my life as of january 5

around four this afternoon i replaced my ski clothes with sweats, drove to campus, dipped my wax mold for my bronze caste in a ceramic slurry, chiseled at a 23 pound block of alabaster by way of henry moore, burned recordings of lawnmower and leaky faucet noises onto cd's for a sound graffiti project, and climbed up and down a fifteen foot ladder to cut down my first installation piece.

somewhere, quite distinctly, all pretense at making school a thing of stoic practicality and masochistic marathoning fell into a lovely heap of massive self-indulgence. i hardly know whether to feel guilty about days spent philosophizing over greenburgian purity or ogling eva hesse or dreaming up performance pieces or transforming j.m.w. turner paintings into painted pixels, or to finally let myself bask in four months of that which i love. sometimes i worry, between euphoric readings of art theory (could this really be homework?!?) and sublime discoveries of contemporary artists (or research?!!), whether any such happiness could be either justifiable or sustainable. meanwhile, the full academic endorsement of my continuing obsession might transport (might be in the act of transporting) me into the esoteric land of the artistic deranged.

case in point:
because i like lights, and because i like things that hang in the air, and because i like record players, i put the following s-e-l-f-i-n-d-u-l-g-e-n-c-e up for display.



and then, today, i snipped it all away. and really, in the act of cutting the string, in the moment of layers falling down upon layers, i may have been the only one to bear witness to the real art taking place. i let the pieces fall slowly, like a dance, smiling softly as the installation i spent hours hanging with my classmate fell crumbling to the ground.
esoteric, deranged, and thoroughly unsustainable - but for that moment, i couldn't have been happier.