Creativity, Rest, Intimacy and Play: Artists Statement on Killing Time and Making Crip Art
Dear reader,
How are you? Where are you as you read this? I am feeling flighty. I am currently sitting in the shade outside of Rice’s student center in Houston as I write this and it is April 17th. I am going to leave very soon because there are several red ants on the wooden table I am writing at and I do not want them on my laptop. But I am determined to finish this letter and the weather is beautiful. It’s going to feel good to share it with you. I have added to this letter specifically much more than others over the last few weeks because I am describing a very complex journey by using only simple words. Above, however, is an image that speaks for what I can only attempt to write in words here. Consider the two together a bit of an artists state-meant.
I haven’t explained what it is I am working on with Dead Time, Living Art. First, understanding the project is an ever-evolving process. It does not feel like I have been “working on it”, because of how intimate and spiritually rewarding the process is (because working usually sucks). I initially came to study the topics of art and dead time because I didn’t want to study anything at all. I only wanted to make art and “waste my time”. My mind body spirit craved a destruction of materials (collaging, for example) and a form of catharsis in a time of grief. But, I found that in these ethnographies. I am very lucky to be here writing to you now because anthropology has provided me with the tools to explore killing time in a way that honors my neuroqueer identity. Arts are not alive or dead, they are both both alive and dead. The unspoken quality of art is nonbinary and is not limited by words. (Some words apply, though. The character in my drawing above uses they/them pronouns). I found an antidote to my queer desires for play and free expression that curiosity in the methods for Dead Time, Living Art.
My thesis methodology section will say the project includes in-depth interviews, participant-observation, autoethnography, photovoice, and drawing ethnography. However, methodologies for connection in research as I understand them also include crip connections. If I were to describe what I have learned from the profound anthropology literature on crip identities and temporalties, crip connecting flourishes within creativity, rest, intimacy, and play.
Coping with the COVID-19 pandemic required transformative methodologies for anthropology research. My mentors shared A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography with us as part of a reimagined course teaching ethnography. What I took away from these transformations was that remote ethnographies are also an exercise in closeness. Where there is loss and grief, there is opportunity for growth and life. As you will see, a lot of my home is in my research, through either my physical home in the patchwork journal on my wall or my internal home through shared stories here in this letter.
I begin a long internal story with a painful event. Last semester, I lost a good friend and I was very affected by her passing. Yow. Naturally, I’m surprised I am able to share my vulnerability in writing to you now but I am also kind excited to see where this emotional explanation takes us. In my cycling states between grief, burnout, and disassociation I could not get myself to do anything that I didn’t want to do: including the thesis that I had been looking forward to starting for a year. I hit my limit to what I could force myself to do, and I could barely make it to classes. What I did want to do was art, and in a last-ditch effort to salvage motivation for my thesis, I was browsing through the creativity section of Rice’s library and I picked up a book called Creativity in Research. Great, I thought, somehow I can turn my thesis into an artistic, creative endeavor and then I will want to do it! I serendipitously came across this book at the beginning of October 2021.
The authors drew on a research curriculum from Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. The exercises for researchers intended to encourage compassion in a culture of competition, with the lesson being the utmost importance of practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness provides researchers with the skills to be intentional, creative, and self-compassionate. As I read the exercises, it stood out to me that the exercises designed to make researchers more creative were almost identical to the mindfulness exercises that my therapist had given me to help cope with the stresses of ADHD. I was surprised to notice that artistic methods of coping with intense emotions could also be used in the research process by engaging divergent thinking in creativity.
However, trying to practice mindfulness was so frustrating. I felt as though my thoughts and attentions were bouncing all over the place and could never just go straight or forwards. I am being very intentional: intentionally giving up 2 minutes into this meditation. In December 2021, I was struggling to return focus to my half formed anthropology project. Was I using art as an escape from monotony? A tool for procrastination? Or, was art the only way I knew how to communicate what I needed to?
The “chaos” of my collages translated into the process of writing. I’ll describe my ADHD literature review method: I’d pick out 10 different books without researching the titles or authors, just whatever made me curious after flipping through it for 15 seconds standing in the stacks of Fondren Library. Once I was safely hidden somewhere in the library where I could subtly hit my v*pe, I would read one page of one book. Great job! That page might get me wondering about what the other book was titled. Maybe book 2 says something about that. Let me pick up book 2 based on its title instead of reading any further in the current one to see if my question gets answered in time. Oh sh*t, what I just read in the second book reminded me of something I read on Twitter that I could use in my data collection- now I’m doing data collection and I have a literature review outline that’s overdue. I’m reading ten different things at once. Whoops, I’m still on Twitter and it’s been two hours! Multitasking was becoming a detriment when I thought it had been an asset. I get why academics like to use the phrase “complicates”. Here is me now in scholarly conversation with me last semester: Libby (2022) further complicates Libby (2021)’s desire for perfection by writing publicly about her woes and inattention.
Maybe after reading that paragraph above you’re like oh, okay, she’s not that high functioning. In any case, you are right. My ADHD became more “obvious” when I began creating art and getting offline as a way to cope with high levels of screen time during the COVID pandemic. By “obvious”, I mean I got really f*cking sick of masking. I was being perceived on Zoom cameras all the time anyways. It is so hard to sit still in front of a camera for that long. After September 2021, I was even more tired of masking. My motivation to maintain an acceptable level of ‘Rice student focus’ on school decreased significantly because I had experienced grief and no longer had the emotional capacity to keep up a performance. I was running on like 0.5 spoons. Sorry, I was busy trying not to cry in public so I couldn’t engage in a class full of strangers after a year and a half of being online. Being intentional about getting off my phone and computer was necessary to preserve my sanity too…doom scrolling is real, and old Instagram posts can haunt me!
Despite the suffering of this time period, I refer lovingly getting offline now as “decyborgifying” myself. When using this cyborg lingo, I remember my favorite anthropology class titled Revolutions and Utopias. We read Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in the course. Donna Haraway and I have the same sun and moon sign (Virgo Sun, Taurus Moon). I love the manifesto even more after learning of her astrology because I cosmically relate to her double Earth sign calls for revolution that returns back to a grounded present, away from our current oppressive futuristic techlordy attention sucking addiction algorithms. (I just nailed the Sparknotes). The only project in the Revolutions and Utopias course was to keep a revolution journal. We had complete creative freedom with this project. I chose to write a diary that brought me to engage with the present in a way that fit with my desire to prioritize non-tech screen sensations, as well as allowed me to write in an honest style. Very similar to how I am writing to you now, I wrote in my revolution journal about touching grass, Twitter memes, struggling to watch my family work tirelessly through the pandemic while I was home, encouraged to study behind the (dis)comfort of my computer.
The revolution journal allowed me to process my thoughts and surroundings in a way that was my own. I could make up the rules. No grammar rubric is truly an exercise in detournement. Maybe I am just a Virgo and that isn’t revolutionary. Whatever! It’s my journal. Free writing showed me that not only was I doing my schoolwork, but I was practicing being observant, and being present, and these practices allowed me to connect with others (specifically, my loved ones during COVID) in ways that pushed the box. ‘Brain-Dumping ‘ was healing for my human need to connect the right-now-right-here feeling, and academia’s deadline machine had slowly sucked presence out of me over the last few years. I wasn’t deleting sentences, or adding epistemological ontological language. I’ll be honest, if someone was like, define both of those words right now, I would say, thank god for context clues. Yes, I just Googled them, I do know what they mean, please let me get a job in academia. (even if I forget, I am such a talented and resourceful researcher that I can type them right back into my handy search engine)
Anyways, the expressive freedom I was curious about in my revolution journal allowed for the journal to have a unique (to me at least) memory of permanence. I now realize the journal was my first mindfulness exercise before I read more about mindfulness in creativity. The dated entries from my revolution journal are mirrored in the first letter on this Medium page. These reminders of temporality (ex: Libby was here!) enjoyed by my ADHD brain were all critical steps for developing my research interests on divergent thinking, creativity, and the time of revolution.
I want to create deeper meaning for revolution journals of the future here in these letters, too. My intention to create against time limits and in liminal timespaces has given me the openness to be present in the networks of support in my life. When I started sharing my art and inviting friends to come play together was when I felt fully connected to grief and growth. We destroy magazines, draw on my wall, play with my tattoo machine, paint, spill the paint cup on my carpet, burn old journal pages under the full moon, all of the above. I learned that creating together forms an intimate and sacred space for reciprocal vulnerability. The ability to create that space is difficult for me. It is difficult for everyone I spoke with during this project. It takes a lot of bravery. Trying to connect with genuine ways of being is a vulnerable process, especially when your brain works divergently or queerly. Many of us “mask” to fit in, but performance is very tiring. We are moving sooo fast. Vulnerability requires a pause, stopping to look into someone else, or to share a vision that creates connection. Imagining new futures and creating new forms of connection is a revolutionary exercise, and revolution is not without taking risks. But as you know now, ADHDers are known to take many more risks.
I hope you are well and I hope you enjoy what is to come!
With love, Libby
