The Elephant in the Studio - Defining Terms

It is winter of 2000 and I am colder than I think I have ever been. I am in a graduate seminar with more than a dozen other students in a bright room overlooking Lake Michigan. I have avoided these seminars for most of the time I've been in school, but I let a friend talk me into this class and now I am regretting it. We have been asked to produce an artist's statement and I feel I cannot not say the one thing I want to say about my work - "I want my work to be more like prayer".

Inspired by Sol Lewitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art, I produce a statement called 'Eleven Lies and One Truth about my Work'. I make outrageous claims about the theory and context of my work, and slip in my one true statement. It is recognized immediately as the truth and I am called to explain.

In this installment of the Elephant in the Studio, I want to revisit that seminar and talk a little more about what I meant.

It's always helpful to figure out what I mean by starting with what I don't mean. First, it's significant I had chosen not to model my art making on anything like making art. At that moment, the notion of art as research was just beginning to appear, we were seeing a lot of work that engaged in practices of collecting and archiving, of interpreting collections. I was fascinated by Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum, but bored by my peers who collected drier lint, sloughs of their skin, and bits of clipped fingernails and called this act 'archving' or 'knowledge production'. I was okay with art being a way of knowing, but not in the dry and pedantic ways that I saw taking shape around me.

Another thing I didn't want was some open-ended process. Because the word has duel citizenship in art and religion, I will write about the idea of 'practice' at a future date, but as that notion was starting to take shape in the minds process-driven artists who felt that thinking about making things alleviated them from actually finishing anything. While certain aspects of my work coincide with certain aspects of this conversation, I wasn't headed there.

And it was pretty clear that making art in the romantic, self-expressive mode was not interesting. I have never thought of myself as having anything unique to express, I have always distrusted the fetishization of brushwork and other tropes of individuality. I have, in fact, long wanted to use my work as a vehicle for getting as far away from my tastes and instincts as I can get. 

This may be because I want to learn something from my work, but also because I recognize that doing it is not just something that I do for me. I may not have a large and eager audience for my work, but I expect it to have a place in the world. That place is earned not because I am anyone special, but because the work belongs in that context and in those conversations that happen in that place. 

And hear we begin to see some of the aspects of what I mean by 'like prayer' coming into focus. First some of the simpler interpretations.

A big part of what I am after is creating a space for structured reflection. Way too much of my life in the art world consists of judgement and too little time is available for deliberation. Consider how a typical studio class works - students are given an assignment or a chunk of time to do work, the work is put up and more or less immediately the conversation begins. I find that people are not looking at the things in front of them at these moments, but rather at the things that were nearly done or in-process over the last few weeks, or, more typically, at absent examples of works thought to be similar to the one under consideration (the most common and meaningless critical move in the post-canonical art world is to compare a work, favorably or unfavorably, to another work not in the room). Coming off years of being a critic, I wanted to transform my work in the studio into something else - something that had time for reflection and attention, where I could be less concerned with evaluation and more concerned with analysis. At the beginning of mass, there is a penitential prayer where we ask for forgiveness not only for thoughts and actions, but also 'what we have failed to to do'. Considering not only your acts but also the missed opportunities to help others is an inspiration to value decisions not only for what was done, but what was decided against.

The recitation of specific prayers formulated by others brings me to another point. I certainly don't agree with every position taken by the Church leadership, or with every word used in its rituals. But participating in these rituals week after week throughout your life puts you in a specific relationship to a text. One begins to consider the role of inflection and cadence in speaking, and the importance of metaphor in reading. I wanted my work to exist in relation to something in that same way - so I had to seek out texts that could withstand prolonged reflection and reward rigorous analysis. It has been suggested that some people read many books and find one meaning in all of them, while others read one book and find many meanings in it. If I wanted to get away from my own mind, what better way to get to another mind than through anothers' words?

Finally, prayer provided a way to structure one of the longest running problems I had with my work; what was it supposed to do in the world? I don't come from a family with a lot of history in the arts. I feel like the third generation in the John Adam's formulation of democracy, and for a long time that meant being anxious about what art - a career so mysterious to my father that he once likened it to an addiction -  did for the world. The problem of a life lived among books and ideas and its apparent (but falsely diametric) opposition to a life of active service is an important question in religions life. The tension between contemplative life and the active life is one that appears not to exist outside of the religious world. In fact, the religious world - which strives to be in but not of the world - is a site of alternative thinking to the consumerist art world, and prayer is a means of exploring and coming to terms with that alternative world. At the very least, it served to remind me that there was more to life than what was going on in seminar rooms high above a frozen city. 

I haven't talked about gratitide or grace, about the way that the universe can make you feel like you need to connect with something larger, about the need to be part of a tradition, or any of a dozen other impulses. Could I have figured out how to do these things and others that I have done to my work without using prayer as a model? Perhaps. In the next installment of this series, I'll talk about how this metaphor led me astray for a while and how I think I found my way.

The Elephant in the Studio - Introduction

A cross stich made by my mother, Helen Brown, that hangs over the door of my studio

This story begins in the mid-1990's in the lower church of St. Patrick's off Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. I am in my late 20s, writing, painting, and trying to figure out how to complete the transition from adolescence to adulthood that higher education alone had not achieved.

In the pre-mass quiet, I try to clear my mind. This has always been my habit and from time to time, things come unbidden to mind and I am inclined to see them as important issues who have been waiting for a moment to speak up over the din of my day-to-day concerns.

On that morning, clear as a bell, the sentence, "I want my work to be more like prayer" came to mind.

At the time, I didn't know what it meant, if it was a realistic goal, or how I would achieve it. I just knew that it explained something - it clarified that I was unhappy with what I was doing and suggested a template for action that would be more satisfying.*

I didn't know it at the time, but this realization set in motion a number of changes that have led me to my current work. It provided rules against which I could measure an idea's value. It gave me a kind of purpose that painting didn't have before.

I have wanted to write about this for a long time, but have been reluctant to do so. For all of its professed openness, the art world is a rigidly secularized field and it welcomes discussions of spirituality more generously than attempts to talk about organized religion. 'Iconoclasm' remains one of its bywords, and I expect that merely mentioning prayer will cause some people to distrust anything that follows. Also, having taken on the mantel of research, art and design have put even more distance between themselves and their roots in religions expression. Modernism's great project was to free art from the political and religious functions that it fulfilled for centuries. I am not alone in wondering what it should do with its freedom.

So, to some degree it has seemed hazardous to bring up the subject, however much it haunts my thinking (and, I must admit, my teaching). But on my current sabbatical (a word with a religions past...), I feel compelled to engage it - and to invite others to talk about the ways they frame creative work in their own minds. For too long this has been the elephant in the studio, and now it's time to name it and start trying to figure it out.

So, over the next eight weeks (each Saturday), I will post essays on the subject of prayer and studio work. We'll look at the fashionable use of the word 'practice' to describe what we do in the studio, we'll talk about various forms and objectives of prayer, about the relation of physical objects to the spiritual world, and a few other topics. I invite comments and discussion on this, and hope that giving the subject some boundaries helps structure it and provides points of entry for others.

* Realizing that this may sound surprising to some people who know my work and who might think I've invented a new concern for myself, I want to point to my first attempt to deal with this issue, the 1998 exhibit Articles of Faith I organized for the Philadelphia Art Alliance. That was a confused and problematic exhibit - but I don't regret either of those aspects of it. Generating problems and looking for hidden connections between things are important tasks, and hopefully I have gotten a little better at them over time.