​Becoming Someone Else

Tameka Norris and the Construction of New Selves

Process philosophy includes the idea that our individual selves are always in process. We are becoming slightly new at each moment, relative to the circumstances of our lives and the decisions we are making. There's a cosmology in this: a metaphysics of novelty.  As the philosopher Whitehead puts it, a "creative advance into novelty" is at the heart of the universe: in atoms and molecules, stars and galaxies, people and penguins. We humans are part of the universe; we ourselves are always 'creatively advancing' in one way or another, for good or ill. Existentially, this means that we ought not pretend we fully know ourselves. We are never quite the same as we who we were, or who others might imagine us to be, or who we imagine ourselves to be. We are mysteries, and we can surprise ourselves. In her arts assignment below, Tameka Norris shows how we can become new selves, prophetically and playfully, for life's sake.

- Jay McDaniel
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​"Tameka Norris (b.1979, Guam) received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles before graduating with an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2012."

Becoming Someone Else
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How it Works

Imagination
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In the spiritual life, imagination has two meanings. First, it is a human faculty — the part of us that traffics in images, symbols, myths, and stories. It is the capacity we all have for innovative thinking and creative expression. Second, the imagination is an inner reality, a boundless realm not defined by our senses or reason that we know from our dreams and can enter via certain exercises while awake. The practice of imagination encourages us to use this faculty and enables us to explore the realm.
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Begin by learning the language of imagination. Keep track of the images that come to you spontaneously in association with your feelings and thoughts. Draw pictures of what you encounter in your dreams. Contemplate art and see yourself as part of the picture. Read myths and tell stories. Remember, through the ages spiritual pilgrims have found that it is possible to step into the inner realm of imagination. There you can find fuel for your journey and gifts of wisdom.

- Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

​Travelling without a Compass​

​Not all those who wander are lost.

                    -- JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
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In order to travel without a compass you need to cultivate the art of not-knowing. Sometimes it is good to know who you are, and sometimes it is good to not-know who you are. In the not-knowing there is an opportunity to explore new possibilities; move past what has become stale and predictable in your life; and improvise new ways of thinking and feeling.

It is an illusion to think that we must always be true to ourselves: as if our selves are reducible the things we've done, the ideas that have been important to us, the people we've known, the values we've held, the concepts we've had of ourselves. Our selves are also in the future, as yet undetermined. The greater wisdom lies in being true to the best of who we have been, but also open to the lure of who we can be, even though we don't know who that person is.

Even God doesn't know. God calls us to improvise our lives into new forms of selfhood; to re-invent ourselves with each new situation. Some say that, from God's perspective, the the only compass we really need is love. Tameka Norris' art is an invitation to surprise even God.

​- Jay McDaniel

Meka Jean

also known as Tameka Norris
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Meka Jean: Too Good For You (Music Video) from FosterBear Films on Vimeo.

On Becoming

​by Cameron Shaw

Cameron Shaw is the executive director of Pelican Bomb, a New Orleans–based nonprofit dedicated to supporting and expanding contemporary visual art in the city. This essay is reposted from Art 21 Magazine, edited by Shaw.

"I often find myself thinking about becoming. For what is an essentially fluid state, it feels like a permanent fixture not only in my own life but also in my work with others. It’s an existential question, often, but in no way a meaningless one. And even at the height of its philosophical murkiness, its applications are purely practical. If you can’t define where you are or where you might be going, how do you determine your next steps? Self-definition, for me, has always been the key to right and forward action.

In my professional life, that has meant grappling with what it means to have become a writer, then an editor, and now, most challenging and amorphous of all, a leader. In my personal life, I have in recent years variously become, in this order, an aunt, a wife, and a homeowner. Becoming is a perpetual state. We are always, or at least I hope I am, becoming something new. Many of these labels and their attendant practices have been cumulative, but not all have. There have been those times when I wondered whether I had in fact ceased becoming. Running an organization and editing the work of others left me little time to write. If I wasn’t publishing or even working towards publishing, had I ceased to be a writer?

In my own mind, the answer was yes, which is why when Art21 contacted me about writing a series of articles, I was poised to say no. Then I learned of the theme for this first issue of the online magazine, “Becoming an Artist.” That simple but loaded word--becoming—made all the difference. It was something I could wrap my mind around; it felt relevant, familiar, present.

Assisting and supporting visual artists and art writers, particularly emerging ones, is the core of my daily work. But the magazine’s theme didn’t lead me directly to the actualities of becoming an artist, though that will no doubt make its way into future writings during my residency. Instead, I began to notice the ways in which artists around me are picturing the immersion and adoption of the artist’s role—the aesthetics of becoming.

One example is Tameka Norris’s recent show at the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans, in which she appropriates Bruce Nauman’s 1967–68 action Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square. For thinking about becoming, I like Norris’s video precisely because it is a re-performance, a fundamentally unoriginal gesture. There is much to glean from the insertion of her black and female body more than forty years after Nauman’s work, but here is one simple colorless, genderless, timeless reading: In reprising those ten minutes of dull and deliberate walking, Norris gets to become Nauman, the famous artist. She symbolically fast-forwards through years, if not decades, of toiling for definition and recognition. I like this video because, like Nauman, Norris shot it in her studio, a site central to so many artists in their acts of becoming. The video image is fuzzy, intentionally out of focus. And as Norris traces that taped perimeter, I can see in the background not Nauman’s mirror but rather the objects, the clothes, and the wigs that help Norris at other moments to become other characters. When Norris has finished the performance of becoming Bruce Nauman, she will then task herself with becoming someone or something else."

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