LET'S JUST GO CRAZY

on making art as a way to stay sane

Kusama with Pumpkin, 2010 — Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/ Singapore and Victoria Miro Galler (from anothermag.com)

Last week I volunteered at O’s school for Halloween. The kids make their own, grade specific costumes to go along with their class mascot: a fun animal + a descriptive name that they select in a vote at the beginning of the year. Olive’s grade chose a neon axolotl, an animal I didn’t even know existed until she entered the first grade and her friend was obsessed with them. The friend left the school but the obsession caught on and so I was sitting with a broken mirror at a teacher’s desk, asking eight year olds if they had any ideas about how to render said animal on their foreheads or cheeks. 

A skeleton, one kid suggested, while another wanted pink eyeshadow and another wanted football stripes on her cheekbones. The teacher was overwhelmed, cutting spare fabric on the floor, and I tried to make every kid happy as I transformed them into some kind of version of a vibrant vertebrate.

One person wanted hearts in various places and pink lips and I gave her something different because I didn’t want to paint on her mouth.

I hate it, she said, when I finished the design and she looked in the mirror. Do you need to aks someone to go to the bathroom? I asked. I can ask you, she said.

Here’s what the other classroom is doing, said the school director, who is also a mom, and she showed me a photo from the classroom next door of kids with bright rainbow fins on their faces on both sides. I know she was trying to be helpful.

I wanted to make them look more fishy, I really did! But I also wanted to make each of their brains come alive when they saw an idea that had played out, even if badly, on their bodies. Why NOT a skeleton fish combo? Why NOT a football playing amphibian. What is the purpose of a costume if not to find the infinite variations of breaking ones own established rules?

Just involve them, said the woman at the store who had cut my fabric the day before. She also said to make a tail out of the fabric I was buying I would need to think about wire, and stuffing and bending something sewed up into interesting shapes. Even she, in her articulate cutting, in her years of volunteering, in her absolute commitment to singing while her scissors moved along the fabric, had come to spit out the infinite and conflicting demands made on women’s free labor.

I volunteered for the school costume fair because I LIKE the idea that the costumes are made on school property. Parents (aside from the ones that come in to help) are not asked to do additional labor to help their kids have fun. The institution gets to try its hand at the fairy godmother gold standard, instead of moms in private domains. I wanted to connect with that childlike energy that feel rebellious but is also expansive. I saw that my effort did nothing to help my sense of self progress. Instead I left feeling conflicted about whether it makes sense to try to bring creative forces into an institution setting that gets run by a clock. By 2pm we will both out of there early, to get ready for the next stop on the madness express.

At ballet kids allowed come in costumes. 

Are you Hermione? the teacher asked Olive, as four out of the usual twenty kids went through the glass doors.

I was, but my cloak is blue and that’s Ravenclaw’s colors, so I’m just a student in Ravenclaw, Olive responded. 

All this was before trick-or-treating in our neighborhood which goes wild. Someone across the street put up a fake casino with candy prizes, complete with tiny kid size cocktail tables and on the corner there’s a casket filled with every single kind of candy you remembered as a kid. There used to be a troll in a garage (he's gone now) and down the block there’s a seance of grown-ups who start drinking at 4pm. 

My favorite costume was the woman who was dressed as Yayoi Kusama. Is it surprising that I chose a woman who decided that her best bet for making art was to do it from the inside of a mental institution? I can't think of any greater nightmare than having art be a medium that turns you into a prisoner. But also I think she made a good trade given the circumstances: as a woman she knew that she would be expected to maintain the structure that contains her - why waste her creative energy on that?

When we finished, Olive joined our neighbors at their house to dump all their candy out on a table and eat it. Talk turned to Halloweens past and my neighbor mentioned that when she was a kid, and lived in the same house we were hanging out in now, she used to watch the throngs of people go to the Castro on Halloween for a huge city funded celebration. She was saying that the costumes that people wore were so amazing and inspiring. Creative. Conceptual. Constructed. Until there was shooting at the party and the city pulled the plug. And I think we were both feeling a kind of sadness about what’s been lost.

Our kids didn't notice, but I think we both did. O in a Harry Potter cloak and her two in a movie themed costume and a furry jumpsuit that her son usually wears on a good day. Halloween was void of its connection to any kind of creative freedom, becoming instead another space where even kids have become happy to take on prescribed roles.

What do you have planned for Thanksgiving? my neighbor asked, and as if she knew we’d have no answer, she invited us there.

I wonder why she thought we needed a refuge? 
I wonder why I accepted that the next Holiday would be mine?
I made a joke about how we’d just been fighting about Thanksgiving that very same morning!