Miscellany – Page 230

I could do that

Friday, July 13, 2018

After I made this, I realized I was basically plagiarizing Craig Damrauer, who I quoted in Steal Like An Artist:

MODERN ART = I COULD DO THAT + YEAH, BUT YOU DIDN’T

More on the subject over at The Art Assignment.

After I wrote about looking at things upside down, a reader relayed what his daughter was learning in army cadet training: “In the field, troops are told to scan from right to left. As we generally read left to right, doing the opposite aids in detecting anomalies in the landscape and potential threats to safety.”

Here’s photographer Dale Wilson (emphasis mine):

One of the first tricks I learned many years ago had nothing to do with photography, but was drilled into me by an army sergeant. It only took a few smacks up the back of my head to learn how to look from right-to-left when scanning a landscape in an effort to see the hidden “enemy” in our mock battles. This process of reverse reading forced me to slow down and read each tree as if it were a syllable I was seeing for the first time. Even today, about thirty years after I called that sergeant every adjective not found in a descent dictionary, I still find myself scanning a landscape from right-to-left.

Inscrutable blueprints

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

If you read John McPhee’s Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, you’ll come across several diagrams like the ones above. “McPhee creates them for everything he writes,” wrote Sam Anderson in his terrific profile. “Some of the shapes make almost no sense — they look like the late-stage wall sketches of a hermit stuck in a cave. Others are radically simple.”

McPhee learned the technique from his high school English teacher, Mrs. McKee, who made him do three writing assignments a week. “We could write anything we wanted to, but each composition had to be accompanied by a structural outline, which she told us to do first. It could be anything from Roman numerals I, II, III to a looping doodle with guiding arrows and stick figures. The idea was to build some form of blueprint before working it out in sentences and paragraphs.”

These little inscrutable blueprints reminded me of the diagrams scattered throughout the notebooks of Paul Klee (collected in The Thinking Eye [PDF] and The Nature of Nature [PDF]):

I was also reminded of Sylvia Fein’s First Drawings, which collects cave drawings alongside children’s drawings and work by famous artists:

The distance I can be from my son

Monday, July 9, 2018

We took the 5-year-old docent and his brother back to the Blanton Museum this afternoon. My favorite piece was Lenka Clayton’s The Distance I Can Be From My Son (2013). In three short videos, Clayton films her son walking away from her until she can’t stand it anymore and runs after him. The videos were part of Clayton’s “Artist Residency in Motherhood:” an attempt to “allow [motherhood] to shape the direction of my work, rather than try to work ‘despite it’.”

In Hannah Gadsby’s devastating Netflix special, Nanette, she deconstructs how jokes work on a system of tension and release — the setup is “artificially inseminated with tension” and the punchline releases it. Each of these videos is structured like a joke: You see the son toddling away, and at the very end of the video, the mother bolts after him. Tension and release. Setup and punchline.

There are interesting layers here: Clayton is setting herself up to see how far she can let her son go, and she’s setting us up, too. (Gadsby points out that her job as a comedian is to build tension and release it and do that over and over again. “This is an abusive relationship!”) We watched the videos with our kids after spending an exhausting 30 minutes in the museum trying to keep them close, my wife restraining the 3-year-old from leaping onto the paintings. (Unfortunately, art museums do require “helicopter parenting.”) The joke, I think, is not on the kid, or the kid viewers: my sons laughed out loud during the videos — I think they were rooting for him to get away!

Then, you remember the news and the fact that our government has split thousands of families apart at the border. Suddenly, The Distance I Can Be From My Son takes on a completely different meaning. You laughed and now you want to scream.

Drawing side by side

Sunday, July 8, 2018

My 3-year-old loves Super Simple Draw (how great would it be to have an animated Ed Emberley!) but my 5-year-old never really showed much interest until the other day when they were both in the studio. It was really fun to watch them draw side-by-side and compare their drawings: