Several passages from
Reality Hunger convey well some of Shields’s major concerns:
“When I was seventeen, I wanted a life consecrated to art. I imagined a wholly committed art-life: every gesture would be an aesthetic expression or response. That got old fast, because, unfortunately, life is filled with allergies, credit card bills, tedious commutes, etc. Life is, in large part, rubbish. The beauty of reality-based art...art underwritten by reality hunger...is that it’s perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) “life as art.” Everything in life, turned sideways, can look like...can be...art. Art suddenly looks and is more interesting, and life, astonishingly enough, starts to be livable.
“The center of the artistic process...for me...is the attempt to transform a particular feeling, insight, sorrow into a metaphor and then make that metaphor ramify so it holds everything, everything in the world.”