Austin Kleon

Make bad art, too

Sol Lewitt’s letter to Eva Hesse

“A lot of bad art is going to come out of this nightmare — including my own — and that’s okay.”
—Dean Haspiel

In Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art, he wrote:

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.

A fine message! But I’d also make a plug for something else: when the going gets rough, make bad art, too.

Don’t listen to people who remind you that Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague— we’re living in King Lear!

When 9/11 and Katrina hit and she lost a bunch of her close friends, Lynda Barry got really depressed, and all she could do is doodle:

I found myself compelled, like this weird, shameful compulsion to draw cute animals. That was all I could stand to draw. You know, just cry and draw cute animals…dancing dogs with crowns on, you know? And, like, really friendly ducks. But I found this monkey, this meditating monkey, and I found that once – when I drew that monkey, it’s not that it fixed the problem. But it did shift it a little bit, or provide me some kind of relief. And that’s when I started to think, maybe that’s what images do, because I believe in all my – with all my heart they have an absolute biological function…

And here’s Sol Lewitt in his famous letter to Eva Hesse (collected in Letters of Note), which I quoted in Keep Going:

You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO… Try to do some BAD work — the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell — you are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work — so DO IT.

“Good” can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What’s important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it’s good or bad is beside the point. Just make something. 

(And when that doesn’t work, sit on the damned couch and watch some stupid television until you pass out.)

The car as a space for good conversation


I love this story Ron Perlman tells about his father’s early encouragement and how much it meant to him:

https://twitter.com/coenesqued/status/1249578783444594697?s=20

Perlman’s father tells him what he needs to tell him while driving around. It makes me think about the power of the car in our emotional lives.

The automobile, for all of the evil and danger and destruction it’s brought to our culture and the planet, also provides an emotional space in which parents can talk more easily to their children and men can open up to other men about their feelings. (Kerouac knew all about that, and as goofy as it can be, I’m also thinking of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.)

Here’s an excerpt from a Psychology Today on the benefits of talking to your kids in the car:

  1. You have a captive audience-your passenger cannot leave at any time (at least safely).
  2. It’s less threatening-sitting beside or better yet, behind a parent, can feel less intimidating or less threatening to a child or adolescent.
  3. Car rides are limited in time-unless you are on a longer drive, you have only a limited time to get your point across and engage in a dialogue.
  4. Distractions can be minimized-although you may still have to compete with a phone or music player, your child will have fewer other distractions.

A week ago I wrote about how much I miss that brief 10 minutes my son and I got together driving him home from school. Gas is so (horrifyingly) cheap right now, I keep thinking about just throwing him in the car and going on a drive to nowhere, letting him DJ along the way…

The Man With No Advice

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant…”
— Emily Dickinson

I thought I was done making zines, but I can’t seem to stop! Here is one I made yesterday, with the first line from Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” (Here’s Dennis Hopper reciting it on The Johnny Cash Show.)

It feels like it should be a time in which people need advice more than ever, but I’m not so sure. (And though I could be seen as a professional propagator of advice, on the whole, I am skeptical of giving it.) I think, in all times, but especially in these, if you sit quietly for long enough, you can hear that voice inside you that tells you exactly what you need to do.

“Advice, wrote David Foster Wallace in The Pale King, “even wise advice — actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path.” (I got that from Tim Kreider, who is “Against Advice.”)

Besides, as Steinbeck said, “No one wants advice — only corroboration.” I think my advice books mainly give voice to what the reader already thought but couldn’t put into words. The books are permission slips, in a sense. “Go make some art!”

Then again, some advice is good. I know I always sought it when I was starting out. A reader on Twitter a few days ago told me, “Thanks to your advice I’ve stopped being an artist and I’m making art again.” That was my message perfectly distilled and it made my whole day.

Anyways, this zine is not actually about advice at all. It’s about the power of staying quiet when people ask you how you’re doing what you’re doing. Refusing to answer, Bartleby style. (“I prefer not to!”) Because the thing you’re doing is still very close to you, and it’s still very much alive, and like a wild horse that’s somehow letting you take a ride, you don’t want to spook it. Or it’s a gift being given to you and you don’t want to cheapen it. Whatever metaphor you want to use, it’s something precious to you right now, and you don’t want it out in the air. You want to keep it close and see where it goes. And besides, those who really look close, they’ll get what they’re looking for.

But it’s also about how much easier it is to say these things with art. And how freaking good it feels not to talk, but to make.

Sticky note collages

In my never-ending borderline-OCD quest to never waste anything and make something of my by-products, I’ve started keeping a pad of sticky notes on my desk and when I have unused scraps from my collages I add them to a note. Eventually the note becomes its own collage, sometimes more interesting than the “real” collage I was working on. (The note above was made while tidying my desk and talking to the friend on the phone.)

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