Pain is political
because people's reaction to your pain reveals something of their need for control, sitting in a shitmash: of individuality, societal rules, and mortality. When you have to suppress pain you implicitly hide the social sources of your pain as well. Revealing the sources of your pain questions existing power structures. That's systemic, that's political. People in pain are required to be either invisible or channelled and properly scripted. People who wish to "help" you by focusing solely on your individual "responsibility" are camouflaging the systemic roots wherein they too are complicit. Equality and solidarity deconstruct class, Classes are presumed to be as natural as oxygen. But they are human made, and they can and must be unmade, questioned, revealed. Messy: blood, guts, and psyche. By hiding pain, you become a constant potential interloper, an exploder, because a person in pain triggers others, when the causes of your pain, show the world as it is, -- clashing with the world as it white-knuckle "must be." It threatens the social orders that benefit some people and not others. "Some people and not others:" there's the history of the world . . . In pain, you are an interloper not just to the world but also to yourself rubbing up against your internalized: "how to behave" script. The question is, why does anyone have to hide their pain? My images, and the way they have come into being, are not easily familiar, because the processes of making them: are "not linear," (bottom line) they are convoluted. Art isn't supposed to be convoluted, it doesn't market well . . . So, I am making art and am sitting in my pulp. Evolution is not linear and not without dead-ended wastage. I destroy and deconstruct a lot of my work and marks sometimes. Making visibilit:. somewhere along the line (many times compounded) I got the idea that, in immense pain, I was not to be visible. Sometimes, I got this idea, because people were evil. Sometimes, because people were also in pain, and everything in between. Can you see it, the irony of an invisible person making art? I look at my art not knowing how to pigeon-hole it, me, your reactions. Living with the contradictions of not wanting to look at messy smeary mirrors.
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