TRANSCRIPT
What is the purpose of art? A friend of mine, a good friend of mine, taught me many years ago. He said the purpose of art is to instruct and to inspire. Well, that helped me explain to myself why I hated so much modern art. So much art that isn’t even so modern, because it does the opposite of instruct and inspire. It actually says nothing. It has a depressing message. It has a message that life is hopeless, life is meaningless. It reflects the misery of the world. It reflects the horrible conflict of the world. But it does nothing to rise above it. It does nothing to give people a new way, a new idea, to give people real hope. Not dissociative hope that tells people that life is hopeless, life is pointless, life is meaningless. Sometimes people feel good about that because it doesn’t challenge them. Sometimes I think most people, actually I think they like art that doesn’t challenge them. That just tells them that the misery that you see in your life, that you feel in your life, your lack of growth, your lack of insight, your lack of struggle to become real, that’s okay. That’s inevitable. Because the great art, it also reflects this. Well, I reject that art. I don’t like that art. To me, it isn’t really even art. It’s just technique. It’s just fakeness. It’s just garbage. And sometimes what I see is the most modern art, the most lauded art, the most expensive art nowadays is the worst. And probably no surprise, actually, because if it’s expensive, that means that people like it the most. There’s a market for it, and it reflects that most people are incredibly lost. Most people in this world are so screwed up, and they don’t want to pay money for something that challenges them. That tells them that their life is totally on the wrong track and backwards. They don’t want to have to look at some art on the wall or listen to video art that tells them, “You’re screwing up. You have it backwards. You’re not even facing the most important things. You don’t know yourself at all.” And in that way, I consider these videos one of my basic forms of art. This is my art, in a strange way. Yes, it is art. I mean, it’s me sitting in front of a camera, just talking extemporaneously, with no preparation, no script, no plan. But anyway, I’m opening up a vein and letting out truth and sharing it in a very, very direct medium. This video, I don’t need to paint abstract things. In fact, all this abstraction takes away from what I consider to be the most important thing: the truth. The truth about growing and healing from trauma. Sometimes I think maybe this is the clearest way to do art. Writing also, writing. But I think also sometimes writing doesn’t necessarily capture the spontaneity and the passion that video allows. The truth of the face, the truth of my insecurities and confusions, and the baubles in my voice, the errors, the anxiety sometimes that comes through, and the confidence, the hope. Because I do want to inspire. I don’t want to share a hopeless message. I mean, yes, I don’t want to deny that the world is a complete and absolute mess in so many ways. That the world, by and large, the mess that humans have created, our species, that as a whole is crazy, is very, very, very lost, is very much off the track. I don’t want to hide that. I don’t want to pretend it’s anything other than what it is. That the norm is nuts. That my family system is very confused and very sick. And that the parts of them that I took inside of myself as a child to survive in their world, under their dominion, under their power, in the society that they created, and the greater society that they prepared me for, those parts of their sick self that I took inside of myself and modeled parts of myself after, those parts are sick. There is no hope in that. But that I can look at that, I can see it for what it is, and I can do a lot in my life to transform it. That is the inspiration that I wish to share. And the reason it’s inspiring, I believe the message that I have is inspiring, that I know it’s inspiring, is because I have done it. I’ve already done it so much. I have transformed so, so profoundly. And I watched myself do it, and I saw how it happened, and I saw what I did, and it is still going on. It’s an ongoing process inside of myself. A huge amount of my inner self has already converted, and it’s that part of me that is sharing this message. But is also watching myself and is watching the parts of myself that are still stuck, that are still lost, still confused, still immature, still beholden to the ideals of the family system, still hoping for rescue from sick parents and a sick society of parents and a whole world that’s just like them that will never rescue me and will never save me. And I see that inside of myself, and I know that. And this is part of the instruction, the instruction that I provide. And one could say every day when I don’t have the video on, I’m providing it to myself. Because the lessons that I have learned already on how to grow and heal and work out traumas, to grieve traumas, to get away from the traumatizing people, this is also instruction for me. A template for me to learn how to continue growing. And in a way, that historical knowledge I have about how I’ve already done it and how much I’ve changed and how this process actually works, this is my art manual of how to create more art. Because the new me, I am the art project. I am the art. I am the reservoir of how to create more art. And the other thing is I see this in other people. Other people, everyone is an art project to the degree that they are healing and have healed. Many people I look at them, and there’s not much that I can learn from them. They don’t have many ways in which they can instruct me, and they certainly don’t inspire me. Instead, they’re just a reminder of what I don’t want and what not to do. In many ways, that’s what my parents became for me. They became, I’ve talked about this, they became negative role models. They became the reminder of, “Ooh, that’s what I don’t want to do with my life. That’s who I don’t want to become. Those are the mistakes not to make as an artist of life.” And so I share this art with you in hopes of being more inspirational about the hope of growing, the wonderful things that come from becoming more real. The primary thing being self-love. I love myself more than I ever, ever did, and certainly more than I was ever allowed to love myself as a child. It was not safe to love myself that much or much at all. Now it’s like I love myself. I love my life. I love what I do. I love my relationships with other people. I can give love. I know how to give love to myself. And now, from a surplus, from the template of loving myself, I know how to be a good person in relationship to others. And I know, I know that that’s what I’m doing because that’s not how I was raised to be. And no wonder I was so confused and lost. And now, by knowing how to give more, how to share more, how to be more loving, I get more of that back from the world. I have it reflected back to me, and what a wonderful thing. And so, as I close this video, this video about art, so much of the art that I see in the world being lost, confused, uninspiring, non-instructive, and sometimes just downright perverse, I think about the art that I will continue to make in my life as I continue to grow, as I continue to become a healthier, less traumatized, more self-actualized person. And I think about the art that other people who are on this process, people who I believe will go much farther than I will ever go, especially if they live in a world where they are accepted more for being who they really are. How much farther can they go, and how much more instructive and inspiring will their art be?