I had hoped that I could make art after having a baby but now understand the temporary impossibility of this goal. My eight-month-old son Mauricio lies before me in his crib, finally sleeping following the “fade” method, a questionable aid. The scent of milk perfumes my life. My mind fills with visions of his infinitesimal hands and his furious Nixonian face. I am in love with my son. I love him. I don’t think it’s very good for my work. My work might be dead. As I stand over Mauricio’s bassinet and breathe him into me (I am thumb-typing this Comment on my phone), I can feel my formerly stringent aesthetic standards crumble. I used to spend my days worrying about Wittgenstein and curatorial ethics and art-world economics and faux-art institutional point-of-viewlessness. Today I entertain mostly globular thoughts, framed by threadbare conceits like don’t die, exhaustion, and love.
I am a performance artist, or I was. Right now I am a single mother. A single mother does not make art by loving in a frenzy, cleaning up shit, and going to work. Does she? A single mother does not make art by freaking out about childcare and sore breasts and pumping breasts and cracked nipples. A single mother does not make art by surviving the wail-struck darkness. Right? Instead, she walks into her office with the haircut she hacked out herself and sits down to write memos on how to expand Snapchat’s—that is, her employer’s—March $1.8 billion Series F financing round with an even more lucrative $200 Series FP round involving Alibaba and WeChat. She does this only so that her son will have food, shelter, medical care, a nanny, and savings that will probably vanish into one of Los Angeles’s better private schools. The single mother does this. This is not art. It doesn’t feel anything like art. And because the single mother does not make art by raising her infant son, her actions are merely that: actions, not “Actions.” Her output remains unreviewed, ungranted, unworkshopped, and undocumented, except for when she records it online in the form of Instagrams or Facebook status updates or Reddit posts or rejected Wikipedia entries or furious, unread Comments on YouTube videos.
A long time ago, I ran naked through the streets of Tokyo while singing Gary Glitter songs to protest war capitalism by dematerializing the art object. Once I undertook an anti-death-penalty art performance/hunger strike in Atlanta that included sending SOSs in Morse code with a Maglite. I painted bad text paintings. I made a film about clowns that premiered at Slamdance. I spent a summer at Yaddo choreographing all of my dreams. A year ago I busied myself with unrealized plans to produce a show featuring myself as an emotionally vulnerable alt-right insurrectionist named Texit. I went so far as to purchase a fake Colt 9mm submachine gun from eBay and to stitch a blue costume with a red cape and “Texit” spelled out on the chest in sequins.
Now the fake 9mm submachine gun and Texit costume languish at the bottom of my closet and I labor at a “norm” job. I materialize my love for my son through intermedial gestures that combine spoken word with breastfeeding, breast pumping, doctor visits, kissing, worrying, and unsleeping.
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