no longer my place to hide

It’s been kind of manic lately and I’ve been ignoring this blog, like the proverbial redheaded stepchild or something.

if you care enough to check me out at my other various web haunts, you’ll be up to speed on where my head’s at.  I try and keep this blog of Alex Spaulding/PhD stuff, but there is something that’s worth talking about here and not there

Some background info:

Within the scope of my PhD I am creating three room installations, the first being modeled on the bedroom I had as a child at my parent’s house. Due to various situations beyond my control, finishing this work
is taking forever. Meaning that I have conceptually been sleeping and breathing this work for longer than I have ever had to do in the past. What strikes me the most about this is how boring one’s idea can be
over a long period of time: not your normal long period of a couple months, rather a couple years, but also how in denial I’ve been about the true nature of this work.

The impetus behind this work was to recreate the space where I had my first ineffable experience, hiding from the world, listening to music and bathing in the waning winter daylight. Yes, that all happened, and it
was fundamentally one of the most important experiences in my life. But what also happened was I used to retreat to my room, to that space, and listen to music because I was a miserable child. (This is where blog
writing gets tricky, how to tell the tale without telling you too much).

I have plenty of distance from the kid I was, and parts of that kid still live inside of me: I still listen to music with the same wonderment and I still look for the winter dusk to hide lines and corners and turn what I see into a living Uta Barth photograph, but all of this looking and thinking, and reconsidering also makes me realise in some way that that was fundamentally one of the worst times in my life. Yet, here I am mining it for my own work, and essentially rewriting history by making it more than the sum of its parts.

The most challenging aspect that has come up for me is this unconscious way that I was going about re-writing my history, and denying that there had been anything even remotely negative about the memories or that particular time in general. More succinctly: can I take such a situation and make it ineffable for others, and do I even want to?

The first half of this question is important, the second references my exhaustion in fighting to make this project come to life, but it’s that fight that the question comes from. Before ignorance was bliss, I wasn’t aware of how painful the past was, and in my mind every aspect of the work was ineffable. But now that I sense perhaps not all aspects were so great, why bother covering that up? There is no rule that says I must engage in full disclosure with my viewers and the real tale is mine to tell,so why do I feel as if I am betraying the child whose room that was, and to whom the experiences belong?

There are no neat answers, and I don’t have witty replies or retorts within which to wrap this up, and in some way this is the worst form of navel gazing and chin stroking. As this blog explores the idea of
commonality within music and art, and perhaps the real struggle I am having is what sort of balance needs to be achieved within this room project to reach a humanised commonality, a place where the real is
accessible so that the ineffable can just exist.

-APS