Wow, I’ve had some really interesting questions as a result of this blog.
When it comes to titling, if I title, I tend to do it after the work is finished, trying to find in the title something that relates to the outside world or that takes the work beyond my-self. Sometimes I’ve thought of finding a title that relates to some everyday incident but more often than not this would reduce the work to biography, so I agree with Tamarin’s caution regarding closing the work down and like her idea of asking different people to think of a title. Rob’s idea of giving each work two titles is also interesting – perhaps a work could have multiple titles. Or, as Tamarin suggests, maybe having no titles would leave the viewer freer to constitute their own subjectivity through their experience of an artwork; on the other hand, untitled work might also leave the viewer with no way in.
I remember a newspaper article I read about Gillian Ayres, which refers to her practice of asking her friends to do the titling. I think this is definitely a path worth following.
Sometimes when I am really supposed to be doing something else I end up reading newspaper articles that catch my eye. Today I read “A healthy dose of sick lit” on the Guardian Unlimited Books blog (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/sep…). Like the author of the blog, I also generally avoid books about “bodily decay and death”, but I also find myself being drawn to the topic through having been ill myself and being currently in that “everything crossed” state. I find that now I do often read other accounts of the journey through cancer treatment though for the same reason as the author gives – distance – not as yet a whole book.
Kalder does “succumb” to reading a book about the experience of having a brain tumour though, and says this of it:
“When Karinthy articulates what is happening to him, he reaches for Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, and sundry Hungarians you’ve never heard of. He sees and explains himself via literature, instead of the modern babble of confessional self-analysis“
That’s the nub of it: Literature, theory, other writing is that place of mediation through which one can reflect upon one’s own experience and make others’ stories one’s own, as well as recognise one’s own story as not singular but a part of collective human experience.
Anyone else grappling with titles? to title or not to title and if titles then how to find them?
i have found myself turning to and reading Seamus Heaney’s poems and dipping into translations of Chinese poetry – Poems of the Late Tang.
Admittedly i am only on the second of these ‘spaghetti’ drawings but I have been thinking about the issue of repeating the same subject matter again and again. It shouldn’t present a problem in a sense, as many other artists do precisely this, Jane Harris being a case in point.
Writing about Jane Harris, Tom Lubbock in the Independent (2005) says “Restless-minded as I am, I find it quite hard to come to terms with the way that some artists confine themselves. How can they be content to do basically the same thing, over and over again?”
Sometimes I cast about for “something to draw”; worrying that perhaps I should try this or that or do more “observational drawing”. To quote Simon Morely in an article also about Jane Harris (Art Monthly 1994), “The problem of subject-matter still persists as the most important dilemma for artists.”
Not having to worry about subject matter provides a kind of relief. This is not to say that the issue of subject matter is thereby wholly resolved, for the subject is not simply the thing apparently represented – in other words Harris’s work isn’t just ‘about’ ovals and ellipses – but at least, for me at the moment, I don’t have to fret about what to draw.
