In so many ways, I feel like I’ve been burning the fuse at both ends since I was like 15 years old. About this time last year, it occurred to me most lightbulb-ily that I am firmly IN my life. I’m not white-knuckling the present anymore—holding my breath through today’s crisis, waiting to collapse into each imaginary “other side.” I feel safer than I’ve ever felt.
But…after two years of COVID restrictions and income-annihilation, I had booked myself a RIDICULOUS wedding season, with an album release as a sort of perverse bumper block at the tail end of the whole ordeal.
So, all summer and fall I was dreaming about the art I wanted to make, the experiments I wanted to conduct, the exploratory play I’ve been longing for since childhood.
And literally THE MOMENT my busy season ended…
…what do you call it when it’s a cock block, but the cock is art and the block is a severe knee injury?
Anyway, I got approved for weight bearing yesterday, and took my first steps IN NINE WEEKS last night. Naturally, I’m feeling a lot of things. And one of those things is creative motivation.
So. Now that I have a little mojo in the tank, I want to tell you that while I’ve been MIA from the whimsical art projects of my dreams, I have been busily pouring creativity into the courses I teach at Utah Valley University.
Last time I wrote, I told you that I’ve been thinking a lot about chaos, and a chaos flavor I especially love is one that pops up all over my interactions with my college students.
In private lessons, we wrestle with the line between building our technical skills and our confidence—balancing a present lack of ability with an equally present, fully-formed worthiness.
In group performance class, we work to tease apart the tension between independent artistry and the institutionally-bolstered skillsets the accreditation board [in my opinion, rightly] requires.
In party-band ensemble, we’re prone to squeamishness at the “entertainment” factor lurking all elephant-in-the-room around our ivory tower. #peerreviewedjester
And in songwriting class, we question the wiggly idea of “quality.” Is it measured by commercial recognition and popularity? Does it live in the well-craftedness of the chords, melodies, rhyme schemes, and metaphors?
Of course, these are unanswerable questions.
One of my songwriting students, when presented with a particularly “mathematical” piece of music, wondered aloud whether the artist had stopped to consider the “could vs. should” of it all.
I, for one, would argue that this question never belongs in art (science and technology can have at it).
There have always been artists pushing on the outer boundaries of their mediums—making status quovians deeply uncomfortable in the process, and moving the needle on culture and innovation, as they do.
What’s more enchantingly chaotic than that?
I LOVE art that’s on the edges. Even if I don’t really get the thing itself, I’m just thrilled that someone is doing whatever bizarre or experimental thing they’re doing.
I’m glad Theo Jansen is making sculpture beasts that wander around beaches, nudged by wind and weather. I’m glad Kyle Edward Ball made Skinamarink. I’m glad Pez Outlaw Steve Glew crossed the ocean in ill-fitting pants and bucket hat to collect rare Pez designs (#curation)—performance art-ing himself through US Customs. I’m glad James Joyce went punctuation-free in Ulysses. And I’m glad Jennifer Lopez labored over every passionate, radical, intersectional detail of her Superbowl halftime set.
I live for anything that smashes against my biases and expectations, rattling them all around.
I think I’ve always been interested in those edges. The more I think about my early experiences with art, the clearer this seems. And I’ve been edge-adjacent (chaos-adjacent) for a lot of my artistic life, but I’m more and more ready to hokey pokey right on over that fine line.
Experiments coming. But first, physical therapy.
Happy February!
Love,
Emily
P.S. A pic of me after my first partial-weight-bearing day of work! Please as punch, and quite sore.
