On the Other Hand

 

 

World Wisdom

 

 

 World Wisdom: What you see is what you get.

Explorations

 

My default process when writing is closely akin to my process when beginning a drawing or collage. I put a blank piece of paper on the desktop and begin with a mark of some kind: a word or phrase, if I’m writing; a shape, if I’m drawing; a scrap of paper if I’m starting a collage. Donald Barthelme puts it in a way that makes sense to me:

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

                                             
After that I proceed by making another, and another, and another, pushing into the space and watching what emerges as I work. As Billy Collins puts it:

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.

The core concept, the fundamental practice, is thus purely explorational. I don’t know what I’m doing when I begin. And often, when I have finished, I would be hard-pressed to describe what I have done. The artwork, if it is successful, will speak for itself, and will invite the viewer to participate in the creation of whatever “meaning” the work might be understood to have. The “meaning” derived by one viewer will in all likelihood vary considerably from the meaning derived by another.

If this seems to be a somewhat arbitrary and potentially confusing way of proceeding, so be it. I find that submitting myself to this process to be both entertaining and, in the long run, very satisfying. (This all should sound vaguely familiar to anyone who has read my previous post about “the open text” in general and the poetry of Cole Swensen in particular.)

Anyway, all that I have written so far is by way of introduction to a few pieces I have recently completed which combine collage-making of a sort and drawing of a sort. In each case the artwork began as pure collage (pasting paper on paper), and upon completion of the collage work the pen-and-ink elements were added. I had not until recently thought to combine the two, but what resulted when I did so interests me:

 

 

 

Essay

 

 

 

Essay

A place to begin. An undertaking. An attempt at con-
        struction, picking up pieces, turning them this way

    and that. Squinting, weighing, wondering

         whether this one goes here or
                    there.

                                             How do we de-
        cide? Slowly something takes shape, a song

  insists on being sung. One voice, another, eventually, a choir.
                    A cathedral. Vocational

            therapy. We're in this together, we

        gather, we lean on
                    each other. We wander. We stand tall,

       we call out, we await the arrival
                    of the eyes

                       that, falling upon us, bring us,

                                            ever so briefly, to life.

 

 

Process Reflection:

Most people, hearing the word "essay," don't necessarily think about its derivation, the sense of the word that means "a trial" or "an attempt." But every work of art, and of writing, is in that most elemental sense an essay. The collage at the top of the page, entitled "Essay" is one of literally hundreds that I have worked on in recent years. The poem, a very "wet" recent draft with the same title, is an attempt both to generate some words about the collage and to mirror in its structure some of the observable elements of its architecture: the way in which disparate fragments and pieces come together, or, insisting on their unique individuality, resist coming together. One critical difference between the two "essays" is that the pieces of the collage, once glued down, are immovable, whereas the poem, now in its fifth or sixth incarnation, is subject to as many re-visions as I have the time and the patience to attempt.

           

 

 

The Poet

The Poet (RBS Collage)

The Poet

Out on the water

I can think, or

rather give up

thinking altogether—

the afternoon hills

bathed in sunlight,

the glistening water

on fire, the scull

itself gliding oh so

lightly as if through air,

bearing me to a place

I seek but cannot see. 

Twenty Questions

The other day there was an interesting post on Tumblr a list of questions that Paul Thek used as “Teaching Notes” for a class that he taught at Cooper Union from 1978-1981. I have always been intrigued by inventories of this kind—lists, list poems, brainstormed possibilities—both as artifacts in themselves and as challenges to me (and, once upon a time, to my students).

I have had in my files for more than 40 years now a poem by Donald Justice that goes like this:

Twenty Questions

Is it raining out?
Is it raining in?
Are you a public fountain?
Are you an antique musical instrument?
Are you a famous resort, perhaps?
What is your occupation?
Are you by chance a body of water?
Do you often travel alone?
What is your native language, then?
Do you recall the word for carnation?

Are you sorry?
Will you be sorry?
Is this your handkerchief?
What is your destination?
Are you Aquarius?
Are you the watermelon flower?
Will you please take off your glasses?
Is this a holiday for you?
Is that a scar, or a birthmark?
Is there no word for calyx in your tongue?

I find this poem to be, well, charming. It’s playful and purposeful at the same time. There are elements of structure in it (the framework of the game of twenty questions, the sense that there is a conversation going on between strangers who speak different languages, the suggestion of a seduction taking place) combined with elements of (apparent?) randomness (“Is this your handkerchief?”). It’s a kind of verbal collage. The poem has a logic, individual lines undercut or redirect the logic in ways that are surprising. The poem creates in a short space an implied world, a world in which certain facts are established but most are left open to question.

There’s a game being played here, and, as often happens when we see a game, there’s at least the possibility that we might ask, can I play too? I’ve had my students write “Twenty Questions” poems; the results are always surprising and interesting to read. There’s something about not having too much in the way of a pre-set intention that frees them up. So here I am, working on this post, and here as well the task is to come up with something to say. So I think I’ll play. Here goes:

Twenty Questions

Did you hear the thunder this morning? What was up with that?
Shouldn't there be an easier way to get those sneakers clean?
Have you seen my sweater? What are we going to do about
Elizabeth? Can you tell me what you have in mind? Don’t you
Think we’d be better off if we just stayed home? What is that crow
So upset about? Is there a reason why you need to be doing that
Right now? How many times have I asked you to stop?
If I get done in time, would you like to come with me
To the basketball game? Why are the newspapers still covering
That story? Would you care for some peppers? Is my scarf
Too much? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to fly a plane?
What do you think you’re doing? Isn’t there a statute of limitations
On that? When is the rain supposed to end? Can I ask you a question?

Okay, so there’s a draft, created in the moment and lightly edited as I set this up on blogger. I may go back and work on it more later, but for now it serves the purpose. What I noticed as I was writing was that even as I was just pushing forward certain elements of voice and tone kept asserting themselves more or less in spite of me. I’ve remarked before how every collage—every work of art, really— is in some ways of necessity a kind of self-portrait. And that certainly applies to this poem. It’s a little bit odd. It’s a little bit random. But it was fun to write. How about you? You want to try?

November

RBS: Homeland

November came in like a sauna and went out like a cold shower. We had a sustained period of hot, sunny afternoons, and then the last two weeks have been more typically autumnal. My art practice during November turned out to be mostly collage. Strathmore makes a very sturdy textured paper out of bamboo. As far as I can figure out it only comes in two sizes, trading card (2.5" x 3.5") and greeting card (5"x 7," folded, with envelopes.) The card stock stands up well to the acrylic medium that I use as glue and glaze for my collages. It was pleasant, after having spent most of October working with only black and white, to play with color again. I wound up doing about 35 collages in this series, and within that set of 35 several smaller sequences. Typically I'll choose a set of papers and then wind up doing two or three or four different collages using the same basic set materials, and then pull out a different set of papers and do the same thing with them. One thing I noticed about what I have been doing is that my tendency is to build a collage additively, using only one piece of each kind of paper in any given collage, as in these examples.

Colors or shapes can and do echo one another, but I do not normally include or layer multiple pieces of the same paper. But I do see other collage artists doing that to good advantage. Here, for example, is a masterful instance by Robert Motherwell entitled Australia II, where he has an interesting mix of repeated and cognate elements on the one hand and unique elements on the other:

Motherwell: Australia II

So I'm thinking that's something I want to start playing with in my next sequence. But so far in December I've been playing possum. I've been doing a lot of reading and a fair amount of writing, but no art yet, and I've been turning over in my mind what I would like to do next, and when, and why.

Notes on Collage

Over the last few years I've spend hundreds of hours making collages of various kinds. I've also made an effort to familiarize myself with the work of other contemporary collage artists, and to archive their work on tumblr and Pinterest, as for example on this board, which has nearly 5000 examples. I've been making an effort lately to try to articulate some of what goes on in my head as I'm working. This is what I've got so far.


Considerations:

• You are always working in two dimensions within a rectangle. It's a grid. You can work against the grid, with it, or, most often, in some combination of both.

• Variables include the shapes (both positive and negative), the colors, the number and the relative sizes of the elements.

• In terms of number of elements in the collage, there are challenges at both ends of the spectrum. I've seen very interesting collages that are composed of only two elements. On the other hand too many elements can threaten to overwhelm the eye.

• Text can be included as a formal design element, as a vehicle for the introduction of a concept, as another kind of contrast to color and shape, or to signal seriousness of purpose or lack thereof.

• Colors can be coordinated or contrasted.

• Juxtaposition can go in many ways: one on top of another, edge to edge, overlap, or with space in between.

• There is an inherent element of randomness and playfulness in collage. There are tradeoffs. Things that don't work for me: 1) complete chaos on the one hand, 2) overdetermined, message-oriented, pictorial stuff, 3) incongruous combinations: eagle heads on cacti, cars with boobs, people with apples where their heads should be, etc. I like to work in a zone of semi-abstraction, one the elements of the collage create a field of energies that are like a nonverbal conversation. I don't generally like explicitly narrative collages, but I do like collages which function, as in the best abstract art, as independent universes whose idiosyncratic rules distantly echo our own, and which invite the viewer to think about what those rules might be in this particular case.

• There is a very large intuition quotient in the creation of a collage. You put it together piece by piece, and every part of the process—the selection of the elements, the decision whether to tear or cut or both, the placement of each piece, the configuration and extent of negative space—is made holistically and without explicit strategic planning. Sometimes, very rarely, I will lay out the major elements of the collage first before I start gluing, mostly to make sure that the last pieces don't look just stuck on top. But more often I start, as I do when I'm drawing abstracts, by gluing down a single piece somewhere on the paper and then simply building from that, linking the additions via placement, color, and shape as I go along. Given a pile of materials—and of course there is always an element of selection, however arbitrary, in the makeup of the pile—it is not completely off the mark to say that once I start working the collage builds itself.

• On the other hand, it could also be said that every collage is in effect a kind of oblique self-portrait at a particular moment in time. I'm the one who has collected and selected the materials. I'm the one who has decided, even if the decisions have been intuitive rather than strictly rational, what goes where. And each collage reflects my inner sense of what juxtapositions feel right and complete one another. The collages I make now don't look much like the collages I used to make. I'm a different person; they're different too.

• The ecology of collage: there's something inherently satisfying about up-cycling old, often discarded materials in order to make something new. One of the great masters of twentieth-century collage, Kurt Schwitters, was explicit about this:

I could see no reason why tram tickets, buttons, and old junk from attics and rubbish heaps should not serve well as materials for paintings; they suited the purpose just as well as factory-made paints… it's possible to cry out using bits of old rubbish, and that's what I did...

Example: 

This collage, which I completed in January, consists of eight elements placed in a roughly square configuration. They do not "mean" anything, either individually or taken together. (I make it a point of practice NOT to make collages which have a paraphrasable content or message. Any attempt to "interpret" them is more or less doomed by design and intention.) Which is not to say that there isn't anything to think about here, but that the thinking I am trying to generate is intuitional, nonlinear, nonverbal. I am going by feel. I put things together so that I like the way they look. But I am also interested sensing the energies that are set into motion by particular juxtapositions, and by the irregularities and disharmonies, as for example between the rectangular, gridlike elements and the soft, irregular torn edges of some of the shapes.

I have tried with some consciousness to provide lines for the eye to walk. There is for example, an arm which moves the eye up from the landscape, pointing to the people on the bridge, the same people which the eye of the bearded man on the old coin seems to be looking at. There are patterns of rectangles, but there are patterns of disruption in and among the rectangles. In the upper right corner there is a rectangular piece of paper holding a triangular shape framing a half-circle on which is superimposed a full circle, holding a face, looking at the faces of the other people on the walkway, facing us. The checkerboard is one sort of landscape plan, a playing field, which echoes the actual field below it. The upraised hand and finger belong to Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors basketball team, photographed at play on a different plane. The checkerboard in the center is a kind of abstraction and simplification of the lines the collage as a whole, a kind of playful mirror-in-miniature: the rigorous grid-like logic of the former both echoing and contrasting with the loose connectedness of the grid-like elements in the latter.

The whole collage is made of pieces of paper that 1) are in a certain tonal range of brown, grey, and black, 2) have been selected by me in a preliminary way at various times previous to the construction of the collage, and in a very specific way during its construction, and placed in square 6" x 6" format that was a given before any of the arrangements began. (That particular format is one of my favorites, both because I like the paper the pads are made of, and because the size constraint feels about right to me for the materials I most often use. It's also a convenient format when you are working, as I most often am, in a limited space.)

Perhaps it's only because I have taken the time to work all this out in words, but I have a particular fondness for this collage. Every time I make a collage it's a crapshoot. I'm just playing with shapes and colors and juxtapositions, and sometimes they come together in ways that are emotionally and intellectually satisfying to me. As I have said above, each collage is a world of its own, with its own internal harmonies and disharmonies, its own logic, its own set of unarticulated and preferably unarticulatable overtones or reverberations. Sometimes, it just feels right.

64 x 41 (Fig. 6)

Fig. 6

The start: 1925. Behind the wall, George has disappeared; Mom's not all there either. What's the story? Shadows, mostly. Rice paper: ghosts. Across the way, a child looks out for herself, waiting, but for what? She didn't know then. She doesn't know now. Those fingers, holding on. Fig. 6. Where have we been? Black and brown. Lost and found. Going, going, gone. The end.

64 x 38 (Alex Malcolmson)

I'm about as excited about discovering a new artist as I have been in a very long time. I've been doing paper collage for some time now, but recently I've been playing with wood. Today I discovered a British artist, Alex Malcolmson, who does beautiful, inspirational collages using wood. I'm excited about exploring the new possibilities his work suggests. Examples from his web site:

64 x 33 (The Standards of Excellence)

Completed several new collages last week. The one I like best came pretty much out of nowhere. I had completed several others and had a pile of paper scraps on my desk and basically began putting the leftovers together, starting in the lower left, working around clockwise, and finishing up with the brown puer tea wrapper in the middle. Feels alive to me now.

The Standards of Excellence

64x 18 (Collage: The Quest for Identity)

Working on one collage yesterday, I had another one going on the side. The first was more color-based; this one was composed more of neutral tones. But once the work was done, this one had a greater gravity. "The Quest for Identity" started out as a design element but wound up pulling together all the other elements thematically: family, writing, art, geography, community, voice.

The Quest for Identity