Craft Notes
And Then We Came to the End
Today, I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (which, it must be said, is quite expensive and staffed by some insanely rude and surly individuals). I walked briskly up the Rocky Stairs. I also saw interesting and confusing and awesome art objects but the best exhibit was a retrospective of the work of Arshile Gorky. Toward the end of the exhibit was a placard discussing the end of Gorky’s life which, as is the case for most artists, ended tragically. In one of this final interviews, Gorky stated, “”I don’t like that word finish. When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting–I just stop working on it for a while.”
Gorky’s comment has had me thinking all afternoon about when a story or a poem or other creative work ends or is finished. How do you know? Do you, as Gorky does, believe in everlastingness and that to finish something is to kill it?
Tags: Gorky, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rocky
i love the philadelphia art museum staff. they really are surly. it adds a level of pompousness that i feel all art museums need. i only wish they wore expensive hats and spoke without looking at you.
i love the philadelphia art museum staff. they really are surly. it adds a level of pompousness that i feel all art museums need. i only wish they wore expensive hats and spoke without looking at you.
sundays are free mostly (donation only) for any future visits to the museum or if you didn’t see it all. at least last i heard.
another point of interest maybe: there are really good used bookstores in philly: house of our own (39th and Spruce – tell them joe murphy sent you if you have time to talk; debbie and greg are good people but will talk – they’re interesting though), book haven (21st-ish and fairmount) and another right behind the central library.
sundays are free mostly (donation only) for any future visits to the museum or if you didn’t see it all. at least last i heard.
another point of interest maybe: there are really good used bookstores in philly: house of our own (39th and Spruce – tell them joe murphy sent you if you have time to talk; debbie and greg are good people but will talk – they’re interesting though), book haven (21st-ish and fairmount) and another right behind the central library.
The staff members were *crazy* surly today. First, I got yelled at for taking pictures (I was using a camera phone, no flash or anything). Now, the last museum I was at, in Minneapolis a couple months ago, was a public museum where photography is allowed so I genuinely didn’t know and I have no problem with the rule but it was the way the rule was conveyed that bugged me. The little old man in his blue blazer literally screeched at me and followed us around for a few minutes. Then, my friend got berated for carrying a slender messenger bag throughout the museum because it might damage the art. Meanwhile, all around us, were people carrying these huge, bulky bags. It was more surreal than the art itself. Art should be accessible, not necessarily in terms of content but definitely in terms of how it is shared with the public. I could go on and on about how so many museums seem to get it wrong.
The staff members were *crazy* surly today. First, I got yelled at for taking pictures (I was using a camera phone, no flash or anything). Now, the last museum I was at, in Minneapolis a couple months ago, was a public museum where photography is allowed so I genuinely didn’t know and I have no problem with the rule but it was the way the rule was conveyed that bugged me. The little old man in his blue blazer literally screeched at me and followed us around for a few minutes. Then, my friend got berated for carrying a slender messenger bag throughout the museum because it might damage the art. Meanwhile, all around us, were people carrying these huge, bulky bags. It was more surreal than the art itself. Art should be accessible, not necessarily in terms of content but definitely in terms of how it is shared with the public. I could go on and on about how so many museums seem to get it wrong.
It’s actually a freeing thought, that a work is never finished, only abandoned (or set aside), and it’s of course true, isn’t it? You could always revise a little more, prune a little here, amend and build, no matter how perfect something seems. The work is created in the viewer’s/reader’s minds anyway, so what is the peak of perfection to one will not be to another. It’s a happy mindset, really, I think.
It’s actually a freeing thought, that a work is never finished, only abandoned (or set aside), and it’s of course true, isn’t it? You could always revise a little more, prune a little here, amend and build, no matter how perfect something seems. The work is created in the viewer’s/reader’s minds anyway, so what is the peak of perfection to one will not be to another. It’s a happy mindset, really, I think.
if ye don’t fancy a surly staff member, don’t ye be goin’ to the Cleveland Museum of Art
they be the surliest salty dogs you’ll ever meet
if ye don’t fancy a surly staff member, don’t ye be goin’ to the Cleveland Museum of Art
they be the surliest salty dogs you’ll ever meet
i like their Duchamp exhibit
i don’t like being in the Duchamp exhibit with a lot of people though. some people have the dumbest reactions to etant donnes.
my favorite reaction came from an older man with his wife:
“you don’t wanna look in there, honey” and then he whispers “it’s a vagina”
i like their Duchamp exhibit
i don’t like being in the Duchamp exhibit with a lot of people though. some people have the dumbest reactions to etant donnes.
my favorite reaction came from an older man with his wife:
“you don’t wanna look in there, honey” and then he whispers “it’s a vagina”
What do you expect from a museum that has a life-sized statue of Rocky at one entrance?
Wait, what was this post about again? Oh yeah:
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Paul Valery
What do you expect from a museum that has a life-sized statue of Rocky at one entrance?
Wait, what was this post about again? Oh yeah:
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Paul Valery
i think we should just have a lot of rising action, like rising and rising, like oh my god oh my god oh my god, bam! and then boom, we finish. and we go to sleep.
that’s how everything should work.
i think we should just have a lot of rising action, like rising and rising, like oh my god oh my god oh my god, bam! and then boom, we finish. and we go to sleep.
that’s how everything should work.
To begin & never finish with there is this Leaves in a Drained Swimming Pool, by Dean Young (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3692/is_200611/ai_n17197034/), who may very well have been careening, careering, caroming like a baseball with Muppet eyes off Gorky, the exhibited fantastic sad lightning of which by curious or not so curious happenstance I also got to see the other day whilst in Philadelphia. (I found the staff largely unobtrusive except for when we got too close to the giant canvases upon which gunpowder had been used but I remember trying to keep 2nd graders from falling into Twomblys and Cornell boxes in the Menil Museum in Houston, so my sympathy was somewhat with them.) DY’s divergence from Gorky here is that where Gorky may see his paintings as advanced studies that go on, for DY the material appearance of the art already reveals its terminal limitation, its finitude—. We must also remember, though, that the form is the vehicle for the experience of the art, and that experience is renewable.
Anyhizzle, I too was struck by that Gorky quote, which I’m pretty sure I wholly agree with. No art’s finished that hopes to keep mattering—at this stage, I think we make art that is self-conscious about its unfinishedness because that shit is inviting. If you chance upon a painting or a poem or a novel or any other kind of art that doesn’t change from one experience to the next I think you have to consider the possibility that you are contemplating a plastic bottle with a sip of Gatorade: nice enough while it lasts but disposable, perishable, unsustaining, and with all its juice gone just a plastic container. The plastic container’s got potential, maybe, but… I digress. The point is that the finished object has bled out (or has but once to bleed out), the unfinished object may be revived again and again in the presence of new audience, even if that audience consists only of one person who observes the object every day, even if that audience is the artist, lost and looking to be a little less lost.
What may be true is that art finishes with us—this is how I usually think of Valery’s quote—but even that’s only true for a little while. The notion that art might be finished seems neoclassical: it presupposes that there’s a swell ideal that may be universally perceived and appreciated, if it may only be apprehended and represented. It also suggests that art is an attainment that can be absorbed or collected, mastered rather than a material, conceptual or spiritual presence that may be listened and spoken to, but only ever related to or conversed with: it’s a person, a recurring phenomenon, a resistance, a contender that gives brief shape and direction to its audience. The value that great art has is that it keeps this up. It’s dieing all the time and all the time it’s revived, and in turn it kills and revives us. It’s tireless that way.
To begin & never finish with there is this Leaves in a Drained Swimming Pool, by Dean Young (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3692/is_200611/ai_n17197034/), who may very well have been careening, careering, caroming like a baseball with Muppet eyes off Gorky, the exhibited fantastic sad lightning of which by curious or not so curious happenstance I also got to see the other day whilst in Philadelphia. (I found the staff largely unobtrusive except for when we got too close to the giant canvases upon which gunpowder had been used but I remember trying to keep 2nd graders from falling into Twomblys and Cornell boxes in the Menil Museum in Houston, so my sympathy was somewhat with them.) DY’s divergence from Gorky here is that where Gorky may see his paintings as advanced studies that go on, for DY the material appearance of the art already reveals its terminal limitation, its finitude—. We must also remember, though, that the form is the vehicle for the experience of the art, and that experience is renewable.
Anyhizzle, I too was struck by that Gorky quote, which I’m pretty sure I wholly agree with. No art’s finished that hopes to keep mattering—at this stage, I think we make art that is self-conscious about its unfinishedness because that shit is inviting. If you chance upon a painting or a poem or a novel or any other kind of art that doesn’t change from one experience to the next I think you have to consider the possibility that you are contemplating a plastic bottle with a sip of Gatorade: nice enough while it lasts but disposable, perishable, unsustaining, and with all its juice gone just a plastic container. The plastic container’s got potential, maybe, but… I digress. The point is that the finished object has bled out (or has but once to bleed out), the unfinished object may be revived again and again in the presence of new audience, even if that audience consists only of one person who observes the object every day, even if that audience is the artist, lost and looking to be a little less lost.
What may be true is that art finishes with us—this is how I usually think of Valery’s quote—but even that’s only true for a little while. The notion that art might be finished seems neoclassical: it presupposes that there’s a swell ideal that may be universally perceived and appreciated, if it may only be apprehended and represented. It also suggests that art is an attainment that can be absorbed or collected, mastered rather than a material, conceptual or spiritual presence that may be listened and spoken to, but only ever related to or conversed with: it’s a person, a recurring phenomenon, a resistance, a contender that gives brief shape and direction to its audience. The value that great art has is that it keeps this up. It’s dieing all the time and all the time it’s revived, and in turn it kills and revives us. It’s tireless that way.
hmm, i’m reading the title of your post (minus the first word) by j ferris and not digging it that much
i was expecting you to rip on it or say it’s good or something
i am in the gorky camp (not park) about things never being finished. everything i’ve published could and should be improved,
hmm, i’m reading the title of your post (minus the first word) by j ferris and not digging it that much
i was expecting you to rip on it or say it’s good or something
i am in the gorky camp (not park) about things never being finished. everything i’ve published could and should be improved,
Once a story is out in the world and read by strangers, it is alive inside the mind of each reader.
It is so much more alive than continued revising could ever make it.
Look at Hollywood movies. That shit is revised. By a lot of people. For a long time. Until it becomes smooth and lifeless. Too much revision of anything can do this.
Plus, each finished story captures you as an artist struggling in a moment in time – – when the story was written and worked over and finished in the best way it could be by you at that time, then sent out into the world.
Over-revision ends up fighting itself, and I think that’s because no story can represent you as an artist in all times. You’d write it differently today, after all, than you did last night.
I think this is a major way over-revision can make a (possibly great) story get generalized. Too many different selves as the artist have their hands in the pot.
(Part of this I learned in this way: when I teach workshops, I always ask readers to note at what point they felt “closest” to the story – – it’s so totally bizarre for the writer to see. Because a lot of times, the moment the most readers felt closest is not the smooth opening you slaved over for weeks. Half the time it’s some sublime section that just clicks – – a section that would maybe even get taken out in subsequent revisions for not being relevant enough or not well-paced or too indulgent or whatever.)
Plus, once you make art, it has a life of its own. Which is fucking magic, for real, here in the world. So have some respect. Over-revision is an attempt to control art, and you can’t. Just make it be good and then respect what it is.
Once a story is out in the world and read by strangers, it is alive inside the mind of each reader.
It is so much more alive than continued revising could ever make it.
Look at Hollywood movies. That shit is revised. By a lot of people. For a long time. Until it becomes smooth and lifeless. Too much revision of anything can do this.
Plus, each finished story captures you as an artist struggling in a moment in time – – when the story was written and worked over and finished in the best way it could be by you at that time, then sent out into the world.
Over-revision ends up fighting itself, and I think that’s because no story can represent you as an artist in all times. You’d write it differently today, after all, than you did last night.
I think this is a major way over-revision can make a (possibly great) story get generalized. Too many different selves as the artist have their hands in the pot.
(Part of this I learned in this way: when I teach workshops, I always ask readers to note at what point they felt “closest” to the story – – it’s so totally bizarre for the writer to see. Because a lot of times, the moment the most readers felt closest is not the smooth opening you slaved over for weeks. Half the time it’s some sublime section that just clicks – – a section that would maybe even get taken out in subsequent revisions for not being relevant enough or not well-paced or too indulgent or whatever.)
Plus, once you make art, it has a life of its own. Which is fucking magic, for real, here in the world. So have some respect. Over-revision is an attempt to control art, and you can’t. Just make it be good and then respect what it is.
Yes.
Yes.