Create, Keep, Destroy?
Create, Keep, Destroy?
We have to make art to become better artists. What do we do with all of it?
I’m moving at the end of the summer, so I spent some time this week going through old art, books, and assorted other creative snippets that can be found in a studio. Scraps of paper with notes on them, postcards from friends, unfinished pieces, promotional brochures from museum visits that were kept for design inspiration because the fonts looked cool.
Most of the stuff had been on walls, or on an overflowing corkboard next to my desktop computer. One of those “here is a place to pin things that are inspiring” and then the inspiration turns into layers that need to be excavated, like you’re an archeologist going through the history of your own creative life.
I filled an enormous cardboard box and moved it from my home office space to my studio. When it was too hot to sleep that night, I thought about the box. If I taped the whole thing up I probably would never give any of it a second thought. In a tired, heat-induced haze, I made a commitment to myself: get rid of it.
The next afternoon, the temperatures rose in the studio, too warm to do any thinking or writing. I eyed the box. Now was the time. In a flurry I went through the whole thing, recycling old papercuts, drawings, random watercolors that I didn’t like. Almost all of it went into the recycling bin. Old printing blocks from over a decade ago? Into the trash can.
It was liberating and depressing all at the same time.
It’s hard for me to go through things—whether it’s scraps of paper, art, books, or old clothes—and not feel overwhelmed by the mass amount of stuff that exists in the world. Even something as innocuous as a blank card has me thinking about how many cards there are out there and how many will make it into the recycling bin. Then I remember that I make and sell cards. It quickly leads to an existential spiral.
I consider what it would be like to be a sculptor, metal worker, or ceramicist and how much physical space and storage that would entail, not to mention the remnants of the trials and error to improve one’s craft. Even just writing this piece and thinking about all the stuff and materials required to make and sell art, I felt a sense of unease in my body, an itchiness, a desire to simply abandon it all.
There’s a conundrum that I just can’t solve. I want fewer “things” and less “stuff,” and I want to consume less and create more. Yet even creating requires consumption (hello art supplies and lovely notebooks and pens that feel good to write with), and creating ultimately results in the production of a thing. No matter how beautiful, how wonderful, how inspiring that thing is, it adds to the accumulation.
Trying to make an organized pile of cardboard—useful for packing art and shipping things—and realizing that a pile of cardboard is just always going to look like a pile of cardboard, I texted a friend: “cleaning up all my art and packaging supplies makes me never want to make any art again.”
After my recycling endeavor—in which I was ruthless, and moved on to other things in the studio that had overstayed their welcome—I followed up with another text: “there will be no retrospective.”
“Often, the decision to demolish is about an artist wanting to take control of his or her legacy before death wrests away that option,” wrote Ann Landi in Art News back in 2012. For me it feels less like wanting to get rid of something in order to have control over whatever is in the future. I just want control over my space—physical and mental—right now.
For my own creative process, I’m hyperconscious of the clarity of an early morning versus the muddle of the afternoon. It’s why almost all my writing happens in the first hours of the day. That time feels open, clean, spacious. In the afternoon, too many things have accumulated, my brain feels full, ideas are ungraspable. I keep thinking of space in the same way. I am no minimalist and I do not keep a clean studio, but I wonder when all those snippets of inspiration and ideas, unfinished projects and old pieces of art, become a hinderance rather than encouragement. If they’re the proverbial afternoon. What if our own work takes up so much space that it blocks us, holds us back?
The only way to become an artist is to make art, the only way to become a writer is to write. Making “bad” work is an essential part of that process. We have to learn, we have to work through ideas that don’t go anywhere.
The question is: where does all of that work go?
***
Anyone who writes on a digital device for their creative medium has the luxury of shoving their musings into the cloud somewhere. It may be invisible, but it still takes up space. It’s estimated that total global data storage will exceed 200 zettabytes by 2025. A zettabyte is 1 billion gigabytes, and you don’t even need to know how many zeros are in that (there are so many) to know that it’s a lot. “Digital hoarding” as it’s now called has a significant impact on the planet. Data centers, which are accountable for 2.5% of all human-induced carbon dioxide, have a larger carbon footprint than the aviation industry, and while things like AI and cryptocurrency bear the brunt of it, even our old drafts and unorganized digital photos and documents do contribute.
The global art market requires its own mass storage scheme—you have to house all of those potential investments somewhere. A New York Times article from 2018 lists some of the sizes of the spaces owned by concierge storage services for art, fashion, and design: 520,000 square feet, 150,000 square feet, 1.2 million square feet. Museums do it too, storing enormous collections. The British Museum only shows about 80,000 objects out of the 8 million that it owns—about 1% of its entire collection.
I think of my house and studio, which together come out to about 900 square feet total, and consider how many sketchbooks I can cram into a bookcase.
***
"My canvases might be taking up space under my bed, but one day, someone’s going to find them. And every time someone looks at them, they’re going to smile," artist Fernando DeOliveira told WBUR. I have several storage boxes full of framed pieces of Women’s Wisdom Project sitting under my bed. I’d love to be as optimistic as DeOliveira about how someone might engage with them in the future, but right now, you know what would make me smile? Not having them under the bed. Sometimes I just want get rid of them entirely. Burn the art, give the frames away, call it a day. Move on to the next creative endeavor, freed from the weight of the past.
Throwing away, or destroying your artwork, might seem sacrilegious to some. I get a kick out of doing it. It’s very liberating. Many artists through history have taken a similar approach. Their reasons vary—often they’re plagued by self-doubt, the weight of perfectionism, and their own expectations—but the result is the same: the final works disappear into thin air.
Agnes Martin would destroy canvases with knives and box cutters, and much of her early work has been lost to her own proclivity for editing out what she didn’t like. In 1908, Claude Monet had been diligently at work for three years on a series of new paintings for an exhibition. In a last minute decision, he decided they weren’t good enough, and destroyed them all. People were enraged, but one person, impressed by Monet’s commitment to ensuring the quality of his own work, told The New York Times, “it is a pity, perhaps, that some other painters do not do the same.”
When I teach papercutting workshops, I always tell people that if they really don’t like what they make, they can pitch it in a fire. I love deleting a paragraph in a word processing document, but you know what feels even better? Throwing something you’ve written into flames. There’s the sweet taste of finality. No return.
“If writing is slow, quiet, creative work, burning pages is quick, loud, and flagrantly destructive. Where once there was something, afterward there is nothing. There’s something irresistibly dramatic about the act of applying a naked flame to the corner of a page and watching the paper disappear in a sheath of fire,” Alex George wrote for Lit Hub. “And while words deleted on a screen usually live on in a cloud somewhere, when pages are burned, they stay burned. There’s no coming back from the ashes.”
Franz Kafka burned almost all of his work during his lifetime. Barbara Molinard, a close friend of Marguerite Duras, would write a story, tear each page into pieces and put them on a pile on her desk. The pile would eventually make its way into the fire. Once the pieces of the story had burn, Molinard would rewrite them. Duras even had to take her friend’s stories to the publisher in order to make sure that they saw the light of day (published in English as Panics).
Naomi Hoffman wrote this about Molinard’s practice.
“Surely destruction offered something else, something that publishing her work could not: release from her frustrated toil. The chance to begin anew, at the top of a blank page. The possibility of conjuring from nothing a singular, stark sentence.”
In researching this essay, I read about a BBC journalist going to Belgian painter Luc Tuymans’ studio:
“…he told me that his $1m-plus paintings only ever took a day to paint. That is his way. Tuymans destroys his art if he does not like it. When he returns in the morning he either decides to send the finished painting to his dealer or destroy it. Fair enough. But that's tantamount to trashing a million bucks!”
A few things here come to mind:
$1 million for a painting. The art market is weird, a lot to unpack there.
Tuymans is honing in on what he likes. Lesson: if you aren’t interested in your own work, let it go. Make what you want. Move on.
Oh, how we are attached to money as a society, our only gauge of what’s “valuable.” When I read the description, my immediate thought was not about how he was or wasn’t trashing something that might or might not go for $1 million. I was just thinking about how freeing it is to make something and then to be able to let it go.
Of course, if everyone had destroyed their drafts, notes, and letters, we’d miss out on some of the creative insight and wisdom from across the ages. Like many of you, I love the newsletter
by . Silvia Plath’s illustrated notebooks! Julia Child’s culinary notes! Beatrix Potter’s sketchbooks! It’s all so lovely and inspiring, and makes me want to take more notes, make more random sketches. But whenever I come across someone else’s notes or powerful insights that were simply a jumble of words accumulated in the margins, I can’t help but thinking, “where was all of that stored?”I look at my own piles, and wonder if we suffer from hoarding our own ideas. If we hold too tightly to what we’ve created, and what we might gain if we loosened a little bit, let go a little more?
Even if we scrap an old piece of work, recycle a piece of paper with a jumble of notes, are we ever fully getting rid of our underlying ideas? We may not remember the exact wording or composition that we came up with once it has left our hands, but that doesn’t erase it from our muscle memory.
To make “bad” art, to write an assortment of “bad” sentences—it’s all just practice. Whether or not we keep what we came up with, the practice has already been done, already been logged in the brain and the body. Already information for the next piece.
That’s what I’ll tell myself at least as I take on this weekend’s creative project: a dump run with all my recycling bins.
After all, there’s a burn ban.
-Anna
You must clean and arrange your studio in a way that will forward a quiet state of mind. This cautious care of atmosphere is really needed to show respect for the work. Respect for art work and everything connected with it, one’s own and that of everyone else, must be maintained and forwarded.
No disrespect, carelessness or ego [and] selfishness must be allowed to interfere if it can be prevented. Indifference and antagonism are easily detected — you should take such people out immediately. Just turning the paintings to the wall is not enough. You yourself should not go to your studio in an indifferent or fighting mood.
Reading: I just finished The Improbability of Love which was a fun read if you like taking an over-the-top fictional step into the upper echelons of the art world, complete with Russian oligarchs and dark secrets.
I really appreciated this essay by
Fumi Imamura’s painted papercuts which are incredibly stunning (there’s a video of Fumi’s work in that link that’s worth watching).
Heather Bird Harris’ new Earthseed work, made using inks made from walnut and clay found in Atlanta, Georgia, watercolor, salt, and water.
Upcoming Creative Fuel Workshops + Events
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The Fall 2024 session of DIVE writing group is now open. Gather together with facilitator
Kerri Anne
and other likeminded souls and make fall a season of writing. I know I know, it feels far away, but think of it like an early present to yourself. More info + sign up.
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Thank you…I needed to read this. My “studio” is a disaster…boxes full of stuff, piles of fabric, trolleys of art supplies, two cabinets of yearn, baskets of ephemera, two bookcases of knitting magazines and books that I haven’t looked at in years (because day job).
I struggle when I try to clean and organize. I’m attached to the *potential* of the object. “It’s still good (or useful or whatever)!” And then I set it aside to be used later, which never seems to come.
Ahh the sort and purge, it’s my heat retreat also. We hope our house will sell this summer and getting ahead of moving out day is good. Books to sort through and see what I can pay forward and yes the spring clean of work that has sat and sat, words to be revisited and still gathering cobwebs in corners. Purge and release - to shed, to let go and make room for something new. Thanks Anna- hope you’re staying in PNW