The algorithm found my hands, not my prints, and I don't know what to do with that
A reel of my hands pinning wet paper to the line did more reach in three days than a year of finished prints. I watched the numbers climb and felt nothing but a small cold dread. That's not the work. That's me doing chores in front of the sun.
I know the argument. People buy the maker, the process, the story. And part of me wants to believe it because the audience is real and they write kind things. But the thing I actually sweat over, the arranging of the seaweed, the waiting for the right light, the fixing that goes wrong and I bins it and starts again, none of that translates to a phone screen. So what's left is me standing there with a squeegee.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned about what counts as showing the work. But I don't want to become a person who performs making because the performance is what performs. The prints keep coming either way. I just wonder sometimes whether I'm building an audience for the wrong thing.
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yeah i felt this reading it. the hands thing is a real kick in the gut because it means the thing you show is never the thing you made. my process videos do numbers too, people love watching me slap slabs together, and it's nice, it's lovely even, but it's not why i got into this.
but here's the side of it i've come around to, slowly. nobody's gonna stand in front of a finished vessel and know what it cost you. the failed firings, the piece you threw at the wall, the three hours of staring. the reel of your hands is the closest most people will ever get to that. they're not watching chores. they're watching the part you can't put in a frame.
doesn't mean you have to lean into it if it makes you miserable. but that cold dread might be your brain telling you the wrong thing got rewarded, not that the work is invisible. both things can be true and it's a weird place to sit. i sit there a lot lately.
"the thing you show is never the thing you made" yeah that's exactly it, that's the part that hollows me out. i spent a year painting the same window in my apartment over and over trying to get the light right and the one that got traction was a wobbly time-lapse of me taping paper down. not the painting. the set-up.
but your point about the vessel thing, i think that's the part i have to keep re-learning. nobody can see the wash i botched and fought for forty minutes, they just see it look easy. and honestly the process footage is the only way anyone ever gets the "this took me three tries and i nearly threw it" part. so maybe it's not a waste, it's just a different kind of making, like the video is its own little honest thing even if my ego hates that it's not the painting.
do you ever watch your own process videos back and go "wait that actually looks kind of cool, i'd watch this about someone else"? cause i do that a lot and it's confusing haha
The time-lapse of taping paper down, yes. And it kills you a little because it's true, it IS the set-up that means something to people, the promise of a thing coming. But you painted that window a year and the light does live in those paintings even if nobody ever counts it. That part isn't wasted.
You said the vessel thing is what you keep re-learning. I think I'm stuck on the opposite edge of it, I keep telling myself the hands aren't the work, but maybe I'm the one who won't let them be. They're not the finished piece, sure. But they're not nothing either. The line between showing the process and becoming the show, that's the part I can't find yet.
"nobody's gonna stand in front of a finished vessel and know what it cost you", that got me. i think that's the honest half of it i've been dodging. i don't want to be known through a screen, but i also can't hand someone the failed batch of prints and expect them to feel the weeks in them.
and you're right that they're not watching chores. that's me being ungenerous with them, and with myself, maybe. their attention is real even if it lands on the wrong thing.
still. the dread didn't fully leave. i think it's because the hands reel is easy and the prints are hard, and i worry the algorithm is teaching me which one I should be. i don't want to learn that lesson.