How I Came to Start this Blog: The Idea Takes Root

Sept. 23, '10: Views on Art

1. The first, French: art as excess, luxury, something out of bounds, sinful, ugly. The truth is ugly, the way a dry wash is ugly, or the mass of tiny wrinkles on an old face, the folds of flesh so deep and cavernous they mimic the landscape: organic forms. Beautiful and rotten.
2. The American view of art, esp. the essay: discipline that unruly flesh, sculpt it, manage the impression, craft it to fit your audience, put in the WORK to make it your best self – which is always, in the end, inauthentic. And yet there's something to discipline, to the work required to make a marriage, bring the art into the home.

In contrast, what about writing as exile? Becoming an expatriate, a foreigner, someone who does not belong in her own country anymore, someone with a made-up country that can never be returned to?

The paradox of leaving oneself to find oneself, the separation implicit in becoming an observer of one's own life.

Virginia Woolf said we needed a room of our own. I've never had one. How, then, do I find the space to separate from myself long enough to long for myself?

Men have always had the luxury of having their home and leaving it, too. More solitude. More focus, should art become a discipline, a career. We women are dilettantes. The man also has his leisure, time for the dalliance with his mistress Muse. I get one day to myself and I have to cram everything in. The true form for a woman with husband and children is anything that can be done piecemeal: a crazy quilt of desires, here & there. A mosaic, in other words. It can't be all of a piece.

Domestication is the death of passion. This is true for art, for writing, too.

Art as masturbation: solipsism, self-referentiality, the audience as mere voyeur.

I think I like the “Art as Adultery” model best, but then, I am an adulteress.