The importance of self knowledge in you work.

Some of the most common questions I receive are, how did you develop your work? How did you come up with it? What “inspired” you? The concept of inspiration seems to come up a lot when talking with other artists who are early in their development. The simple answer is that while inspiration certainly has its moments, the work did not rely on it so much as doing a deep dive into who I am as a person and artist. And this was absolutely critical. But also terribly frustrating and at times painful.

In graduate school, I wanted to take the time to work with something new. In undergraduate, I became focused on working with assemblage sculptures. And as much as I enjoyed working with them, they were bulky, heavy, and the need for storage and transportation of these objects began to outweigh their practicality at the time. I was, after all, a poor non-traditional student. So when I arrived at graduate school, I felt it might be time to work with something new and perhaps more practical for the time. 

I could have worked drawings, paintings, printmaking, or any number of traditional mediums. I was fluent in all of them. But several artists in my program, along with myself, wanted to spend the time to develop something uniquely our own, and to use the time and resources productively to experiment. We all had our own studio space on campus, access to resources we may never have access to again, and the most valuable thing of all. Tons of feedback from experts including renowned art critics like Jerry Saltz, or spending an entire semester in our studios with Michelle Grabner, and other artists and curators.

We had the amazing resource of our professors who were established exhibiting artists with awards in their fields asking us questions constantly, trying to get to the core of what we may be working on. And we had some of the most brutal yet supportive critiques with each other on a regular basis. Those exercises made us and the work stronger, and made us a close knit unit. But, it was also demanding. It demanded honesty, not just with the group, but with ourselves. 

I spent a lot of time at home and in the studio just trying to find some sort of inspiration. It did not come. And everything I started on was torn to shreds in critiques. As frustrating as that was, it became absolutely crucial to my work and development.

Some of the avenues I attempted were things like exploring my own past experiences, diving into personal traumatic events and making work based off of that. But did I want to exist there? Always drawing from pain? Was that who I am, or are these things that happened to me? The answer was, although these things did have an affect on me, they did not represent who I am as a person. And to be locked into constantly revisiting that pain, was not something I wanted as a practice. I wanted them behind me, not to define me.

Then there were social issues I felt strongly about. Could I develop collage work speaking to these issues? I could. I had focused on the issue of private prisons in undergraduate pretty hardcore as part of the Sociology catalog I had exhausted. But the reality is, as much as I hate our current prison system and in particular private prisons incarcerating people for profit, is this the right direction for my work? I knew people who had been inside, good friends. But it’s far more powerful for someone who has actually been inside to make work speaking on that system, than it is for a white male who has not.

I still thought that I would like to work with collage however. After all, there was still the issue of practicality, and money. I was poor as hell, so whatever I decided to work with had to be light, storeable, and cheap. Try as I might, there was no “inspiration”. But I did have a ridiculous amount of old magazines from my teen years that for some reason, I would lug with me in boxes everywhere I moved. They survived a previous marriage, a divorce, moving across state lines several times, undergraduate, and now they are here with me in DC. How could I make use of them? But here’s the catch. I couldn’t bring myself to cut them all apart into pieces. 

I had already experimented  in the studio with old posters from my teen years like Heather Thomas, Iron Maiden, and the Lost Boys. I immediately regretted that. They were destroyed. Gone forever after coming with me everywhere. And I had watched undergraduate students tear magazines apart with glee wasting so much good material, just throwing it in the trash. I couldn’t do that to these magazines I had come to attribute as somehow being personal now. Why were they personal?

They were just objects that I hadn’t even looked at in probably a decade or more. But somehow I associated them with my teen development. Owning these issues of Fangoria, Thrasher , Guitar World, or Ninja Magazine had somehow become ingrained into who I perceive myself to be. Like some sort of symbol of my subconscious. But why? How did that happen? And how could I at least do justice to these objects I so loved?

These questions led me to the works of Edward Bernays. And this is where it all began to unfold.

I found Mr. Bernays by asking questions first. How was it that I had come to associate my identity in a mass produced product?I had always been interested in the ways that advertisement invaded every aspect of our modern lives. Or how it’s virtually impossible to go a single day without seeing some sort of corporate logo. But how did these things come to be? It couldn’t have always been this way. And how did it influence me as a person, especially during my developmental years? 

I grew up a heavy metal skate punk in the 80’s during the satanic panic. And my family was not middle class by any means. They provided what they could, but it was a constant battle at school with kids during the 80’s who very much found identity in having the newest fashions, the best hair cuts, and the hottest brands. I was more punk DIY. I had to make my fashion by hand sometimes, or piece together outfits for the look I wanted. My parents bought our school clothes from K-Mart or Hills Department Store. Not the most fashionable to say the least. But it’s what we could afford, and oftentimes through layaway. So if I wanted something else, I had to make it, or thrift it.

But these magazines, somehow after all these years I had held onto them as some sort of symbol. Why? Sure there was the cool factor, but I didn’t actually use them as an object anymore and yet they held some sort of value to me. Asking these questions set off a flurry of research. I had to know how we had got to this place, and what it meant for me.

The further I went down the rabbit hole, the more it began to point to one man. Edward Bernays. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he used his uncle’s theories of the irrational mind, along with the crowd psychology of Gustave Le Bon to create what we now know as public relations. These theories together proposed that people do not make decisions based on rationality or logic. They instead make decisions based on crowd sentiment and emotions. 

Armed with this, for the first time, companies were able to have people find identity in products and company branding, and to associate self worth with mass produced objects. The way this developed is absolutely fascinating, and I may do another post entirely dedicated to it in the future. But for practical purposes for this post, it’s far too lengthy to get into. Just take away this for now. Every company, advertisement firm, public relations firm,and government have this singular man to thank for the amount of control they have over public opinion and how people identify with them in a tribal sort of fashion. 

I also discovered that when I had graduated in 1992, for the first time in American history, teenagers outnumbered adults. Advertisement tactics shifted dramatically to target this larger demographic for the first time in an aggressive way. Teens had the most disposable income. And thus the anti-commercial was born, where it became more important to entertain and associate brand image than to present the product. This didn’t last long as my generation transitioned into later adulthood. But for a time it was extremely effective. 

Now that I had this knowledge it became so clear to me what I needed to do. It was like an adept of the mystical arts suddenly realizing that they are surrounded by mystical tomes of great power that they had never perceived before. To understand them, I didn’t need to cut them to pieces. No. They had to be dissected, page by page. I had to cut away all of the noise, and focus on the things that caught my attention. Sometimes it’s purely aesthetic, sometimes it’s repeated elements or subject matter. Other times it’s about the layout or editorial choices throughout. But with each dissection, I was learning the ways in which they influenced the reader, and I could either reinforce those intentions or subvert them. They could still remain the object, and yet speak to us in a different way than we normally experience them.

As you move through a magazine page by page, you may not notice all of these elements at play. Your focus is on the current page. But when revealed, layered upon one another, a sort of subconscious is revealed in the object. I no longer needed this concept of inspiration. At least for these works. And my work expanded into magazines I would have never even looked at before to explore how others are perhaps influenced. 

They were born of research, and digging deep into who I am and what really gets me going. That has now also given birth to new works in cut and layered self-adhesive vinyl on acrylic panels that speak to experience and identity translated into a shiny consumer ready product. I’ve also begun to use the cut magazines as studies for some of these, as they are an experience in themselves. 

While inspiration definitely can bring something in a moment’s flash that can excite or motivate us, don’t wait for inspiration. You have all the inspiration you will ever need inside of you. Know yourself truly, keep asking questions, and dig deep. There you will find an endless well of work that will never be exhausted.