Today I was thinking about artists who write. There’s quite a lot of them (us?). Picasso has at least one thick volume of collected writings and stories published… Louise Bourgeois’s creative writing has just started appealing to me. With quite a psychological or surrealist edge, she describes brief, intense scenes of loss, absurdity and overwhelming fear. They work well with her drawings and etchings of that period and offer a theoretical/emotional framework for them, though I’ve also seen a wall stacked salon-style with similar etchings: the screaming tense delicate quality of line and compositional awkwardness on those etchings are way more affecting, breathtaking even, without writing or titles beside them.
Thought I’d link to a couple of stories that I’ve written: ‘Robotics’, ‘Pottery Class’, and ‘Flowers’. I’m not sure if I’d be interested in using text in close conjunction with more physical art but I tend to write about specifically visual art related subjects. It might be a way of sorting things out in my own mind after an attempt at working with a particular medium that I couldn’t get to work satisfactorily. Hmm… I have much lower expectations of writing than of visual/fine art though so satisfaction comes much sooner, and perseverance is only over a period of a few days or hours, not months…
Thinking of satisfaction though, I had coffee with an artist friend on Wednesday morning. He’s way more productive on the actual making things and getting them seen side of things than I am; has international residencies and shows often; but he surprised me by saying that he is never satisfied with his work or with his exhibitions, it’s only the tiniest little bit of something going right that he relies on to keep going… Do most artists have such low satisfaction levels?
Agnes Martin wrote about artists needing to be able to cope with failure and disappointment as a staple of their practice. What do people on artists talking think about this?
