All Swim, No Sink Found in Artist DNA
Instinct or impulse—we are fish, we cannot stop swimming.
Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
“The further you get the fish from the bone, the harder it is to recognize what that fish is.”1
Is it purpose? Or is it just impulse? Is it coded into our DNA? What is it that drives us to keep swimming even after we are caught and gutted with our bodies split apart on the dock? Our intestines rudely out and our gills gaping, what is it that compels us to believe we are still capable of being fish?
Are we fish?
Or are we just piscine pretenders? Do we gulp and bubble and fin our way upward, denying the dark pressure threatening us with the bends should we rise too fast to glory? Is it the artist’s destiny to be forever picked apart by seagulls, our innards exposed and slid upon by rubber-booted googans as they hose our rejected ideas from briny boards? I ask you: Are we chum, or are we water dancers?
The further you get away from the thing you want to be, the easier it is to give up.
They hose our blood away. They force the knife between our ribs to slice us and gut us and filet us into submission. They make us feel as though the act of swimming is nothing more than a hobby performed in a pool from which we must be rescued. But our natures compel us. This urge to wiggle and gulp and torpedo cannot be quashed. We swim against the current and willingly into the jaws of sharks, who are themselves helpless against their own dark natures.
Reflections on the surface are closer than they appear.
“You are not fish,” they’ll say, sloughing the scales from our bodies as they stick fat and arrogant thumbs in our gills to drag us toward a lifetime of getting in line. “Welcome to synchronized swimming in the cesspool of sameness,” they’ll say. “We will make of you a sashimi sheet to fit upon the dull mattress of your life from this day on.”
Gutted. Flopping. Gasping. Hooks and nets and greedy faces abound yet we are away, caudal, pectoral, and dorsal fins steering our bodies as we struggle toward the promise of creative salvation.
“The further you get the fish from the bone, the harder it is to recognize what that fish is.”
We know what we are and we don’t need a DNA test to prove it. We will not accept this flawed system that declares us boneless and faux. We are fish now and forever more. We taste as we taste and we swim where we swim. Don’t ask where is your bone, Tuna? Where is your rainbow, Trout? Fish all you want, but your hook will find no purchase in our true purpose.
The longer we are out of the water, the stronger the tide calls.
We swim, if only in our minds. We make, we dream, we continue in the big blue, even with our flesh torn away by those whose dreams were long ago lost at sea. We filter and absorb nutrients from this imperfect water, imagining ourselves to be as big as whales serenading the whole world. It is better to swim and keep on dreaming in the deep. Better to chance it against the hooks and trawls. Better to be one-eyed and steering than blindfolded by fear and drown.
Better to be fish.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together”
- Keith Haring, from the Keith Haring Journals
Record of the Week: Sons of Kemet, “Black to the Future”
Can’t remember how I found it2, but I love it. Here’s a sample of the goodness held within the grooves of this record.
Maybe not the best link to click if you have a thing for shoes (or maybe exactly what you need, I dunno), but artist Willie Cole takes some heels and makes sculptural masks from them. There’s a whole bunch over at this link—where you can just generally read more about Willie, current galleries where you can visit his work, and the impetus behind these shoe masks—and a few more at the artist’s website. They really are quite impressive. Dig it.
Via This is Colossal
Drone footage of sheep herding and the mesmerizing patterns they make.
Via Kottke
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
Quote by Peter Horn, Director of the Ending Illegal Fishing Project, and taken from this article: “DNA test fails to find any tuna in subway tuna sandwiches.”