No More Goals

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful

Imbued in my professional artistic training was the practice of setting goals. I would hone this as I also read the densest texts for my postmodern theory classes, and while developing new recipes for ceramic glazes to test. At the time, the late 1990s, working with clay was the domain of a subgroup of creatives that read Ceramics Monthly and Studio Potter and whose artwork inhabited a nebulous space between crafts and fine arts. And the skills to learn to project into the future, or to strategically discern on what specific stone to step on to reach the desired side of the river, was thought by my professors to profit both the ceramicist and the academic in me. One particular exercise for a seminar I took entailed writing how I saw myself three years from then, then five years, and finally ten. “I want to live off my artwork, I want a house in New York City, I want an exhibition at a major museum in Manhattan…” With the wants visually planted into the ether of capitalism, I forwent the essence of life, even when I wrote copious statements about how my praxis existed within the day-to-day. Years were measured in regard to projects, a term that I have come to distance myself from, perhaps more so for semantic reasons than for what it might mean: an enterprise connected to an aim. Nothing wrong with that. However, my interest is centered on the everyday as a door into creativity and yet, reducing life into a project is, in my opinion, a disservice to the mystery I seek to engage unencumbered.

With no clear understanding of the detour I was taking, one day like any other ordinary day, I pulled a hard plastic binder out of one of the filing cabinets in the room I call my archives. The scissors were in the desk salvaged from the corner of Banana Kelly Highschool in my neighborhood in the South Bronx. The job of cutting up unpassionately months of past writings and years penciled into a future was not at all difficult. I did put on the breaks when I came across my obituary, knowing that what I was doing represented a death of sorts: the end of goals. How was I to move from here and still make meaning out of my life? Afterall, I had been schooled to draw the road I intended to take, the salary that I imagined myself entitled to receive as payment for my thirty years in pursuit of higher education, from medical school to art school and, eventually, to seminary. Without stones to step on, or steps to climb on the ladder I was left with the freedom to jump into the river and befriend the muddy current, or to trust the branches of a tree going in all directions. Did this liberation from goals open up the possibility for autonomy?

With no goals in sight, I started to experiment with meaning as a compass for moving out into the world; and with the world itself as a collaborator. Purpose in this choreography, rather than being a synonym of goal, has become a motivator to remain attentive to caring for self and others in the web of life. One example of this has been my involvement with Bodies of Water: Fluid improvisations Along the Bronx River, a series of actions on the banks of the only fresh water entity in New York City of its kind, and where I have sought to co-generate social/movement-based responses with the ecology of the place and in relationship to other human-animal creatives. While there is a defined statement describing where we might go together, the emphasis in Bodies of Water: Fluid improvisations Along the Bronx River has been on mutual explorations and on learning in partnership with all beings. What would otherwise be goals are gestures that are invited to remain in constant motion, sustaining me (and I hope everyone involved) in the present, instead of forcefully pushing me/us to shape a future deprived of the now and its teachings. This has allowed for compassion to come forward during tender encounters, and for intention to rapidly shift course for the sake of everyone’s wellbeing. At this stage in life, the purpose that propels me is one that arises from interdependence and that is deeply rooted in dancing with All at the core of the moment. I become one with the wet Muskrat swimming under the Amtrack bridge over the Bronx River. This creature’s fleeting presence becomes purpose to me; everything there is to attend to. I give this graceful rodent my full devotion.