...Is it cheating to gain what you desire with little or no effort?

A friend asked me why artists say they "make" art instead of "create" art? Answering for myself in embarrassment--I thought maybe it's because things come through me, I just make them. I tried to explain what I meant.

I have this space I go to, or rather, a no place. I know now how to get there, though I always fear I won't find it. Actively, I seek out answers to certain questions in my life by dialogue with myself and with friends, or with reading and writing. When there seems to be no answer--complexity coils up and overwhelms the mind--I give up. I lie down or sit somewhere to just stare out. My head is numb, my eyes are blank, my body begins to float. My chest and viscera expand. I am almost asleep. I am getting rested. I am empty. I give up.

There is no shortcut or disguise to this "giving up." My writing this will not take it away or make it easier. I despair of an answer. I give over. Air washes over me. I will disappear for a while. I am no place. I do not get up and make tea or a phone call. I do not go to sleep. Everything gets arranged as my body floats. A luscious passivity fills me with images that seem to contain the question so well that they embody the answer--golden apples. I need only make it--it creates me.

One must be passive to dream. Force will not bring it, nor even need, but all at odds, one gives up, beyond inertia, over and out.

I am walking past Mitchell's house. Silent Mitchell of the ltalian pale face whose chestnut wave fell flat across his forehead. His mother used a bobby pin to hold it up. We saw it with amazement at school, almost awe. Gees, where was his mother from? His sister had a long braid to the back of her legs, until she got a fever and her mother cut it. It drained the girl's energy, her mother said, or so the rumour went (none of the kids seems to have talked to any of them). We chewed on the hot sticky asphalt in the summer in front of Mitchell's house and watched our first TV through the curtains of the big arched window in his dark front room. The sidewalk in front of Mitchell's house was very bent up and down; roots of some tree long gone (or did we dream it?). I never thought much about Mitchell or even spoke to him.

At twelve, I dreamt I was walking on the uneven sidewalk in front of his house and I met a snake. A pause and then terrified, I tried to run, but my body was too heavy, my legs moved only in slow motion. Oh, it will get me--despair--and then a giant step and a heavy lift off. I flew just safely off the ground. I had to get away. Half awake, I knew it was cheating to fly.

On the first slab, a girl is dreaming while seated next to a palm tree ripe with nuts, and birds are flying away.

In the next sheet, the girl is running in terror from a snake.

And in the third the snake has turned into a man (why not admit it) and the girl, now a woman, has nearly run off the piece.

In the next to last piece, almost awake--ego returning--the woman turns to embrace the man.

At last, awake, full bodied, incorporating all, the woman is indoors with potted plant, safe.

Five or six years later the image of the plump lady fleeing the coiled snake returned. She now has stumpy chicken wings, and a beak and halo, Saint Esther! It all takes place on a holy front by moonlight. She cannot really run and she cannot really fly. Will she lift off with that heavy body?

Recently, the need for an image to express the pressures building up in me has brought back the plump winged lady. Having moved to the city surrounded by cement, my body seems a rather demanding vestigal organ. Surely, there are many things I can do with it; jog, dance, sex, and exercise of all sorts. There are lots of errands to be run. I feed, clothe and wash this ever present body. But its glow is only a remembrance. Best try to forget it or at least treat it like a city dog that needs to be taken out for a walk...

Making sculpture which I have been doing for the last five years seems truly old-fashioned, since, at its best, it talks to the body. I am beginning to wish I could stay on a flat surface.

The tossing and turning in my mind is tiring. I can't accept that after all this evolution I am supposed to kiss my body goodbye, blow it away and move on to the spiritual plane. I'm stuck with an old idea, female perhaps, that spirit and matter are one. Gads, a sort of 60's notion of integration, not so much unable as unwilling to adapt to 70's fragmentation, let alone 80's disintegration.

Jan Baum Gallery offered me the roof top of the gallery to show a new work. I had been working in an empty lot, mid-city to step out of the art context, but my pieces were stolen too quickly to be seen. How can an artist attempt even to discuss issues when art seems so easily co-opted by the consumerist outlook of a whole society? All ideas have been neatly packaged and categorized. As a person and an artist, I felt cornered. All active seeking stopped. I gave up. I sat around. I gave myself up to a spell of luscious passivity.

The lady returned. She is no longer running forward. She is leaning back, body in submission. There is a slight lift off. Is it a nuclear blast or just the wind?

She is not alone. She is in a bevy of androgynous weathervanes (ranging 4 to 6 feet in height). The figures are in soft airy colors, tilting backward with beaks instead of noses and stumpy wings instead of arms. They can not make works or things, so important in our culture as a sign of productivity. They are witnesses, things happen to them. They represent transitional beings; not upright as creatures of the mind (human) and not horizontal as creatures of matter (beasts), not nude and yet not naked, slightly classical, but almost comic bookish. Each figure is of styrofoam in motion, turning on an aluminum shaft and tacking with the wind. The wind shifts figure and ground, styrofoam and sky, artifact and nature, going with fate and resisting...

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