One of my favorite things about discovering a new material — like the security patterns on the inside of envelopes — is then attempting to exhaust the material. Seeing how many different ways I can use it. Trying to use every scrap of it. (Below: a bookmark for Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses.) A great inspiration to me has been watching what Kelli Anderson does with paper.
Materials, man
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about materials. Obviously, a painter’s material is paint, a sculptor’s material is bronze or clay. But what of the other, more abstract arts? For example, a stand-up comedian will refer to her material. What, exactly, is that material? Jokes? Stories?
What is a writer’s material? Here’s Annie Dillard:
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ”Do you think I could be a writer?”
”Well,” the writer said, ”I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ”I liked the smell of the paint.”
More and more I think that our work — and happiness in our work — is to be found in not only identifying our material, but thinking of it as actual, tangible material that you can see and and hear and touch and smell and even taste and manipulate with your hands. This is easier to do if the material is physical, which is why I think so many writers write longhand, or print out their rough drafts to edit with a pencil, or read their work aloud.
An artist has to have a kind of sensual relationship with her material. She has to find material she can fall in love with, or, maybe even better, she has to love the material available to her. The stuff that’s lying around. (There’s a saying: “Attention is the most basic form of love.”)
Yesterday, I was flipping through a big stack of newspapers, looking for images — material! — and I came across this article, “The Materials Man of the Emirates,” about artist Hassan Sharif: “Sharif’s art insists that nothing is wasted if you make waste your creative source.” As Sharif found out, your material could be, in fact, what others consider trash. That is part of the artist’s job: finding treasure in the trash.
Anni Albers, in a 1938 bulletin for Black Mountain College, wrote about “Working With Material.” She said that modern civilization has caused us to lose touch with our own creativity. Her advice: “we must come down to earth from the clouds where we live in vagueness, and experience the most real thing there is: material.”
Over 40 years later, she asked, in “Material as Metaphor,” “How do we choose our specific material[?]” Her answer: “Accidentally.”
Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed. We are finding our language, and as we go along we learn to obey their rules and their limits. We have to obey, and adjust to those demands. Ideas flow from it to us and though we feel to be the creator we are involved in a dialogue with our medium. The more subtly we are tuned to our medium, the more inventive our actions will become. Not listening to it ends in failure.
She speaks of her own path:
In my case it was threads that caught me, really against my will. To work with threads seemed sissy to me. I wanted something to be conquered. But circumstances held me to threads and they won me over. I learned to listen to them and to speak their language. I learned the process of handling them.
What she learned, in the process of working with threads, she was then able to apply to other materials, for example, learning how ink wants to be with paper. She emphasizes that you really have to work with your materials, understand what they want to become. They will tell you what they want to be if you listen to them. “The finer tuned we are to [them],” she says, “the closer we come to art.”
Materials, man…
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.
Intelligence in your fingers
Reading some of composer Robert Schumann’s Advice to Young Musicians, I came across this piece of advice for composing, which I thought was spectacularly bad: “If you are starting out on a composition, begin by working everything out in your head. Do not try out a piece on your instrument until you have fully conceived it in your mind.”
This might be good advice for a musical genius, like Beethoven, Mozart, or Robert Schumann, but it runs counter to my own personal experience with art. Very few of my decent pieces have come from me thinking in my head, as in, thinking through a piece and then sitting down and executing it. In fact, I don’t know if that’s ever happened. Most of my good ideas have come from an exploration of specific materials, a kind of back and forth between eye and hand and head. These collages are good examples: I did not set out with any kind of purpose or ideas before I made them, merely some time, space, and materials.
I know some writers who claim to work out all their writing in their heads before hitting the paper, but 1) I suspect they’re liars 2) even if they do have it worked out, it’s in getting the words on paper and then editing those words that the ideas take on any kind of real form. As a young artist, I thought the ideas had to come first before you wrote, and now I think the opposite: You start working with your hands and the ideas come.
Better advice than Schumann’s might be from a newspaper clipping I saved called “How To Draw Blood” (you could cross out the last word), in which a worker at a free clinic started out by saying, “Develop intelligence in your fingers.” Her point was that every vein in every arm is different, and you not only have to think, you have to feel your way through a lot of medical procedures. The feeling is as important as the thinking.
Best not to overestimate the intelligence in your head: your fingers have a lot to teach it.
See also: Don’t Ask.