hi arabelle! your work has always been so inspiring to me, but for the first time i feel like I need to ask something directly. do you have any advice for someone who is struggling with who they want to become? I just ended my 1st year of uni studying geopolitics but i feel like im leaving behind my life as an artist. I feel like it would be helpful to talk to someone without vested interests in my life. or maybe you know of some book or poetry that might help me cope. thanks for everything :)
hm. i can’t think of any book in particular, i just think you, my tender friend, should stay open to the idea that you can…do many things in life! your life does not have to be linear! you aren’t leaving anything behind, you’re just evolving multiple lives within you. you’re never going to be done, babe. you have time to do a lot of stuff. my favorite thing about queer theory and also, very relatedly, art - poetry or whatever form - and cyborgs! - is that the point isn’t the person at the end of the story, it’s the process. rather than asking “what kind of person do i want to be?” as a narrative structure it’s really helpful to ask instead “what kind of life do i want to lead?” (Sara Ahmed and Judith Butler in convo - very good) It’s a constant action rather than assessing yourself as a still thing. I mean, the optimism of queer futurity is all about the action of becoming, not what you become. struggling and movement is so much part of the essential process. it’s okay to have doubts, and also to deviate. it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong. you can always put something down and turn to something else, or you know - use what you’re learning and studying as an artistic approach. you will be an artist all your life so long as you genuinely pursue it and keep returning to it and examine life through your creative work. and honestly, studying geopolitics is in my opinion such a good background to approach art from! you don’t have to leave it behind: paint it into your process. One of my favorite people, Paul Virilio, has said a lot about art and politics: “Art is the casualty of war. So don’t let anyone bug you with the crisis of contemporary art. The most contemporary thing about contemporary art is its crisis.”
I do have a book recommendation for you to that end, actually. I want you to pick up The Aesthetics of Risk. It talks very specifically about geopolitics, art, praxis and has a lot of cool interviews. There’s some good stuff in there about risk transfer, about art that threatens the audience, about social redistribution and all that stuff. I consider it an absolute essential to my own work. Maybe it will be a good bridge between your study and your soul.
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