Painting is not the only discipline to say, in one way or another, that the real work is beyond the craft of the work. This essay is about what that work seems to be, what it is like to do it within a discipline, and how different fields share this particular method.
I happened to be spending most of my days in a painting studio at an art school in Scotland when Zadie Smith’s two incisive essays about writing and reading were published in The Guardian. She wrote about the peculiar nature of the work of writing, its resistance to craftsmanship, and the difference between the way that writers privately measure their success and the ways it’s measured by the outside world. She connected these with her own reasons for writing, and outlined how the writer’s duty was to “tell the truth of your own conception.”
Her clarity when talking about this work was remarkable, and it was just as striking to realize how hard it was to find other clear, thorough statements about the basic qualities of how one works in a complex artistic discipline like literature, even at a time that continues to feel like the late hours of a busy civilization. We talked plenty in art school, but that was like a years-long conversation about trying to put your finger on something that slips away when you touch it, under deadline no less. And, most of that talk amounted to, “It slipped away again,” or, “Here’s everything related to the work except the actual moment of work.” Not to say that it was worthless talk, but it seemed to occur around an experiential center that no one really expected to be uncovered in a group critique, one that was better found alone during the act of conception. The tremendous, tragic, afterness of paintings as objects was never more clear than when a student had been moved by making work that no one else could understand or access.
I put Smith’s essays up on my studio wall because, more than most things like it that I had read, the thing at the center of her essay didn’t seem to slip away as much. Following her thoughts, I felt I could hold it lightly in my mind even if I didn’t understand it all. More than once I showed up to my studio to find a fellow painting student reading one of them, agape and frozen in place. She was talking about writing, but what she was trying to communicate seemed to touch on something basic and vital to the thing my classmates and I were trying to do as painters.
Smith says:
A great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own. And I don't care if that consciousness chooses to spend its time in drawing rooms or in internet networks; I don't care if it uses a corner of a Dorito as its hero, or the charming eldest daughter of a bourgeois family… What unites great novels is the individual manner in which they articulate experience and force us to be attentive, waking us from the sleepwalk of our lives.
I think this is a very important passage, because it is necessary to make any discussion of the duty of an art useful rather than proscriptive. It also leads to Beckett’s titular advice to “fail better” by moving away from the idea that there is a strategic path to successfully executing this duty. The point is that if you understand the direction in which an art must proceed to attempt the metaphysical event it is (almost) capable of, you may proceed in any style or genre that becomes your clearest voice, you may move at whatever speed will get you there, and you must make new, honest things rather than slightly-dishonest references to the look and feel of things that did well in the past. It is a type of working, not a type of product, that you produce. Literary fiction is not the right road any more than science fiction is the wrong road. Smith tells the Tale of Clive to illustrate how no degree of craftsmanship will ensure that you’ve done your duty. You simply have to try to do it, and try for real.
Smith restrains her discussion of potential metaphysics to the realm of literature, so I would like to expand it to other disciplines. It is true that literature is uniquely suited to transmitting the way of one person’s mind to the mind of another, but this is only one kind of transmission over one kind of channel. The duty of the student whose art failed to move any viewer in the way it moved them is to find a method to transmit those mental events appropriate to their medium. That is the work Zadie Smith describes. If that is the real work, then it’s not just writing or painting we’re talking about. This work must show up in other disciplines.
In my first year at art school, I began taking Taijiquan classes at night. Soon I realized that I was attending two schools which did not share a discipline, but had instructors who were saying roughly the same things. And then came Smith’s essays, which were about a third profession still. I slowly came to understand that I was not studying painting, and I was not studying martial arts — I was studying an art. As in, “there’s an art to it.” This is a phrase you will hear from mechanics, writers, painters, comedians, chefs, and nearly anyone who has gotten properly dirty in the grime of their work.
How many practices contain within them the potential to communicate between consciousnesses at an unusually high order? Or, at least, how many contain the type of work that Zadie Smith was describing? What if we were to ignore the artifacts or conventions of a discipline, and instead look at the way that it is attempted through its media? In a critique or a review, the question of “what is the thing you are trying to do here?” is a way of asking that. It implies that you are not just trying to make a good painting, or tell a rousing story. You are attempting something that follows a path that may overlap with the conventional work of a discipline, but that goes much further. What transmission is being attempted, and over what channel? How is that work done?
The way we work in any of these fields is shaped by what we desire to get out of the work. Assuming that this work is in some way generative (which it may not always be, but we will start there), I can see nine conventional motivations:
Most of the output of a discipline, whether it is painting or chess or playing the vibraphone, will be driven by some combination of these motivations. However, the duty of literature, as Smith has it, is indifferent — but not allergic — to any of these motivations. I believe any robust discipline has work left in it like the work that Smith talks about that can occur after all these motivations are exhausted.
A film may not be entertaining or enjoyable, but it may teach you how to look at human behavior a little more closely and clearly. A chess player may lose a match, but they may do so in a way that is at once both deeply funny and sad. A comedian may simply tell some facts about their life rather than tell a joke, and we will laugh, but it’s not funny. It’s true, and startling, and laughter is the only safe response to truth that doesn’t look the way we expect it to.
The way something becomes an art is when someone figures out how it can also be used to embody and transmit a pattern of thought or experience that is materially familiar or useful or otherwise compelling to a conscious mind operating in the world. Within any such discipline, there is a sub-discipline of practitioners that have shifted the way in which they work away from the conventional ideas about achievement and performance. Their goal has become to embody their discipline’s methods of transmission, and to “force us to be attentive” to some aspect of consciousness. This is less self-centered than the nine motivations above because the desire for one’s work to reflect on themselves is replaced by a profound desire to contribute to the fabric of their discipline. However, it becomes deeply self-involved because your own experience often becomes a tool of this embodiment, and you must learn all its parts to a degree of scrutiny that the rest of adult life does not require or actively avoids.
What were we trying to do in the painting department that we recognized in Smith’s essays about what she was trying to do? Mainly, we were sharing in a process that goes something like this:
It usually cracks in the crucible, but that failure is itself a significant part of experience. In fact, whole industries exist to sell broken visions, propped up by the luminous, rare ones that made it through whole, larded by canny imitations. Smith’s crucible was language, and in school ours were the materials and tropes of visual art. The differences were not insignificant in practice, but the driving force behind our projects was the same. We were all, it seemed, experiencing something nearly impossible to record that regularly drove some of us to spend most of our lives trying to capture it.
I thought you could only find these secrets through painting, so I moved across the Atlantic to study painting in a building built by a painter as a painting school. However, once I went there, I discovered such exclusive secrets did not exist.
The art I most loved seemed to lend the viewer some clarity of experience that the artist had found through the hard work (or luck) of their discipline, and that clarity had helped me enormously in my own life. On my path to art school, I thought the way to do that mostly involved getting better at creating recognizable images.
But by the time I entered art school I had learned that no level of technical competence would guarantee that clarity. Rendering an object never seemed to create a result that would move my patient friends in the way it had moved me during the process of drafting that picture. The most I had learned was that I fact I had no idea how to transmit that experience through handmade images, and figuring that out became the job of painting. To progress, I had to enter into a dialogue with the materials, with my sensations, with my methods, with my rational ideas, with any relevant prior art, and not the least of all with my persistent assumptions about all of those things. And that is how I tricked myself into becoming a contemporary artist.
The obverse of Smith’s permissiveness about the way one chooses to do the work of literature is that there is no medium, material, subject, or method that will guarantee that you will do the duty of your chosen art form. What I was looking for was not the correct neighborhood of the giant favela that is the art world, it was a particular argot spoken everywhere, but only by a select group that may have nothing else in common but this language.
It seems that part of the nature of the work is that it inevitably involves burning away all your ideas and methods and materials that do not demonstrably and deeply connect to the duties that your medium demands of you. There is an awkward middle place, full of distraction and waste, where your work appears to progress but achieves nothing of what you are hoping for. It lies between the rough-cut clarity of the beginner’s mind and the sardonic looseness of someone who has not necessarily mastered their discipline but has at least learned its language well enough to speak intimately in a regional dialect specific to their field. Once you identify this process, a separate, sideways set of strategies emerges to keep you away from the middle place and stay focused on your duty. That’s when the real work begins.
My favorite metaphor for this process is Arno Minkkinen’s Helsinki Bus Station Theory of Art, in which the desire to make art or be an artist takes you to the bus station. You pick a route, he says, and you ride for a while, get off, and show your work to someone. It reminds them of some famous artist’s work, and, incensed, you go back to the terminal and catch another bus. Catching another bus will not fix this. Staying on a bus, maybe the first one, is the only way to get where you belong. I like this metaphor very much, because it implies boredom, and uncertainty, and flat expanses where you feel very alone.
While some destinations are obviously better matches for you than others, an accounting of risk won’t help you pick the right bus at the right time. The right bus emerges from the determination and timing of how you stare out the window until you have come to a new, interesting place. I feel like this fits the first two items on my how-to list very well. You have to wait, and watch, and watch very carefully (#1). Eventually you will be compelled to get off the bus. (#2)
One must learn the intimate dialect of the region they have traveled to, but the argot I was looking for is learned on the bus. The nearly-metaphysical communication Zadie Smith talks about appears to be done in a creole of the bus language and the specific dialect of wherever you have found a place to belong. I do not mean to say that only the journey matters, but rather to point out that while we are all going to our own strange and specific places, we have a shared experience of staying on the bus long enough to get there. That experience, of course, is intimately connected to the perspective we bring when we step off the bus into air that is as familiar as it is strange.
As the Helsinki Bus Station Theory of Art suggests, the artists who have learned this common language learn it while traveling very far away from each other, deep into their own personal concerns. This seems like a contradiction if you’re only looking at the country where someone has ended up at the end of their journey. The artifacts they’ve brought back look so different, after all. This is the view taken by our museums and schools and job descriptions — they are of course ordered by medium, tradition, subject, region, or era. That is why this kind of work is found through the materials of individual disciplines and not by studying the work itself. One says “I want to go where that painter or that drummer has gone”, so they take the bus that’s going to Lower Painting or North Drumming. But, as we know, whether one discovers what they’re looking for is a function of which bus they pick and how far and how observantly they ride that bus. So what makes this very specific work generally recognizable?
There is a line in Wes Anderson’s first movie, Bottle Rocket, which crystallizes an untold number of hours spent by lovers and friends and spouses striving desperately to be understood. Owen Wilson’s character demands to know if his efforts to repair his relationship with his best friend, played by his brother Luke Wilson, are working. They aren’t. Frustrated, he asks “Does the fact that I’m trying to do it for you do it for you?”
What the line from Bottle Rocket acknowledges is that striving and failing is as important as striving and succeeding, and the situation suggests that sometimes it is all we can do, given our many, obvious imperfections. Success is found through refining fruitless efforts. It is not achieved by carefully following an exhaustive set of instructions, or optimizing a set of tools and resources. Smith’s metaphor for this effort is a bay with piers extending from shore, or “failed bridges” as James Joyce called them. In her allegory, the ideal novels lie on the banks of a far island, and the work of writing is to build a bridge across the gulf. Most of us don’t make it there, our bridge remains a pier and most writers “get wet.” That striving to build a bridge is what makes up most of the landscape of literature.
What distinguishes this work from the nine conventional motivations is that, in the end, it is all about cultivating the potential to reach the other side. If this is the type of work we have to do, “duty” does not seem like an inappropriate word. If you focus on the tasks of cultivation to the exclusion of all the other trappings of your discipline, you have created a duty for yourself. If you attempt to cultivate even a single head of lettuce, however selectively-bred or genetically-engineered that lettuce is, you have to understand its nature and dutifully support it. You cannot present new requirements to the lettuce to make your work easier. Any innovations you can make will made gradually, and through advanced expression of your duty to the lettuce.
The duty of literature that Zadie Smith has the guts to care about is at once very specific to literature, yet overlaps significantly with my duties in the studio. But still, words are not incidental to her project of writing any less than paint is to my painting. They are vital, and the duty she executes with them is found through them and their specific structure and texture. I am not in any way suggesting that you could remove them from her work and leave behind what Daniel Dennett calls “wonder tissue”, locating some atomic particle of literature. The work that she does emerges through a highly complex use of language, and cannot be isolated from that complexity.
The comparisons you can draw between disciplines where this work is done are like comparisons between marriages. If you have deeply integrated your life with another person’s, you share a sort of knowledge with other people who have done that work, even though much of the content of your knowledge is very different from theirs. You could never have reached that type of wisdom without engaging, in excruciating detail, the particular personality of your loved/infuriated one. And yet there’s a sort of shared wisdom in there, one whose subscribers can spot in the eyes of others who have reached it. They may not have the knowledge of the specific person you have, but they know what it’s like to know someone. This seeming paradox of sharp contingency and general resonance is what makes this kind of work so difficult and so valuable.
Going with Smith’s metaphor, the paradox is that you can only end up with a decent bridge if you just start trying to build an excellent pier — striving to do your own thing and do it honestly is the only route to giving others something useful to their own striving. One can easily imagine an ambitious bridge builder, doing all the right things to build a bridge, only to run out of money or time halfway through, or to discover unknown depths in the middle of the channel, and the whole unstable structure falls into the water.
It’s as if some spooky weather of the gulf between shore and the island of perfect novels prevents everyone but the most honest, dedicated, and inventive pier-builders from making it all the way across. So to even make it part of the way means you have done battle with these odd conditions, and you have gotten somewhere. Your only chance of making it across the gulf, which is still a slim one, is to be true and sensitive to the specific conditions of your medium and yourself, often to the exclusion of almost all other worthy concerns. Reasonably this should alienate others. Yet Bernard Malamud’s stories of the deeply, Yiddishly Jewish community that he knew in 1940s New York can reliably put a lump in my millennial, midwestern, gentile throat. Part of the duty of the work is that it makes the strange understood while letting it remain strange.
It took a long time to extinguish the last of my hunches that, deep down, writing was the same as painting, which was as the same as Taijiquan, or that James Baldwin and Donald Barthelme were, deep down, telling the same story. I finally understand that it is not the same, but it is not entirely different. They have gone different places, with different means, but their work has followed a similar pattern.
Part of that work, which is much harder to do than you would think, is to simply leave behind methods we learned on shore that are useless in the open water. This sort of mastery is not imperious and loaded down with trophies, it is nimble and shaped by its conditions. You have to align your work to the nature of the thing you have found, whether it is JavaScript or knitting. You must learn to speak honestly and with originality in an adopted language.
I think this is the closest we can come to a universal description of what this work is trying to accomplish — there are dialogues that you can have between yourself and a type of work that, when followed with sensitivity and tenacity, arrive at a result which is as true and specific to the contingencies of its process and situation as it can be, even if it is a result of bewilderment or incompleteness. The “result” is in part a record of its process, meant to be followed more like a labyrinth than a blueprint. Its true value, which separates it from other products driven by my list of nine motivations, derives from its ability to be reactivated by the viewer or reader or student who visits it.
This is why subjectivity is a tool of this work, rather than its limitation. Engaging with yourself and your experience as a structural component of the cultivation that this work requires is a form of advanced research into what your audience will face if they walk your pier out into the fog. They will use your record of striving to reach the other side in part as a guide for their own striving, on your pier or somewhere else. We cheat ourselves as artists and viewers to think that there are entertaining shortcuts to the views that make our work worthwhile. This is why Smith’s second essay is about the art of reading.
When we understand the thing this work is trying to do in these terms, we can sidestep otherwise endless debates about what is and isn’t art.
In 2007, film critic Roger Ebert ignited a legendary spat with the video gaming community by declaring that video games can never be art. The debate worked its way through different properties of video games in much the same way that painting was compared to photography in the early 20th century. They debated the visual sophistication of modern games, the difficulty of producing them, questions of authorship, genre conventions, and how the artifacts of the relatively young medium still shaped the majority of its work. Much of it consisted of gamers sending Ebert the “most beautiful” examples of gameplay and design.
I once had a housemate who seemed to have a passion and dedication to video games that wasn’t significantly addressed by that debate. His favorite thing, which he spoke of with the same tones that marathoners talk about the runner’s high, was to discover a text-based role playing game that he had not heard of and knew as little about as possible. Ideally, it would be undocumented, more than 20 years old, not translated to English from whatever language it was written in, and somewhat difficult to install on his computer. He could spend days simply trying to figure out the mechanics of the game, or whether or not he had the game he thought he did. The satisfaction he derived from finally playing the game was of an entirely different type than the satisfaction of the Halo player thrashing some anonymous opponents in a tournament. There are many video games which recognize this, and allow a state of free play with challenges that encourage a creative ownership over the process.
You can never answer the question of whether something is pretty or good enough to be an art, because you are not asking the question of whether or not it helps you, as a conscious individual, understand the world and your experience of it better. To me, one of the greatest achievements of the modern era was how artists, mainly visual artists and writers at first, shifted their discipline along these lines. In their task of making culturally approved products of high craft, they unearthed moments of profound subjective insight, but they were still required to make acceptable products. If there is an arc to art history in the last 200 years, it is the movement of those moments to the center of what we demand of art, and how it demands that the rest of the world try this shift of focus too.
In his short essay “How to Improvise, and How Not to Improvise”, Misha Glouberman discusses with Sheila Heti how teaching improv shifted his concept of the point of improv comedy:
I’m interested in improv as an experience for people to have, a thing for people to do, a practice.
Success, he realized, wasn’t ultimately measured by the laughter that his students got out of the audience in performance, but in the laughter shared by the students in practice. They were related, but cultivating the primary work was what made it worth anyone’s time.
Every discipline has its own vocabulary for discussing this work, that creole of shoptalk and the strange bus-language. Smith observes:
It’s my experience that when a writer meets other writers and the conversation turns to the fault lines of their various prose styles, then you hear a slightly different language than the critic’s language. Writers do not say, “My research wasn’t sufficiently thorough” or “I thought Casablanca was in Tunisia” or “I seem to reify the idea of femininity” — at least, they don’t consider problems like these to be central. They are concerned with the ways in which what they have written reveals or betrays their best or worst selves. Writers feel, for example, that what appear to be bad aesthetic choices very often have an ethical dimension. Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self — vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised.
The way artists (for lack of a better term) discuss their bridge-building efforts can be more useful in classifying disciplines than couching them in terms of the medium, genre, or institutional category that they most resemble. The conditions of self and medium will make the results take many different forms, but the Thing I Am Trying to Do is to know how to do the duty of a conceptual framework within a medium. Since that duty can only be embodied in the practice of some form or discipline, I believe that one must cultivate multiple practices to understand the full character of this work.
I don’t know how many, exactly, but if I were to design the curriculum of an art school these would be my departments:
When we perceive the surface of anything, there are specific qualities to the experience. So we get music and visual art and certain kinds of film as methods for working within the texture of perceptions.
Bodies are about movement and the problem of being an individual among many. Conflict and physicality are uniquely understood through bodies. So we get martial arts, and dance, and sometimes even sports.
We construct ourselves through stories we tell internally, and then we bash them into the stories other people tell about themselves, and we try to catch up to the stories they become when they’re all smashed together. So we get things like literature, film, comedy, management, caretaking, and counseling.
The intention to affect a purposeful difference in the world around us has an art in it too. An “engineering problem” is one where the questions are known and must be carefully and correctly answered, but the entire process involves a dialogue to produce and update these questions, which shares fundamental work with the studio process. So we get coders, designers, and other builders striving to develop a similar conceptual core in their work.
The thing I am trying to do takes different forms in different disciplines, but shares enough qualities across them that I think it is worth trying to put my finger on its nature, and to advocate for my experience of it. Because that is also the thing I am trying to do.