Artists Learn to Code [ 3 ] Athene Takes Her Cut
a meandering consideration of some of artist-educator Sister Corita Kent’s rules, as delivered to us by John Cage.
I remember a moment in grad school, I was TA’ing in the lithography shop. An undergrad who had been working a gigantic litho stone totally flipped out. Complete meltdown, incoherent tears and rage. He’d done the chemistry wrong and blanked the print matrix.
Even in the no-grade pass-fail environment of that school, it was a huge loss for him. Image, vocabulary of meaning, collage, all gone. Athene takes her cut. Time at the loom, done right, or the fabric won’t hold. Who trains the hands but the loom itself?
How do we find the balance, create art with technology instead of being technologists who sometimes create art?
As an instructor there’s the need to coach students to resist the temptation to ‘build a sexier car’. I’m thinking of a man who took photos of wild birds, and really worked hard optimizing those photos to be, by technical standards, perfect. Bell curves on all the color panels. Certainty in the technology’s easy. The art experience — both creating and getting feedback from the audience — is rich with uncertainty. Creation and viewing each demand trust, risk, and intuition.
‘Some Rules for Students and Teachers’ was passed on to us by John Cage. As mentioned, it was originally created by Sister Corita Kent. In this essay, I’m mulling over some of the rules in the context of the new media artist’s studio.
Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment. I love this idea, in the abstract. But the execution of an idea using the complicated tools we get access to these days leaves room for us to pick up every piece of gear, dongle, cable, and app to figure out what it does and what it might do for our purposes. At the same time, we don’t have time to learn [ the entire programming language ] [ all the functionalities of a pro application ]. So I’m going to go find the tutorial for [ xyz ] and learn how to create [ abc ] without reinventing the wheel. But sometimes too, I ‘m going to build my own wheel in order to get the result I want.
Instead, perhaps consider everything as an experiment with an aim. This allows a starting point: identifying the knowns and the unknowns and giving ourselves a framework for prototyping.
Experimentation can involve figuring out what the audience will even consider. At times painters still have to fight for the legitimacy of abstraction. Can we cut through the audience’s screen fatigue to get them to consider technology-based works?
Rule 6: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.
I think about technology and the work that supports art making. I consider intention, execution, and teaching in tandem with concept-sourcing and craft. Art needs a body; through the body, we give the idea. If the how of that body is symbiotic to meaning, we can get some really amazing art*. “There’s no win and no fail…” Indeed we are outside of the realm of a competition or of a race, but there’s also effort until we arrive at functional form.
Aligning intent with execution is the natural consequence of Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something, it’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things. This is the locus of the experience of making, the varying distance between intent and outcome. How we gain skills at managing that variance helps us catch on to things. Each artist develops their own vocabulary of questions, of ‘interrogating the work’. Knowing accumulates in the body and the memory of past creating-activities. Rule 6 is meant to free us to step into that work.
The technological demands of new media create a paradox of liberated vision straight-jacketed into the strict restrictions of specific platforms. Our vision is pitted against the weird forced limits of “Well we can’t use that tablet because the tech we’re using won’t run an audio signal”. This is the “get it to work first, then optimize it” part of the puzzle.
Rule 8: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes. Here, while creating, we must discard the perspectives prized by creative entrepreneurial culture. We have to relinquish knowing in order to explore and create. Except, of course, for troubleshooting to get the mechanics of the thing to work. One can’t analyze the creative process through the filter of one’s own brand. If you are interested in an art historical vision of your own work you have to be at the end of your career to get that perspective. Let it go. Stay present.
Is this why Hollywood has shot itself in the foot? Creating overanalyzed-while-in-production ‘products’ guaranteed to deliver particular sales results? Perhaps. Athene says ‘Only troubleshoot. Make sure it works. Analyze later.’ If anything, this frees the student from choking on anxiety and doubt and gets them going on actually making things.
Rule 10: We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for x quantities.” John Cage — Get something to work first. Big vision, then build through accretion. Corollary: don’t let features override the meaning in the artwork.
And now I loop back to my friend with the blank litho stone, and consider the missing aspect for Kent/Cage’s list — the grounded context of actual creative practice. We love our ideas, and the processes we tinker with. That devasted student I mentioned? His heart was broken because he really loved what he was making.
Similar to the litho stone, with computers it might be a windows-forced-an update-before-I-saved-my-project-and-I-lost-my-most-important-edits kind of moment. Or else the failure of a thumb drive at a key instant. Or else a software upgrade that breaks a project. There’s something amusing, couching Cage & Kent’s list, that encourages creative fearlessness with thoughts of best practices for backing up, exporting/importing data, etc. Athene takes her cut, particularly when we work this way.
*this definition my own approach to the conversation what is good art
