THE GIRL WHO QUIT SMOKING

Butt Soap

Though recently I’ve been thinking there is more to it than that.  There is also the fact that the artistic process is an impulse.  Maybe on an unconscious level art satisfies my compulsive need to tidy.  For example, art is a great way to repurpose old junk.

Then again, those are really different things.  Take, first, the impulse to tidy.  There is something very satisfying about washing up and containing things at home or at work.  In much the same way, there is something very satisfying about putting a line next to or around a smudge, because it contains the smudge.  And both tidying and art require resources: containers, detergent, vacuum, bags, ink, paint.  In the process of cleaning a kitchen, we transform chaos into order, with bags of mess on the side.  In the process of creating an object, we start out by making a mess out of some stuff we have, probably prepackaged, and then we clean it up, putting some of it back in the package, throwing some of it into the bags on the side, and transforming some of the mess into a third thing, a thing that contains some of the mess and expresses it or tastes like it.   And we say “that was my point.”

But in order to make the mess that produces the third thing, we need to buy supplies.  I want to make an ink drawing on paper.  I buy ink and paper, and then I make a drawing, and then I have almost a whole bottle of ink left, and the rest of a pad of paper.  The only way to tidy it all is to make more paintings.  Boom.  By nature of my impulse to tidy I’m hooked.  

This is a tautology caused by mass production.  The story of the girl who quit smoking is a parable of this tautology.  She decided to smoke just one.  So she bought a whole pack, because an individual cigarette cannot be bought, and when it can it costs a dollar and much more in energy, sometimes exacerbated by shame.  So now she had a whole pack of smokes.  She smoked one, and, true to her word, she didn't smoke any more for the rest of the day. But the next day she still had most of a pack of cigarettes, unless she has given it away.  Chances are probably 50% (?) she still had it.  She decided to keep it in her freezer and only have one once in a while.  So, even if she succeeds in slowly weaning herself off cigarettes, the box remains in the freezer, adding to the total disorder, along with waffles.  If she does not eat all the waffles, if she does not smoke all the cigarettes, it will be a waste.  Which would be, at best, uneconomical, at worst, mentally disturbing.

Which leads to another, more fundamental problem, which is you can’t eat art.  For basic survival, the best you can do with the matter of art is convert it into energy, or build a shelter, maybe out of stretched canvases or photonegative plates.  But that would not be as plush as living in a condo, forged from an old iron shop into a fully stocked machine, a block away from a bistro where the drinks have their own menu.  So the artist is left in a quandary.  On the one hand her creation is priceless.  The trick is to get the owner of the bistro to believe it is worth a wedge of baguette (smeared with something chopped compulsively tidy and small).  On the other hand the manager of the bistro would sooner exchange bread for her government notes than for her love beads.  In fact, with fiat currency, she doesn’t even have to ask to see the manager, unless she wants to, for her own entertainment.  Entertainment is something that is not really essential to survival but still highly prized (just look at the food in this bistro – it’s fun, and pricey).

It can be stressful to make either choice.  Either you leave all your stuff moldering in a closet and earn fiat somewhere else, or you spend the day tidying the mess by sticking it all together and then you try to trade it for a chicken.