"make weird art!"
Look, I am genuinely glad the current rallying cry right now seems to be “make weird art!” but I can’t lie.. There’s a part of me that also finds it so annoying. FRUSTRATING. In my experience, people have a low tolerance for nonlinear storytelling. I got death threats for period sex ten years ago. It used to upset me a lot when I was starting out. I just wanted to make something exciting and interesting, no one knew that my comic was basically my lifeline. Now, I kind of miss the alarm over every small thing that happened. I don’t know. Things are getting weird regardless, good & bad ways. there’s weirdness (whatever that means to people) everywhere already, in the past and in the present. Maybe its good people are reflecting on what they’re holding back from themselves or judging others for doing. Or maybe they can’t find what it is they need there and are looking to discover it out there in the world. Personally though, I can’t relate. Not to be too rude or blunt, but i cant take two steps without it being “weird.” The weird i make isn’t weird to me, its normal. I don’t need to make my art anything, it is just what it is. I just need to make the art, that’s my only job I need to do here.
Make weird art, sure. Do it, please. But I also would hope in that journey, when you look at other art that you find repulsive, shameful, complicated, yes even offensive.. If you find yourself with the instinct to sink your fingers into it, rip it apart until its unrecognizable.. Until its utterly destroyed in your heart in a way that feeds the satisfaction of that desire. The art you experienced that affected you that way, its not gone. You can’t destroy the art, just the person. And I hope that whatever you ripped apart there inside of yourself, was not something that was or could have been actually important to you in your personal journey with art. Sure.. Still feel those things! its important to get in an uproar over nothing. I sure do! Oh, theres some art out there i hate so much that its entertainment for me, I’m not going to let anyone change my mind about it. Fire and intensity is part of the passion of art and pursuing your vision of it for yourself.. But what really disturbs me is how common artists hate their own art and hate making art. I don’t like seeing so many artists my age, younger, older.. In pain because they can’t love art anymore. What happened? I don’t get to do art all the time anymore as i’d like. I get frustrated, I cry and feel lost but I never have hated making my art. I don’t know what I’m doing that helps with this but I’m glad I’m doing it. Part of that I think is that i don’t feel an ownership towards what other people are making because that doesn’t belong to me, just my own feelings. And I personally like using every part I can find, that often gets discovered because I ran into something i didn’t know was out there. Most of the time, I wouldn’t have found it if i wasn’t genuinely upset in some way.
What are you ripping apart?
