Welcoming Failure
on monsters, parasites, and haircuts
My hair is too long. This thought has been somewhere in my mind for the past few months as I shower and get dressed. I could make an appointment to get it cut, but I’d need an idea, a direction, a shape I want to assume, something that aligns with the image I have for myself in this moment, an expression of how I feel about aging, about gender, something that reminds me of my aspirations, that can help point the way when I feel lost, when my identity is some blurry thing moving at the periphery of my vision. I need a cut that makes me feel sexy, something that communicates that I know what that means for me right now, that I know what kind of sex I want to have and who I want to have it with, something that feels relaxed but also like I’ve got my shit together, a cut that says I live in the city but connect deeply with non-urban landscapes. And it should be unique, different from anything I’ve done in the past. Haircuts are expensive, I can’t waste it on a trim, a lateral move, on stasis. I need to progress, evolve, develop.
In early January, as those of us conscripted into the Gregorian calendar were experiencing the yearly demonstration of fealty to the humanist myth of the infinitely perfectible human through the creation of resolutions, filling up e-carts with vitamins, dance lessons, and gym subscriptions, a feeling came creeping from some shadowy place. I felt it like a tender spot on my body that I couldn’t stop pressing, this presence that was both uncomfortable and intriguing, and communicating to me only one message for the coming year: to fail.
It started with the list of self-improvements I could fail to make and then spread to the world of self-created expectations I could fail to meet. I could fail to keep up (nowhere more evident than my recent, erratic substack posting schedule), to maintain, to appear, to cohere – yessss. I felt a beauty-horror shiver as I saw the possibilities laid out before me, or perhaps it was failure, unfurling inside me like a parasite who had found the perfect host, who was doing the shivering.
What is failure? Is it possible to intend to fail? Many artists have embraced failure as creatively generative, opening up their processes to open-endedness and loss of control. But does that intention simply reinforce the idea that there is some more “successful” version of the work that could have emerged from these processes? Can failure move us to someplace more strange, more unsettling than simply the erroneous, ugly, or unplanned? Rather than see failure as the inverse of success, can we experience failure like a parasitic fungus that affects our brain, reshaping our bodies, the functions of our organs, completely altering our desires and drives towards survival?
You may be asking yourself: what would be the value of that? Why would I want to let some strange force change what I think I want to do or become? You may be feeling the recoil of disgust. I feel it myself. Or rather, I feel the presence of those flows and forces that shape my body, my actions, the way I move and speak, into something that succeeds to be human. Those forces that become queasy when the foundations of certainty start to soften, mix, and merge with other possibilities, other shapes and sounds and ways of being. I felt them too, at a house party I attended recently, when I was looking in the bathroom mirror at my too-long hair and the thought arose in me: I could just not do anything. And it was striking to me that just being felt like such a failure, that the drumbeat of progress was so loud and insistent even in that bathroom, even in the smallest, most inconsequential decision about my body.
We are constantly told that we must succeed because to be anything less is to become a monster, something aberrant, perverse, not fully human. But what if, in the words of Bayo Akomolafe, we welcomed the monster?* What if we let ourselves become monstrously unsuccessful at upholding this figure of the human as fixed, as exclusionary, as the ultimate decision on who belongs? What if we let failure make ourselves less selves, individual and isolated, becoming instead more diasporic, emergent?
There is something more monstrous in failure than simply letting go. Like the monster, failure cannot be domesticated. It cannot be civilized. It seeks neither representation nor belonging. In a collective cultural moment when we are grieving and panicking at the destruction and loss of life all over this planet, racing to find bigger and better and more creative solutions to all that loss, is there something to be learned by welcoming failure as a radical change in course?
I teach drawing. Or rather, I facilitate explorations into sensory experience through the medium of drawing. I do not offer lessons on skills or techniques; I am more interested in what drawing fails to do than what drawing can reinforce. And, however disorienting this may be for those who choose to do this kind of exploration with me, there is so much richness that we share in not assuming that perception works a certain way, in questioning what realism means and how we might sense our way into the possibilities beyond these categories of experience.
A drawing practice is a place to explore failure not because drawing is some inconsequential pastime or superfluous decoration adorning the margins of real work. It is important because thinking about representation matters. The human, or ‘Man’ is a project that we are asked to pledge allegiance to in the selfies we take, in the way we identify our face in the mirror, in the way we learn to differentiate figure from ground. Bayo, again:
‘Man’ is a cartographical project (a way of finding home again and again), an ecology-building project, an intergenerational intra-species project. A temporality-secreting, terra-forming strategy with a beating heart gifted from the ideas and yearnings of the Enlightenment period. This ‘thing’ wants control, stability, permanence, eternal growth, and separation from the elements that are its conditions. It works by abstraction, denial, repression, displacement, and the ruthless colonization of other earth bodies – a process euphemistically called ‘progress’.
What then do we draw when we draw ourselves, when we render a figure? In what way does representation in art teach our senses how to behave? What happens if they refuse?
I have the strange fortune of getting to ask this question in my art practice, my classes, with my collaborators, and in my role as Artist-in-Residence for Bayo Akomolafe’s Dancing with Mountains project, in which I think alongside Bayo and the rest of the DwM team and community on the emergent potential of failure. If you would like to join me in this exploration, you are invited to come to our monthly series.
WHO: Dancing with Mountains Vunja! and ten
WHEN: Sunday, April 28, 2024 | 8:30pm – 10:00pm IST
WHERE: Online everywhere
Write to: courseteams@dancingwithmountains.com if you’re interested in participating.
I also host a Spontaneous Community Drawing Session that you can sign up for here.
In the time between starting and finishing this post, I did cut my hair (thank you, Arielle, for entertaining all of my contradictory style prompts!). This Krista project is far from coherent or conclusive. It is changing shape in a cacophony of time signatures. And it is grateful, so grateful, to be a monster amongst you.