It has rules: you shouldn't start writing before you've had coffee (broken, this minute) but writing when drunk is perfectly acceptable and often humorous (probably still shouldn't). You should post every day (broken daily) if not multiple times a day (um...). You should provoke conversation (batting about average). You should reference other blogs (done obsessively). You should go join in conversations on other blogs to see what other people are saying. You should be smart, thoughtful, witty, insightful, silly, serious, proactive, reactive, first, or last. You should monitor your use of semi-colons, parenthesis, and emoticons (:|). You should be yourself (check).
Artists can have particular conflict in blogging. There's so much to say I've hardly the time to say it and criticism is tricky. Also I should be in the studio more often than on the computer (I'm eyeballing my table piled with fuzzy yarn just to the right of my mouse right now) . That might be a fallacy, maybe the writing and research is part of the studio practise but I'll get to that in a minute. And the words are themselves an uphill battle fraught with either too elite a tone or not elite enough. I don't have an example for that last one. Yet. But it needs to be accessible and it needs to be lucid.
I'm not the best at keeping up but it's important that I write. It seems I must. My fingers itch if I don't start typing about something, and I must have about ten different articles started that I intend to post. I just can't seem to shut up about it -- I'm always thinking and talking even if no one's around. This seems to have happened to George Orwell - here's an excerpt from his essay Why I Write:
As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.
I don't want to put you through it, but like Orwell, there's a continuous narrative running through my head at all times. By narrowing it down and writing about the world I occupy, the art I see, the people I meet, and the aspects of my studio practise which interest me, I'm strengthening my artistic muscles. I'm honing the focus, and getting to the truth. I'm sorting through a myriad of problems and solutions. Through these words, I'm threading everything I've ever seen and written about into the paper with the yarn along with the thoughts and daydreaming and history; and hopefully carving out an ever-larger piece of that damned pie.
Why do you write? What do you write about? How does it influence, fortify, expand, inspire, or otherwise nurture everything else you do (art, programming, teaching, fill in the blank)?
Ceci n'est pas une pie thanks again to Shaun K.
And this is supposedly animated. Click on it!
5 comments:
Sharon, you raise an interesting array of questions, as usual. I came to technology and online social networking late in life, (and with some fear and skepticism) and had to take some time to respond coherently. As a youngster I read John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio”: about a couple whose new listening instrument was so receptive it captured every conversation in their NY apartment building. The resulting porosity of boundaries and loss of privacy caused them to literally decompensate. There are curious premonitory links to Baudrillard’s “Ecstasy of Communication” where he speaks of obscenity as that same loss of privacy via the total transparency of new media. Of course, like all theory, Monsieur B’s butts up against the progression of real life, and how individual human beings wield new tools in new contexts.
Speaking strictly for myself now: instead of falling into no-filter hell, I try to exercise discernment over intake and disclosure: to make tools of virtual communication (blogging among them) serve life and work offscreen: studio practice, primary relationships, face-to-face meetings with friends, peers, and colleagues (with artists especially it seems these 3 categories mingle), care of the body and spirit, simple sun exposure, etc. Aimlessly hanging out online can facilitate my native procrastination and inversion. Paradoxically, I’ve discovered allies and ideas, gained insight into who and what I already thought I knew well, and found sounding boards and meeting places, both on- and offline, with a speed and fluidity unimaginable before. When a shared cup of coffee or stroll is impractical, there’s still the potential for connection.
If I can manage to transcend my own version of Orwell’s “crude narcissism” (a chore for me) blogging serves simultaneously as a running informal annotated bibliography and personal diary (with caveats about the intimacy of certain revelations). It’s also good writing practice (while striving to be compassionate about spelling, grammar and syntax issues). Sometimes that practice is oblique, as when I take the time to formulate a response to the writings of others rather than make a LiveJournal entry. (This week has been a bit personally sticky for that).
Even online, living, breathing, working, feeling people are the ones making the real flesh of their fingers work the keyboards. It’s still all about relationships. Isn’t the goal of communication, after all, to see, hear, and affirm each other?
Well done, artstache. You bring up some good points yourself - I like the idea that all these things are relationships/related. I'm certain it's the philosophy I'm running on, to be sure.
I guess it is a diary, for myself and for others. I suppose I think if I lift the veil so that I see clearer, in some way I expose a part of my process/practise/trajectory for others to see. Art is such a solitary act and the only thing people see is the finished product.
But the truth is, the really interesting part is all the work before the work, or during it. The finished art is almost a byproduct. A fortunate one, but still. It's not always the point.
Thanks for the compliments and discerning my meaning(s) so well. In addition, you reminded me that we are all more that our production, which I forget sometimes. There is the paradigm that Art (with a Capital A) means everything in itself, but for me is a subset of the encompassing drive to live and communicate fully.
hmmm... why i write. I, too, am stricken with persistent commentary running through my mind. Writing it out is the only relief I've found. Also, for me, writing about art has equaled community here in Seattle-- it is how I've met wonderful people like you, Sharon!
Susanna, thank you and likewise! I agree, another beautiful side effect of writing is the community it builds. If that's not a motivator, I don't know what is! :)
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