short notes #14
art monsters, a word list and a response to my thoughts on abstraction from Vanessa Bell!
Hello, welcome to ‘short notes’ #13! Thanks for still being here! Love you for it.
This week I read a wonderful book, Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin. I found elements of it challenging, or unconvincing, but overall I thought it was fascinating. I discovered some super interesting artists (Sutapa Biswas, Maria Lassnig and Hannah Wilke among them), and felt inspired and like my mind was expanded, which… well, what more can you ask for?
I feel bad to share this excerpt in a way, because it's not about any of those artists, and is, in fact, written by a man (😱😱), but I did love it, and am going to copy it out to keep by my desk. It's from a letter written to Eva Hesse by Sol LeWitt when she was struggling as a painter before she turned to three-dimensional work.
Stop worrying about big deep things. You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you'll be able to DO.
Elkin adds:
Stop trying to make the work be about something, I think she [Hesse] understood; let it be expressive of itself, of its own materiality.
It feels just like what I need and want to remember right now. I felt a real impulse as I was reading to make my own work rawer, messier somehow, feeding into the existing drive I've had lately to paint more instinctively, in a freer, looser way. So, I love that idea of the work being ‘expressive of itself, of its own materiality.’
This is also why I'm really taken with a word used, Elkin tells us, in a book called Touching Feeling by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and originally found in an essay written by one of Sedgwick's grad students. ‘Texxture’ is defined as ‘dense with information about how…. it came into being. A brick or metalwork pot that still bears the scars and uneven sheen of its making would exemplify texxture in this sense.’
I understand this as basically being ‘showing your workings’ and it's why I'm a fan of a pencil mark poking out from or showing through a layer of paint, visible brush strokes and imperfect lines. Carolee Schneemann collaged inks and feathers onto the actual material of the film itself when making her piece Fuses, and left it outside to ‘interact with the elements’. Victorian photographer (and Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s great-aunt) Julia Margaret Cameron would scratch at the negative, leave finger prints, dirt and hair on it. Whilst I don't intend to get anything like this ‘messy’, I do love the idea of the tactility, the ‘human-ness’.
If you read Sunday's newsletter, you may remember I talked about abstracting images in my mind's eye as a sort of automatic reflex, and mentioned how interested I would be to hear of others who do this. Reading Art Monsters on Monday night, you can imagine my delight to find this, from a letter Vanessa Bell wrote to Leonard Woolf in 1913:
I often look at a picture… without seeing in the least what the things are. [C]ertain qualities in life, what I call movement, mass, weight, have aesthetic value.
Love it when this sort of thing happens so much! I've written before on the magic of books to allow you to converse with people through the decades - it's never happened in such a direct way to me before, though!
I'm thinking a lot about how to progress with my abstract pieces this week (mounting the paper on wooden panels and / or incorporating them into collages are two of the options that I'm playing around with). As I read Art Monsters, certain words really resonated with me, which I underlined and copied out in my notebook. Titles for my artworks are something I struggle with, and my original thought was to use these words as names for my abstract pieces. I still plan to, but what struck me as I noted them down was how they in turn inspired thoughts for new pieces, how they evoked and conjured up certain shapes and moods that I want to embody in my work as I go forward. Here’s the list, which I've started adding to with words that aren't from the book.
Seems appropriate to finish with a work by one of Elkin’s art monsters this week. I adore the recurring circles in this, as well that amazing expression on her face.
