I had my first thesis committee meeting. It was embarassing, and revealing. I tried a sort of half-ass roleplay a la They Say Small meets Mike Kelley (I began to realize that I had to work overtly with my personal life as a kind of fiction) that fell pretty flat, and ended up rehashing the same old tripe I don’t really believe about people getting something immediately and having something more to chew on later.

I enjoy making things, and I enjoy stringing ideas together in dubious, amusing, and even revealing arguments, but those two processes aren’t necessarily trying to achieve the same thing. It seems I have decided that I need to pick a theme and fit everything into categories around it, which may fulfill some retentive part of me that likes puzzles and patterns, but is it a satisyfing or sucessful art-making strategy?

I guess it has just struck me that I have absorbed the point of the thesis as treating art as some sort of research tool, or process of demonstration, like a devolved science-fair exhibit. That can’t be true? Thats just silly!

So, then, what is the point? What does my art do. It doesn’t peel back layers of reality, and if it really is about purposeful missaplication, well, then its really founded on a gimmick rather than … than what exactly?

..than that something deeper that art is about?!? Uggh, puke, as my mom would say.

So, if art is not research, and art is not an excuse, and art is not a demonstration, what is left?

anyway, I am not allowed to use the word ‘art’ anymore, so I’ll let that line lie, and think about what I am actually doing. Really, with all these great fancy ideas that will easily and interestingly fill up my allotted thirty pages, all I can honestly say that my art does — that some of my art does, is set up these pathetic little phyrric victories - the dead fish is “saved”, the robot freed, the wood “resurrected” as tree, the cowboy gets his plywood prey (hurrah?).

A missapplication? Perhaps. A wink? Often. A loop? An empty term exchangeable with many others. Even more than the gap. So I am left with uselessness (which all art has in the way I am defining it) and misapplications and misguided intentions.

So, those categories fit, but are they responsible for what works in my works? Probably not. Lets see what works, then…

Uggh, here goes. A warning, this is porbably not for most of you, and is really me thinking as I type.

The fish. What works with the fish is that it is obvious at first glance. That thing is trying to saw that fish free. so, first people explore how it works. Ah, I see that motor makes that go in a circle, which pushes that wood that squeezes that leather that moves that other wood that pushes the saw that cuts the branch that holds the fish that falls into the bucket of water… If it works… will it work?

And so in a sea of inscrutable flotsam they sip their wine and nibble their sushi and talk with each other while watching, waiting for the fish to fall. Perhaps something occurs to them regarding the piece during the interlude.

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