Negative self-definition

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

A page from *The Steal Like An Artist Journal*

Sometimes it’s much easier to get started when you define what it is that you aren’t going to do.

The page from the Steal journal above was inspired by this story I read in From Wilson Neate’s 33 1/3 book on Wire’s Pink Flag:

Wire’s aesthetic was built on subtraction, a consistent withdrawal of superfluous elements. “The reduction of ideas, the reduction of things down to the minimal framework—it just seemed completely natural,” explains Colin Newman. “By closing down possibilities, you very often open up possibilities. You have infinite possibilities of simplicity and subtlety within a frame.” Natural minimalists, Wire pursued a negative sensibility, defining themselves in terms of what they were not…

“The only things we could agree on were the things we didn’t like,” observes Bruce Gilbert. “That’s what held it together and made life much simpler.” Recalling some unofficial Wire rules, Graham Lewis summarizes this negative self-definition: “No solos; no decoration; when the words run out, it stops; we don’t chorus out; no rocking out; keep it to the point; no Americanisms.”

(If that story sounds familiar, I used it in chapter one of Keep Going.)

In the book Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment, David Levine tells of “The Worst Assignment I Ever Gave.”

Hoping to get the students to find their “artistic allies,” Levine passed out a bunch of art magazines to his students and told them to find an artist they liked that they’d never heard of and report back the next week to the class.

The assignment was a total failure: none of the students liked anything they saw.

So Levine told them to come back next week and give a report on an artist they hated. Bingo.

“The students performed totally engaged, specific, ten-minute critiques, followed by adrenalized argument… which inevitably led back to a positive discussion of each student’s own practice.”

What I found interesting about this turn of events was how much easier it is, as a first step, to define your own position negatively, and how the beginnings of articulating taste are almost always through discovering what you don’t like.

A negative approach

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

“I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say,” said philosopher Mary Midgley, “and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict.” She admitted it was “a negative approach, as they say, but one that doesn’t seem to run out.”

She was 81 when she said that. She wrote well into her 90s.

This is what writing often is for me: Making a list of everything stupid and idiotic that someone else is saying and then sitting down and trying to articulate the exact opposite.

There. Now you know my secret!

Printmaking with the six-year-old

Monday, July 15, 2019

Here are some linocut prints carved by my six-year-old, printed by me on a photo and an advertisement from the New York Times. (The one on the left reminds me of Corita Kent. “Save up” vs. “Power up.”)

I like how the prints (made with cheap Speedball blocks and ink) look like laser print-outs low on toner. Raw and spooky. The one on the left had little bits dirt or food stuck to it, so it ended up looking like stars around the tower. (I was thinking while we were making these that there’s no reason to ever participate in an art-making process unless there’s some chance for happy accidents and moments of serendipity.)

Here’s what the kitchen table looked like by 9AM.

I love cutting up the discarded prints and collaging them into something else…

…and extending abstract shapes into new forms.

Another thing I love about block printing is the ability to merge different blocks into a single print. Here I’ve printed out the six-year-old’s tower and added a big bad wolf head copied from a drawing by the four-year-old. (The Big Wolf Energy has not subsided.)

Unfollow

Saturday, July 13, 2019

Here is my beloved Wayne White painting that my wife bought me for my 32nd birthday. I look at it every day and it reminds me, yes, to unfollow: to trim my feeds, to cease hate-following, cut the vampires out of my life. But it also reminds me to unfollow myself. Try to Destroy the ego, abandon my sense of who or what I am, forget the noun and do the verbs.

Here are some process shots of its making, from WW’s Instagram. (If you don’t know his work, watch the documentary Beauty is Embarrassing.)

Know your exits

Thursday, July 11, 2019

Rip Torn died a few days ago. I like this story about him told by actress Conchata Ferrell:

I shouldn’t tell this story, but it was my first or second day, and we were rehearsing, and when we were leaving rehearsal, Rip had a car, and he said, “Do you want me to show you the town?” I said, “Sure!” So, you know, he’s driving around, he’s showing me this and showing me that, and I said, “My God, how long have you been here?” And he said, “Oh, I just got here two days ago.” And I went, “How in the world are you so familiar with everything?” He goes, “I make it a point to know every way out of town in any town I’m in.”

“Know your exits,” as they say.

I’m reminded of Iggy Pop in his John Peel lecture: “Be careful to maintain a spiritual exit.” (Whatever that is.)

Here’s hoping Rip smelled the Glenlivet on God’s breath.