Nadeem:
My first inclination is to say art doesn't have rules. But that's clearly not true because a large part of artistic "invention" is rule-breaking, and it's certainly not a personal rule. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what makes "art" in an attempt to create a framework in which to create, or outside of which to create, or to put in relation to creation. Can we call the act of defecation art? Well, actually yes, it is if Martin Creed is the one filming it. But then what makes that "art", as apposed to a pornographic video of someone shitting, which you could find on the internet long before martin creed came along. And certainly if Martin Creed had made that piece 50 years ago, it would never be shown as art. Could 2 Girls 1 Cup be called art? What if it had been shown in a gallery instead of online? So it's clear that whatever the definition of "art" is, it's a relational concept that can only be understood in terms of society and culture at large. But what about the Mona Lisa, a Duchamp urinal, etc. Do we not call these timeless classics, instantly identifiable as works of artistic merit? So it's clear then that there something inherently outside time that can be identified as art. And here, I'm just talking about "high art".
But this isn't actually answering the personal. What are my rules for my art? First, it has to have humor. It's usually a personal humor, about personal events, but if I don't chuckle while I'm making it, it's not good. I can't make sense of things if I can't figure out how to laugh at them. It's a nervous habit, to be sure. It's my way of defusing things. Of taking tension out of situations, of ignoring my own neurosis and I think, most importantly, it my way of connecting it to the rest of my life. It's how I keep things from getting too serious. For me, seriousness is what kills art. Life is serious, art should be a refuge from that seriousness. At the same time, my process of making is horribly repetitive and mundane. I don't know what to do with painting because I can't get in the rules of it, the structure and the repetitious system of it. I need to understand the system I'm working in to find the humor in it, to figure out how to make it funny for myself. It's about making 1+1+1+1+1+1.... add up to less than the sum of it's parts, and then have that loss be something more. When I try to make it add up to more, or even just add up, I find I can't, that something ends up wrong.
The worst thing art can do is take itself too seriously; to presume it can change the world. It can't. It never has and it never will. I think it's egomaniacal to assume it can. The act of making art is like an extra marital affair. Pieces should be treated as such, performed in secret behind closed doors and only thrown to the wild after it starts to fail to capture lust and desire. I want my viewer to feel like they're stepping into something private and a little uncomfortable; someone else's personal space, yet without any of the traditional artifacts of personhood. Perhaps the best way to describe it might be stumbling into a physical representation of someone else's cosmogony, one perhaps regarding something slightly alien.
But this is all still non-sense. Perhaps if I distill a list:
1. Have fun while creating.
2. Periodically, while working, take on a facade of intense thought coupled with either sitting and looking intently, or standing and pacing around. Stare upwards, off into the distance, and twist one's mustache or play with one's hair.
3. The use of caffeine and alcohol should be employed to work late into the night, so as to avoid strictly coherent and reasoned thought.
4. Anything that can be understood solely through through reason should be disregarded as either fallacious or irrelevant to life.
5. At no point should contemplation of the deeper meaning or greater intellectual importance of a piece occur while making it.
6. The work should come from the gut and the heart, not the head. Only work from the groin should be coupled with the head, and then it must always be coupled with the head.
7. Keep things simple. Don't say something with a film if it could be said in a single picture, a picture if it could be said in a sentence.
8. The consumable one should be using up as fuel for creation, when making art, is one's ego.
9. One should investigate what one does not understand.
10. ???
There is no profit.
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