I wrote this three months ago and wasn’t happy with it. The final three paragraphs seemed a bit confused. I put it to one side, vowing to go back later and edit it. I never did, of course, which is entirely its point…
We look at the art exhibit. Neither of us is particularly impressed. This isn’t the shiny new post-post-modernism that we expected. The Mrs* thinks we should be able to take home one of the flags scattered across the floor, claim a country as our own. I’m staring with a more pragmatic eye at the collection of empty food jars clustered next to them and all I can think is: recycling. I’m trying to find some smidgen of empathy with the artist’s creative intent, but sliding into “Do they call this art?” mode.
The Mrs wants glass jars, it turns out, for his painting. His is an art I can believe in, so I promise to raid my recycling bin in the name of creativity. Then I promptly forget all about it. Three days later, placing an empty Nescafe container on the floor by the back door, I remember my good intention. Outside, I identify a few likely contenders and bring them back into the house. Then I wonder whether he needs the lids. They’ve all been thrown away. Probably not, I decide. Lids… what would he do with them?
I e-mail him. I wonder how much detail to go into. I have jars, I say, casually mentioning their lidless status. If he doesn’t want them, I joke, I’ll create a sculpture called The Transparency Of The Empty Vessel and sell it to the Tate Britain. This is my pithy, succinct comment on everything that I dislike about post-modernism – its irony and detachment, its focus on form over content, its cynical lack of belief. “That would be a better idea,” comes his characteristically terse reply, “I need them to be airtight”.
Airtight. Of course. I finally realise that he wants to use them for storage. I have clearly been in “DIY” frame of mind, thinking of re-purposed jam-jars full of turps holding skanky brushes that will never be used again (i.e. the contents of the middle shelf in my garden shed). I e-mail back signifying my understanding. I start to ask whether he prefers small, medium or large jars, but then I realise that this is an anally-retentive path to lunacy and backspace those sentences quickly. Fuck, this is complicated.
I think of my own chosen medium: words. So much easier. They are free. I have an inexhaustible supply. They don’t require specialised storage media, however environmentally friendly. They won’t dry up if the seal on their container isn’t airtight. I’m glad I’m a writer rather than a painter, I decide. But then the more I think about it, the more I realise that I’m probably completely wrong. I have a whole folder on my computer full of opened cans of words that dried up because I didn’t use them quickly enough.
Paint is essentially the physical embodiment of two concepts: texture and colour. Words are the physical embodiment of a billion and one different concepts. In fact, words aren’t physical at all; you can think a word without it ever having a material existence. You can think a texture or a colour, but you can’t “think” a paint: it either exists, or it doesn’t. So, my “words” that dried up are actually combinations of words – or “sentences”, as writers like to call them, frequently fearing imprisonment.
But sentences aren’t any more intrinsically physical than their constituent words. So what exactly has dried up in my hundred-plus “work in progress” files? Not so much the ideas that they contain, but certainly the specific articulation of them at a precise moment in time. I can no more go back and recapture it than I can go back and be 15 again. I need to get better at treating ideas like preserves: they keep for years until you open the jar, after which they have to be kept cool and used quickly.
* Yes, I realise it’s confusing that I have a friend called The Mrs, as well as a wife who I refer to on this blog by the same affectionate title.
methinks,and its only me mind,that you take things far too seriously. Chill.
I’m skeptical of benchmarks against which contemplation can be measured along a spectrum of seriousness. There’s no more intrinsic validity nor value in chilling than in overwrought distress.
To the point, though, I’m down. I have so much in progress–an old novel collected as several pages hand- and type-written, a few short stories in various stages of polish, a development of an website not so much as a mercurial coffee-table piece as a platform for commitment to ideas and their experimentation–and they accrete and reform sinew and bone. They could be more if those instant notions of purpose, that come at a particular intersection of focus and context, and which defy recollection or capture like velocity upon determining position, as if there’s a universal law preventing later recall in anything approaching the initial experience.
Let’s look at the shelf, though: among your hundreds of files, you’ve got hundreds more finished pieces in different media. Not everyone can say that. There will always be casualties. The outbound train from cognition to completion goes through rough country, and you don’t get to take all your children with you.
There’s a lot I identify with in this excellent post – eg:
” This is my pithy, succinct comment on everything that I dislike about post-modernism – its irony and detachment, its focus on form over content, its cynical lack of belief. ”
“But sentences aren’t any more intrinsically physical than their constituent words. So what exactly has dried up in my hundred-plus “work in progress” files? Not so much the ideas that they contain, but certainly the specific articulation of them at a precise moment in time…”
This is why I like sometimes using words as things, giving them physical form, as in scratching them into a metal plate combined with images, a handmade book, etc.etc. And of course when words are sung they take on another kind of life. What if you were to turn some of your work-in-progress files into operas, literally? (Opera meaning work in Italian of course). Just as they are, what would they sound like, sung in different voices?
I like your new blog layout too.
Hello Hg. What you said to me once about perfection not being the point came to mind as I read this.
heatpress – yeah, you wouldn’t be the first person to say that. Life is a serious business. But you’re right. In my defence, this was originally written in February, at the time of the year when I’m at my most intense. Time has moved on and now I have a much sunnier disposition.
Daniel – dead right. The Billy Childish interview that I blogged recently (not by me – the Sunday Times one) covers this territory well. He’s an inspiration: do it, forget about it, move on, maybe go back later and see how it stands up. I’m just habitually bad at the “doing” part, but it’s a philosophy that I endorse. Had the very same conversation with a friend in the pub on Thursday, then e-mailed him later with a wry admission that I don’t walk it like I talk it.
That’s going to change. I set up a blog for that particular friend recently. “I’ve been doing it for seven years,” I said blithely, “whereas you’ve only been doing it for a month. Play with it, get to grips with it. It’s another art form.” I realised the day afterwards that even after a month he’s actually a better blogger than me. The fucker! He does stuff, then writes about it and shows you. I do stuff, then think about it, then think I should write about it, then don’t, then do something else, then wonder why I didn’t write about the first thing. The paint dries up, in other words.
Alex – and thus we come to your point. True, true, true – guilty as charged. As above, I know the theory but fail spectacularly to put it into practice. Hydragenic has become a place where I intend to put honed, considered pieces of writing, but actually that’s bollocks. Not that I can’t/shouldn’t do “honed and considered” but I shouldn’t limit myself to them.
Natalie – yeah, towards the end of last year I started wanting to express myself in other media. I played around with some sound recordings, but didn’t really take them seriously. I bought a beginner’s painting kit but have never used it. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. But, I hope, having watched others create beautiful objects from nothing over the past few months, inspiration is building momentum. As you say – same ideas, different voices. It’s time to try. I might not have said much directly about your own art round your place a couple of weeks ago, but I was scanning the room, soaking it all in…
Thanks for the comment on the blog layout. It’s actually a reversion rather than a revision: I’ve gone back to the simpler “design” (a rather grand word for so little) of a few years ago. In fact, I don’t like it any more. It was supposed to be a temporary thing, but I’m struggling to work out what I want it to look like instead. I think that might also possibly be influencing my (lack of) writing, because I don’t look at this site and think “That’s gorgeous and I want to fill it with stuff that does it justice” at the moment. So… another good intention that needs to be put into action
And more generally, you’re all demonstrating what I already know to be true, what has been proven time and time again and yet what I seem to keep ignoring: that the crafted pieces in which I sweat over every word seem to result in zero comments, whereas the stuff that I think of as scrappier, throwaway, second-best is the stuff that people actually comment on. It’s the curse of perfectionism again.
Long response, I know – thanks for making it this far. The words are clearly mustering for battle…
Well…one way to defeat the defeatism of perfectionism is to decide to do something imperfectly. Experimentally. Accidentally, almost.
eg:
Pull out one of your old files, at random.
Take a paragraph or two, or a page.
Record yourself speaking or singing it.
Build a video and/or still pictures around it.
Post it on your blog.
Voilà.
That’s it.
H’m, maybe I should try this?
Glad you scanned my stuff while you were here. I wonder what you saw?
Great suggestion, thanks. You first
No, seriously, I’ll trawl the work in progress files looking for something that I can somehow re-purpose, mash-up, express differently, whatever.
I find it quite difficult to talk about art (of the painted or sculptural variety). I feel I don’t have the vocabulary. I always end up comparing my in-ART-iculacy adversely with my ability to talk and write about music.
What I saw initially was what I’ve always seen: the confident, distinctive work of an artist whose style isn’t necessarily something I’d be drawn to (no pun intended) if I didn’t know her. Something I respect.
But my eye kept returning to one of the smaller pieces on the shelf (at either knee- or waist-height, I forget) to the left of the fireplace. More of a mini-installation than a painting. I liked it very much.
The more I looked at it, the more I seemed to be able to perceive it beyond the surface of its form and engage with the substance and the idea of it. I was inspired by it, envious of it, wished I could do something similar.
It was a background thing, obviously; I was much more focused on the conversation between the four of us. But I found myself thinking about it on the tube on the way home and a few times since too.
The piece you’re referring to is, I think, ‘The Lesson’, which is also my favourite of the constructions I’ve done. There’s a link to a detail of it on this page of my site:
http://www.nataliedarbeloff.com/lesson.html
and also a video I made of it on my blip.tv page (link is on right-hand sidebar of Blaugustine).
Very pleased that this piece caught your eye, inner and outer.
BTW, the commenter signing him/herself as ‘heatpress’ above is a spammer who has been infiltrating lots of blogs. I’ve deleted and banned him from Haloscan, maybe you should do likewise.
That’s the one. Love it. It seemed like a lesson to me too – forgetting to be amazed, too hung up on perfection and “quality” to seize daily opportunities for self-expression. Thanks for pointing me towards more detail.
Yeah, I figured the heatpress thing might be spam, but I haven’t seen it elsewhere so I gave it the benefit of the doubt in case it wasn’t. Also intentionally or otherwise the comment did seem vaguely on-topic and Daniel responded to it so I didn’t just want to delete it. I’m gonna take a pragmatic view and let it stand, but remove the link (thus de-spamming it).
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