Specialization and Humility

Artists are not, by nature, specialists, and I think this is especially true of anyone who identifies as a sculptor. When you're an artist, the world is yours for the chewing, digesting and regurgitating. And because it's just art--because it's supposed to be evocative and not necessarily practical and because there are no rules--nobody's going to call shenanigans on you for being ignorant, or even just overly facile.

Sculptors take this tendency to a uniquely baroque place when they assert that not only can they know and talk about anything, but that they can make anything work in real space and time. Fuck illusions on a picture plane! We can assemble that shit! The sculptors I know (myself not just included but first on line) fancy themselves: fantastic cooks with an impressive mastery of basic and advanced kitchen technique; riggers who are better than professional riggers because they are creative enough to lift very funny shapes; amateur electricians and auto mechanics and knowers of almanacs of information. We can build your house; tune your bicycle; teach you how to compost and deliver a sermonette on the way the earth tilts on its axis, and how this affects the way your plants are growing in your backyard. Bring home the bacon AND fry it up in a pan, all the while explaining why this yoga asana and not that one for your situation. Why this is the best method for parallel parking.

We are an insufferable people.

So I have to bow my head and say to you softly while looking at my shoes that I have been learning a valuable lesson about how great specialization is--how well it works. I am going to tell you even though I can't talk about it without admitting that I don't already know everything. That all my experience making funny shapes does not always translate into better.

Friends and regular readers know that I bought a house last year and have been struggling with it ever since. And like manna from heaven, I recently received a familial gift that resulted in hiring a contractor. And all I have to say is that these guys are much, much more competent than we were! Part of this, I am sure, is an inherent gift. But it's also because they've done this many more times than once!

I know, I know. This does not blow your mind. But it does mine, and here's why. I pride myself on being extremely curious about the world I live in, and about being able to figure just about anything out. And I tend to move from a very specific intellectual conceit:

That true wisdom is to know nothing.

That is how I make my art; it is how I get up in the morning with a smile on my face; it is how I get myself into these crazy fixes like owning this house or making this gigantic sculpture or whatever, and it is how I get myself out. When you don't know anything, you have to work so hard and be so patient and listen so well that only excellence can result in that kind of highly-attenuated state of mind. That's my dogma!

But that's not really true. Not always. Because not only does doing things inevitably create knowledge that you wind up holding onto and bugging your friends with, but for all my knowledge of what different fertilizers do and what a transmission is and the geometry of cranes... gardeners, mechanics and riggers know more than I do. Not-knowing is a great way to approach a sculpture. But sculpture is not always like life.

Again, regular readers and friends know that I am a real cocky motherfucker about drawing parallels between art and life. But maybe a global kibbutz isn't the only way to learn how to manage our garbage. Maybe it is more likely that garbage specialists will save us.

And maybe for all my talk about making and doing, I am a specialist myself. Perhaps my goal should not be to get everyone's hands dirty, but to convey the essence of dirty hands to clean people.

Like anyone, I hate spaces between things and want everything to be perfectly unambiguous and linked. I'd rather live in a simple world, in which we all knew everything from direct experience. But that is a Little House On The Prairie kind of existence that we can't have back and probably shouldn't even want. I mean, I don't know enough about foreign policy to fix the genie we unleashed in the Middle East, and I don't know enough about sequestering CO2 or hybrid engines or climatology to fix global warming. And the more I mouth off, the stupider it sounds to say that ignorance is a legit strategy for fixing it.

The bottom line is that there is a gap between those who know and those who don't. And I have been using sculpture as a way to try to make that gap go away, but the world is more complex than that.

Comments

[Michael Konrad]

Deborah, this is a great post.
I get what your saying about artists not being specialists (although I think that's really only true for the best kind of artists). But I think artists are still specialists in their own way, filling a certain role in society. I'm not sure exactly what that role is (perhaps that of professional questioner or pioneer?).

I've been thinking a lot lately about the process of making specific things without specialized skills. It can't really be done properly, but artists are sort of specialized generalists who figure it out and in the process acquire those skills. This post gave me the jumpstart I needed to put some of those thoughts together on my own blog.

[21st Century Plowshare]

Thanks for visiting, Michael.

I think that the role of artist is really unclear for a reason.

On one hand, we need art. We really do. I honestly believe that not valuing the arts makes us an increasingly stupid people, less and less capable of seeing past our own immediate needs.

On the other, the trajectory of the modern/postmodern artist is about the avant garde, which is a self-annihilating concept.

Sure. You start out ahead of the curve--daring, outside the box. But as outside becomes convention, what was once ahead becomes mere manner and increasing irrelevance to a larger culture.

Then there's this idea that artists should be doing what they do entirely for their own sakes--that usefulness or goodness makes art suffer. Roberta Smith hands this maxim out at least once a quarter, and I see what she means by it

(art is not activism, for example, and art with a specific agenda often suffers for its specificity)

But there's something about saying that artists should not be concerned with meaningfulness or goodness or the world at large that makes it easy to come to a set of rash conclusions: that art should therefore be about all that is bad. Or that it should be meaningless. Or hermetic.

Nothing is further from the truth! To be meaningful art must sit there and do the voodoo that it does so well, without being "about" an issue. Without taking a side, becoming propaganda, or otherwise sliding into dogma.

But of course it still has to do that voodoo.

And I think that good art is a matter of being very much engaged with the world it sits in, and should very much have a vector--a reason for being.

Not that this answers your comment :)

To speak to what you're saying about specific things without specialized skills, I have a lot to say about that but don't want to step on your toes. I'll go read your blog first!

[Oriane Stender]

On the role of the artist:
In ancient societies, art was a part of the various rituals of a community. Harvest rituals, coming of age rituals, courtship practices, marriage ceremonies, healing practices, blessings of new homes and businesses - all of these involved specific actions or performances (storytelling, dances, masks, costumes, magical objects, prepared potions) - this was all art, but the art was part of the larger social structure and there might not have been such a thing as an "artist". As organized religion took over most of that performance of ritual, art increasingly was made in service to religion. Now that religion is less an integral part of our lives (I know, according to statistics most of the world's people are religious, but in most Western industrialized cultures, people may go to church, or believe in god, but it is not the central belief system guiding their lives that it used to be) and since science has replaced many of the unknowns, there are fewer of those rituals left (and most of them are now largely symbolic, rather than truly belief-centered), and art has less of a function intrinsic to society. Now you can be a designer, architect, wedding-dress maker, or a florist or an event planner, but these are all specific jobs that fill a commercial need. So now we have the advent of the fine artist, who, without an obvious sense of purpose, without being a valued member of society, is left to figure out or create her own role, her own purpose, and is constantly justifying or redefining it as she goes along because her work doesn't answer any obvious need on the part of anyone else.

This was a bit of ramble; I was sort of thinking about it as I wrote, I hope it makes some sense.

[Oriane Stender]

I guess what I was getting at is that art used to be both part of a shared spiritual practice and part of a community's everyday functioning; an essential part of life. But now that it has been untethered from its functional role in the life of a larger group, the individual who feels the need to make art is forced to continually confront the question of why she does what she does, what contribution does it make to others, is she doing it just for herself, and if so, is that okay, is she part of a greater system or has she stepped outside the system to do this irrational thing, etc.

[Ethan]

Your characteristics of a sculptor cracks me up (& describes me to a 't')... I'm forwarding it to my girlfriend to brighten her day :)

E