Comprehending art (daily blog 1 of 30)

I’m trying out an experiment where I write and publish every day for the month of April. This is the first post.

I’m doing this for a few reasons. First, I want to get back to enjoying writing more, and I can only do that if I overcome some of my fears around it. Fears of writing? you might ask, what fears do you have if you’ve already been writing for two years? Yes indeed, I have lots of fears, as does almost everyone else who writes. My fears are a nebulous, hazy amalgam of things like: realizing I’m not actually a good writer, or realizing that I have the latent potential to be a good writer but that I’ve squandered it by being timid, inconsistent, and unambitious. Et cetera.

Something that makes this worse is that right now, the mere thought of publishing anything is terrifying. It’s no longer the case that if I put something out, basically no one will read it. (For a while this was how it went.) This is a very strange feeling: the realization that people I know, and people I don’t know, will actually read what I’m putting out. There’s a vulnerability there, and you know, at this point I’m pretty comfortable being vulnerable on the internet, but still, this is new territory for me. I think it’s interesting that social media has this strange dual character of: on the one hand, you’re speaking to a group of people (sometimes a big one!), but on the other hand, there is no actual crowd of people anywhere, each person is looking at your work in isolation, separate from everyone else. It feels like there’s a crowd of people facing the stage but there is no such crowd, only one person looks at your work at a time.¹

In any case, I think I’ll overcome some of these anxieties by putting things out at a more regular pace, so that publishing no longer feels like such a big deal. I also want to be more consistent with writing than I’ve been in the past, and setting a publishing schedule helps enforce that. (I don’t expect I’ll actually publish every day this month, but if I publish on 23 out of 30 days I’ll be quite happy.) And also, I actually do have a lot to say, and (almost) all of my thoughts are buried in my journal and notes, copious amounts of notes; they are blocked from being shared with the world by perfectionism. Taking lots of time to craft a piece and get feedback on it is good, and I think it’s what you should be doing for your most important work, but I think there is much to gain from occasionally jumping into a burst of extremely fast idea/draft/publish cycles, if for no other reason than getting the writing juices flowing. So let’s begin.

(Given time constraints, these pieces will be fairly unpolished. I’ll publish edited versions of the best pieces on my Substack, if you wanna stay in the loop.)

Day 1: Comprehending Art

I went to an art gallery yesterday: The Drawing Center in downtown Manhattan. It makes me happy that admission to a lot of these art galleries is free. I don’t know how that became a thing, but I’m grateful for it.

The exhibit on display right now is called Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past through the Present. On some level I feel like the exhibit was about drafts and incompleteness. Consider this piece:

A lot of the pieces on display looked like this. Fairly simple-looking work, procedurally. Just pen on paper (or so it seems, I don’t draw). But there’s something I find deeply satisfying about it. There’s a simplicity and innocence to it. It’s just a bunch of lines on a piece of paper. Obviously all art can be boiled down to “lines on a piece of paper”, but in this case the lines aren’t trying to hide this fact from you, they’re brazen and bald-faced about the fact that they’re just lines.

As I was looking at all the pieces I was thinking about the miracle of our ability to comprehend things. You see, there’s a naive view on this kind of art, a view I’ve held in the past, which sounds something like: what is going on here, what is impressive about this? I don’t understand it. I think what’s missing in this view is that it assumes that comprehension is a binary: something either has a meaning—totally obvious, apparent, freely given to us—or it doesn’t have any meaning at all. There is nothing in between.

But of course, seeing meaning and structure in something, in anything—whether it’s lines scrawled on a piece of paper, or bricks arranged in the shape of a building, or atoms of iron and carbon huddled at the sharp edge of a stainless steel knife—is a highly involved and creative act. The patterns and shapes of our world are constructed much more than we believe them to be: there is a constant act of imposition by our brains—both conscious and unconscious—that makes the world intelligible to us.

Recently one of my favorite writers is Brian Cantwell-Smith, who writes a lot about computation, minds, and meaning. He writes about how one of the disorienting features of modern physics is that the reality underneath our familiar everyday perceptions is dizzyingly foreign, intractably complex:

modern physics is alien: a stupefying spray of interpenetrating waves of every conceivable frequency—turbulence, attractors, vortices smashing and piling up on top of each other in dizzying disarray. Imagine falling overboard in a storm—and opening your eyes to nothing but salt and spray. Now subtract you. It’s a little like that out there, only a zillion times worse.

A far cry from tables and chairs, obedient street lights, moribund committees, the PTA. So let’s label this distinction. By the physical world I will mean the almost incomprehensibly strange, object-less world of modern physics. By the material world I’ll mean our familiar day-to-day realm of medium-sized macroscopic objects: people, cars, elections.

The kind of art that was on display at the Drawing Center evades immediate understanding. It is more like the physical world in Cantwell-Smith’s terminology than the material world that we’re more familiar with. Here’s another one of the drawings:

On the one hand, wtf is this? But on the other hand, you could see all kinds of things in this. Even before I make any cognitive interpretation of it, I find that it captures my attention. It means something to me, but not the kind of thing you could create a recognizable photorealistic representation of. I get these feelings that I can’t describe more articulately than a series of adjectives and nouns: broken, worn, ephemeral, trace, heritage.

I have much more to say here—about how my willingness to be more flexible in interpreting art is connected to my desire to go to more art galleries in the first place,² and how all of this relates to Cantwell-Smith’s ideas about meaning-making—but I’ll save it for later this month.