Avoiding "The Clench"
Can you tell which of these embroideries was worked from a plan and which was worked spontaneously? The answer is below.
My favorite art supply is randomness. This is a quippy thing I like to say, and it is a true story — but it obscures a common tension I’ve wrestled with throughout my creative careers: planning versus spontaneity.
When I teach writing, this issue invariably comes up. Usually I characterize it as “plotters versus pantsers” —those who make an outline versus those who go by the seat of their pants. My students are invariably fascinated by the discussion, and I’m not surprised by that. It’s so foundational and there are many strong, sensible, tested and ultimately conflicting points of view.
In visual arts, this is more about making a sketch or mock up ahead of the work itself, but the same principles apply.
As in most things, the rigid binary choice isn’t a real thing. In writing, I found that depending on the stage of the process and the genre I’m working in, there are times when it makes sense to plot and times when it makes sense to “pants.”
I am personally someone who truly loves to organize and design processes. I am also someone who can feel strangled by a plan.
In my visual art work, the balance tips decisively toward improvisation and spontaneity, a decision I recently had an opportunity to revisit.
In Which a Teacher Makes Me Nauseous
I arrived at this approach thanks in part to one of the least pleasant art classes I ever experienced. Some ten years ago, I took a class at SVA with a Big Whoop Illustrator, who shall remain nameless. He required an extensive planning process going from concept to sketch to painting, and said the goal was when you got to producing the final work you’d have no decisions left to make.
I was so repelled, I was nauseous. To me, trying to execute a plan perfectly is another way of saying: your only job is to try not to fuck it all up. When I work in this way, I feel “clenchy” which is my technical term for tense, anxious, and bored. If this is what it took to succeed in art, I just wasn’t going to be able to hack it. I’d burnt out in magazine journalism pleasing a series of exacting editors, my spirit could take no more.
Luckily I found other points of view.
For example: I strongly resonated with this story from the superlative painter Yvegenia Baras:
“ In graduate school I sketched ideas in detail and then carried out the work. I said to myself that I want to tell this particular story and then I tried to narrate it. What resulted was more of an illustration, which is not what I am interested in making. It was such an A to B process.Meaning was prescribed, glued to the piece in its initial stages of being. The attachment was forced: This piece is about this. It was so literal and dictatorial. I became uninterested in speaking this way. I am much more interested in meaning arising and growing through the process of making."
And this from Philip Guston:
"I want to make something I never saw before and be changed by it.”
I literally have a whole file of quotes like this that I use to self-soothe when I lose trust in my process.
Now, in fairness to the Big Whoop Illustrator, he had to work collaboratively with editorial clients who are by definition directing the process. Also, they clearly hurt him. This made him very risk averse. (Also a little mean, a description that I think would surprise him.). Plus, he came in the pre-digital era, when making any changes to an illustration would require a total do over.
But of course this is still the case for any non-digital work.
So friends, here is where I’ve landed. if you are wanting to produce a final result of of quality, and you rule out luck as a strategy, you have two ways to get there:
1- You plan as much as possible out ahead of time.
OR
2- You have to be willing to undo and redo, a lot if necessary. And/or work in multiples which is a different way of getting at the same thing.
Pick your poison.
Looking for trouble
For myself, when I’m working a visual medium, I’d rather redo, work in multiples and generally problem solve most of the time. I actually like getting into trouble and finding my way out of it, and often make interesting discoveries along the way.
It helps that I don’t accept commissions, don’t make work to order, and probably never will again (see previous comment about magazine journalism experience. ) This isn’t to say I’m uninterested in selling my work, or am indifferent to what “the market” and its gatekeepers want.
But at this point it’s better for me to see what comes out of my process and then find an audience that would be receptive to it. I’d rather take the risk of ending up with something no one wants, then to have made something to order that degraded a bit of my soul along the way.*
And sure, there are times that planning ahead is an operational necessity: working with a material that is expensive or rare comes to mind, coordinating with others, pursuing a limited access experience, doing something upon which lives depend. But here’s the issue that I think is at the heart of it: who is the planning for? Is it for the artist? Or is it actually another piece of marketing?
The “clench” comes for me when the plan is a promise I’ve made to someone else, a set of expectations I’ve committed to before I’ve actually made the thing.**
But. plan for myself that lets me maximize my time, think things through a bit more in advance, or not be stressed out — that’s a different animal all together.
I still don’t love it, but I can live with it.
Notes:
This is part of a small series reflecting on a month of embroidery experiments. The next part examines what happened when I experimented with making a plan. The last part looks at technical learnings.
*If I had to work on the basis of a pitch, I think I would try to work as improvisationally as I could and THEN backtrack to a sketch to present.
The answer to the question of which embroidery pictured above was planned is… neither! At least in my work, some of the most structured and representational pieces have been worked without a plan.