19. Embed Thought in Material, How to Be an Artist

19. EMBED THOUGHT IN MATERIAL

What does this mean? An artwork should express thought and emotion. (I contend that the two can’t be separated.) Your goal as an artist is to use physical materials to make these thoughts and emotions, however simple or complex, accessible to the viewer. Materials have the potential to take a previously empty space and suffuse it with new meanings—meanings that will continue to transform over time. Eric Fischl has said that he “wanted to paint what couldn’t be said.” All artists are trying, on some level, to do the same.

Some artists work with oil and canvas, others with stone and chisel; some use gallery spaces, museums, or town squares as staging places; others use performance, digital signals, city walls, desert rocks, string, steel, glass, mud, whatever. My materials are words and sentences, similes and conjectures; they are all embedded with the way I think and feel. If you’re able to do this with the materials you choose—even if viewers misinterpret your work—it will strike them as distinctly yours. And this will give your materials agency and energy.

If you fail to use your materials fully, your work may end up starved for ideas. Don’t rely on wall text to do the work! Recently I was looking at a series of ho-hum black-and-white photographs of clouds when a gallerist sidled up to inform me: “These are pictures of clouds over Ferguson, Missouri. They’re about protest and police violence.” I bristled. “No, they’re not! They’re just pictures of clouds and have nothing to do with anything. They’re not even interesting as photos!” A work of art cannot depend on explanation. The meaning has got to be there in the work. As Frank Stella said, “There are no good ideas for paintings, there are only good paintings.” The painting becomes the idea.

There is a different way. Without knowing anything about the English painter J. M. W. Turner, spend some time with his work and you’ll see his drive to push oil paint to its limits, to make landscape as important as history painting, to shatter and abandon Renaissance space. Turner didn’t care about contours or readability; he probably painted with all manner of tools, even his fingers, and his thoughts about nature were conflicted, imaginative, breathtaking, even when muddy or overdone. All of this is in the material.

Or consider Marcel Duchamp. In the winter of 1917, at the age of twenty-nine, Duchamp purchased a urinal at J. L. Mott Iron Works on New York’s Fifth Avenue, signed it “R. Mutt 1917,” gave it the title Fountain, and submitted it to the non-juried Society of Independent Artists exhibition. Fountain is an aesthetic equivalent of the Word made flesh, an object that is also an idea—that idea being that any object can be an artwork. In 2004 it was voted the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. Two years after Fountain, Duchamp literally drew a mustache on a postcard Mona Lisa, gave it the title L.H.O.O.Q.—an acronym for a cheeky French phrase that translates roughly as “The lady has a hot ass”—and completely transformed the image. What was he doing? Showing us that the artist can embed thought in any material—just as the first artists used color and line on stone to create cave paintings, which remain one of the most advanced and complex visual operating systems ever devised by our species. As Jay-Z put it, you make materials “do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.”

With this in mind . . .

Exercise

MAKE A MEMORY TREE

Step one: Using any material, on any surface, make, draw, or render a memory tree of your life. From this work we should be able to know something about you other than what you look like or how many siblings you have. Include anything you want: pictures of you, your friends, or your exes; texts, places you remember, signs, maps, objects, found photos, and so on. The goal is to create something that gives others access to you. This should take no longer than three days. Period.

Step two: Show this new tree to someone who doesn’t know you well. Tell them only, “This represents my life up to now.” Then ask them what the work tells them about you. No clues. Don’t worry about whether they like it. That doesn’t matter.

Step three: Listen to what they say.