Frances Stark - A Craft too Small (on Bas Jan Ader) in Frances Stark Collected Writing: 1993-2003

“Recently my mother lent me another Ouspensky book, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, a series of lectures. In the introduction he states he was motivated to give lectures because people would always ask him what he was working on and he found it too difficult to consolidate the information; only a lengthy series of lectures could begin to do the job of explaining his work. I like the generosity in this, probably because I always find it particularly impossible to give an answer when people ask me ‘what is your work like?’ upon my foolishly having revealed to them that I’m an artist. I feel like my non-answer is often misinterpreted as ‘I’m too deep to tell you’, but usually I’m just thinking a description of what I do is going to make what I do sound really un-worth doing. …While worrying whether something sounds as if it weren’t worth doing, as I mentioned above, I must also hold inside me the belief that not only is it worth doing, but the knowledge that it’s also worth a couple thousand dollars to someone else who thinks so too. This hidden-agreement-to-believe is even more difficult to explain to people than the ‘actual’ art, but it might just be the thing that convinces me I’m doing self-work and not self-help.”