“When I Paint My Masterpiece”

Trying to write, one needs so much confidence in oneself to carry even a sentence. The moment the level goes down one realizes the futility of all things, the thin nature of the enterprise and language that refuses to work.

I’ve become very interested in artistic practice recently. I’ve picked up Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Gilles Deleuze’s On Painting seminars, and A Natural History of the Studio from William Kentridge. Those are just visual art. I’ve also got the edition of Antigone Kefala’s Sydney Journals (quoted in the epigraph) that Transit Press has recently put out here in the US, and I finished the quintessential writers’ biography Square Haunting not too long ago.

Why the focus? It’s in part just a continuation of my interest in human labor practices. Art is a technical practice after all, even if it doesn’t produce technical objects as such. I find artists’ commentary on their working method interesting because it involves perception and affection, experimentation, anticipation, and judgement just like any other way of working. There’s no lack of commentaries by artists themselves and advisors to wannabe artists, plus Deleuze’s take on the act of painting (in contrast to most philosophers who theorize on the finished art object and not operative process). So I have my pick of material.

But what’s also got me is that I’ve started a modest art project of my own. I had previously played a musical instrument, beginning with the trombone and then picking up the tuba and sousaphone. The former I played through high school in concert and jazz band; the latter took me into college in a wind ensemble and marching band, respectively. I didn’t really ever think of myself as a musician, though. If I recall correctly I would have identified as being in the marching band and as playing the tuba. The title of “musician” would have seemed strange, overly grandiose. I don’t play now as I don’t have an instrument and even when I’ve had one handy I didn’t feel the inclination to break it out to practice or play for its own sake. I still don’t think of myself as having been a musician, and I suspect that that lack of drive is a part of why. I did band because I was pressured by my mother and kept it up because I developed a social life from it. That hardly seems like it’s worthy of making me a musician in spite of my performing in ensembles which made music. (I realize the Romanticism of all this.)

This new project is visual art, which is not something I think I did very much of even as a child. I suspect that’s the age when most people today do most of their visual art, and very few keep it up through adolescence or return to it in adulthood. It’s modest, as I said before, but I hope interesting enough to exhibit somewhere. Especially if I add an auditory component. (Shout out to Sereptie for the encouragement and generally opening his archive to me.)

The new practice and the challenges of doing the work are what have got me focusing on all those texts. I’ve seen art supply stores before and been in some of the big box craft ones but never really paid attention because I was there for and with others. Now I’ve faced challenges of my own in finding and selecting equipment. I also need to do editorial work that isn’t really possible with playing music. A musical performance is ephemeral while visual art is more durable. You’re thinking about the audience for each but the mode of engagement with the aesthetic experience is so different because you can’t edit or redo the performance before exhibiting it. So I’m operating in a new way that feels like growth.

There’s all kinds of advice books on making art and maybe I could use those. Those feel very conventional, though, and I don’t want to produce conventional work. But I also want to be inspired by artists whose work I admire, not just some person who publishers thought had a book that could sell to people who want to make art. The Kentridge book, for example, is out from a relatively popular press but isn’t an advice book and that makes a big difference to me.

I’ll end on this: What makes me think of this as art while the music I was making before as not? And I do I think I’m an artist now that I’m making art? I think the difference I mentioned before about engaging with an audience is key to both questions. The sociological aspects of when and where the art is made and experienced by the audience plays a big role. It’s not hard to see paintings hanging on walls in a room as an art exhibit, but it’s unusual to think of the halftime show of a football game (that isn’t the Super Bowl) as a break where the audience experiences art. The audience factor is also why I don’t consider myself an artist, at least not yet. I haven’t actually displayed my work, mainly because it’s not complete but also because I have no idea how to go about getting it displayed in a gallery or another venue. Again, that public display seems crucial, to me, to having made art and I can’t be an artist until I’ve made art. I hope to get there some day, if I don’t encounter that deflation that Kefala wrote of so well.