Preparing for the Harpo grant due May 4th. I have to provide 10 images of new work. I have a few things. But there are some pieces I still want to develop. I have time! Before I make them I want to process their ideas. Each idea is numbered and the goal is to make one or two pieces per idea.

1. The myth of meritocracy idea. This is the idea that with hard work alone one can achieve anything. This does not consider "head starts", like generational wealth and prestige (trust funds, for example). It doesn't account for discriminatory practices which shape themselves in the every day and confer benefits to the dominant group. Challenging this notion for me jeopardizes the entitlement that I earned everything I worked for, never mind accounting for actual family money which permitted me to go to school, not to mention coming from a family with enough wealth and safety to allow me to pursue something as impractical as art school. If I came from a poor family, would I have had this agency? I'm looking to undermine notions of innate ability and the American dream. Personally speaking, calling into question my trajectory taps into anxieties of undeservingness, the fear I am stupid, and the fear I didn't wholly earn what I gained.

2. Privilege/Support at the expense of ___________
The idea that life's pleasures cost something. This is a concept of postcolonial theory. Basically, your wealth or privileges exist at someone's, or some place's, or some group's expense. It's a system of power dispersal, and there are haves and have nots. The best examples are the glittering palaces of Europe. These would not exist without imperialism, slavery, and the looting of outside civilizations. So the idea I'm working with exposes this construct. Privilege, in racial terms, is the legacy of a racist social system of rank. Privilege, in terms of sex, is the legacy of a sexist system of rank. As a white man, I have to understand that my rank only exists in terms of inequity.

3. The Custodians of this order.
In so many words I was born into a specific rank, like a caste. Within that caste, there is the social construction and expectation of my fulfilling it. Most white men don't even realize it. Therefore, they are the custodians of this order. Basically, the maintenance men, or the enablers (if they know what they're doing). In my instance, the question now is, why would I want to enable this? Why would I ever want power over anything other than myself? Why would I want to be separated in any way from a large family of equals? It's too much for one group to handle anyway. I'm interested in looking compassionately at the pawns of a great apparatus which, through a privatized reward system, begets ignorance endlessly, therefore not only disadvantaging society, but sapping the custodians of this system of any empathy or spiritual progress.

4. Earning Vs Giving: Ties into the themes discussed in 1, but specifically tackles the anxiety of never knowing how much you've earned, and how much has been given to you, and how this unsettles the complacency of entitlement.

5. Invisibility. White men are rarely defined as such since socially they are the perennial human. Meanwhile, everyone who is not white and male is defined linguistically by their skin, or by being a woman, or trans. When a white man is racialized and gendered, he is linguistically linked to everyone and on equal terms to the rest of the human race, vs, being ranked and separated. What does it mean to no longer have superiority, since that is only a social construct?