The disillusionment of fame is arriving
HOW WILL YOU FEEL SUCCESSFUL AS AN ARTIST?
Yesterday, I found solace in the ladies bathroom at the old pub near Australia Street. The cold winter foamed the streets that night, and I was wearing jorts, my calves disposed of like seeds in the June wind as the group for my boyfriend’s birthday walked in.
The graffiti in the stalls is so easily skipped past when you’re taking a quick piss, and you feel you have to quickly wipe your pussy with that shy 2 ply at best to get back to the laughter in the smoker’s area. But this time, I decided to pay attention to the beautiful wall flowers of drunk girls warning me that “Lewis is a rapist” and that I “deserve what I want”, especially if that means “I want anal now” with an “04” phone number beneath.
These omens tell me God Is a Bitch in pink crayons, and Get Money reads the door while I sit on the toilet. I’m in the bed of my period at this time, so I’m trying not to convince myself I am slightly suicidal because I haven’t any money yet and owe Telstra-the-dogs for last week’s data. The perfect room to whir myself into a frenzy.
I exit with a breath, passing through the bead curtains separating the sinks from the stalls a few more times than needed because I like the sounds and the feeling of the strings cascading on my flushed face.
We all laugh over bitters and beers, chats about eventually getting off Centrelink after TAFE finishes get thrown across the table while at the same time, the other side of the bench gives helpful but unsolicited advice about each other’s romantic relationships while going on funny tangents about music.
Skip forward to the present day, and I am on a film set, covered in Durex lube, on a Tuesday morning in Western Sydney with a crew of film students who all want to be directors. We are shooting for a new documentary about the latest wave of humans who wish to immortalise themselves through tech. I will be sharing the screen with the local guy who put a chip in his hand to tap on for Opal – downloading Consciousness and what-not.
I have been typecast as ‘Lubey Embryonic Sack—grown-foetus actress’ and lie curled up on the roots of a particularly magical ficus, replaying the moments in my late mother’s womb as the cameras roll and the lights strike heat on my wet neck.
Earlier in the swirling guts of the train station on the way to set, I thought to myself, this will
all be a memory one day, and peace flooded my eyes.
In my post-shoot commute, I twiddle my granny vibe 18k gold ring, which I found on the floor at my old job, while I think about how to Get Money for this week’s rent (unpaid acting work pays in ways that aren’t visible from my banking app yet.)
As I look up to check if I’m at my stop, the neon sign that says WE BUY WE SELL CHINATOWN PAWN SHOP (THE BEST) stares back at my checking eyes as the tram rolls on. I get off at the next stop and fuddle into the store, still holding my lumpy large duffle from the weekend.
I see the maze of vintage shit cased in glass; I am happy to be here; these are stores I don’t find myself in often.
Everyone in here has eyes for drugs, I think to myself. This is a judgement, but I still look at them with love.
I see their claims as just as my own.
An electric scooter to score drugs is handed to the pawnman next to the security door. Eshays, only with trackies rolled up to reveal prison tattoos, and a girl with no teeth looking at my outfit file past the line, waiting for their statement of cash to be brought from the back.
I’m leaning in my booth, waiting for my gold ring to be checked for quality.
“$260 I can do.”
says the sweet girl behind the counter.
“How about $319? -I’m tryna make my rent.” I responded to her darting eyes.
“-Sorry, that goes against the price of gold.”
“…All gee.”
The exchange is finished quickly, and I try to blow bubbles with my gum while looking at the camera directly above my booth. But I fail, as my hubba bubba has gotten harder on the jaw, so it seems like I am repeatedly sticking out a bulbous pink tongue. Cash in hand to now be deposited.
It’s almost like I have a pattern for scrounging; it gives me some sense of fulfilled creativity that maybe I believe I lack deep down.
The plan is to return home, get changed and run 3ks to the beach.
On my run downhill, I am distracted by a shiny surfboard warehouse and glance sideways just in the nick of time to see a cement truck turning blindly into the driveway I happen to be sprinting across. I stop just before the doubled wheels pulse my knees into the bitumen. I try to play it cool, weirdly, by shooting a look of “whoops” at the car in the lane the truck just exited, but they don’t see me.
Life is delicate.
I worry all day until my forehead hardens about what people think of me, whether I'll be loved, and whether the things I want are forever.
When, in reality, the chances of me and my headphones being minced a few blocks away from my house are only three seconds away.
I stopped running.
I tried to run the 3k without stopping to boost my ego, but I needed to stop running.
I walk for a bit, then sprint to the beach. The beach allows peace to wash over my chest, loosening my sports bra with its calm.
I had shepherd’s pie for dinner back home and received the BTS from the shoot. I was shooting a birth scene and almost died later that day.
I worry if I am a good thing, if I am a”Good” artist and a good girlfriend/roommate/worker/cat
owner -when things are all so quick.
I try not to beat myself up.
Life is coming from me, not to me, but that’s not the perspective I’ve been exercising.
My cousin helps me remember when she spills advice, starting with, “You just need to…”
I am glad she is around me; she is moving her stuff into the platform above the living room to sublet. We ended the night with a shoot together in the new loft, and we joked that she should pretend she’s this squatter when she brings guys over. And that my roommate and I have no clue so that if she wants them to leave last minute, she can say they are being too loud and risking her dwelling.
I produce the best photos I have taken of her, and once again, I see my artist feeling” Good” again.
I remember that in year 7, I dreamed of having this exact place and told myself I would be a “real artist” when I had a warehouse studio apartment in a big city. The conditional life. The moving goalpost and the appetite. A symptom of an Artist living simply for my next story rather than actually paying attention to where my inner voice would like to take it.
I deleted the convoluted conclusion previously wrote in replacement for remembering to be grateful for hot water and circumstances of Australia as a country, and my privilege to live as a young artist in this world when under contrary circumstances youth across the globe have their story strewn only on a digital footprint with nothing other than ‘content’ to assimilate viewers like myself to their pain, their reality.
I used to want to be famous. Or I used to think if I am not famous, I am not a good artist. I am not impactful if not touching millions, and everything is this in between state in which fame is coming and this moment is either fuel for that day or pointless crud that I may blame my unproductivity on whoever I was killing time with.
The narrow way I hope to now reject through my work. As a 20s something today the culture is a social economy. Chasing the life of a successful artist is now seen as one where big money can come from.
Getting past the starving artist means Big-Fish money, and the fantasy of million dollar mansions in a country that we see is falling apart politically. I see more articles than ever on how Hollywood is dying. Where the game has been played enough for the old heads to leave the tricks of the trade behind for us now.
If you’re an artist, what do you really want to feel from your work?
I ask myself these questions and realise that only through doing will the answer come to pass.
Is it all some means to an end towards the shining herring of FAME?
Is being an artist today harder than ever because there’s so many ways people are telling you which way to become one in order to be worth creating a living, a legacy or a life understood from?
How would you live life as a prolific artist if there was no such thing as fame?
CORPUS\CHRISTI is a Filipino, Sydney based writer and artist dedicated to exploring conditioned ideas and asking the audience: is this really the way we want it to be? Raised in a Christian cult in rural NSW, the process of breaking through the status quo has become second nature, and is a practice fuelling the backburners of their artistic practices from music, to the page and modelling.
