In My Free Time

Many of you have seen this image before. Before I came to PSU, I had used this time clock to have artists in a shared studio space clock in their studio time. I then paid them with a currency I made up and tried to get the currency legitimized by a few local businesses. I think at this point I was wanting to combine my interest of art and business, thinking about commodity and labor. The time clock was one small part of a larger business operation actually. At PSU I began the time clock project again by placing it in the studio's of the studio-practice graduate students. This time I traded them their time for physical labor. A conceptual problem arose and I put the project on hold. I still owe some time to many of the students and for that I apologize, I will indeed be giving you the physical labor I promised. I stopped the project though because I could not figure out why I was making them clock in. It made sense before, I had declared myself the manager of the space and was working within that space. But I don't work in these PSU studio's. I just had them arbitrarily clocking in their time so that they could entertain me and participate in my art project...this just wasn't working for me. So now let me tell you where I've gone from there:



(click thumbnails for larger image)
Lately I have been thinking that I want to use art less and less as a symbol or metaphor. I think many of my projects will continue to operate that way, but my hope is to change that more and more. What I want is for my art to have a solid and reasonably tangible impact in my life and certainly in the lives of others. The past 5 weeks have been 5 very busy weeks for me and it got me thinking about my time and my life. As I've mentioned in a previous blog, I do not want to spend my life working some job that is not fulfilling, I want to enjoy my life. So I began creating my ideal schedule; if I could rearrange my week, or my life for that matter, into anything I wanted what would that look like. This actually led me to analyze how I look at work, leisure, vacation, relaxing, art, etc. I realized that everything I do is, in some way, a form of work. For example, if you work a 9-5 job and you come home, eat and watch tv, what are you doing? You are relaxing, and detoxing...for what? because you're body needs it after work...why? so that tomorrow you can go back to work. It's all work; it's all part of the cycle of working. This is a cycle that is hard for me to agree with. I began looking at my time and I realized that as a "creative person" there are certain times of the day that I think I am most creative, that there are major obstacles that can stunt my creative process, and I began to realize the importance of what we might call leisure activities, or at least "detox" time. See, I'm in grad school and shouldn't a grad art student be steeped in art and constantly be producing? I'm not so sure, especially when we can redefine work to mean hanging out at the pub and talking concepts, religion, art with friends. That too is work, it's a different kind of mental work; your brain in this situation is processing the incoming information differently than it is in a classroom setting, or when you are reading a book. So I've been looking at all my time and what I do throughout the day and I'm trying to reconsider what is work and why. I'm not done but I thought I would formalize all my thoughts into this rather brief statement. I have been writing a lot about this all and I've been reading about it too (the website whywork.org brings up a lot of interesting topics about abolishing money, eliminating forced labor, etc. and while I don't agree with everything presented in what I've read so far, I think if you are interested in this, that is a great place to look). Lastly I would like to turn this into more of a social project. So far, this has been mostly an introspective exercise and I'm hoping that it does not stay this way. I've been contemplating what to do with the information I've gained and there are a few things I've come up with but I've not enacted any of them quite yet. I will keep you updated. If you want to talk about this, please let me know.