Building Another Boat

On living a sane life in an age of insanity

17th century Dutch etching of shipbuilders at work

My last post here was a conversation with some friends about Artificial Intelligence, Art, Technology, and the many other issues that those topics touch upon. Most of that discussion centered on the seeming inevitability of AI’s rise, and with it, of all the potentially negative side effects of its proliferation into our lives which we may have cause to fear. But as we talked about all these things, the bigger question that seemed to hover over our heads was that of how to live a satisfying life; one that does no harm to ourselves or others, and which might build towards something better than what we are presently experiencing in the globalized chaos that threatens every morning to overwhelm us before we’ve even ventured a foot out the door.

One consistent obstacle to finding that answer is the sense of futility we can experience in the face of the big systems, and their many dysfunctions, that rule over and shape our world in ways we do not like, but feel so powerless to alter. I don’t need to list them all here because we grapple with them every day, and the list would be very long. But the core set includes the basics of environmental degradation, of institutionalized racism, of the astronomically spiraling cost of living in every sector from food and housing to education and healthcare, and of the grotesque concentrations of wealth and corporate power which have now completely corrupted our politics (on both sides of the increasingly performative divide between left and right), thereby eradicating every former lever by which “we the people” could once collectively turn the tide on such catastrophic scenarios.

I am a painter (pictures, not houses) and as anyone who follows my writings here knows by now, it is mainly about painting specifically, and art more generally, that I write. But on a deeper level, I am always addressing the question posed above, about how to live a satisfying life in a world of institutions and conventions that so often get in the way of the autonomy and freedom on which my own creative satisfaction depends. My central struggle from very early in life has been one of separation from, and resistance to, whatever set of rules, ideologies or values that other individuals or institutions might have been demanding at any moment that I accept and apply to my own life and practice — be it the ideas handed down in my own rather opinionated artisanal family, or later in art school, or within the commercial gallery system through which I have made my living, or in the paradigmatic art historical and critical narratives of any of the cycling artistic eras through which I have now lived since launching my own career in the 1970s

Much as these resistances have all been specific to art, and to a range of received cultural ideas about what art should be, or how I should think about it, make my living from it, etc., they are also about the ideals of freedom and autonomy writ-large. As I have written here before, the conventions and ideologies within which we live are so often imposed (by those who make it their job to hand them down to the rest of us) with a sense of righteous correctness, to which any resistance is necessarily deemed either futile, or worse, contemptible, or worse still, unintelligent.

It is surely true that the weight of the conventional, the official, the institutionally codified and delivered, can feel overwhelming and inevitable (in our earlier discussion about AI, we talked a good deal about the sense of its inevitability that is fostered by the people who are developing it). We fall so easily into the trap of believing that big movements of ideas, of politics, technology and economics are so far beyond and above our own individual control that they simply cannot be resisted, and are even more impervious to being overturned. And in some respects they are, so it is fair to say that in those cases we have no choice but to live as best we can within whatever system prevails when we arrive at our individual slot in the timeline. It is also true, however, that all around us are other systems, other creatures, who — however much they may be negatively impacted by our presence, maybe even to the point of extinction — go about their business impervious to it and according to rhythms and logic that are antithetical to ours, and have furthermore done so, presumably happily enough, for millions of years. Just watch a murmuration of starlings in flight, floating in the air like an intelligent unified cloud that can turn in any direction, en-masse, in a fraction of a second, and then ask yourself how troubled they are about Donald Trump’s, Elon Musk’s or Mark Zuckerberg’s machinations for world domination.

Some years back I went on a walk in the woods in Oregon with some cousins, one of whom was voicing terrible anxiety about the fraught political and environmental state of the world and her feeling of total powerlessness to affect it. It occurred to me in that moment that believing that there must be some new idea, some new leader, some new movement of rebellion that could actually turn this mammoth supertanker away from the rocks on which it is so inexorably bearing down, is precisely where that feeling of powerlessness is born. As often as not, we are in fact completely powerless to stop or turn the ship. The answer, I offered, is not to waste energy grabbing for its wheel, but to build another boat on its deck and quietly launch it before the rocks are reached. It too might sink of course, but at least we would have the satisfaction of traveling for a time in a craft of our own design.

In my tiny sphere that “other boat” is mainly defined by the kind of painting I like best to make in any moment, irrespective of trends or orthodoxies that may be current in the “art world” but which don’t always gratify my own interests or tastes. I’m a skilled, intelligent and critically curious maker, so I will always do things with an awareness of the fine work that other skilled and intelligent makers are doing, or have done. But that doesn’t mean that I have to do what they do. Professionally, the other boat has always resided in my capacity for self-representation, in the engaging presentation of my works to the world, and in the large, now international network of artistic colleagues, friends and patrons which I have cultivated over many years of practice. I work with galleries too, but this is always (and sometimes challengingly) transacted on condition of the autonomy and free-agency I’ve made for myself across my own carefully cultivated networks. I am not therefore ever interested in a relationship in which I am expected to be seen as a subsidiary or property of any dealer’s “brand”. You like my paintings and think you can sell em? Good for you! I’ll give you some to sell, and if it works out, we’ll both make some money. But the art and the identity belong to me and to me alone.

Widening the lens a bit, there are many other ways that another vessel can be built alongside the careening behemoth of our socio-economic and political status quo. Don’t like ChatGPT? Don’t use it. Don’t like Jeff Bezos? Don’t patronize Amazon or Whole Foods. Don’t like all the plastic in the world? Try paper and glass and metal wherever you can get them. Frustrated with the latest OS on your PC? Go dig around in that drawer with all the older versions and find one you liked better. It doesn’t work with the current internet? Unhook! Don’t like looking at your iPhone all day? Put it down! Patronize local businesses; it’ll cost more, but the money will go back into your own community. Pay cash; write checks; fix things when they’re broken; stop buying so much crap all the time!! Next time you go to buy some product online, or even at a local store, ask yourself what it really is, what it is actually good for, and most importantly, whether or not you would like to hand it down to your children. I went into a Benny’s store in New England once about twenty years ago, looking for something or other that I thought I needed at the time and have now completely forgotten. I walked the aisles for a few minutes, then stopped in the middle of the store and realized that there was probably not one single item in that whole place that was not going to end its life in a landfill, and probably much sooner than later. It was all garbage, manufactured for a disposable culture: cheap, badly made, ugly, mostly plastic junk.

Okay, so I exaggerate to make a point, but you get my drift.

The much larger context and thrust (and promise) of this “other boat” strategy, however, is community. In my last post in the AI discussion I cited a book towards the end — The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow — that has had a big impact on my thinking about all these things of late. In it, the authors describe the complex and sophisticated political experiments that were enacted in pre-history by a wide range of cultures across the globe, and which incorporated far more adaptable kinds of freedom into social arrangements that were not organized like the top-down, hierarchical, bureaucratic and “coercive” systems of The State as we know it today. The three core freedoms the authors identified were “the freedom leave [the system in which you live], the freedom to disobey [its rules], and the freedom to create new social experiments.”

We can do this individually, but as gratifying as it can feel to autonomously refuse participation in systems that we find personally objectionable, the actual construction of that other boat cannot truly begin until we do it in community. Once again returning to art, I have been able to do this by gradually building, or making connections to a community of other artists, makers and thinkers all over the US, and even in other parts of the world, who are charting similarly independent pathways for their lives and work. In 2021, at the height of the Covid 19 Pandemic, I reached out (with my also artistic brother Nick), to a large group of artists, artisans, writers, chefs, musicians and other performers, to collect and publish a volume of short personal essays about how and why they make the things they make. In the end, the book — titled ART IN THE MAKING, essays by artists about what they do — contained ninety-one essays by makers from all over the US and abroad, with each essay also including some color plates of the essayists’ work. It was a fun and reassuring project to put together in that frightening time, but also a validating one for this effort to build something better (to us) than the hyper-commercialized, tech-besotted, ego-driven marketplace of celebrity personalities and artworld buzz that can be such a discouraging gatekeeper for those of us who make artistic things. We had many well-known participants, but even more who are not so well known, yet whose work is no less skillful or worthy than that of the relative celebrities with whom they share the pages. It was therefore both a democratizing and a unifying effort, a building on a small but relatable scale of an alternative social vessel for all that we collectively care most about. The participants were as diverse in their pursuits, styles, backgrounds and personalities as we could find willing to participate. And yet, a thread of similarity runs through all the essays, of a common ideal of independent discovery and experiment that most of our makers shared despite the tremendous variety in their mediums and styles.

Last week, I read Robert Frost’s iconic The Road Not Taken poem for the first time, despite having felt for years that I knew it, and having so often quoted its signature line. It is the quintessential call to gently reject convention, to experiment, to strike out on a self-determined path, and one so clearly and elegantly articulated. What I propose above may seem simplistic, and it is surely only one small example of a way to take another fork in the road and chart a different path — or as I have put it here, to build another metaphorical boat. But it strikes me that it is one of the few workable and sane options before us in this moment of global madness. Get out on the barricades by all means; rage against the machine; march in the streets; organize and vote for the changes you want to see. But don’t be surprised if those efforts don’t succeed in turning the ship away from the rocks. So why not also leave the leaders, systems and purveyors of all we do NOT want behind and begin articulating for ourselves what a better world might look like, then start to create it in the midst of all that is failing? It’s good to do this for oneself, but so much better to do it as a community. And once we begin to build those connections and bridges, rather than just concentrating on the disasters we cannot control, the world can brighten up and feel a little less overwhelming.