materials

 

yes, i'm insistent on properties of process and making. my friend says, "and the product?" i think, yes, there's that too. 


it seems so much more important that there's work. so much more important that the product depend on mistake or error (surprise even) and the act of SEEING those small details as important or part of something else.

maybe this shows some marxist tendencies in wanting to see the "hand" of the person who made something (and that hand is shown, often, in mistakes: a stitch that's not straight, a thumbprint on a screenprint, a thumb in the way of a perfect photograph). it's just so human and i'd like to think art shows us how to value our human-ness.

or maybe it's too much tolstoy, too much thinking that "true life is lived when tiny changes occur." the tiny, the minutia, the really small of it all is another way i see process. you can't pretend like a painting doesn't have brush strokes and i often think those strokes are more important than the product, are the very reason there is a painting anyway. and we can push this thinking to the person who made the paint, made the brushes, and see that the art object relies on a series of products/processes.

a walk today to think about why i bother to care so much about craft and making:

                    almost a mistake to be as warm as it is outside. a certain 

                    mistake when my foot steps in a puddle and my shoe                         

                    soaks through to sock, to foot. at least, a moment 

                    to see bubbles collect. to pay attention.

the intention of the walk: a looking for fungus

certainly not a "mistake" or even a "mess," but something that just happens, that can be called a "happening." so much fungus was happening and it was of so many colors, shapes, and sizes. none of it relied on "being made" and it just happened, just needed to be seen for how it was just happening. 

these surprises seemed like the "materials"  needed, but-- more so-- the focus was an activity: involved in an "act" of looking. less dependency on materials and products and more on taking the time to see, to look again, and to notice. so much so that the art activity was just as simple as paying attention. maybe setting the intention to look: the mind, patience, and sight.



so my response to the interest in product is still up in the air, is still an almost strict adherence to thinking that it isn't mystical to think there's a poetic ear or artistic eye--some innate property to a person being able to take the time to look and look again and look again. even, to look through looking. something that leads me back to keats, thoreau, maybe even wordsworth. negative capability is a process.



it feels a bit knotty to say that it's process, craft, and making. i know i look at design, product, packaging, and i am all oooh and ahhh about it. i also know i don't want to make art anymore "high" and "away" by suggesting it is not accessible to everyone. but if eliot can say, 




"sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough"




i think it's fair to suggest that it's possible to cultivate looking, to cultivate a process so well and with so much intention that it naturally yields a product, an art object, a something that's worth being seen.  and i think taking a walk becomes a pursuit if we change it's intention (or give it intention). 







when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.




i've spent years thinking about what keats might have meant and how we can actually give up reaching for reason, product, purpose.  this work with sheena seems in line. 







so, can you cultivate a mess? can an uncertainty or a mistake be "taken care of" and "attended to" enough that it, too, becomes a product worth being seen instead of erased or discarded?












a few errors: of course the bumps and inability to make a straight line with being hit, but also the choice of using a soft pencil. the choice--the process--as primary.