Austin Kleon – Page 319

Warm-ups, test prints, and selling your by-products

Friday, November 10, 2017

While visiting our stunning new library, I popped down to the second floor gallery space to see collage artist Lance Letscher’s Books exhibit. It’s an interesting show because all of the pieces started as studies, or warm-ups: Letscher begins his day in the studio by collaging and experimenting on a book. Sometimes he’ll incorporate what he comes up with into a larger or more involved piece, but sometimes the book itself becomes a finished piece. (To learn more about his process, check out the new documentary, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher.) These aren’t your typical Letscher works. They’re rougher, more miniature. They’re beautiful in a more intimate way, like looking inside a Van Gogh sketchbook or listening to a Prince demo.

I love process-based shows like this, and I was reminded a little bit of “Test Me,” an exhibit by Chris Maddux on display at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery’s Image Lab, the interdisciplinary work space run by Lynda Barry.

Of course, I wrote a whole book about sharing your process and showing your work, but this is a very particular kind of move, which is akin to what Jason Fried calls selling your by-products: Taking stuff lying around the studio that you’d usually keep in a box or throw out, and re-framing it and presenting it as a finished piece. Turning process into product. (Fried talks more about selling your by-products in the book Rework and on the Rework podcast.)

Lynda does this herself when she sells off her watercolored calligraphic manuscript pages or her morning pages on eBay:

And the folks at Aesthetic Apparatus do this with their test prints: one-of-a-kind artworks made by layering elements from different screenprinting projects they’re working on:

Art monsters

Thursday, November 9, 2017

My nominee for one of the dumbest sentences ever spoken goes to Andy Rooney, who said of Kurt Cobain after his suicide, “No one’s art is better than the person who made it.”

Take a quick dip into any one of the hundreds (thousands?) of years of art history and you’ll find that, no, actually, plenty of great art was made by creeps, assholes, vampires, perverts, and worse.

In Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, the narrator calls them “art monsters”:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

We’re all complicated. And we’re all creepy, to a certain degree. If we didn’t believe that we could be a little better in our art than we are in our lives, that our best selves are found in the art, what would really be the point? But it’s still crushing when someone who’s made art that you love turns out to be a real creep.

What is heartening, I think, is that the cultural celebration of the Art Monster is fading, and the myth that being an absent parent, a cheater, an abuser, an addict, an asshole, etc. is somehow a prerequisite for — or is somehow excused by — great work is slowly being torn down. And if making great art ever let you off the hook for your failures as a human being, those days are going away, too. (Good riddance.)

Director Steven Soderbergh was recently asked if he believed that an artist has to be disturbed in some way to make memorable art. “Not at all,” he said.

It takes a lot of energy to be an asshole. The people I admire most just aren’t interested in things that take away from their ability to make stuff. The people I really respect, and that I’ve met who fit this definition, have a sense of grace about them, because they know that there is no evolving and there is no wisdom without humility.

Earlier in the interview, Soderbergh said that when he speaks to a film class, he spends the last 1/4 of the talk “discussing personal character, how to behave, and… how you treat people.”

That’s the kind of talk that helped me as a young artist. I remember asking George Saunders how he managed to be a decent artist and a decent family man. How he and others showed me that it’s not impossible, you don’t need to be an art monster, and that, in fact, being a decent human being will only make your art better.

Hurry slowly

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

“The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time.”
—Junot Diaz

It was my pleasure recently to be interviewed by Jocelyn Glei for her podcast, Hurry Slowly. We talked about analog vs. digital tools, how space affects your work, working by hand, and slowing down. You can listen to our conversation here.

“Hurry slowly” has its roots in an old Latin phrase: “Festina Lente,” or “Make haste slowly,” or “more haste, less speed.” (See: The Tortoise and The Hare.)

Here’s Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, on the phrase:

Festina lente should totally be a model for our age. I came across it just reading about the early days of printing and Aldus Manutius—the great printer who of course figures in the plot of my book. It’s his motto. I’m sure that you could translate it different ways—but the one I liked best is “make haste slowly.” And I just love it cuz it seems like a contradiction, but in fact it’s exactly right. It seems to fit our time really well, but I stole it from a guy 500 years old. Oh wait, maybe this isn’t new, maybe this is not a new feeling.

Here’s Erasmus in his Adagia, 500 years before Sloan:

[Festina Lente] ought to be carved on columns. It ought to be written on the archways of churches, and indeed in letters of gold. It ought to be painted on the gates of great men’s palaces, engraved on the rings of cardinals and primates, and chased on the scepters of kings. To go further, it ought to be seen on all monuments everywhere, published abroad and multiplied so that everyone will know it and it will be before every mortal eye, and there will be no one who doesn’t hold it of greatest use…

Later, Erasmus writes, “Things that ripen prematurely are wont suddenly to go limp. What grows slowly and steadily can endure.” Echoing Erasmus, about 360 years later, is Henry David Thoreau, in his journal entry for November 5, 1860:

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected.

“Let’s slow down,” Steinbeck wrote in his journal while working on The Grapes of Wrath, “not in pace or wordage but in nerves.”

Some of my favorite writers use older technologies to force themselves to slow down: Lynda Barry used a paintbrush and red ink on legal paper to write the first draft of her manuscript for Cruddy. This page hangs in my bedroom:

“People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster,” says David McCullough. “Well, I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower.”

“The real issue with speed,” writes film editor Walter Murch in his book, In The Blink of an Eye, “Is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.”

Finally, here is one of my favorite works by Corita Kent, which she sent to LBJ in 1963 “after reading that his wife Ladybird had been telling him to slow down.”

Top image: my friend Marty’s back yard — photo taken in 2010.

Here I am 34 years old

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

“Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many instances that I may say I am unborn…”
—Henry David Thoreau, 7/19/1851