Scraps into poetry

Friday, May 8, 2020

While many writers are turning to the calm of collage as an escape from needing words, Hanif Abdurraqib is turning to self-collage and assembling his leftover scraps into poetry:

[I am] recycling my way toward a feeling of productivity. I copy and paste email responses that work across multiple inquiries. If I don’t feel up for making a morale-boosting lunch, I pile some leftovers into a bowl and hope for the best. I’ve found myself doing this with poems, as well. Piling leftovers onto the page and seeing what makes sense. I don’t throw away drafts of my poems. I keep them all in a folder on my computer. If I cared for something enough to write it, I care for it enough to imagine that it might be useful later.

About once a week, I’ve been digging through my folder of misfit poems and constructing new ones out of them. It’s like a joyful puzzle. The work of writing is already done. The work of arrangement is where the excitement is.

This is a fine method for artists of all kinds. A little hoarding goes a long way. You never know when a discarded scrap from something can be turned into something new. (Keep Going contains a whole section that didn’t fit into Show Your Work!)

Sticky note collages

Sunday, April 12, 2020

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.)

Art is the fossil record of the artist

Friday, November 8, 2019

I always keep a pencil handy when my friend John T. Unger is talking.

This bit came from us discussing how my books are the by-products of my process of figuring out how this stuff is done.

Art is much more interesting and makes a lot more sense (at least for the artist, anyways) if you think of the finished works as just the remains — the “fossil record” — of a process of looking, thinking, making, etc. (No more is this on display when we clean up my 4-year-old’s drawings at the end of the day.)

By the way, the reason John is so quotable (I think I’ve quoted him in the past three books) is that in a past life he was a poet. Here is one of my favorite stories of his, which I retold in Show Your Work!:

Detritus

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

After I posted about her creative residue, Wendy sent me a link to a show she was in at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art last year called “Detri t us.”

Detritus explores the leftover scraps and byproducts of the art-making process that artists do not discard for a number of compelling reasons.

Wendy exhibited empty sketchbooks with all the pages torn out. (More at KQED: “ICA’s ‘Detritus’ Looks at What Artists Leave Behind.”)

The residue of creativity

Monday, November 26, 2018

A few days ago, my friend Wendy MacNaughton (who has a terrific new column in the New York Times) posted this “Mistakes” jar, filled with eraser shavings “and tears.”

Einstein supposedly said that creativity is the residue of wasted time, but I think a lot about the residue of creativity. Sometimes that residue is a work of art, but more often than not, it’s a tiny trail of waste —debris, dust, shavings, clippings, trash, etc.

I love it when artists collect and display this residue. (Sometimes they even sell it.) One of my favorite parts of Edward Carey’s show at the Austin Public Library was a bowl of his pencils, used all the way to the stumps.

Years ago, I saw a show of book carver Brian Dettmer, and there was a box of his X-acto blades on a pedestal. (He estimates he goes through “15-50 blades a day, usually switching over to a new blade every ten minutes to half hour.”

In 2013, designer Craighton Berman ran a funny, tongue-in-cheek Kickstarter called “The Campaign for the Accurate Measurement of Creativity.” It included a “Sharpener Jar” — “a product designed to quantify creative output.”

Since I wrote Show Your Work! in 2013, I’ve been interested in how artists share their process, how social media allows you to share when there’s nothing, really, to share, and how sometimes the scraps and ephemera from our process can turn into their own attractions. (Above: Amanda Palmer’s sticky notes posted while working on The Art of Asking: “[I] was trying to find a way to share their colorful beauty without also revealing their content.”)

Oh, and while I’m riffing: “Butt Pattern,” from the #MTAMuseum (more here) is this idea of process-residue-as-art taken to its most extreme and funny conclusion.