When I remember my days as a conceptual artist, which I unequivocally loved, it’s a bit of a shock to realize how far I’ve moved in another direction creatively. Definitions don’t always contain the whole truth of any situation, but I’d say that in terms of artmaking I am now primarily non-conceptual, driven by intuition, emotional expression, connection to process, and mindful present-moment awareness. I’d like to share the story about how I got here.
Looking at my history, it’s no wonder that I was a conceptual artist at first. I came to art after I completed a PhD in philosophy, and I continued to teach philosophy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) while pursuing a graduate degree in art. I was a pre-med biology major in undergrad and took enough art and art-history courses to double major in art. But I didn’t consider myself an artist. Then, in my last year of college I fell in love with philosophy and took a detour, following that love right into a philosophy graduate program.
Academia at the graduate level was a whole new world to me, and unlike anything I could have imagined. After I finished my preliminary coursework and started writing my dissertation, I also started secretly painting. In a literally underground situation, the woman I rented a room from let me paint in her basement storage area of the condo building. Hiding away in that tiny space, I turned to painting to release the frustration of my graduate studies. As much as I love philosophy there was something alienating about the kind of research I was expected to do at that level; it was highly specialized, every claim had to be justified and footnoted, and at times the subject matter felt esoteric and out-of-touch from ordinary life. While a part of me excelled at the analytical rigor and intellectual inquiry, another part objected to the pressure to conform to the conventional standards of the discipline. It felt like the program was only interested in my mind and the quality of my arguments rather than the whole human being. Painting large, colorful, figurative canvases gave an outlet for the parts of me I excluded from my academic writing. It’s no coincidence that in these early paintings I systematically deconstructed images of the female form culled from dominant fashion-industry ads, objecting to the norms and conventions imposed on women’s bodies. In school I experienced a similar imposition directed to my thinking mind.
Yet despite my resistance to certain aspects of academic schooling, I was also deeply invested in an intellectual life—my intellect was a safe haven from early traumatic experiences held in my body. The mind/body dissociation came naturally.
Looking back, it makes sense that initially my approach to art was heavily conceptual even though I was partly drawn to artmaking as a release from conceptuality. Compared to the norms of academic philosophy, the way I worked with ideas as a visual artist – not as an academic philosopher – was liberating, free of the constraints of disciplinary writing. Marrying concept and art materials, giving ideas concrete substance, embodying them in physical form: the act of combining artmaking and philosophical thinking was my entry into the art world. Nonetheless, for all the internal turmoil I manifested in my furtive paintings, I wasn’t ready to abandon the intellect. I completed my philosophy degree and taught philosophy for a year before giving myself permission to become an artist. Even then, I needed the external structure and validation of an academic structure to make the move. Given my conceptual leanings I was a good fit for the conceptually oriented MFA programs I attended at SAIC and UIC, both in Chicago.
At art school during the mid-1990s I found and fell in love with conceptual art. It was the link between the two fields of philosophy and art, and there were decades of art-historical precedents to draw from. I looked strongly to Western conceptual artists working during the 1960s and ’70s and subsequent artists influenced by this era: Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper, Douglas Huebler, Bas Jan Ader, and Martha Rosler. I was particularly drawn to artists who created performative actions in the world guided by a conceptual frame: Yves Klein (a post-WWII artist who worked in the 1950s and early ’60s), Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Francis Alÿs, Sophie Calle, Gabriel Orozco, Gillian Wearing, David Hammons, Marina Abramovíc, Yoko Ono, Hamish Fulton, and Richard Long. And artists who worked with language as a primary medium, like Lawrence Wiener, Ed Ruscha, Mary Kelly, Glenn Ligon, Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Krueger. These are the folks I studied and aligned myself with, the artistic companions who inhabited my studio. So deep is the conceptual-art canon, this list is not exhaustive, which is to say I had a lot of artistic company.
Gradually, however, over time and long after art school, as I started to heal the dissociation from my body outside the studio, I yearned for more inside the studio as well. More body, more materiality, more emotion, more heart, more spirit. Most if not all art draws on these elements, even if it’s not apparent on the surface. However, the way that conceptual artists typically work with these aspects is so subtle, understated and pushed into the background that I started to look elsewhere. Thus began a process of freeing myself from another set of norms and conventions, this time from within the academic art world, creating space to move artistically in other ways.
Mapped on to the body, the main direction of this movement was from the head down into the heart and belly, beginning to integrate the thinking mind with the rest of me.
During this transition I initially used a mix of conceptual and phenomenological approaches to expand my practice. I would research a project and create a rough framework for creating it, and then build into the equation something I could not foresee or control ahead of time. My site-specific illustrated map projects took this approach. For each map I chose a historical topic and location that caught my attention—the site of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remote hut in Norway, the canyons of southeastern Utah where early 20th-century explorer Everett Ruess disappeared, the U.S. National Park Service record of suicides at the Grand Canyon—and researched the area extensively before making a trip to the actual location. All the reading and writing conceptually motivated the trip, and gave me a reason to be there, yet I was equally committed to exploring the direct experience of the land through walking and meditating on site. I wanted to observe what the body knows outside of any prior ideas I had in mind. How is the actual world different than what I think it is? Where do my conceptual perceptions match or belie the lived, felt experience of the earth?
Another example of a combined conceptual/phenomenological approach is the piece Conversation Portraits. For this relational performance I created a conceptual frame within which to hold one-on-one conversations with people and, based on their answers, immediately write a biographical text poem – a “conversation portrait” – using an old-fashioned manual typewriter. The participant would sit nearby till I finished typing, then I’d give them their portrait as a gift. The framework structured the interaction, and the list of interview questions gave me a loose script to follow. However, I could not prepare beforehand for what each person would say, and I could not write the portraits ahead of time. The writing was improvised on the spot and in real time in response to whatever the participant shared with me. Built into the project was a dynamic tension between the assumptions, expectations, and conditioning that I brought to the table and the desire to attune to the lived reality of another person before me. What could I learn, see, notice outside of my own limited perspective? How could my listening get to the truth of their experience and not merely reflect my own?
Step by step I created formal, artistic ways to get outside of what I knew conceptually, and attend to the lived reality before me, be it the natural world or another person. Eventually a more radical turn occurred, and in moments I was able to let go of needing a plan altogether when making art, fully tuning to the body and heart to lead the way.
In terms of painting, this meant embracing color, intuition, and the moment-to-moment exploration of process and materials. Approaching artmaking from my emotional imagination rather than a conceptual imagination, slowly over time I dropped the need for conceptual frame when I entered the studio. Rather than researching and writing beforehand, I spread paints and an empty sheet of paper in front of me and let myself feel my way through the process. Using materials to respond to whatever arises in the given moment, connecting internally in a mindful way, and trusting the creative process. I follow the energy of creative and emotional impulses that are not predetermined at the outset.
I don’t mean to draw a hard line between working conceptually versus working intuitively or more materially. Of course, artists can turn painting into a conceptual practice or use it as a formal way to track their ideas. On the other hand, there are always material, intuitive, and emotional choices being made when working conceptually. Within the arts, absolute distinctions between “conceptual” and “non-conceptual,” “intuitive” and “non-intuitive,” and “material” and “non-material” don’t really exist.
These categories reflect the binaries of language.
Nonetheless, as much as my thinking mind is still involved, it feels different to make art intuitively and non-conceptually. Connecting to materials in visceral ways, tuning in and following the energy, heeding emotion and desire without an end-product in mind, I experience such artmaking in a more integrated way: less intellectual and more embodied, less future-thinking and more present, less from the head and more from the heart. Significantly it feels less critical and more playful. Working without a fixed agenda, I am more responsive, spontaneous, and mindful (defined here as being in the moment non-judgmentally). Doing my best to create without self-judgment, I am more accepting and less perfectionistic too, as if all of me is welcome. The implicit agreement with myself to show up just as I am partly explains my more recent expansion into music and song as expressive creative outlets.
There are so many ways to be an artist in the world, among different people and even within one’s own lifetime. The art world has conventional and culturally specific norms, rich material traditions, and academic and art-historical trends that go in and out of fashion. Despite this hegemony of values and ideas, there are no absolute rules defining what being an artist must look like. We get to decide to work within a singular tradition or move among them, carving our own path, each in our own way.
The takeaways, if your artistic path is one that shifts midstream:
Let yourself change, grow, explore.
Be who you are at this moment.
Don't tie yourself to an older version of yourself just because it's what you've always done or what you're known for.
Don’t let fear of what others might think stop you from trying something new or doing something differently.
Embrace change. Evolve.
Love the process.
Love yourself through the process.
It will be okay.