I’ve spent the last week adding tons of old work (in some cases very old work, like, from 1999, when I would have been fourteen years old work) to the “Juvenilia” section of my website. This has meant hours upon hours of Photoshopping, in part because I have a very specific style to my documentation (work is to be shown against a white wall, framed where applicable) and in part because for a lot of things I have only imperfect photos to work from (in the case of 2D work, this usually means at the very least that the photos were cropped, which doesn’t convey a sense of the piece as a physical object—that I’m faking that appearance of “objecthood” through digital manipulation is an irony not lost on me) and works have either been sold or given away or lost or destroyed or are in any case in a storage room in Ohio.
On the whole, it’s been satisfying to be able to really see these pieces again, even when they’re stupid or hackneyed or just not-very-good. And the Photoshopping process has yielded some transitional images (above) that are themselves kind of satisfying. But as things have progressed, it’s become clearer to me that for this to be anything besides a self-indulgent exercise in revisionist (exclusionist) autohagiography, I’d have to include everything (everything, at least, from high school onwards, since before that I didn’t have any real concept of what making art might mean, even though I’d always made things). And this was fine. Until I stumbled upon a usable photo of a piece that was genuinely, ineradicably, irreducibly, and irredeemably awful.
Like this charming thing from Drawing II (Fall 1999). It was Sophomore year; I was fourteen; it could be so much worse (or I need to believe that much anyway). But do I want anyone to know that this thing existed (and I think continues, stubbornly, to exist, albeit in deep storage somewhere)? Absolutely fucking not. But the project would demand that it be included, and so I probably will.
Not by itself though. I think, when I can track down a picture of it, I’ll pair the drawing with my first, intensely regrettable stained glass window (first semester of Freshman year, Fall 1998). I can’t bear the idea of either being considered singly; they need one another’s twin poles of abject suckitude to cancel each other out.
So there’s still revision, and they’re still cheating, but there always is, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise.
