overdue

Candy Koh. Untitled, 2011. oil pastel on paper.

Dear Mr. Critic--

            Years ago, when you looked at my coffin, my baby, my soul, you said it was self-indulgent and sensationalist at best.

            Did it remind you of the newest trend in Chinese art flooding the New York scene? Was it too blunt for your refined taste in subtleties?

            I take self-indulgence to mean that you find it over the top and excessive, but still boring because you don’t identify with it.

            You don’t identify with it because you spend your hours sitting with piles of theory, sifting through Adorno, Derrida, Wittgenstein, and surrounded by crumples of cheap copy paper discarded by you, those forsaken words that didn’t make it into the neatly organized file cabinets of your ideologies. You split your hours between obsessively honing your precious theories and making the gallery rounds, to sort through the latest displays of creative labor that hang in the thousand white boxes of New York City, awaiting their fates: to be discovered, seen, bought, sold, to make it in the art world. Hands behind your back, you circle through each space; your narrowed eyes scan the latest products, searching for ones that are worthy of your time and gaze. Most of it’s shit, you say. You only come across two or three good shows out of the hundreds that you see every month.

            You call my art self-indulgent because at least back then I spent most of my waking moments in the studio. I loved the screeching of rusting hinges and the faint echo of my cautious footsteps moving over the cement floor as I quiety slipped through the heavy door to spend another night with the smell of resin, paint, burning metal fumes. I loved every minute of carefully pouring just the right amount of water over the powdery hill of plaster, churning the milky contents with my chapped hand until it reached the perfect degree of creaminess. If it weren’t for the dizzy spells from the heat behind that mask or my hands slipping inside the gloves because of the sweat, I could spend the entire night without food, without a cigarette, without a moment of rest, just listening to the sizzles made by the beads of perspiration dripping and coming in contact with heated steel plates. I loved every bit of clay, wax, paint, and even the holes that made it onto my clothes better than sitting over coffee with chattering people; every scar from a burn, a scratch, cut, was a source of my pride. I even loved the black stains left on the tissues after I blew my nose or coughed from breathing in ground steel dust. My hands were rougher than any respectable construction worker’s; sometimes I would refuse to put on lotion even at the insistence of my book-and-computer-handling friends because I had what they did not have, and you will never have.

            Or maybe it’s just because I am a woman and you are a man.

            And is it so bad that I loved it so much and it showed in my work? Does that make me a petty hobbyist who simply likes making things and not a serious artist who deals with greater issues like the future of humanity?

            I don’t claim to know art. You tell me you don’t know either, but I know that you think you do.

            This is not a frivolous competition about who understands art better, the detached theorist or the immersed practitioner. No, this is a simple request for dialogue, for you to think outside of the criteria that you have established to make yourself the authority who always has the final word.

            After three years, I finally state my response to you: Let’s talk.

            Since back then I was naïve enough to think that you were right because you read more, I left my studio for three years to enlighten myself with the words you worship so much.

            Now I can speak your language. Now I too have the same books in my head.

            So now let’s talk.

            Because quite frankly, I still don’t see your point.

Sincerely,

The amateur in her mid 20’s still suffering from teenage angst