Nihilism in Art as an Artist (Why I Love Zines)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen more mental breakdowns, witnessed more self-doubt, or seen more feelings of depreciation than when I was in art school. But, at the same time, it was one of the best experiences of my life. I think myself, and my classmates all had this feeling of “why am I doing this? We’re going to be poor when we get out of here..” Not to mention the odds that my whole class was going to move on and continue to be an artist outside of school was very small. Why were we doing this?? Going thousands of dollars into debt to go into a field that is oversaturated, not really 100% beneficial to society, in a field that is known for not being lucrative at all?? We were doing it because for some reason we needed to. Within ourselves. And that’s a feeling that you can’t explain to other people who aren’t artists.
Leaving school, I think for everyone, is very difficult, and for an artist, it can seem challenging when there is no clear-cut path. When you leave accounting school, you go to work for an accounting firm. When you leave law school, you work at a law firm. When you leave medical school, you become a nurse or a doctor and work at a hospital. But then again, as someone who is not a part of the corporate world at all, there are many “normal” jobs that I don’t understand. For example, what do business people do? Business? I didn’t know what that meant as a child and I honestly still have no clue what that means…
The number of experiences for this varies for the number of people on earth, but going from school to the professional world is such an intense wake-up call. I’m like “Oh, people don’t want my silly undergrad work about fake Facebook pages in their art boogie ass art gallery?” “They mainly want large fake Jackson Pollock paintings?” “I really just wanted to make a video of me pretending to eat spaghetti made out of sliced-up steel sheets or a video of people pouring water on my head.” “That doesn’t make money??”
I know it sounds silly, but I find it hard that people don’t want to see you be as weird as you really are. You have to wake up early, and find something that will keep your lights on, and it's probably going to take up all your time. When am I supposed to even work on performances that are going to make me the next Marina Abramovic? Well, there’s only one of her and a million of us that want to be just like her. 9 times out of 10 I feel selfish for dreaming, but grateful for what I have.
I find this competitive nature of not just the art world, but society in general to be exhausting. I think most people my age do. We’re not FINANCIAL GENIUSES like Boomers. And we’re not Technological pioneers like Millennials. What are we? I think a lot of us are thinking it doesn’t matter. For a lot of artists, like myself, zines hold space for a feeling like this. It is a space with no expectations and it can be anything or nothing, all wrapped up in something personal and tangible, like a book. Because of this, it is an object that rids itself of capitalistic competition in exchange for brother and sisterhood and community. They become a tool to navigate our world with sheer intentions. Other art forms do this as well of course, but there is something about a homegrown zine that is the essence of what pure intentions of art-making are. I love every single one, especially the shitty ones.
