6 September 2020
Ongoingness
I picked up a small book the other day by the writer Sarah Manguso entitled Ongoingness and zipped through quickly. I had seen a review of it in the NYT and it looked very interesting because it concerns her diary-keeping. Being a diarist myself, I was immediately sucked into it. It's tiny book of short entries on each page in which she reflects upon her feelings about keeping a diary. For anyone interested in this microscopic form of inquiry, I highly recommend it.
But I mention it because I fell on two entries in her book wherein she remarkably articulates exactly what I have trying to do with my own pictures in this period of my life.
"I often prefer writer's diaries to their work written intentionally for publication. It’s as if I want the information without obstacles of style or form. But of course all writing possesses style and form, and in good writing they aren’t obstacles....
.... I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them.... the goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect."
This is most interesting for me but I immediately thought of the Japanese Haiku for some reason.
As improbable as it sounds, it’s as if there might be some mystical way of achieving a painting that reveals no trace of the creator’s hand, actually, no proof of the creator even. In fact, many artists today bypass the entire process by simply exhibiting found objects rather dryly in an exhibition space. No more need of hands!
Today, it' actually a generally accepted method of working (and exhibiting). It’s the new intersection where the Natural History museum and the Art Gallery are grafted together to make something new.
I'm almost always up for change but the danger I sense from the viewpoint of the artist as craftsman, is that it also tilts the work of art away from the comfort of craft and into an i-cloud of ideation. And who knows where this evolution will take art into the future?
The problem for me is that it risks to bypass the long and painful training that is the grunt work of education. I'm old-fashioned, no doubt, and I like pianos and guitars, not buttons on a console. I also like mixing paints and making a mess more than I like making a few quick clicks on a keyboard laptop to make a painting. Because I'm an analogue kind of guy, I think it's through learning a craft that an artist's vision is formed of the long haul. But hey!
So though I kind of liked the idea of this miraculous conception in art, it would never work for me even though it's a sexy idea. It would feel to me like cutting corners somehow sort of like letting ChatGPT write love letters for me.
Painting, is an art form distinct, and yes, still noble. It's basically all about the clever and cogent organisation of a colourful mess. Why would anyone wish to deprive themselves of this?
But Sarah Manguso speaks in tongue and cheek, for that I really like both her mind and her writing.
But anyway, here on the Pacific Coast is an example from last week of an extremely unruly image that exudes a purely emotional response to the sea and sky. Although, it falls terribly short, it’s an example of a failure that I’ve decided to keep as a souvenir. Sometimes it’s interesting to reveals all the warts of a picture even if there is something in it that speaks to a part of me. In this image, it’s as if my id took over from my ego that afternoon.
I never want to imitate Nature even though it might appear that I do in some paintings. I would say that I desire to mimic it by building up an image with pigment only to then tear it down a little here and there until I get what I want. This might even resemble the way I remember using oil based clay to make sculptures. In this way,
I hope to get to the truth of what’s inside of the me about the motif. It is a process of editing, but also layering until that secret intuitive pool of meaning is drudged up from the very deep inside me. A writer might describe it as playing with the unconscious, manipulating it, and with discipline shaping it into something of form, a story perhaps. I imagine that crime writers need to find themselves crawling around the edges reason and sanity to discover the hideous nature of certain people and all they do to one another to arrive at the end of a story.
Perhaps, like the crime writer, the choices involved in the painting process can create the idea of the work in question quite unbeknownst to the creator.
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