Toothpaste, light switches, remotes: Artist finds room in her life for her stuff
Bottom line, it's about stuff. Most of us have more than we really need, here in Massachusetts in the 21st century. Painter Gail Martin looked around her house in Lexington and began to wonder about her relationship to her stuff.
"I study Buddhism and I practice meditation, and one of the teachings is always that desire leads to suffering," Martin said recently. "My house is full, I can't fit anything more in my house, I have everything I need, but that urge to acquire new things never abates. The next shiny bauble I see, I want.
"So I thought, well, maybe part of that is that I don't honor what I already own enough. And I thought a way of contemplating and honoring what I own would be to engage in this yearlong process of really looking at the stuff, one by one, more or less," Martin said. "Let's see if my attitude toward acquisition changes or desire abates or gets worse or what."
The result is "Precious: A Year of Looking at My Stuff," on display through Oct. 27 at the Bromfield Gallery in the South End. The gallery walls hold 365 small paintings. Of Martin's toothpaste and her light switches. Paintings and goblets. Remote controls and smoke detectors and sculptures and masks. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it is banal. All of it is hers.
"The rule was, if it's in the room, it's fair game," Martin said, sitting outside the South End gallery on a sunny September afternoon. "My husband is in one of those pictures, and my cats. And also, what larger possession do I have than the house itself?"
Starting the project in January 2006, Martin planned for success. The paintings are small, executed in her Somerville studio in acrylic on 5 1/2-inch squares of clear pine cut from boards purchased mostly at
She painted one room per month, working from digital photos taken at the beginning of the month. Each room is depicted in 28, 30, or 31 paintings - the same number as the days in that month.
"I started at the top of my house. My bedroom is on the third floor . . . so the first room is actually the master bath, and then the master bedroom, and I kind of worked my way down through the house," she said. "I don't have 12 rooms so I had to cheat a little bit. So one of the rooms is hallways, and one of the rooms is the basement. I also have a screen porch, and that's one of the rooms."
She doesn't paint just the most interesting or prettiest things, but a "fair representation" of each room: "You know when you're in the basement, one of the dominant features is the litter box, so it's not really an honest painting without the litter box."
And she wasn't exactly strict about the one-painting-per-day concept.
"I know I'm not going to go in on Sunday and work. I like my weekends like everybody else," she said. "So my idea was just to keep up with it week by week. I might work three days, and do two this day and three this day and two the next . . . but it was important not to fall behind so I could actually finish in a year."
Institute of Contemporary Art curator Carole Anne Meehan says that it's common for this kind of artistic "daily practice" to have spiritual roots, in meditation or yoga for instance.
"Such practices are grounding and illuminating, and help you find your place in the persistent ebb and flow of life. Artists have for some time adopted the quotidian repetition of a gesture or action in the making of art, usually for similar reasons, as well as to leave a trace, a record of their lives," Meehan said via e-mail. The primary motive, she added, is usually "the daily, methodical examination of life as it is lived." Much like bloggers, in other words.
Meehan pointed to the work of On Kawara, whose "Date Painting" series has been underway since 1966 and is planned to continue for the rest of his life. DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park director of curatorial affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo also cited series by Karl Baden, Nicholas Nixon, and others. Although Lafo hasn't seen "Precious," she said the work "certainly fits into this impulse to obsessively document aspects of one's own life to try to make sense of it."
Martin said she has been meditating for about 15 years in the tradition of Theravada Buddhism.
"It was interesting, when I finished the project there was definitely a bit of disenchantment with possessions and a bit of an abatement of the urge to acquire more things," she said, adding with a laugh, "Of course, another teaching of Buddhism is that desire is never-ending. . . . It's pretty much back now."
Other changes were less expected: "There's a certain amount of myself invested in all these objects, and somehow through looking deeply at [them], my sense of self shifted. There was a sense of being unmoored a little bit, because if I'm not them, what am I?"
She also learned a lot about her own artistic process, she said. "I can see, though it might not be obvious to a casual observer, that my technique really improved. . . . I became very fearless in what I would take on as subject matter. Bring it on!"
Such gains are important to her. "My take on art these days is that success in the realm of sales or any of the other ways we might measure ourselves in the greater world is so elusive and so arbitrary in some ways, that for me to keep going and doing this work, whatever project I take on has to have some primary value to myself in the process of doing it," Martin said.
"Whatever happens after that - if it finds an audience or finds a place in the world or gets sold or whatever - all that is secondary," she said. "It's nice, I want all that stuff, but there's still a good reason to do the work if all of that doesn't happen."
Of course, there's just one problem with "Precious" now, Martin said: "Somebody saw this work in preview at my open studio last spring and said, 'Oh, it's about stuff, huh? Well now you have 365 more things!' And it's like, oh, darn, I hadn't thought of that. I think part of the detachment thing is, it's like a virtual yard sale. I get to let go of the things without actually having to let go of the actual object. There's a lot of ironies in it."
"Precious: A Year Of Looking At My Stuff " is at the Bromfield Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., through Oct. 27. 617-451-3605, bromfieldartgallery.com, gailmartinart.com
