Starting to think a little less flat...

When I see writing like this. I realize I am doing everything wrong...

The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The professor may get top billing, but make no mistake - this is the madman's story.

I had high hopes for this book...perhaps too high. I kept feeling like I was on the surface of it and wanting to go deeper. The description of how a dictionary gets made was fascinating, but perhaps too scattered to be a useful example of process-analysis. The description of Dr. Minor's youth kept offering tantalizing hints, but ultimately delivered only insinuations. The relationship between Minor and Murray is described with occasional foreshadowing...and those roads go no place, as if the author had some anecdote he planned to use but forgot.

All of this would have been fine but for much greater problems - first, Winchester admits that ascribing Minor's mental illness to a single episode of battlefield trauma is a risky proposition...and then does it and does it again and again. (He later tries this approach with an imagined connection between the murderous doctor and the widow of his victim, and it seems so hopeless it sputters away as you read it). But much more disturbing is the notion, entertained late in the book, that Minor's mental illness was somehow 'necessary' for his work on the dictionary. This kind romantic glorification of suffering as somehow essential to creative work is ugly and unwise. As someone who has struggled with depression, I don't think about how much it's helped my creative work so much...I wish it would just go away forever so I could just work.

A large part of the book is spent implicating the treatment of the mentally ill in 19th century England, making explicit comparisons to earlier cruelties and implicit comparisons to possible cruelties of modern medical treatments. But the allure of madness as a creative fuel is perhaps greater than the author's ability to remain objective. Is a dictionary - even a really good one - worth one man's death and another's misery? At the end of the day, I think the author would say it is. This is too bad - not just for his tale, but for readers who seek to understand the working of the mind in more than cliche terms...

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Can we talk about work ?

I tried to make a living from my creative work alone. I was a number of years out of undergraduate school, had held a few jobs in galleries and non-profits. I was freelancing a lot on the side. I got a really big freelance gig as my first marriage fell apart and, with a ton of help from my friends, tried to relaunch my life in a new apartment in a terrible part of town (where, twenty years later, one can now buy expensive coffees and craft cocktails, and all things 'vintage').

I failed miserably. I worried endlessly about the next gig - to the point where it made me overshoot deadlines so I had at least something to work on. I racked up enormous debt. It seemed that no matter what, I could not patch together enough stable income for one reasonably healthy man in in his early 30s to live responsibly (that is, without being a leech). The idea of starting a family was utterly out of the question.

I didn't come from that kind of childhood. My father was a company man at IBM who had miraculously survived the downsizing of the late 80s and eventually retired after a life-long career. My mother, a nurse, worked in hospitals and doctors' offices except for a brief stint at a department store when we lived in New York. I don't know that they ever 'did what they wanted', but they did what they felt they needed to do to take care of us.

A life in the arts, if it was discussed at all, was - from an early age - equated with poverty and a certain amount of selfishness in my family. "What are you going to do to support your addiction?", my father once asked, in all seriousness, when we used to share a commute that took me to a community college art school and him to his office. Pursuing art was a pathological endeavor, one that was going to drain resources, not provide them, and one that was about what an individual wanted, not what needed to be done. My parents worked hard - I knew that - but they worked for large (and largely benevolent) entities. If they didn't worried where money would come from when they finished this or that project, they never told us.

This is not the life of the artist, the writer, or - in the era of mass adjunct higher education - even the college or university professor. This may be why I was so interested to see Chris Offut's story in the February 5, 2015, NY Times Magazine, My Dad, the Pornographer. Offut's story may have prurient appeal, but it's the mechanics of it that interest me. Offut describes his father's twin motivations for writing porn: what was out there was so poorly written and he needed to pay for his kids' orthodonture.

The article goes on to describe the way Andrew Offut (writing under various pseudonyms) was able to produce a book a month:

Dad’s writing process was simple — he’d get an idea, brainstorm a few notes, then write the first chapter. Next he’d develop an outline from one to 10 pages. He followed the outline carefully, relying on it to dictate the narrative. He composed his first drafts longhand, wearing rubber thimbles on finger and thumb. Writing with a felt-tip pen, he produced 20 to 40 pages in a sitting. Upon completion of a full draft, he transcribed the material to his typewriter, revising as he went. Most writers get more words per page as they go from longhand to a typed manuscript, but not Dad. His handwriting was small, and he used ampersands and abbreviations. His first drafts were often the same length as the final ones.

Manuscripts of science fiction and fantasy received multiple revisions, but he had to work much faster on porn. After a longhand first chapter, he typed the rest swiftly, made editorial changes and passed that draft to my mother. She retyped it for final submission. At times, Mom would be typing the beginning of the book while Dad was still writing the end.

His goal was a minimum of a book a month. To achieve that, he refined his methods further, inventing a way that enabled him to maintain a supply of raw material with a minimum of effort. He created batches in advance — phrases, sentences, descriptions and entire scenes on hundreds of pages organized in three-ring binders. Tabbed index dividers separated the sections into topics.

Eighty percent of the notebooks described sexual aspects of women. The longest section focused on their bosoms. Another binder listed descriptions of individual actions, separated by labeling tabs that included: Mouth. Tongue. Face. Legs. Kiss. The heading of Orgasm had subdivisions of Before, During and After. The thickest notebook was designed strictly for B.D.S.M. novels with a list of 150 synonyms for “pain.” Sections included Spanking, Whipping, Degradation, Predegradation, Distress, Screams, Restraints and Tortures. These were further subdivided into specific categories followed by brief descriptions of each.

Dad was like Henry Ford applying principles of assembly-line production with pre-made parts. The methodical technique proved highly efficient. Surrounded by his tabulated notebooks, he could quickly find the appropriate section and transcribe lines directly into his manuscript. Afterward, he blacked them out to prevent plagiarizing himself. Ford hired a team of workers to manufacture a Model-T in hours. Working alone, Dad could write a book in three days.

Now that is how you answer the question, "How are you going to support your addiction?", which is really a person who loves you but has no idea what you do asking, How are you going to support yourself and your family as a creative artist?"

When I was in college, my parents withdrew their support for my art studies and I had to drop out for a time. I was rescued from a lifetime of working in record stores when the chair of the art department, Stuart Baron, arranged for a full-tuition scholarship that allowed me to finish school. I am eternally in his debt, but I remember the anxiety I had at the time that I might lose that chance, and how I worked as hard as I could to earn its continuation. I am eternally in Professor Baron's debt, but I think what I began learning from the experience was how to make art into a central focus of my life - a career - not a distraction or addiction.

I have to admit, I still grapple with what my employer - a Research 1 university - generously calls my 'creative work and research'. I am extremely grateful for the privilege I enjoy that allows me to pursue my work. I work on some pretty esoteric things. And people I meet still think it's somehow not really work. But when I read about a man who figures out how to write pulp pornography to pay for his son's braces, I think I know what love is.

Which is more popular?

For a while, I've thought that I am sneaking signs into places through my work. Here's why, in one handy chart:

Printer's progress...

Anne Schaeffer's image of a stage of one of the prints for Chromography...this one is one of four prints based on passage by Judith Butler (about how we must be able to read in a democracy - texts, images and everything)....stay tuned for more...

Progress on Chomography...

For a few months now, I've been working with Melinda Steffy on a project that will open this spring at Rowan University Art Gallery. One of the major parts of this - for me - is the translation of twenty four literary passages concerning time of day into short melodies in Solresol, a constructed language invented by Francois Sudre in 19th century France.

Sudre's language employed only seven syllables - the notes of the C major scale - to form a vocabulary of nearly 3,000 words. Here is a link to a play list of the translations, and I am considering ways of revealing the scores themselves. Melinda has translated my translations into her color-based form of music notation, and we are thinking of large decals on the gallery windows...something like this:

Soon I'll post images of other work that's coming together for this show...I appreciate your comments.

On Cyphers...

A couple of Solresol sketches...

Here is a sketch of a translation of a passage from an Oscar Wilde essay (you an see I am struggling with vocabulary in this one...)

this is a line from Auden that I often use as a translation exercise...

Here's a passage from an Oscar Wilde essay - the black dots are used to indicate spaces between words, not stresses or special type (i.e. italics or boldface, which - I would argue - are more immediately needed to make Solresol a useful script)

Visualizing

An interesting film posted on the Atlantic's page...

Interesting

Just posting links:


Why Original Artworks Move Us More Than ReproductionsBy TOM JACOBS

Who do first year Art, Architecture, and Design students think we "must talk about" in freshman seminar?

Filming what cannot be seen...on seeing, watching, and reading...

For a long time, I have been interesting in how film communicates things that really aren't visual. The quintessential example is a mention in an essay, "Romans on Film", of how cinema depicts the act of thinking. Roland Barthes, wrote the piece in the early 1950s, notes that when Romans in movies have to think, they sweat. We still have a lot of these kind of signs in movies - to show someone has died, a trickle of blood will often drop from the corner of the mouth or ear, even if the injuries they sustain don't seem to indicate such a possibility...



So I was super excited to see this post from "Every Frame a Painting"..you can see text messages, but it's boring to read them. What the filmmaker is getting at is super interesting - how editors create new images that we can understand in movies...images that describe the passing of time, images that show people reading or writing. The question seems near the heart of my studio's big problem-what is the difference between seeing and reading? - only here the problem of watching is introduced. Watching allows for reading to take place. It is clearly of a different duration and focus than 'seeing'...what else?

Song of the Heidelberg (2014)

Preparations for September's First Friday...

For First Friday in September, Carmina and I plan to explore experimental cinema...

The idea came to us when we visited the Leger exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art earlier this year (it was this year, right?). There were examples of Dadaist films contemporary to Leger, and we were curious. I've done a little research and now we're planning to project some of what we've found...

So I'll be posting a little play list here, and we'll no doubt have some surprises... Looking forward to September's First Friday...

Marcel Duchamp:


Hans Richter:


Harry Smith:


Joseph Cornell:

Which craft?

A Huffington Post essay by F. Scott Hess on de-skilling has been making the rounds.

I won't spend a lot of time on this - it's irritating to read an artist writing about the systemic problems with the art world that make his obvious brilliance invisible to everyone else on the planet. However I am interested in a couple of claims about education Hess makes and feel the need to address them.

After pointing toward a 'prejudice' in academe that privileges "Postmodern hybridity, identity politics, or pure theory", Hess writes:

The idea that you might train a surgeon to be clumsy, or an engineer to build poorly, or a lawyer to ignore law, would be patently absurd. In the arts, however, you will find an occasional musician who purposely plays badly, or a writer who ignores grammar, but only in the visual arts is training in the traditional skills of the profession systematically and often institutionally denigrated.

Can we impose a ban on comparing entirely different things...like the education of artists and physicians or attorneys? Aside from its obvious foolishness (do you really train anyone to be clumsy? isn't the point of training to remove clumsiness?) Hess' analogy obscures the fact that some surgeons are clumsy, and some lawyers do flagrantly ignore (what other people to believe to be a correct interpretation of) the law. Without these incidents, there would be no malpractices suits or legal debates.

Arguably, there would be no innovation, either. More on that in a minute, too.

Hess' article was re-posted by a few friends who identify with the crafts world, and its to that audience that he makes his strongest appeal. His ego still bruised from an incident in college (in the 70s...please... isn't getting over insults a part of growing up? If not, dealing with criticism is certainly part of becoming an artist...) Hess rails against 'conceptual' art (which he apparently confuses with the presence of concepts in art...more on that later) by collecting anecdotes from artists who have been criticized for their aesthetic conservatism or their interest in displaying skill in their work.

And yeah, I'm not going to pretend that I have never seen crits in which a student's representational work (...or exhibits in which a practicing artist's work) was greeted with yawns. But nine times out of ten those yawns came because the work was boring, not because it was figurative (believe it or not, there is dull performance, dull video art, all kinds of dull art...it's not just figurative painters who are singled out). Artists of all kinds tend to forget that the display of skill is often very dull for audiences. Couple it with the preachy allegory of Hess' paintings or the mawkish moodiness of the work he favors in his article, and you've got a dreadful cocktail of narcissism and self pity.

Like most conspiracy theories, Hess' claim that skill is out of favor sounds like an explanation for all that's wrong with the world until you look at some evidence. There are a huge number of teaching artists (working both representationally and non-representationally) for whom the conspicuous use of craft is an issue. (Locally, I'm looking at you, artist/teachers Judith Schaechter, Kurt Kauper, Susan Moore, Mark Shetabi; on a national stage, you could start with painters Kehinde Wiley, Walton Ford, sculptor Judy Fox, and go on and on and on...)

His claim that schools are brainwashing students or withholding vital information about craft is also hollow. Hess describes his tortured studies at 'a small midwestern liberal arts college in Wisconsin' (one assumes he's trying not to invoke the anger of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from which he graduated in 1977) where the faculty failed to cater to his every whim, preferring, one assumes, to teach the curriculum they had devised...or at least to teach what they knew or believed to be important.

What Mr. Hess seems to have forgotten that to be young is to be misunderstood - terribly, savagely, horribly misunderstood. To be a young artist is to magnify that condition fifty-fold. If you're not doing something that people ten, twenty, thirty years older than you can't understand, then you're doing it wrong. Nor does he seem to appreciate that schools are not like fast food restaurants. A McDonald's hamburger in Moscow tastes exactly like one in Times Square, but a drawing class at Yale is very different from one at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Students shouldn't expect fast food hamburgers from their schools, and they should look pretty closely at the menu before they commit to attending them.

Such diversity troubles some people...especially those who hold that there are 'timeless principles' to art that must be understood. Such people tend to annoy the living daylights out of me because what is 'good' in art is what comes closest to those abstract, Platonic principles, never the messy, contingent things - the ones that tremble on the edge of falling apart in some way - that interest me. Does anyone else find it remotely troubling that all of the images that illustrate Hess' essay correspond neatly to western aesthetic fashions of the 18th and 19th centuries?

But back to clumsy surgeons and creative lawyers. Skill perfected and repeated has its place, but it's often in working beyond skill, working skillfully with unforgiving materials, or working with ideas to which the skills are not so perfectly matched that creates art in our time. (Of course one can make anything one wants in our pluralist era, but one shouldn't expect that it will be talked about...but that's another post.) It is out of these struggles that new images and ideas are born.

Once upon a time (when I happened to be an art student at the very figurative Boston University School of Fine Arts) I worked in an intensive care unit where we took care of patients who'd just had heart transplants and other cardiac procedures. (An aside: medical students - especially sleep deprived ones - are clumsy without having to be trained to be.) In our unit, physicians performed operations on some risky candidates. Some who'd  had multiple previous surgeries; others whose multiple complicating factors like age and obesity made them questionable candidates. Our hospital experimented with a ventricular assist device so horrific that one doctor compared it to parking a 'lawn mower on a patient's chest'.

By working at the very edge of their skills and technologies, by working with patients that others wouldn't work with, by transcending the display of skill and testing themselves on difficult problems with real consequences, these physicians, nurses, and patients taught me what it means to make art. There were mistakes and there were failures, but we learned from them. Hess wants us to think of artists and doctors in the same frame of mind...but I am here to tell you that it wasn't enough for the doctor to be a brilliant surgeon. You needed a smart, dedicated, and tireless nursing staff. (Maybe that nurse is the curator, or the critic...essential parts of the art world who never get mentioned in Hess's essay.) And - this is the kicker - you need a patient who is going to take his meds, do her exercises, and not assume that getting cut open is his only job. (If you're following this, the patient is the audience who is as much part of the art work as the artist).

So perhaps the last word on Hess' lament really belongs to Roland Barthes, whose writing Mr. Hess no doubt despises because he's a staple of those horrible theory classes we insist on cramming down the throats of young artists. One of Barthes' contributions to the late 20th century was the idea that readers mattered as much as (if not more than) writers. As readers, we have the authority to challenge the implicit assumptions of artworks, to question what they represent and how they represent it. We have the responsibility to ask whose interests are being served by the publication or display of some works and, if we're interested in social justice or equality in the real world as opposed to the images of these ideas that have been handed down to us, to create new visions of these virtues. It's a world where literature or art or music are not automatically important because they are connected to traditions or because artists say they're important. It's a world in which paintings, stories and songs achieve significance because people use them. "The birth of the reader," Barthes writes, "must be ransomed by the death of the author."

And the birth of the viewer comes when we stop letting our artists tell us what to think.

The (After)Life of Pi

Just watched "Life of Pi" and - of course - I had heard about the bankruptcy of the SFX firm that did so much of the work that made the film enchanting. Carmina came across this short documentary about the collapse of Rhythm & Hues, and it's a sobering reminder of how artists will work themselves ragged to make the best product and will do anything to realize a vision...even as those who work with them (possibly ignorantly, possibly maliciously) exploit those traits.

The parallels between contract-workers in the SFX industry and adjunct faculty in higher education are hard to ignore.

The film is a sobering reminder of the economic forces that surround the 'creative economy' and a challenge to transform creative work into sustainable careers.

Woodmere Catalog

A Better Pencil by Dennis Baron

I cannot say this was a page-turner. Many books were able to leapfrog over it when I would curl up for bedtime reading...why? Baron has chosen a fascinating subject - the transformations wrought by changing writing and reading technologies - but his book suffers from an unusual condition: too much reasonable thinking. When the conclusion of your book includes the sentence, "The effects of the technologies [forcing changes in how we write, read and circulate text] have typically been positive, with some negatives inevitably mixed in  - the plusses and minuses owing as much to the vagaries of human nature as to the advantages or disadvantages of the technology itself", you're being a little wishy-washy.

While the book includes flashes of imagination (a good section of Ted Kaczynski as author, an imaginative and inclusive overview of writing technologies form clay tablets to forgotten early word processing programs, a thoughtful meditation on global citizenship in the information age), Baron seems to have written a book that would be better discussed over dinner than actually published. His informal, conversational tone contribute to this impression.

All of this perhaps says more about my expectations than about Baron's book - an effort to consider the ways we are being manipulated by our own communication is a valuable opportunity for reflection. I wish I'd gotten a little more to reflect on here.

Another printmaking test

These are sort of amusing...