and when it comes to it…maybe this is actually what I meant?
maybe I had written my response…and maybe it was for him… replacing the "we"’s for "I"’s and the "us"’s for "me"’s..
I take on a role. Each day as I dress for my audience. Like an actor preparing to approach that spot-lit stage to recite a speech…a sonnet. Like a prostitute that dresses themselves up, just in order to get dressed down. Like a politician that speaks what we want to hear, yet know they will never be able to deliver. Like the artist that says it is all for love yet is desperately in need of the money.
I wake up and take on some kind of identity that is not quite my own. An identity already prepared, packaged for the company I know I am planning to keep… or for the viewers of my life that I am looking to meet, yet have not appeared before me
..not quite yet, anyway.
Through my art, I show you what I want. I am asked… "and what audience are you looking at?…who is it for?" And through that I design myself…pushing in, pulling out, mashing up and rearranging, in order to become right for whom I want to effect
…and right now it is you.
You see what I want you to see. You see me, as whom I want you to see. I manipulate you, to relate with my work and my ideas, my thoughts and experiences that I yearn to pass over and with which, form a connection. Even the most honest of artwork is never completely truthful… each second of my life is a moment that I am trying to understand …trying to understand myself …and the world around me… and the life that I partake in each day…and throughout this I am continuously changing…being revised and reformed …and I will never find any of this out…because there is no complete and definite answer… Yet I still look…I still search.
So therefore…no moment is honest…no artwork truthful. Make it up as we go along. Only through that do I find myself on this painful, exhausting yet intoxicating journey… repeating the past, bringing up past ideas and then eventually through finding these, do I see a new take on them, a new possible aspect and yearn to create something virgin…something already known but not looked at in this way.
I seek this…this attempt to not let this life pass me by. Not let it escape my grasp without forming some sort of stamp. Something to leave behind. And if not leave behind…something I have created that definitely was there, yet now remains in some other’s memory. I have to assert my existence…find a witness… make sure I am not passed by like strangers on the street. I need more than that. Not just to be remembered…I need to be remembered for something I once thought…something I was trying to achieve…and the identity I chose for you to see. I am searching for those perfect people that I can affect…Those people who will remember my work and therefore…me. Those people who will understand and only then, keep a record of the fact I was once here.