While I have some training as a performer, I am mostly an undisciplined artist at this point. “Disciplined” is a word that people identify with for artists’ statements, as in interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary. For a long time, I really loved this idea of a disciplined artist, one who works hard or suffers through and for their creative practice. I think there’s some part of it that feels structured and sacred (or even military)—”discipline” shares a root with “disciple” of course and then all I can think of is Jesus.
That disciplined aspect of it—commitment to a character, to comrades, to authenticity, to physicality and practice, going right from a dayjob to a rehearsal room where I was getting paid quarters per hour of acting work because somebody decided they wanted to put on a Shakespeare play (never mind they had no idea what they, any of them, wanted to say with it)—created windows that opened and let in a fresh breeze containing some indefinable clarity about the world; when it happened, reality felt indistinctly but unmistakably transformed. I became a junkie for this, and criticized theater when it wasn’t this. I was committed.
I don’t do this anymore. I remember having forty different dream “jobs,” which I think I’d call vocations now, many of which I carried with love into adulthood: chef, illustrator, grafitti artist, biologist, linguist, cat doctor, tree doctor, alchemist, writer, actor, game designer, magician. A deep interest in all things meant I cultivated a deep commitment to none of them. Instead, here I am: undisciplined. I don’t act everyday. I don’t write everyday, I don’t paint everyday. But I do any given one of those things everyday. I read tarot everyday, but I don’t punish myself to do it. I just let myself not do it. I don’t throw myself into the wringer to achieve technical perfection in my craft… because craft is just a mindful way of interacting with something, of arranging. Craft is skillfulness which can come in many forms.
Most importantly, I never love seeing the same thing!! And if people are studying a craft, they’re just immersing themselves in the same thing! I want cross-pollination! I want to know what microbiology and sculpture have to do with each other! I want fermentation to be an active part of your dance practice! I want the sound artist, the ikebana artist, and the polylinguist to come together and make a bunch of bouquets designed like lyrics to music!
This attitude is not antagonistic to disciplined artists, it is not an oppositional mirror. To belove and autoencuriate is asymmetrical to discipline. It is not a fetishizing of art or extracting one’s life to serve art, but about accepting the fluidity and porousness of all things, how motion is preserved between materials and ideas.
I don’t want to be a disciplined artist anymore. I want to be a wild artist who is well-practiced in living my life. Certainly, I want to finish things. But I want to approach everything with newness and interest. To be disciplined is to create rigorous templates for understanding. But I want to minimize mediation between myself and this world.
Now, I practice as an organism. Go, practice as an animal living life.
Happy Tuesday!