TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "looking"
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees + True To Life by Laurence Weschler
Two fascinating books that really must be read together…1
When the artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin soon after its publication, in 1982, he telephoned the author to say that while he disagreed with virtually everything in it, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He invited Weschler to his Hollywood Hills studio to discuss it, initiating what has become a series of engrossing dialogues, here gathered together for the first time.
Weschler explains in the introduction to the Hockney book:
For some twenty-five years now, whenever I have written about one or the other of these two giants of contemporary art… the other one has called me to tell me, “Wrong, wrong, wrong.” The two have never met or conversed in person (straddling that Southern California scene like Schoenberg and Stravinsky before them, each seemingly oblivious of the other’s existence though in fact deepy seized by the work); instead they have been carrying on this quite vivide argument for over two decades, through me, as it were.
It’s fascinating to juxtapose excerpts from the two books — there are so many things to cross-reference, so many subjects that come up again and again.
One thing that fascinated me is the way in which each artist’s process is driven by asking questions (both artists in the course of their careers have befriended scientists, and waxed poetic about the connections between science and art in terms of inquiry), but how the way each goes about his inquiry has direct economic implications.
At one point, Irwin talks about the importance of artists structuring their finances “in such a way that they do not have to rely on the sale of their art”: “Look…it’s really quite simple. Pursuing the questions which art provokes is a long-term activity that necessarily needs to be free of short-term measures and rewards.” This take is an outgrowth of Irwin’s process: he spends a great deal of his artistic inquiry not actually making anything tangible. In fact, his installations are of such a fleeting and ephemeral nature that “he simply was not producing much by way of salable items.” Irwin admits, “I spen[d] days, weeks, months finishing things no one is ever going to see,” and, “My stuff, my offering, for the most part simply isn’t going to be there to pass on because…almost all my more recent steps have essentially been erased.”
Hockney on the other hand, while working through his questions he is constantly making pictures, whether it be his photocollages, photocopier experiments, paintings, etc. He’s leaving a kind of paper trail behind, and a paper trail can be picked up and sold.2
-
Oddly, my reading year has been a year of paired books: reading one book, then reading another that compliments it or cancels it out… ↩
-
This isn’t to say he’s necessarily intentionally structuring his process in a way that produces salable items. (“I’m not so much interested in the mere objects I’m creating as in where they’re taking me, and all the work in the different media is part of that inquiry and part of that search.”) ↩
How to look at art
I saw a lot of this at the Picasso exhibit at the AGO.
Edward Tufte has an interesting pamphlet called SEEING AROUND — in it he talks about how important it is to make the label and description the last thing you look at when you look at art in a museum:
Pre-installed narratives, categories, metaphors, points of view, and deformation professional all interfere with how and what we see. In looking at art, once story-telling starts, it’s hard to see anything else….
For a while… let the artwork stand on its own. Walk around, see intensely, view from up down sideways close afar above below, enjoy… Your only language is vision.
Joe Brainard said the same thing:
the first thing to do when looking at a work of art was to do just that—look. Let your eyes take in what is in front of them. Look at a picture from different distances. Look away and then look back, but, since each picture suggests a visual starting point in it, choose a different point each time you look. At this stage, try not to have any thoughts about the work, such as where it fits in the artist’s oeuvre or in art history or social history. You can do that later. If you allow such thoughts at this point, they will distance you from your seeing.
Something I try really hard to do now when I look at art — and as Goodfellas shows us, it’s so much more fun to make up your own stories about a painting…
(Source: johnmartz)
These sketchbook pages by Lynda Barry reminded me of this sentence I read recently: “quieting the mind so that God can get on with the surgery of the soul.”
I’ve never read any of David McCullough’s books (something I’ll change soon) but I’ve read this interview twice now, and it’s just great, especially because McCullough mentions that it was a Paris Review interview with Thornton Wilder that changed his own writing life:
I can’t tell you what a difference it made for me. When asked why he wrote books and plays, he said, “I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading or to see a new play that would engross me.” If it didn’t exist, he wrote it so he could read it or see it.
So many good bits. On the importance of looking and seeing:
[S]eeing is so important in this work. Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’s great admonition to all writers, “Make me see.” […] The chances of finding [something new] are fairly remote… it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough. […] The training I had in drawing and painting has been of great benefit. Drawing is learning to see and so is writing.
On slowing down and writing with a typewriter:
I love the feeling of making something with my hands. People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster. Well, I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower.
About quitting writing his Picasso biography, and the importance of picking a good subject:
I didn’t like him… He was an awful man. I don’t think you have to love your subject—initially you shouldn’t—but it’s like picking a roommate. After all you’re going to be with that person every day, maybe for years, and why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don’t like?
