transformation is that their feeling will not fade and will still be something you can find in the world.
Not sure where I was going with this but basically though we are in a grim place, art makes me hopeful because it doesn’t gives me a choice. Find the thing that keeps you steady and presents you with beautiful things.
