Not My Responsibility
The other day during a lesson in my Self-Portraits With Meaning workshop, one member was (validly) lamenting living in an apartment building and having neighbors live close enough to be able to watch her take pictures of herself.
Another member spoke up and said she has the same issue, which can be awkward and uncomfortable but she has adopted the mantra “what my neighbor chooses to see isn’t my responsibility.”
It’s true, our neighbors get to choose to look in our windows and see us at work, but their decision to do so shouldn’t impact us. Because we are free to throw open the shades in an effort to capture that natural light and express things with our beings that we are needing to express.
Everyone gave a laugh when she recited that line, but also nodded in agreement. We are artists, and we know our art shouldn’t be thwarted by the possibility of someone looking into our windows and seeing something that makes them uncomfortable.
Coincidentally, this same member later talked about others judging her self-portraits as being too revealing. She gave the example of her mom confronting her about it, and her walking away feeling shamed for these images that had been taken in an effort to empower herself.
What her mom saw as a vanity project, she meant as a source of vulnerability and strength.
I said, “But wait. Didn’t you just say ‘what my neighbor chooses to see isn’t my responsibility?’”
Ugh, I love a full circle moment.
(And truly, we have the best advice within us already; we just have to be willing to listen to our knowing.)
This is something I think about A LOT as an artist. I create pieces imbued with my own reasoning and meaning, but once I put it out into the world, I cannot control how the viewer responds to it.
And there’s a beauty in that.
The viewer gets to take their own life experiences and get something OUT of my art that I didn’t even intend for. They get to encounter it with their personal struggles and stories and moments of grief and gratitude and see something in my art that touches them in a unique way. This intersection between artist and viewer can be surprising and beyond what we could have even dreamed of intending.
That’s the power of art.
But one thing I hope the viewer doesn’t do is assume my intentions in creating the piece. I also can’t control if they do. So when we let go of our work and put it out into the world, it will encounter people who love it, hate it, and assume things in us because of it.
This is why being an artist takes really solid boundaries. (Easier said than done.)
If we want people to love our work, we have to take that vulnerable step of releasing it into the wild. And we know the wild does lots of things we don’t expect.
Our job is to lean into the call of creativity and birth the thing that is trying to make its way out of us. We are the most important audience for our own work.
Ultimately we aren’t the ones who determine what our neighbor chooses to see. And it’s not our responsibility.
