A letter from Alasdair Gray

Friday, January 10, 2020

After Edward Carey (author of Little) finished writing his first book in 1999, he wrote to his hero, Alasdair Gray. This was Gray’s response.

…please tell anyone you know in the writing game that I’m too selfish to be of use to anyone. If you photocopy this letter and pass it around I will think it a favor.

That handwriting! Exquisite. I want to copy every letter.

I’d never heard of Gray or his work until a few years ago, when Elizabeth McCracken (author of Bowlaway, and, not coincidentally, Edward’s wife) sent me this charming video of him talking about his writing and art:

“I couldn’t make a living by either of them,” he said, “so the writing helped the painting and the painting helped the writing.”

I particularly loved his response to the ever-worn-out question, “Can writing be taught?”

Of course! I couldn’t write before I was was taught! That’s why they give it to you in primary schools. Writing and speaking are things that have to be learned first. Some people at a certain stage think that they don’t have to learn any more. If you’re very interested in words then you try to keep on learning more. And the best way, of course, is by reading other writers. Good ones! Or even bad ones are better than none to begin with.

Delightful video. Do watch.

Related reading: Edward Carey at the APL

3 tips for a better museum visit

Thursday, January 9, 2020

I was intrigued by Gretchen Rubin’s Met Museum Experiment, in which she plans to visit the Met every day of this year that she’s in NYC. (She lives within walking distance.)

Her experiment and her goals — to waken her senses, to learn about art, to explore the building space, to see more clearly, though she doesn’t feel she’s a visual person — got me thinking about how I like to visit museums.

Here are 3 things I do that make my museum experiences much richer:

1. Draw, draw, draw! When you try to draw something, even with just a rough sketch, you really have to look at it, and you notice all kinds of things you don’t by just standing around gawking at it. I always have a pocket notebook and a pencil or two with me. (Many museums don’t let you use pen or marker in the galleries.) I stand and copy the art I like, often just swiping a detail here and there from different pieces. (I write more about drawing and “slow looking” in chapter 5 of Keep Going.)

2. Enlist a small child to guide you through the museum. Kids are alive to the world in ways we aren’t as adults. They’re also lower to the ground, so their perspective is literally different. (More on this: “The 5-year-old docent” and “Borrow a kid.”)

3. Don’t read the label before you look at the art. Watch people the next time you’re in a museum gallery. They almost always look at the labels first! Don’t do this. Use your own eyes first. Let yourself be drawn towards what is genuinely interesting to you. Spend time looking at a piece without having someone else’s words messing with your looking. (More on this in Edward Tufte’s essay, “Seeing Around.”)

Owen (at age 5) exploring the edges of the museum

The portal

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

This morning a spotlight appeared in the ivy on our back fence. It looked like the rising sun was burning through, opening up some kind of portal. (It was really just a reflection off the window of the house across the street.) I walked out and stuck my hand into the beam to make a shadow puppet.

I wished I could stick my head in and see what was on the other side. Then, just a few minutes later, the sun rose high enough that the portal disappeared.

Here is a book Jules (4) was working on a few days ago:

I think all the time about how much your relationship with your children can be a two-way street — intellectually, emotionally, artistically.

The images you show them in the world enter their minds and come out through their fingers, but, like all artists, the images they make with their fingers also enter your mind and open your eyes to new images out in the world.

Update: I showed the photo at the top of this post to Jules and he dismissed it completely. “That doesn’t look like a portal, that looks like a fence.” HA.

A brief appreciation of John Baldessari

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

John Baldessari died.

Last night I played my 7-year-old Supermarché’s short documentary about him, “A Brief History of John Baldessari.” (Wonderfully narrated by Tom Waits!) Owen laughed the whole way through it, pronounced it “the funniest video I’ve ever seen,” and requested that we watch it again.

Watch it, it’s great:

Off the top of my head, here are seven things in John Baldessari’s work that I think about a lot:

1. Pictures and words together to make a third thing.

“I’ve often thought of myself as a frustrated writer. I consider a word and an image of equal weight, and a lot of my work comes out of that kind of thinking.”

2. Bringing a sense of lightness and humor to art.

He said he didn’t try to be funny, but he was. “I’m blessed with a well-developed sense of absurdity—it’s what saved me.”

(I love that he had a drawing of Spongebob and a note from Stephen Hillenburg hanging in his studio.)

3. Teaching as making a space for learning to happen.

“I taught because I needed the money,” he said, “but I tried to keep it interesting by making teaching as much like art as I could.”

(See his brilliant list of assignments in the book Draw It With Your Eyes Closed.)

“I found out that you can’t really teach art, you can just sort of set the stage for it.”

One of my favorite stories about his teaching: he’d have a student throw a dart at a map of LA and they’d all go to the spot and hang out all day for inspiration, taking pictures and videos.

“When I think I’m teaching, I’m probably not,” he said. “When I don’t think I’m teaching, I probably am.”

4. Learning about art from little kids.

“I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.”

5. Salvaging from the mess.

“I’m just messy, I don’t put things away,” he said. “I don’t throw things away in my mind, either; I keep them there.”

From his NYTimes obit:

His father was a salvage dealer, and the family grew its own fruits and vegetables, raised chickens and rabbits, and practiced composting waste. Mr. Baldessari often cited his childhood as a reason he had a hard time throwing anything away.

“It’s hard for me to throw anything away without thinking about how it can become part of some work I’m doing,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2008. “I just stare at something and say: Why isn’t that art? Why couldn’t that be art?”

“Maybe because I’m tall and gangly, I’ve always considered myself an assembly of parts.”

6. Los Angeles. (Or: how “ugly” cities can be inspiring.)

Palm Trees (Near)” by John Baldessari, 1975

“I live here because L.A. is ugly… If I lived in a great beautiful city, why would I do art?” he said. “I always have to be slightly angry to do art and L.A. provides that.”

7. Subtraction

“Nam June Paik said, ‘What I love about your work is what you leave out’—that was a really nice compliment.”

He even once had all of his work cremated so he could start afresh.

RIP.

PS. After writing this all up, I realized all 7 of these are also things I love about Corita Kent.

Circular time vs. linear time

Monday, January 6, 2020

In her latest newsletter, Ann Friedman linked to a twitter thread about how people see the passage of time, an essay about calendar synaesthesia, and this passage from Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 novel Flights:

Once we’re on the bus, she sets out her theory of time. She says that sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress toward a goal or destination, rises in percentages. Every moment is unique, no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things.

John Baldessari (RIP), from the Goya series

In Keep Going, I advocate for a return to circular time — thinking of the creative life as more of a loop, or a spiral:

The creative life is not linear. It’s not a straight line from point A to point B. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really “arrive.”