Forceps - Goes to Work

On the bus today I was thinking about how visual artists have studios, and they might spend work hours, 9-5 on weekdays, in their studio.

For me, this seems strange. Being an artist doesn't seem to be a full-time occupation for me. I imagine if I worked full-time (and I wasn't ill), and that each hour was more or less worth what a current hour of work is to me, I would be absurdly productive. Too productive, such that I would produce so much art there would be no way of managing it all.

My current practice is more leisurely, for the most part. Putting together research papers and documentation takes a considerable amount of time, intensely spent, but actually making work is quite a sparse affair. It's mostly thinking, waiting for ideas to sediment and stratify, reading, mapping things out, and then a relatively intense chunk of time doing the manual labour required to actualize it.

Part of me, and I guess one might call this classical masculine ambition,¹ wants to push myself to that 9-5 every weekday schedule. To work so much, produce so much, that I'm so far ahead of everyone else... to be brilliant, and produce brilliant things, and to have people recognize me as brilliant. When I was a teenager, I had a very well-formed dream that someone might call me a prodigy. No one ever did, and now—being 20—it's a dream that will never be fulfilled. I wasn't even on the gifted and talented list!

I tend to reject that part of me, for obvious reasons. It's arrogant, and it's the kind of thing that works people into their graves. After all, if I have problems with the working week, from an anarchist perspective, and I realise that it burns people out, why would I want to do that myself? The answer, it now occurs to me, is that I would be choosing it, and doing what I wanted to do.

But, on the other hand, I know it's not good for me, not in its current form anyway (I estimate that I have been working over 40 hour weeks in the library). But then, I say that now, but why do I think it's not good for me?

• Food: I'm not eating great while I'm here. Mostly fruit, crisps, various mixes (bombay, trail, energy, that kind of stuff). As such I've been getting hungry, and my time here has mostly been bound by the food I can carry with me. Additionally, it's been costing me a lot. All of these things, however, can be put down to my process of adjustment to living happily with my GI, and will eventually stabilise and improve. I'm already seeing improvements in reaching a functional diet, with grain/seed/etc mixes, bananas, and gluten free bread.
• Exhaustion: I've been getting increasingly tired. Every... maybe four or five days, I have a day where I just crash out completely. I'll sleep for the majority of the day, and not really do anything as a result. This can be put down to a mix of getting accustomed, and the food point above, and of course glandular fever. The mental/emotional exhaustion is somewhat more troubling, because it's different from the physical exhaustion that those reasons might explain.

But saying that I'm 'going to work' or 'going to the studio' holds quite a lot of cultural capital and prestige. It sounds purposeful, it makes me sound purposeful. It would make me feel good to be able to say that.

Anyway, I'm off to stay with Alex for the weekend tomorrow. Should be nice. You'll still hear from me, though. Back on Monday, maybe I'll come in, maybe not. As for now, home for laundry and food.

¹ the kind Kleist patronises Günderrode about in Christa Wolf's No Place on Earth.