No Time For Man Babies

There is nothing more satisfying than having completed the cycle of taking shetland roving, spinning it, and then natural dyeing it with leaves or roots. In this case, we dyed it with dried nettle leaf that one might get from the apothecary. Nettle’s magical properties of gentle boundary setting are perfect for a lot of my fiber spell work. Just as I might do for myself, I surround someone’s pathway in the center of their fiber spell with a gentle barrier that is there to remind those thinking of transgressing that this is not a boundary to cross. It is not an overly harsh barrier that we build into the fiber spells. Just as the nettle plant protects itself from unwanted touch by afflicting a person with a mild irritation or rash, we are building that sort of mild irritation barrier into the yarn and into the fiber spell to protect the recipient of the weaving. Their pathway will not be touched, and if it is touched, a small cost will be paid to those who are meddling. As above, so below.

Ahh, I have spoken of the energetic heft of hand-spun, naturally dyed fibers many times, but it never changes. They feel so alive with the lifeforce of the spinner and the power of the plants that were used to dye them. This is when it becomes so obvious to me that their is a mystical component to all fiber art. There is a colliding of all those elemental powers, earth, fire, water, wind, that one becomes more attune to over time, having participated in all steps of the cycle. Those elemental energies just swirl into an through one another in the naturally dyed yarn, having played a role in composing each of the raw materials and the completed yarn. One cannot fathom these skeins of nettle dyed yarn without the wind that blew the favorable weather in to dye the fiber. One cannot muster the color or the yarn itself with the rain and sun that works on the earth to grow the grass the sheep need to grow their fleece and the nettle needs to grow its leaves. More and more, I get the feeling I am just a cloaked participant in the age-old drama of powers much older than myself working through my hands. Audio equivalent of this revelation is found in Thergothon’s song “elemental”:

"the powers of the sea sea, the earth, the winds and the fire,
can you hear my chant?"

“I want to talk to you about Freedom, about struggling to become free, and necessity which always sneaks up behind. I became an artist to be free to have the levels of freedoms that I received from my Western Culture artist heroes. Freedom to act within the artwork with the body from my uncle Jackson Pollock. Freedom to name from my grandfather Marcel Duchamp and freedom to pass from one dimension to another from uncle Mark Rothko. You might notice the genders. I struggled for years to win this freedom as artists. Then in 1968, out of free choice, desire, and great blessing, Jack and I had a baby. I became a mother. I became a maintenance worker…And here I was keeping this child alive. That’s what it means to be a mother, to be a maintenance worker. And I discovered that Jackson, Marcel, and Mark didn’t change diapers, not in 1968. I have fought so hard to get their freedoms. I fell out of their picture.

…

I was in full crisis. I felt like two people in the same body: the free artist and the mother maintenance worker. Twirling. I had never worked so hard to keep everything going, to keep all the balls up in the air. Yet, people who met me, pushing my baby carriage said to me, “Do you do anything?” Failing, twirling, click, and, honest to god, epiphany. If I am the boss of my freedom, then I name maintenance art. I can collide freedom into its opposite and name necessity art, I name survival art. Why? Because I am the artist and I say so. I, me, as artist, must survive. It is art and art history that needs to change.” Mierle Laderman Ukeles in conversation in 2013 “maintenance/survival/ and its relation to freedom: you and the city.

And so what did Mierle do, she made her acts of survival and maintenance a work of art. She stuck it to the great man babies of 20th century art that had never changed diapers by changing diapers, cooking, and cleaning in an art museum. She got on her hands and knees, scrubbed a floor, and declared that she would not be erased by the art world just because she had a child. She made her survival into a work of art and forced the man babies to take a backseat.

I feel this so deeply as a parent and artist. It feels like mark, jackson, marcel, and all these other f##n’n man babies are leering and laughing at me for caring for my child. God, how many kids did the idiots of this generation and the ones’s after leave behind, alone, isolate to pursue their worthless, empty art? I am a child of these lost man babies. These idiots are all locked inside their own brains, stuck watching re-runs of ronald reagan speeches from the 80s with a hope that they can eviscerate the social safety net again and horde all the spoils. I am nothing but a deranged mutant, hell-bent on FEELING, CARING, in the face of their leering and laughing. I will make my suffering at the hands of a world they created into art. I will make my own struggle to be a parent with no tangible role model or assistance from those men into art.

I will remain outside the art world that upholds these idiots. I will drive further underground. I will rent out a space in the last warehouse in Denver that hasn’t been turned into a marijuana grow and put my art on its walls. I will invite my friends to put their art up too. There won’t be prices. The art won’t even be for sale. I will just invite you to take it off the wall if you want it. I cannot commodify my struggle any longer. All my art is a struggle. Its a struggle against being rendered into a passive observer of the end of the world brought about by the man baby brigade. No, I say to the void, I will be an active participant in the great, endless decay, watching them rot.

And so, in the spirit of casting out the plagues of the 20th century, let us make a new rule: we are not paying attention to your “art” if you are an able-bodied, white, cis-gendered, heterosexual male artist who was or is the darling of the art world by virtue of having all the privileges afforded to you by identification into those groups and have not changed diapers or done any significant care work of the kind. Your work is empty, dead images/dead words. Your work is nothing but noxious vapors seeking to degrade our brains. You are a vacuous, wannabe demagogue. Your work is nothing but a game you play to horde the attention your narcissistic personality craves. We will throw your work out with mark, jackson, and marcel’s to rot in one of our nation’s filthiest trash islands. The world may bend to your ever whim, but I will not. I will only hold a smoldering disdain for your willing complicity in the crimes of the patriarchy.

Some might think it odd for a dude who meets many of these characteristics to display such vitriol toward this group of men. Yet, sometimes those that are closest to the fire are those that are burned the most. I was left behind by my own father. After years of ignoring my traumatic childhood, I sent my dad a letter last year to establish some boundaries for how we would move forward with our relationship. I was clear in what channels our communication could continue. I was met with several instances where the boundaries were transgressed, and I responded with kindness in re-establishing my boundaries. Surprise, surprise: a boomer runs roughshod over clearly demarcated boundaries. Where have we seen that before? Instead of fighting for his son, my dad retreated back into his workaholism to grind himself into oblivion. He just left me out to dry to go back to work. I haven’t heard from him in months.

Long before I sent that later, I pondered this possibility of my dad just ghosting me completely. I considered that he could die without us speaking again. I mean he did have a heart attack that he only begrudgingly told us about. I considered that he was my last remaining parent and this letter could render me completely without any family support. I decided to completely emancipate in the face of all that, because I didn’t want to live in a world of his creation anymore. I didn’t want to be subject to a fake relationship where none of the past misdeeds that he had committed would be addressed. I didn’t want to make any decisions with him in mind. It was time to live my life and protect my family. Again as I have said countless times, becoming a parent in an international pandemic and watching your daughter not breathing once she is born really changes you.

So, let me reiterate, I have no patience for the man babies of the boomer generation and their braindead disciplines that came after, let alone any of their “art”. I have suffered those fools long enough. Dude’s can’t even make themselves dinner, let alone take care of another being. It’s a disgrace. And they have the audacity to try and claim that their art should be considered important. Dude, please. Get outta here. You couldn’t even follow the directions on the back of a box of mac and cheese let alone change the world with your art.

Accompanying my fear is a healthy dose of sadness and grief. I am sad that I have to emancipate. I am sad that I am alone in raising children with Lily and have no help from my parents. I have a wellspring of grief for having lost my mother to an entirely preventable form of cancer. It’s overwhelming how much I wish I had a healthy version of my mom here to help me and be with me in childrearing. I am sad for the catatonia my dad experienced, because his parents were racist, social-climbing idiots. I am sad that my dad could not find a way out of rehashing those generational curses in his own life. Yet, I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR HIM OR HIS BLOODLINE. Their terror ends with him. I took responsibility for my own life and emancipated myself from them. And despite it being the right call, there is an emptiness there. There is a grief for a life and a relationship I was deprived of. It does not go away. The grief of the loss just sits there alongside the anger. Loss is an incredibly multi-layered and complex thing. I am now going to get lost in it for a spell and see what I might see in its void.

And with that, dear friends, I will leave you in the muck of my own personal wanderings through loss and grief. I hope you are well in your neck of the woods and the quickening of the season finds you with renewed energy.

Best,

James

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