Summertime reading - Books on the creative life

Summer is finally here and if you need some recommendations for your reading list, here are some of my highlights.

I read a lot and underline sentences that resonate with me and if they are particularly special they end up in one of my notebooks and accompany me for a while. 

Pablo Picasso on Success

“Well, success is an important thing! It’s often been said that an artist ought to work for himself, for the “love of art,” that he ought to have contempt for success. Untrue! An artist needs success. And not only to live off it, but especially to produce his body of work. Even a rich painter has to have success. Few people understand anything about art, and not everyone is sensitive to painting. Most judge the world of art by success. Why, then,leave success to “best-selling painters”? Every generation has its own. But where is it written that success must always go to those who cater to the public’s taste? For myself, I wanted to prove that you can have success in spite of everyone, without compromise. Do you know what? It’s the success I had when I was young that became my wall of protection. The blue period, the rose period, they were screens that shielded me.”

In: Brassaï: Conversations with Picasso, Univ of Chicago Press: 1999

 

Laurie Simmons on Critique

When you’re younger and get a bad review, you think they hate you. It’s the recovery time that changes. You have to know how to pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and get back to work. That’s the key to maturity. It’s what divides the artists that do what they do from those who are not up to it.

[…]

When you are younger, you think about eradicating self-doubt. But, as you age, you understand that it is part of the rhythm of being an artist. As I get older, I have developed my ability to examine self-doubt in private, to play around with it, rather than push it away.

From: Sarah Thornton: 33 Artists in 3 acts, Granta Books: 2015

 

Molly Crabapple On the role art can take during these times

“Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they're right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can't take on swords, let alone Predator drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.

Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I'm a cynic, I believe these things are all we have.” 

In: Molly Crabapple, Drawing Blood, Harper: 2015.

Olivia Laing on loneliness

“Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they're right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can't take on swords, let alone Predator drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.

Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I'm a cynic, I believe these things are all we have.” 

[...]

"There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings — depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage — are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last."

In: Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Picador: 2016.

 

Amanda Palmer

On Becoming an artist:

"There's no "correct path" to becoming a real artist. You might think you'll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it's all bullshit, and it's all in your head. You're an artist when you say you are. And you're a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected". (p. 43)

On Various forms of exchange:

"These are new forms of patronage, and it's messy; the artists, and the patrons, are making up the rules as they go along. But whether these artists are using crowdfunding ("front me some money so that I can Make A Thing!"), subscription services ("pay me some money every month so I can Make A Thing!'), or pay-per-piece-of-content pledge services ('pay me some money every time I Make A Thing!'), the fundamental building block of all these relationships boils down to the same, simple thing: trust."

On nasty trolls and hate mail

"We got a lot of fan mail. Some of it was hate mail, and we built a special page on our website to feature the worst of it. I hand selected some choice excerpts . . . The hate mail page became the most heavily trafficked spot on our website. People started writing me to thank me for being brave enough to display the nastiness. But I didn't feel brave; it felt like the only option, the only way I could deal with the pain. I still practice this same style of Internet jiujitsu to this day: I grab the hate and air it out, try to laugh at it, and share it back out into the world, so it doesn't eat me alive." (113) . . . The blog (Which I titled "On Internet Hatred: Please Inquire Within") still lives online and now has more than two thousand comments. Every time someone reads it and adds their own story, the net continues to tighten . . .The blog started feeding my songwriting." (p. 129).

If you want to support Amanda Palmer's work consider have a look at her Patreon page.

Experience Amanda Palmer's creativity in this beautiful conversation with Debbie Millman.

Marina Abramović's manifesto

AN ARTIST’S CONDUCT IN HIS LIFE:

An artist should not lie to himself or others
An artist should not steal ideas from other artists
An artist should not compromise for himself or in regards to the art market
An artist should not kill other human beings
An artist should not make himself into an idol…
An artist should avoid falling in love with another artist

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO SILENCE:

An artist has to understand silence
An artist has to create a space for silence to enter his work
Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO SOLITUDE:

An artist must make time for the long periods of solitude
Solitude is extremely important
Away from home,
Away from the studio,
Away from family,
Away from friends
An artist should stay for long periods of time at waterfalls
An artist should stay for long periods of time at exploding volcanoes
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at fast-running rivers
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the horizon where the ocean and sky meet
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the stars in the night sky

In: Marina Abramović, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir, Crown Archetype, 2016

Complement the reading of Abramović's memoir with the wonderful conversation between her and Debbie Harry, the frontwoman for Blondie, where the two discuss reaching new audiences, diary writing, and doubt. 

Sarah Lewis on failure and inevitable incompletion

"The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it’s hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else — a learning experience, a trial, a reinvention — no longer the static concept of failure."

"We thrive, in part, when we have purpose, when we still have more to do. The deliberate incomplete has long been a central part of creation myths themselves. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women sought imperfection, giving their textiles and ceramics an intended flaw called a “spirit line” so that there is a forward thrust, a reason to continue making work. Nearly a quarter of twentieth century Navajo rugs have these contrasting-color threads that run out from the inner pattern to just beyond the border that contains it; Navajo baskets and often pottery have an equivalent line called a “heart line” or a “spirit break.” The undone pattern is meant to give the weaver’s spirit a way out, to prevent it from getting trapped and reaching what we sense is an unnatural end.

There is an inevitable incompletion that comes with mastery. It occurs because the greater our proficiency, the more smooth our current path, the more clearly we may spot the mountain that hovers in our gaze. “What would you say increases with knowledge?” Jordan Elgrably once asked James Baldwin. “You learn how little you know,” Baldwin said."

From: Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, Simon & Schuster: 2014.