Went to the the Editions/Artists Book Fair today with Marcia, the first I've seen her in a good long while. The show itself was something of a washout from a bookmaker's point of view, since it was mostly prints, and what few books there were were mostly boxes to hold prints. There were a few interesting things, but nothing that really took the top of my head off it. It was great seeing Marcia again though, and we had a great chat over food and drinks at the Half King Cafe on 23rd & 10th Avenue. Sadly, much of the chat was about her impending break-up with her wonderful singer girlfriend, largely due to the fact that they're just not making each other happy anymore.
During the course of our chat, MG told me a long sad story about a particular missed artistic opportunity, one which was all too familiar. I can't tell you how often this has happened to me, or artist friends of mine, where we've been given this gift of opportunity and gotten so scared of success that we fail to follow through on it with just the minimal effort that it would take to get it off the ground. It's almost always my female friends who do this to themselves too. Most male artists, presented with such opportunities, snatch it like the brass ring it is and run like hell with it.
What the heck is wrong with us that women can't do that? What? Are we waiting for permission? Well, yeah, actually. I think a lot of us are. And this is something men, in their entitlement to the world, do not wait for.
For instance, I was astounded at how easy it was to sell our first book to the Detroit Institute of Arts. They were as excited to have it as we were for them to have it. And yet, when time came to send it out to MoMA, I could hardly make myself do it (and thanks to Marcia for kicking my butt over it), even though there was far less chance of it being rejected (we were giving it to them, for an artist's book collection that has an open submission policy) than there had been with Detroit, which isn't known for it's artist's book collection, unlike, say, Toledo. To which, incidentally, I haven't submitted the book either. It's a stupid paralysis, consisting of a combination of evil thoughts like "how dare I? What if it's rejected? what business do I have doing this? I'm a fraud." I don't think any of my male artist friends think in those terms. They believe in their work, even when no one else does, like my friend Adam, who's finally hitting it big again. Even when no one was buying, he kept painting. It's not making the art that's the obstacle. That's usually an irresistible force. Then the piece turns into the immovable object. That's the problem.
After the show, Marcia was trying to explain to me why going to see a show like this is sometimes validating for her. She said something like, "If Julian Schnabel can print badly on broken plates and still make a shitload of money, it somehow makes my"—and here we got hung up on the right adjective or noun, whether it was fussiness, perfectionism, worth, validity or what, whether it was about the idea or the execution or the product—but somehow seeing a "real" artist who still produces mediocre or even less than perfect work being validated for it validates what she's trying to do. In short, it's okay to be "good enough," to settle, to not be perfect. I often feel the same way, that somehow, women have to try much harder, produce a better product to get the same amount of consideration or notice, let alone validation.
At the same time, it's the art itself that's important, not the—"validation," I was going to write, but that's the crux of the problem, isn't it? You plod on and plod on and whether you put it out there or not, is the art itself validation enough? If you put it out there, and nothing happens, or very little happens, is that enough? Yeah, sometimes. I'm thinking of my friend Mel, who's a pianist, someone else who had passed up opportunities for artistic advancement, but who still practices her art in public, and plays because she wants to make people happy. The greatest validation she gets is when someone in the audience comes up to her afterwards and says that they loved hearing her play, that what she played made them smile or laugh or even cry, if it pulled some tangible emotion out of them. But even she craves some kind of an audience, some sort of feedback.
Serendipitously, on the way in I was reading an essay called "Envy" by Kathryn Chetkovich, which is about living with another writer who's not only more successful but, worse, more talented than oneself. This is what that validation is all about. Is the other person better than you, just because their stuff gets an audience and yours doesn't? One of the cruelest things my mother ever said to me when I was a kid just learning to write stories and peoms was that I couldn't really call myself a writer until someone had paid me for my work. Eventually, I figured out this was bullshit (Nobody ever paid Emily Dickinson, did they?), but it left me with that niggling fear that I wasn't good enough unless somebody told me I was.
I've been lucky enough to get a fair amount of validation of my work in my life: a few nice if small prizes; fairly steady publication of my individual poems; some good feedback from workshop leaders and editors, even when I've been rejected; a couple of sales here and there. I suspect that even when I do manage to sell a novel (and I'm pretty sure I will) it won't set the New York Times Book Review on fire, and probably won't make me nearly as much as my friend Jen is making on her two non-fiction books. I doubt I'll ever be able to live off my writing. On the other hand, that allows me to make cool artist's books with Marcia.
In the end, you have to believe in the work you're doing, whether anyone else does or not. Otherwise, why get out of bed?