TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "craft"
James Kochalka, “Craft is the Enemy,” from THE CUTE MANIFESTO
Fun fact: the dummy book I made for Steal Like An Artist was Kochalka’s Cute Manifesto (they’re the same format/size) with a homemade book cover:
David Shrigley: The Art of the Doodle - Slide Show - NYTimes.com
In February, London’s Hayward Gallery will mount a major survey of his work. To stuff the show with new art, he says, he had to trick himself into thinking he wasn’t actually making art at all.
In a spiral notebook, he jotted down 180 ideas for 180 pieces. Most consist of a few purposely cryptic words, intended as jumping- off points. No. 116 is ‘‘sea monster smiling’’; others are equally open-ended: ‘‘sword fight,’’ ‘‘dog on its hind legs,’’ ‘‘William Shakespeare.’’ ‘‘I try not to think too hard about what I’m doing,’’ Shrigley says. ‘‘I’m just crossing things off a list and fi lling a page, and the work gets made as a byproduct of that task.’’
…The overall effect is like discovering the sketchbook of a boy who taught himself to draw while locked in a basement. ‘‘I’m not trying to draw badly,’’ says Shrigley, who graduated from the Glasgow School of Art. ‘‘I’m just trying to draw without any consideration of craft.’’
Filed under: David Shrigley
Quotes from a great NYTimes profile.
On work and ideas:The thing that transforms something from being an idea to being a physical reality is work….You can have outlandish ideas, but if you don’t work at them, they just remain outlandish ideas. Anyone can have an idea. Work is transformative.On the merits of being an amateur:
The one thing I’ve kept most with me from when I was obsessed with K Records in high school and college is to maintain the spirit of an amateur, someone who is doing it for a love rather than out of a sense of expertise. The idea that music is free, that it’s not the province of some technician, be it Milton Babbitt or Jimmy Page.On play and cut-up style lyric writing:
many of the songs grew out of playful experiments. For the lyrics to “Stillness Is the Move” Mr. Longstreth had Ms. Coffman watch the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire” and write down lines of dialogue that intrigued her; other lyrics were drawn from an Excel spreadsheet of hundreds of pop clichés.
Great little speech on the three elements of craft to being in a band: performance, record-making, songwriting. I’m going to draw up parallels to art/lit. The major theme is: artists have forgotten that the primary goal of art is to entertain.
