Finished Half Empty last night. So good.
Stoneworks
There are stone monuments scattered throughout my neighborhood — fancy signs announcing the parks, etc. I find them sort of hilarious — they’re so serious, and they look like big tombstones. (They had to cost a fortune!) I like to go around and take pictures of them and then make a game of cutting them up so they announce other things. The only rules are that I never add, only subtract, and I try to make the edits as simple as possible.
(For this one I cheated just a bit and rubbed out letters with the clone stamp in Photoshop.)
Filed under: de-signs
How to hide and still be found
“It is a joy to be hidden… but disaster not to be found.”
—D.W. Winnicott
3 1/2 years ago, I was participating in an online roundtable about art in the digital age, and Ritesh Batra, a writer and film director, asked a question that I liked so much I wrote it on a 3×5 card that’s still hanging on the corkboard above my desk: “How do I hide and still be out there?”
Batra was speaking specifically about his filmmaking process: He was trying to work out how to balance showing his work, connecting with his audience, and maintaining a public presence online and off with his need to hide, to be private, go away, to withdraw into himself and his work long enough for good, creative stuff to happen.
His question, put another way, was: How do I hide and still be found?
Like all great questions, it seems to grow more important and more complex over time.
I thought I’d handled it well in my book, the whole point of which was to outline how artists and other workers might set up a sustainable level of sharing while they work. It was, basically, a book for people who were great at hiding, but not so great at being findable.
When I wrote that book, the internet, for me, was a place of opportunity, where, as Olivia Laing put it in The Lonely City, “You can reach out or you can hide; you can lurk and you can reveal yourself, curated and refined.”
But even in 3 years, the internet has changed, and this question, How do I hide and still be out there?, it keeps popping up, nagging at me, most recently when I was writing about the myth of the artistic recluse.
We seem to have being out there nailed. We’re all of us, it seems, out there. Maybe we need some help learning how to hide again?
For me, that’s what this year has been about: Learning how to hide and still be found. How to stay connected overall, but how to disconnect in crucial ways that allow me to recover some calm, some privacy, some inner sense of self, so that I can make great things to share.
Because if you don’t hide, at least a little bit, it’s hard to make something worth being found.
The “This Sucks” Hammer
In the most recent episode of Song Exploder, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross talk about their creative process in the studio. Reznor discusses his history with addiction, how he used to be afraid of failure in the studio, but how he now trusts “the process” to getting him somewhere. Maybe most importantly, he says that when the ideas are really coming, he’s learned to give them enough time to come forth, without worrying too much about whether they’re good or bad. “There’s plenty of time to bring out the ‘This Sucks’ hammer,” he says.
Every artist has to balance between at least two modes: call them, for lack of better terms, the creative mode and the editorial mode. In the creative mode, you don’t worry about whether things are good or bad, you just let them happen. In editorial mode, you go back and look at what you’ve got, and you ask the questions, “Is this good? Does this suck?”
Lynda Barry’s essay, “Two Questions,” from her brilliant book, What It Is, explores why and when the editorial mode appears and how you can make it go away long enough to get things on the page. It’s essential, Barry says, “To be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape! Without the two questions so much is possible.”
Donald Barthelme says the same in his classic essay, “Not-Knowing”:
The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the… process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing…
Fortunately for Reznor, he says he has been able to offload most of the editorial mode onto Atticus Ross, so he can stay in the creative mode — he’ll even leave the room for 20 minutes while Ross is assembling pieces of what they’ve recorded in Pro Tools (Oblique Strategy: “Go outside. Shut the door.”):
The different mindsets, or different hats one has to wear in this environment: one of them is the subconscious, follow the Muse, eyes closed, and another one, that’s radically different, is the editorial. “What sucked? What was good? What’s the piece that fits with that?” I love having [Ross] do that part, because I can stay in the other mode of not trying to analyze exactly what’s going on, and still stay subconscious. It keeps this momentum going where neither of us are bogged down too much. Our skill sets compliment each other. So, it’s him arranging stuff. I just kind of bang into things.
This is a terrific argument for collaboration, and the power of two, but for those of us who work solo, we have to try to split ourselves into two different people. We have to play the two different roles, inhabit the two different mindsets, wear the two hats. The easiest way do this, I’ve found, is to split up the modes in time: Write something without stopping, let it sit for 24 hours, or even a week, or even a year, then come back to it with the red pen. Or, make something in one space, then take it over to another space to fiddle with it. (This is why I have separate analog and digital desks in my studio: analog for creative mode, digital for editing mode.)
Most important of all, though, is to keep the “This Sucks” hammer out of reach until you’re ready for it.
Some fool use
I enjoyed this video of Tatsuo Horiuchi, a 77-year-old Japanese man who’s been painting with Microsoft Excel for the past 15 years:
When Tatsuo retired, he decided that he wanted to paint. But there was one problem: He was cheap. “When I started to do this I had a defiant and experimental mind. [I thought,] “How can I paint with my PC? You don’t need to spend money on paints, and you don’t have to prepare water and so on.” He didn’t even want to pay for an art program. So he used what was already on his computer. “This kind of stingy idea made me prefer Excel. And with a cheap printer…in 10 years, I wanted to paint something decent that I could show to people.”
I am drawn to art made out of ordinary materials. For example, I love the envelope poems of Emily Dickinson like “The way Hope builds his House,” which is composed on an envelope torn to look like a house:
And this morning I started reading A.R. Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year, which he started composing today, 54 years ago, on a roll of adding tape he found in a home and garden store, and began to “contemplate… some fool use for it.” In the first entry, Ammons asks the Muse for “assistance” with “this foolish / long / thin / poem”:
I find that embracing “foolishness” can be a great boon to the artist. “There are many people who make fun of me,” says Mr. Horiuchi, of his paintings. They say, “Why are you making effort on something that is not useful, are you a fool?” And Horiuchi answers, “Yes, I am a fool.”
In order to do find a use for a tool that is not exactly what it was made and advertised for, you need a kind of willingness to look stupid:
I’ve noticed when people post the video of Horiuchi, they say some variant of, “See? The tools don’t matter! Get making!” On Twitter, @doingitwrong posted the video with the words “YOU CAN MAKE ANYTHING WITH ANYTHING (This is why I am reluctant to give advice about writing tools.)” While I agree with the first part, that you can make anything with anything, when it comes to writing tools, instead of shying away from discussion of tools, saying, “it’s up to your imagination!” and leaving it at that, I think we should talk more about tools, and do more exploring, more investigating with students what it means to make art with different kinds of tools.
For example, Horiuchi’s landscapes are interesting (his portraits aren’t quite as dazzling — probably because landscapes lend themselves well to the geometric shapes you can make more easily with line tools), not just because of the novelty of painting with Excel, but because he’s really pushing the limits of what Excel can do. Here’s a screenshot of his computer:
Whether it’s Microsoft Excel or adding tape, pushing against constraints, finding out the limits of the tools, that’s what makes art interesting.
It’s not that the tools don’t matter — it’s finding the appropriate tools, or, maybe even better, the inappropriate tools, and finding some fool use for them.
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