test

test

Performance Score

late at night

alone in a really hot and humid room, preferably with almost no air flow.

 

1. Take out all the projects you’re working on. All of them. stack them in neat piles.

2. Try to decide what is the best project to start first.

3. Make a list of all your projects. try to prioritize them. remember some random email you forgot to write and add that to the list (but maybe in a different column)

4. decide to start many new columns. grocery list, tomorrow’s to do list, what you should eat for breakfast, what you’re going to wear tomorrow. another email you forgot from last week. someone you really should have contacted two weeks ago and it’s almost not worth it at this point. that other errand you should have done. add it to the list.

5. start getting really overwhelmed. and worried. maybe none of these projects are worth anything. they’re all probably pretty stupid. who cares. why are you doing this?

6. start going through list again and evaluating each project based on its stupidity and lack of meaning or impact on the world in any way.

7. contemplate sending emo tweets.

8. decide to just start something, who cares.

9. take out all your supplies – ribbons, glues, glitters, papers, threads, scissors. Oh that other thing you saved, find that too.

10. get overwhelmed by the mess you’ve just made in such a hot little room.

11. sit down and wonder if this is really what you should be doing with your time anyways. it’s still all a bunch of stupid projects.

12. scan the internet for other more accomplished peers and get worried and anxious about your own work in comparison. look at their CVs just to make it sting more.

end performance.

stop thinking. go to sleep.

it doesn’t mean anything.

it’s all made up anyway.

this was #worthcelebrating

the twitter / real life performance was just lovely. I loved loved loved interacting with people in real life — collecting their stories and celebrations and whatever they were celebrating that day (including both moving to NYC, and also finally figuring out when he will be moving out of NYC). I also loved getting the additional layer of input and story contribution from the amazing online audience — friends, family, and everyone else contributing their stories in little twitter poems.

read the full (mostly full — open up those private twitter accounts in order for me to include your tweets in there next time!!!) story of the performance here.

thank you to man bartlett for documentation, assistance, and for making sure I got some dinner. thank you to curators jean barberis and elizabeth larison who let me throw together a performance in short notice!

in-progress flag photoshoot by alison nguyen!

MY BRAIN, lately

BUSINESSLADIEZ in the comics

My friend Elizabeth sent this to me recently and it is AMAZING. encompasses everything a BusinessLady aspires to be. sorta.

from Hark! A Vagrant webcomic

1980′s Businesswoman Comics

Let’s Talk about BUSINESS: Shannon Finnegan

MONEY/TIME/VALUE/BUSINESS. BUSINESSLADYTIME(TM)INC.
an ongoing series of interviews and discussions about art and business. how do they balance out? how do we make this stuff real?

Shannon Finnegan

Shannon makes work that explores “working” and jobs and questioning what tasks and actions have value. She has done a series of 8-hour performances, doing a repetitive task for an 8 hour period, clocking in and out and making tick marks to note bathroom breaks as well. We talked about Shannon’s ideal / conceptual daily schedule: she would go into work, do an 8-hour drawing, and then clock out and leave without doing any other drawings in the evening or on her “off time”. Her actual ideal schedule (in real life) would probably include spending a majority of her days doing 8-hour drawings, but would also include time to have meetings with her assistants and interact with the people she’s working with, because she would be working with people to produce projects bigger than just her, and she’d have to set up meetings and future performances and gallery shows.

She talked about how just recently she’s fallen into a schedule which has her realize she could actually balance being an artist and make a living at the same time – working 4 days week and then having 3 days a week to be making artwork. “That third weekend day is crucial.”

But we also talked about how important it is having that consistency. if you have to spend some of your non-working day “hustling” for more work, than that eats into your art time, and more importantly it eats into your head space making you worry about the income and leaving no space for creative making.

This is all of the interview I managed to record.

Shannon currently lives in New York City and is working as a personal assistant, nanny, non-profit arts organization summer festival assistant, and probably more jobs I don’t remember.

Shannon holds a BA from Carleton College.

She will be exhibiting an 8-hour performance at the Invisible Dog Gallery on Saturday June 9th from 11am-7pm with a reception and Q&A from 6pm-8pm.

Follow up things:

READ THIS: Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, June 2011