What do I mean by middling?

An attempt to begin to layout some ideas that have led me to see the benefits of avoiding extremes.

The definition of middling, which I looked up a while ago and am just recalling here to the best of my ability, (note that I want to at some point write about how John Holt, the author and educational reformer, would frequently paraphrase quotes in his writings, when it was very possible to just have someone find the verbatim statements. I think that by not doing that he was showing the workings of his own mind and memory, which can be more interesting than simply googling the exact information being referenced. Maybe I did just write about that now and don’t need to remember to do it later.) is something like being average, not special, potentially even being a description of something considered bad because of its lack of extremeness. Basically, not something desirable to be or to want to be because its too mediocre.

I’d like to consider a different way of looking at middling though, and as part of that I guess I’m suggesting even sometimes shifting from just using the word as an adjective, to also thinking of it as a verb—actively attempting to wind up in the middle by middling.

In contemporary society (and maybe always) there is a tendency to value extremes, people who are the “best”—the richest, most attractive, highest grade getting, exclusive school going, largest number of followers on social media receiving, etc. We also often perceive people based on what is considered their worst attributes, which I won’t even bother to list here, but I’m sure you know what I mean.

What if instead of using polarizing metrics to determine value (or lack of value), we saw the broad, and potentially highly interesting, middle as the most desirable place to be? My sense is that because people are often shooting for some kind of “best” it means that they mostly don’t “succeed” and sometimes just give up and fall into what they and other people then perceive as a failure zone. If people were instead attempting to wind up in the middle, it would be much easier to achieve, and more people would be seen as successful.

When I was getting my MFA back in the early 90s it was understood that almost all of the students were hoping to make it big on the national or international art scene. Everyone read the popular art magazines from New York even though we were in Oakland, and talked about established blue chip artists, major exhibitions, and exclusive awards, etc. (which also, mostly, happened somewhere else). I was in that mind set myself but was also becoming slowly disenchanted with it.

Then an artist from Mexico came to do a lecture for my program. I can’t remember what his name was, but I’ve been trying to figure it out for the last several decades (if anyone has any clues let me know, all I remember about his work is that he made giant sculptural books that he set up out in the public somewhere in Mexico City), anyway he said something that changed the direction of my work and life forever after that. Someone in the audience asked him for advice for emerging artists, which is usually a pretty uninteresting question leading to an uninteresting answer, but what he said was different: “Don’t bother trying to be an international art star, become an art star in your neighborhood.”

I don’t know what impact, if any, that statement made on my fellow students but for me it became a very direct and literal goal to immediately attempt to pursue. Soon after that I started collaborating with another grad student, Jon Rubin. As part of that we took over a vacant store on College Avenue a block away from the group house where I was living. The owners let us use the space for free until it was rented and even covered the utility bills. Jon and I spent the next year and a half creating exhibitions and projects in our “gallery” that were about and for the neighborhood right around us. The first show was based on a man named Albert who owned a rug store across the street from us. We also did a series of shows that relocated local people’s garage sales into our gallery context, and another about a garden that a WW2 vet had made in an apartment courtyard down the street from us. Soon we were known, like a good local plumber or caterer, as the go to artists for anything related to the neighborhood. Eventually we moved on (when the building we were using got rented) to become artists-in-residents at a Middle School a couple of blocks away and were paid a decent wage to do all sorts of public projects with the students there for the next couple of years.

As our reputations grew for making site-specific, participatory art projects we got asked to take that approach to other places around the Bay Area, and from there our practices developed into self-sustaining professions, supporting us for the rest of our lives, at least up to now. Meanwhile, most of our peers, and I personally knew about 120 other MFA students over the two years I was in grad school, largely attempted to have conventional art careers—making art in studios, trying to show the objects they made in galleries, applying for grants and exhibitions—and for the most part it didn’t work, and they slowly over time gave up on being supported by their art practices and found other things to do instead.

I’ve had the interesting experience of imagining what kind of art career I wanted and then having that actually happen. By the age of twenty-five or so, having achieved neighborhood art star status, I had developed what I saw as a set of more distant markers that would mean I had really achieved successful—specific institutions and shows I wanted to be included in, various publications, awards, collections I wanted to be a part of, and even starting my own MFA program, and all of those things ended up happening.

It was all fairly modest in the realm of major art world success and often tied to the very localized style of practice I’d developed, but as my involvement with the art world increased, I realized that I didn’t actually want many of the other things associated with bigger versions of art world success. In fact, even my own limited success was starting to feel more like a burden than something I desired anymore. I was doing too many projects, too many lectures, traveling too much, and responding to too many email requests. I couldn’t appreciate or even remember most of the experiences I was having. So instead of moving my art goals further out towards supposedly bigger and better things, I decided that what I had accomplished already was good enough, and that I would start to recede away from further art world activities to focus on other things that I valued instead.

That didn’t happen overnight, it slowly evolved over a decade or so until it was mostly complete. I ran into various unexpected issues along the way. I hadn’t realized how much my own sense of identity and worth had become intertwined with my art world activities, exposure, and approval, so that took a while to sort out. Times also changed and art world interests changed with them, so even if I had not been intentionally retreating away from the art world, it might have just left me behind anyway.

Now I can look back over thirty years of art related projects and activities, a wide array of publications I was involved with, a role in shaping the socially engaged art movement, and various kinds of very appreciated ongoing life support. But just because all of those things happened, doesn’t mean I can’t shift now so that I no longer see myself as an artist. It’s almost assumed that if you are lucky enough in life to do artistic type work that you will continue doing it until your life ends. I don’t consider that to be the case and instead think the decision to stop being an artist (or anything else like that) might be a more radical and creative thing to do than just continuing on because you can or are expected to do that.

One of my favorite professors in grad school, someone who I was greatly inspired by and continue to have admiration for, told me back then that each month when he received his copy of Artforum that he would quickly flip through the whole magazine looking for his own name. As long as he could find it somewhere, even just listed in a gallery ad or some other minor mention, he would feel OK for the rest of that month. If he couldn’t find his name, he would feel depressed until the next issue arrived, so he could search, and hopefully find it there, once again.

Even with all the respect I had for him (which was increased because of his ability to be vulnerable enough with me to reveal his need for continued art world appreciation and acknowledgment), knowing about his, what I later started to call, “success addiction” made it very clear that his achievements came at a cost. I realized that was not a set of conditions I wanted to give much value or power to myself. Instead, I now see my own middling approach and aspirations as actually a much more liberated and fulfilling way to operate in the world.