Since around last September I've been meeting with buds on a monthly basis to discuss ongoing projects; that meeting group and format is called "monthly mondays." As others surely have before me, I have found regular conversations on creative practice to be very beneficial.
Because my thoughts and progress frequently seem to recede immediately into the miniature oblivion of "finished work," I decided it might also be beneficial to keep a monthly "studio blog" to better archive and/or expand them, "looking back" at whatever I was thinking or working on.[1] Generally I'm gonna try to "keep it loose." The title of this "blog" is "Studio Chair."
Worked on this piece from early March to early July with few breaks, finished it about three weeks behind schedule (not bad); just have to finish a title. Seems likely to land with something like this:
"Viewing uncertainty with free possibility or with paralyzing doubt, at the pillar or the curtain" (dedicated to Joe Buzzell)
While everything I produce now is to some extent, this piece is specifically dedicated to Joe's life and was produced with him strongly in mind. The "initial inspiration" for the systems worked through here came while thinking about his playing me "Perfect Prescription" for the first time while we were drawing, once.
Feel that I am now "completely disinclined" from including literal text directly in visual artwork, while becoming somewhat more open to the possibilities of creating language orientations to a given image through "titling." Basically, I now find the idea of "images of words" on the surface of an artwork distractingly "of the world"; it seems actionable (though maybe arcane and quibbling?) that I do not think of my finished paintings as being "english language paintings," and they're definitely not supposed to be infographics.
I think I had come to feel I was "against" titling due to a vestigial and kinda silly formal insistence on "everything being present on the surface of the work" that came out of my earlier, much more literally totemic ideas around making a certain kind of object-artwork that "has a use." I still believe in objects and that kind of work etc., but it took a sec to realize that that's not really what I'm making right now.[N]
And while I want my images to "speak for themselves," that doesn't mean I can't also talk about them, or that speakable ideas present in the work should remain obscure, sacrificed to, or sublimated in some idea of an "unspeakable totalized final image." If someone asked me about the image above, I'd probably point out some system features, but I'd also want to present the ideas and images in the title and call out Joe. Seems like that metadata should just be there somewhere directly - but not on the surface in renderings of ordered selections from the English alphabet.
On a semi-related "shh... the artist is about to make a statement" tip, I got drunk at a party in mid-July and a guy asked me "what my abstract paintings are about, or why do I make them" and I landed on "generally? a pursuit of the sublime"...! Simultaneous feelings of earnest purposefulness and self-aware embarrassment at the apparent total ridiculousness of this proposal... but why archly evade it? Or why suggest that the paintings are "about" their processes, and that the processes aren't themselves "about" other things that painting is just a way to scratch at? More on this some other time/later/repeatedly, I'm sure. (enters and slams dracula coffin shut, muffled talking remains audible)
Feels worth saying twice in this "post." I realized last month that I had swung too far to the right on "only doing serious projects" due to my constrained studio schedule. While generally this has meant that I have been very productive in my available time, it has also meant that my studio has become kinda low on oxygen. I'm now trying to have a more balanced approach to my time, which means recommitting to the value of work that seems to be either "minor" or "totally fucking around," primarily for its mental health/fresh air values.[2]
The general call to action is now "take however long you wanna take on maniac-mode projects, but also start and finish one or two things per month too (since it's doable/feels good)."
So I made this little guy::
Approximately titled "Looking at the horizon on a relaxing vacation"
And Shea'la and I made this tableau:
"A Tuesday night at home"
And of course now I'm trying to do this blog.
My kinda psycho piece "Several thoughts about artwork" from Pleasure 2014 is now online (and it sorta resembles this post in content and format). I tweeted that it is "sometimes obtuse" and "sometimes incomplete;" still true/that's life. I've thought about doing an "updated version" here, should anyone ever read it and wanna discuss. (sound of an automatically locking door closing echoing distantly through an empty gymnasium, as dust pillars fall through golden evening light that "streams in" through high, dirty windows)
"Yes for some reason"
Writing/reading about "writing process" isn't fun or interesting to me (whenever someone writes "I'm such a bad procrastinator" or "I have to turn off the wifi" or whatever at this point it feels like such a dark joke; though of course my interest in granular visual art studio tactical details, attitudes, and gear - completely equally boring - is higher than average) but I gotta figure out how to do that in some way here too; I wanna understand "what I think fiction is for" and "why I still wanna write it" better.
Soooo "I'm working on a new piece" right now and had the grim feeling that writing "a short story" is achingly pointless gameplay, and that nothing can be accomplished in that format other than "a show of force" or "a demonstration of potential" at best = Expressed that at monthly monday last month and have been thinking about it since.
Having a hard time telling if this is "just how I feel this season," or if this is something as solid as "my opinion," or if it's a feeling/opinion related to my own work, or a feeling/opinion I hold more broadly. Have certainly read a lot of good short stories, but for the most part always as "gateways" to longer works that I enjoyed/value more fully, or to collections where one or two stories strongly stood out. I can only think of a very small handful of writers whose format is "short" or "miniature" in a consummate, exemplary way (Lydia Davis and her scion my favorite young writer Evelyn Hampton seem like decent examples (though I think I read that Evelyn is writing a novel? so)); for almost all other writers "short stories" read to me like "demo mode" or at best "a hit single."
The idea of compiling "a short story collection" feels similar to me to hanging a group of paintings in a cluster? I like an idea taken all the way, but rarely feel that creative displays benefit from showing selections from their endless variations, or that "process" or incomplete work ever needs to (or should) masquerade as being "final."
A painting show is strongest when each individual painting is "complete itself" (capable of occupying a room by itself) and when taken together the room vibrates with the suggestions the pieces make about each other... right? (Non-cynical opinion is that it's this that makes art shows "fun": They're the main place this happens with new artwork.) Are clusters of paintings somehow emblematic of a bad art show[3]? Are they a bunch of incomplete versions of a single idea swarming around the possibility of that idea's truest completion? ... And while strong paintings stand alone, then accumulate into a body, then bodies into a career, I don't know that short stories can ever get bigger than a cluster, can individually ever be much bigger or more than their moments, or that their natural connection to "a career" is even evident except in extremely rare cases.
What does this "mean" as it relates to my interest in producing fiction? I guess it means "My relationship to my finished stories and to the arc of their continued development and my understanding of their relationship to each other" is less clear to me than "my relationship to my finished paintings and to the arc of their continued development and my understanding of their relationship to each other." (stock sped-up footage of car lights moving in high speed on city night streets, millions of tourists and non-art-interested and non-art-aware new yorkers riding the subway oblivious to the gallery's month long exhibition, a dumb dandelion sprouting, growing, dying; several youtube videos of different people hitting gongs; boing.wav; etc. etc.)
Maybe a short fiction's value is that it's small enough to easily share and version as "a potentially complete thing" without stepping out so far as to become unforgivably demanding and undignified? Maybe the difficulty for me is that my stories seem so naked and small compared to a 30"x46" or whatever piece of paper carefully covered in materials over the course of several months? A story does not hang out in a room.[4]
I know all of this is the wrong way to be thinking about it; that I play tons of singles, that I've been to shows with only one killer, killer painting, that media metaphors for other media are majorly fraught, that I love a bunch of artists who work in multiples, that "you can't force it," etc., etc. etc., and that there is no "right version" of approaching anything on this subject spectrum... Just trying to understand what I'm even doing, why I even care.
Annnnd that's what "my writing practice" looked like in July.
VVAQRT "Detainee," Three-legged Race "Rope Commercial Vol. 1," mp3 blog dump of every old Yoyo Dieting mix ripping it up all month. "Return of the Mack" at various pitches and tempos and Shaggy "It wasn't me" with shredding tremolo and tincan echo.
"Feel free to 'leave a comment' on twitter or by email." :)
[1]: Is it both classically boring and super frivolous to "document my process" in a public (i.e. searchable, broadcasted) space? Definitely, but probably not more so than keeping an oblique and/or reptilian joke record with occasional earnest thoughts on Twitter. Anyway, I'm generally returning to a permissive view of "who cares." "Nobody has to read it" for sure but also "I don't have to worry about doing an idea." Back up.
[N]: Further a little, I now "know" that I don't believe that "an artifact of my lived relationship to this surface, as documented in materials" is ever what "the work" is entirely. Entirely, it's... ideas and decisions constrained to a surface (rendered there in materials), plus their presentation and relevant context, which I am also responsible for coherently forming. (studio audience claps as I realize this / cut to the only relic of the planet being like, a Twombly canvas floating through space; aliens discover it and slice it in half with a sword / etc. etc. etc.) Back up.
[2]: And anyway of course I don't even think there's a significant distinction between "the serious work" and "totally fucking around" on a process-basis anyway, and that forcing one is problematic - cf. "I worked on it for six months and it's total garbagio, what was I thinking that entire time" and "I somehow just sat down and busted it out, it's the best thing I've made in two years" etc. etc. Back up.
[3]: I get that the answer is "no," tho a lot of weak art shows seem to have them. Anyway I definitely got and fully internalized this idea from Ben Jones via a joke he made to this effect on Paper Rad's "P-Unit Mixtape 2005." Of course, his contributions to the traveling 2007 "figuration" show "mail order monsters" pretty much completing that body of his gallery-facing work consisted of... clustered paintings. (Stay tuned for my eventual paper rad thesis (told in flashback from my deathbed).) Back up.
[4]: Anyway of course it's way easier to make a small experiment than it is to make a big experiment, and way less demanding to ask someone to consider a small thing than a big thing. It feels embarrassing to be asked to read a big terrible novel ("it's over 120,000 words," they will boast to you in hell), or to be shown dozens of gigantic failed figurative / bio-forms / private symbology paintings (or to watch a snoozer set on $3000 worth of gear, etc.) - none of that is what I'm asking for, or looking for from myself - all of it needs to be boiled down to the strongest concentrate, and I get that that frequently means "nothing" or in successful cases "a little bit of really good shit." And that in general, I'd always rather see the killer short demos keep coming than to see someone disappear for years to drop a single sad book. Though I love the mystery of the great books most, and get that the basic decision to seriously pursue writing them is where they came from. Back up.
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