Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2022) (Patreon)

Is anything we see in Showing Up good art? I puzzled over this while watching Reichardt's film, and I found myself inclined to say no. Main character Lizzie (Michelle Williams) is seen fussing over her figurative ceramic sculptures, molding arms and backs, applying glaze, and arriving at table-top miniatures that vaguely mimic the gestural figure drawings we see in the film's opening credits -- they are pinned to her studio wall -- but also evince a kind of forced whimsy, as if they were former pixies drooping under the weight of their new-found humanity. Lizzie's artistic and interpersonal rival, Jo (Hong Chau), is a fiber-based installation artist whose pieces tend to resemble knit-shop dreamcatchers that just kept expanding, for no obvious reason.

But on reflection, I realized just how utterly beside the point this all is. After all, aesthetic judgments are notoriously subjective, and if I find myself rejecting the output of hypothetical members of the greater Portland arts community, it's mostly because these works don't look a lot like other, previous objects that at some point I decided looked like "art," mainly because to some degree they resembled even earlier objects. What Showing Up asserts, rather boldly I think, is that art is work. It is labor, of course, and Reichardt and Williams take great care to show Lizzie manipulating the clay, scoring and bonding, urging it into a coherent form in space. But art is also thinking, a process of mental engagement with the physical possibilities of one's chosen medium. Accordingly, we see Lizzie taking substantial pauses between actions, sussing out how the previous move eliminates some options while generating others.

Throughout Showing Up, Reichardt shows us various creators -- art students, faculty members, and others -- in the midst of creation. We also hear brief passages of shop talk, as Lizzie discusses her work with colleagues, who all have their own ways of working. Visiting artist Marlene (Heather Lawless) makes a special effort to engage with Lizzie about her work as an artist, partly out of genuine curiosity but also as a way to try to make a friend. Meanwhile Eric (André Benjamin), the ceramics tech, tries to encourage Lizzie to embrace chance mishaps, to see the beauty in happy accidents. 

More than any other of Reichardt's films, Showing Up is a direct expression of the director's work as a university instructor. A long-time faculty member at Bard College (alongside other filmmakers like Jacqueline Goss, Peggy Ahwesh, and the late Peter Hutton), Reichardt transposes her experience to the studio arts, but the fundamentals are the same. A good art teacher is open to allowing students to form their own aesthetic identities, and is there to help each potential artist become the best possible version of themselves. It's about entering the other person's creative worldview, and gently nudging it from the inside, not dismantling their entire frame of reference and replacing it with your own.

By shining a spotlight on the ordinary day-to-day effort of artistic endeavor, Showing Up displaces the usual mythologies that surround the capital-A Artist in Western culture (and especially in America). There are no earthshattering epiphanies, no god-given talents, just people committed to finding ways to bend their chosen medium to the measure of their interests and ideas. Of course, Showing Up is not a documentary about art, but it is this college-town Constructivist approach (the artist as worker, as producer) that allows the human scaled conflicts to emerge. 

Lizzie, after all, is a very unpleasant person, but not in the asshole-genius way we've grown to expect. Yes, she experiences frustration while producing her work. But her main concerns (lack of hot water, the comfort of the wounded pigeon she's tending) are utterly pedestrian. That doesn't mean they don't matter; it just means that being an artist doesn't somehow lend her irritations some sort of outsized gravitas. In time, we learn who Lizzie is, where she comes from, and the brittler aspects of her personality start to make sense. She grew up in the shadow of her successful art-prof father (Judd Hirsch), while her allegedly brilliant, mentally ill brother (John Magaro) took up all the emotional oxygen in her family, leaving Lizzie a kind of "middle child" out of two.

Lizzie's artistic creation is sturdy, comprehensible, and ordinary. The fact that she works (barely) as the clerical assistant in the college's art office speaks to both the material constraints on her creative activity (she makes art in the off-hours), and the fact that she is grounded in the real world, perhaps unwillingly but unavoidably. Lizzie may be a little jealous that Jo's work is getting more attention -- two simultaneous shows, a larger gallery space -- but she seems more irked by the fact that Jo makes money, in part, by being a lousy landlord. Jo has more free time, a bit more privilege, and is accordingly more successful. But by contrast, Lizzie knows all too well from her brother Sean's experience that dropping out, losing touch, and trying to create from a place of total disengagement, is both untenable and dangerous. 

For so long, Reichardt's films have been about marginal experiences, looking at various people who could not quite adapt themselves to the social mainstream. In Old Joy, Wendy & Lucy, and First Cow, we observe a number of strategies for trying to carve out an existence that's out of step with dominant structures or ideologies. Now, with Showing Up, Reichardt has made a slight adjustment. Lizzie is a disgruntled nine-to-fiver who wants to be something more, but cannot abandon her need for stability. Rather than regard that compromise as some sort of failure of nerve, Showing Up shows us that we can generate small waves, gradually move ahead, and make space in our lives for the quietly extraordinary.