Less is more*

For years and years, I would quote the great Taoist philosopher Lao Tse, saying "to define is to limit." (And I can't lie: there's a certain agreeable satisfaction to ocasionally whipping out a germane arcane quotation from an ancient eastern holy man.) To define is to limit. It's a notion that almost every thoughtful writer or visual artist (at least those who are engaged in the creation/communication of metaphor) must consider in the course of their practice . . . how much do I give away versus how much should I not. And exactly how much credit should I give the viewer/reader? For me, early on, I gave my hypothetical reader a name: "the thoughtful viewer" and my paintings were made with this person in mind . . . mildly educated, not too daft, but elementally curious about things -- puzzles, how shit works, metaphors, etc. That's my viewer, akin to Seymour Glass' "fat lady" but, perhaps, a little more on the ball. Anyway, it turns out that it wasn't Lao Tse at all; it was Oscar Wilde who gave us that quotation that I'd misattributed for so many years and which popped into my head this morning in the bath when I was reading a water-logged New Yorker and found this:

from The New Yorker, Dec. 10, 2018, article by Joan Acocella:

"The book artist Edward Gorey, when asked about his tastes in literature, would sometimes mention his mixed feelings about Thomas Mann: “I dutifully read ‘The Magic Mountain’ and felt as if I had t.b. for a year afterward.” As for Henry James: “Those endless sentences. I always pick up Henry James and I think, Oooh! This is wonderful! And then I will hear a little sound. And it’s the plug being pulled. . . . And the whole thing is going down the drain like the bathwater.” Why? Because, Gorey said, James (like Mann) explained too much: “I’m beginning to feel that if you create something, you’re killing a lot of other things. And the way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down, I feel that I am doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader’s mind.” He thought that he might have adopted this way of working from Chinese and Japanese art, to which he was devoted, and which are famous for acts of brevity. Many Gorey books are little more than thirty pages long: a series of illustrations, one per page, accompanied, at the lower margin or on the facing page, by maybe two or three lines of text, sometimes verse, sometimes prose."


I love the way he puts it. The fresh spin (for me): "if you create something, you’re killing a lot of other things". It's a new way of thinking about this thought that I've been thinking about  since I began my career as an artist. It's even the subject(ish) of the funism manifesto, (click there to read) which is entitled "clarity versus poetry".

A related thought comes up in John Guare's wonderful "Six degrees of separation", when one of the main characters, Flan, an art dealer, says this:

 Flan Kittredge : This is what I dreamt. I didn't dream, so much as realize this. I feel so close to the paintings. I'm not just selling, like, pieces of meat. I remembered why I loved paintings in the first place, what got me into this. I thought... dreamt... remembered... how easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months, and then, one day, he loses it. Loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting. I remembered asking my kids' second-grade teacher: 'Why are all your students geniuses? Look at the first grade - blotches of green and black. The third grade - camouflage. But your grade, the second grade, Matisses, every one. You've made my child a Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me into the second grade. What is your secret?' 'I don't have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them.' 'I dreamt of colour. I dreamt of our son's pink shirt. I dreamt of pinks and yellows. And the new Van Gogh the Museum of Modern Art got. And the Irises that sold for $53.5 million. And, wishing a Van Gogh was mine, I looked at my English hand-lasted shoes, and thought of Van Gogh's tragic shoes, and remembered me as I was-a painter losing a painting.'

I could go on and on and on about this, but, you know, that would take all the poetry out of it. Which is my natural propensity: to over-explain, to repeat to the point of redundancy. To go on. Needlessly.  My natural propensity and, quite possibly, the enemy of art. Did I already say that?


*In some cases, sure, like this one. In so many other cases, that overused phrase is just bullshit at a minimum and, at the extreme . . .  manipulative pablum meant to sway the masses into being happy with their underfunded attempts at emotional/financial/intellectual sufficiency. (But don't get me started on the sad state of this self-destructing late-stage capitalist experiment of ours.)