Titus O.

My friend artist Peter Fagundo described to me this morning a studio visit he had recently with an artist he works with, at the restaurant where he waits tables to pay bills. He said that his initial reaction to the work was to dislike it, though with some time and conversation with the artist he got a place of appreciating where she was coming from, if still not exactly liking the work.

That’s how it goes. And that works well when teaching; it’s the crucial skill, actually. When I used to write criticism, I refused to meet with the artists because I knew that I would lose, not objectivity, but the integrity of that somewhat “pure” immediate gestalt, and subsequent very personal analysis. I didn’t, and don’t, want to appreciate everything that comes round the pike. As an artist, I want to know what it is I’m supposed to be doing, and actually feel great satisfaction when I see something I clearly don’t care about. As I remember Krishanmurti once saying when asked about some silent yogi or levitating lama, “good for them. That’s just something I don’t have to worry about doing myself.” I love that idea. Rather than giving way to envy or agitation, just to think, oh good, I don’t have to make or do that thing.

Pete said that he feels like his aesthetic knife is getting really “honed”; not to kill, but to pare away the unnecessary. I know what he means. I, too, feel like I’m getting ever clearer about what I want to see, and what I don’t. I can appreciate the latter, but feel an increasing devotion to serving the former. Agnes Martin often spoke about human beings having a certain feeling or idea of perfection in their minds, and how artists often attempt to express this idea through their work, of their own sense of perfection in the mind. I take the meaning of this extremely broadly, as I think she was able to do, though her own work had a clear, very personal expression of it.

For whatever reason, I think I’m one of those people who find it especially difficult to know clearly what it is I need to make with much distraction around. Graduate school was really difficult in that respect. It really didn’t help me at all; in fact, it was quite damaging I think. I guess this is why I’m drawn to Agnes Martin, and Zen hermits, Taoist recluses, and desert monks. They shunned the hubbub in order to be able to truly listen within themselves.

Martin called it listening to inspiration. She said that inspiration is sort of always close, but that rational, discursive thought gets in the way; that artists often have that inspiration but that they don’t humble themselves before it (“humility is the most beautiful word,” she said), that they think it has to service their egos, and between the inspiration and the execution, a thousand thoughts enter and debase it. This is exactly how I feel when look at so much work today. I’m using the term “thinking” here not to mean a certain thoughtfulness; but rather, that I think art is by nature a much more intuitive, pre-rational, immediate, visceral kind of experience – even when as quietly reflective as the Ryman’s and Martin’s and early Marden’s I’m enjoying lately.

I’m reflecting on this “inspiration” standard in my own work a lot lately. In the galleries, I see too much thinking often times, and too much superficial influence from unquestioned trends and conventions. My old Korean Zen teacher used to say over and over “too much-e tinking tinking tinking! Only go straight, don’t-know!”

Which reminds me now of the thing I meant to say at the beginning, which is to relate this series of questions. They were how Pete boiled down his critique of that artist he visited. He rattled it off: “I asked her: Why are you doing this? This way? For whom? What do you mean by it? How do you want people to react to it?” I said she probably felt really tired in the day following. Like, those are the questions, aren’t they? And how many artists are really committed to asking them from their toes to their head tops? I’d say, only a percentage, and not a large one.