The Elevator Speech

and the Complexity of Simple Answers

I found this in the driveway. Isn’t it beautiful?

In 2013, more or less, I mentioned to a friend that I’d been writing a blog (that was in my WordPress days). Naturally enough, he asked me what I write about.

I froze – I had no idea how to put it into a couple of sentences, especially since I was working on The Communist Manifesto with all Words Functioning as Nouns Removed at the time. I’ll have more to say about The Communist in a future post.

The next time I’m asked a similar question, I hope to be prepared, but that’s a condition I very rarely experience - I never graduated from Cub Scout to Boy Scout, I suppose there was too much structure and too few random moments to motivate me to diligence.

So as best I could manage in 2013, here’s the answer I gave to that question: I mostly write about the relation between a visual artist’s work and their explanations of it, and how theory can affect practice. Artists explain their practice to both themselves and others and they need to take care that their non-visual thinking does not contaminate their work through worry about the implications of their justifications and contextualizations. Concerns about a successful career are often the culprit, although not always. If you are a visual artist, your work is primarily visual, and articulated thought is extrinsic.

Regardless of your line of work, it’s easy to baffle yourself. Examine your thinking while you work. Are you thinking about how other people will react to it? That could lead to second rate work. Are you thinking about how this could be the best piece ever, as long as you don’t screw it up? The game’s afoot, as Sherlock would say, and this is the right track. Find your beautiful, it should be meant to please you, and nobody else but you. Strangely enough, that will give it the furthest reach. I don’t think Shakespeare or Mozart were worried about the critics, or the guy living next door.

Here’s a shorter version: I write about how artists can weaken their art because of their concerns about things like their career or what other people might think. I also write about other things that interest me, but the first thing still comes up from time to time. Or even shorter, artists search for unknown unknowns, a lovely idea that needs to be rescued from the associative clutches of former American Vice-President Dick Cheney.

And so it was written in 2013, but it doesn’t seem like a very good answer in 2023. At the time, I was still very busy sorting out the details of The Institute for the Separation of Theory from Practice created in 1999 (previous post here).

Writing is becoming much less instrumental for me, it feels more primary, it’s becoming less about the things written, and more about the written thing itself. How terrible it would be if art weren’t everywhere. I was foolish to think I could describe what I write about or paint because if I were to do so, I wouldn't have made it at all.

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