I have created a secret door into a part of my site that has been shut down for over a year now. I have done this in the name of art. I am asking people to participate in my newest art installation dealing with mental health and mental illness. The door is http://www.fabulousdisaster.com/writing/. There is a full explanation there. It involves not your cash donation, I've already secured most of the materials and am relying on established Patrons for what I lack. No, I need your time and attention. Like I said, that page explains all that I am willing to say about the project right now.
Meanwhile, after three differently worded and hashtagged tweets about this, not one of the 804 motherfuckers that follows me has retweeted the notice. Helping me not at all. So, I'm going to stop retweeting them. Fuck all 804 of them. Even the art directors and editors of online art magazines. These people will only be pleased by what we have proven together over the past 15 years what I am not: the lowest common denominator. I will not relent. I don't actually NEED help with this, I WANT help with this aspect of it. I feel that some outside perspective will enhance the final project immeasurably.
What really bothers me is that #mentalhealth and #mentalillness ignore me completely, while stealing my lines. Okay, the stealing only happened once, by one of the big accounts, and instead of confronting him about it, I passive aggressively "favorited" the tweet it was in, just to let him know I'd seen it. He never used it again. I came up with a great tag-line about my illness. Deal with it. He wrote a book and is getting all the attention because he's bipolar, which, along with ADHD seem to be the only mental maladies represented on twitter. I have neither of these things. There is a possibility that I could add to the conversation, about meds, or the psychotic symptoms that bipolar can bring on. But I just can't break into this clique. Getting accepted into "Black Twitter" was easier as a white girl than this.
So, I've been reading design articles and looking at multi-piece art installations and kind of planning ahead how I'm going to photograph the finished project to submit to the galleries downtown. I'm staying local. I've shown here, in a multi-artist show. In a now-closed gallery. But there are many more galleries here now. I will have to brave a First Friday trip down town to check the galleries out and find what would be fitting for my project.
I wish I had someone to take pictures while I assemble the pieces. I have time to work on that, material acquisition will take a bit of time. And I don't know how long I'm going to give the public the option of participation before I give up for lack of interest. It really bums me out that I already know that this part of the project is going to be a huge failure, like everything I've attempted online. I've spent enough time on it already that I'm invested in this aspect, and knowing that no one else is going to give a shit breaks my fucking heart.
I think I understand Van Gogh more and more. Being invisible when you have so much to share, and being stuck in your own head because you're alone, and producing art that you know no one is ever going to see or care about. That was the reality of his life. I get it. I don't get the genius of depth of pure talent translating images, I wouldn't be that presumptuous. But the rest of it, yeah, I get it.