Art monster
Cycles, abundance, a phone booth, and lasagna
I made a vow to myself last December that this was the year I’d enter into an “abundance mindset” and let go of all my artist hangups about money (money = corrupt, true art is free/from the heart/seeking the essential nature of things and unspoilt by the need to pay a Verizon bill, etc etc) because well, ha, at age 40 it is nice to not stick pictures to the wall with duct tape. Also nice to consider the possibility of one day maybe possibly being able to kind of sort of afford college for our child? Though that remains a pipe dream. And the fact that we have relatives in Sweden and Mexico who go to college FOR FREE (yes, people, you read that right! FREE COLLEGE!) makes it seem especially insane to pay $8,975,642 per year for our child to take jello shots and get fired up about Howard Zinn.
Anyhoo, money. I was all set to go charge some real money for my art, yeehah! And then my friend here in Pittsburgh asked if I’d make something for her fortieth birthday party, which was going to be in a furniture warehouse and involve a bunch of different installations – musical, tactile, performance – around the theme of cycles. And of course I said yes. Because I love my friend. And because I’m forty and think obsessively about cycles, and I dwell in all the questions she posed: what do we carry with us? What do we choose, and what can’t we chose, about what we inherit? What are we trying to let go of? To nurture or shift?
And immediately on January 1st I was working “for free,” making some art. And in the way art does, it inverted the question completely. I found myself asking, instead of how to make more money from art, or to demand the “worth” of art, what in fact an entirely different economy would look like. One where money was not the central arbiter of value.
A few days before the party, my friend and another friend of hers – in town all the way from Athens, Greece – came over to my house to talk about my project. At that point, it was a nebulous essay and a whole bunch of old photos and drawings. I made gochujang caramel cookies and a French press and we sat at my table and ate cookies and drank coffee. They looked through all the materials, and read the essay, and asked the most thoughtful questions about my childhood. They asked about ideas and intentions, about obscure inner workings whose outlines they discerned. When I answered, they listened with their whole bodies. Outside, it rained.
Inside, we rearranged photos, paragraphs, concepts. We connected the lines between our lives and our projects, women’s lives and cycles, my questions and the big questions. On a rainy Wednesday afternoon, in Pittsburgh, creating something together, in an act of listening. When they left, I felt a deep, almost painful warmth. Gratitude, I later realized, for being seen. Honored for what I was making. With faith that it was meaningful, beautiful, powerful.
On the day before the party we showed up at the warehouse for rehearsal and preparation. Everything was a hot mess. Coats in heaps, piles of random stuff, dust, crates, audio equipment in tangles, furniture, tarps, pizza boxes. I had converted my essay to an audio essay, to be played in an old phone booth in one corner, and I spent most of my time seated on the floor amidst a shifting sea of detritus, messing around with Audacity on my computer trying to get the levels of the piano track right.
People arrived intermittently, hung up light bulbs, played cello, inhaled pizza, carried around massive plants, taped things together, ramped up and turned down random sounds, experimented on violin and bass, dusted, swept, brought pretzels and homemade funnel cakes, read to the kids, untangled wires, chatted. I stood in the phone booth for a long stretch testing out my piece, witnessing the action from the surreal, old-school vantage point of that little cell of listening.
Afterwards many of us went back to my friend’s house, where my friend somehow managed to throw together not one but two lasagnas – ??!?! How?!?! – and feed a small mob, children ran barefoot and feral, and we talked about homeschooling and art and music and books and animals and lockdown and travel.
The next day we woke up only slightly bleary-eyed and Jorge spent about eighteen hours trying to figure out how to program the iPad so it’d only play my essay, and not allow access to all the other apps, photos, etc. In the process he reset and wiped out the entire iPad, which was strangely cathartic. That iPad was our number one reminder of the COVID years, and the long, grim charade of virtual pseudo-life that tried to fill them. Now the screen was slimmed down to a single essay.
We showed up early to the space, me wearing a velvet dress of my mom’s from the 1970s, Elena wearing a crop top she got in Sweden and has worn for every remotely significant life event ever since. I made my final adjustments in the phone booth. People arranged and rearranged couches, chairs, cushions. They clipped their mother’s dresses onto threads for display. Tested sounds, put on lipstick. Set up a hot beverage station in the corner where a friend would record and amplify the sounds of people making tea and coffee and hot chocolate. Our friends, the same ones organizing this entire affair, set up six crockpots of homemade soup – ??!?! How !?!??! – on a long table. They carted in several coolers of beer, arranged wine and coffee and mugs. People began circulating through the space, which filled with the zigzags of kids and the snap-fizz of beers and enthusiastic talk and soup-sipping on chairs and couches.
The performances began. They were somber, beautiful, intensely focused, the result of a communion between my friend and her collaborators over the course of months: the result of listening. I asked one of the musicians how she and my friend had developed the idea for their piece, “elegy for the young mother (living)” and she said they’d talked for nine hours about motherhood, art, longing, cycles, creation. It showed. They played by the light of a single hanging bulb, their shadows long on the walls, the elegy sonorous and deep.
The phone booth was frequented mostly by children, who had never experienced such a space (sob), but occasionally an adult would wander in and shrug on the earphones and Jorge would say to me, “Caught one!” I had put together a little guest book with the question, “What cycles do you carry?” and when Jorge and I went to inspect the responses afterwards, we laughed so hard we cried in discovering that it was filled entirely with the hieroglyphic jibberish of children.
We danced and ate soup, and then the lights were turned off so that friends could make the hot beverages in a sound-art performance. We listened in the purple-black light of disco suspense to the gurgles and slurps and whistles of their making. “That sound is CRAZY!” someone commented, and it was, geyser-like and full of drama, and of course it was also simply the sound we experience every morning on autopilot as we prepare ourselves for the day. Art: the great amplifier. Then the hot-beverage-preparing friends traveled through the crowd offering guests coffee and peppermint tea, and the kids lined up for hot chocolate, and this, I thought, this is the cycle: caring, community, the hiss-sputter of the Moka when the coffee’s finally ready, “Sure I’ll have some,” cradling a little white teapot in the hand, craning it over a friend’s cup, serving.
This. Weaving of community, attention, engagement, caring, shared focus in the name of something that is not “productive,” but beautiful. This is art. It’s not that it has nothing to do with money, and yet at the same time, it really has nothing to do with money. It is a celebration of life. Here we are together, turning 40 in this space, all of us leaning hard into the questions together: who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going? For one night, feeling those cycles together, a shared human hum.
I felt the glow for days. It was, as they say, nothing money can buy. No bad feelings or judgement towards money – money is wonderful, money is great, please if you’re out there and would like to become a generous patron of my art, by all means, go for it! –just that it was simply beside the point. It wasn’t the metric, the measurement, the great determiner.
Elena had a sleepover after the party with a new friend from Michigan, and the following day I brought both girls back over to my friend’s house for goodbyes. We walked in to complete chaos: play-doh and pies and soup and bread and jam and people at the table with coffee and a band of children running around playing an actual trumpet. “Want some lasagna?” my friend asked, and of course I wanted some lasagna.
Elena and her new buddy joined the fray and I sat at the table like nothing, like this was how life was lived: in cycles of art, fiesta, food, listening, sharing, reflecting, questioning together. Like this was what life was like when we believed in one another to make beautiful things, nurtured one another, thought it possible to be in a whole different way in the world. This was what life was like outside of all the ways we tend to think about worth, when we give of ourselves freely, only to be startled, awestruck, at how much – the warm plate in the hands, the listening in the rain, the dancing, the shared elegy – we receive in return.
Recommendations:
Okay, I’m sorry, I’m doing it, recommending a Yoga With Adriene challenge. Yuppers, it’s happening. I’m really enjoying this one and have found it meaningful to be intentional about doing it every day. Annnddd in true January fashion I am recommending a SECOND personal improvement-type challenge, the 10 percent happier Dalai Lama meditation challenge, which I absolutely loved. Meditations guided by none other than Roshi Joan Halifax, whose voice makes you feel like you’re at a mountain refuge being fed nourishing soups! Really beautiful stuff, and even if you’re a hardcore meditation skeptic I think you’ll get something out of it. I’m reading Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman and after several attempts at novels that just didn’t lift off for me I’m feeling very grateful to be back in her masterful hands. Listening to Natasha Tretheway’s Memorial Drive, which is just stunningly written and read, and very mesmerizing while cooking an evening meal.
A brief ask:
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This is the most beautiful thing I have read in a long time. Thank you. Will be sharing this widely.