One Hand Gesticulating

[rinue]

Ciro has insisted that the plants be named, so they are now Oregano Port Arthur, Gentleman Basil, and Rosemary Rose Marie.

It looks like I'm going to be leading a number of free open-to-all workshops at the Dallas Museum of Art in April, where my key value seems to be not in passing on film techniques but in showing how I, an artist, approach art, both my own and others'. It's easy to demonstrate expertise in something concrete, like using a camera. It's hard to demonstrate an expertise in my basic approach to the world. I suppose I have to rely on the intrinsic value of the approch. To steal a page from Protestantism, not me but God through me. What matters is not ways I am different from other people but the ways we can all be our best.

I've been asked to come up with a two-line statement that represents my approach to art, and I'm a long way from getting there. So far, I've managed to get the core of it down to this:

Art - like science, business, or parenting - demands curiosity, rigor, and compassion.
Curiosity is the root of innovation.
Rigor is the foundation of craft.
Compassion forms the bond between artist and audience.
When art fails, it is usually a failure of one of these three things.
This is not to suggest that failure is always preventable or frightening.
Failure can be a new source of compassion and curiosity, and rigor should never become a source of brittleness.

I don't know how to make that shorter or whether it really gets at everything. I will have to dig into my Zen Koan mind.

Comments

[oddment.livejournal.com]

Man! I sympathize, though I am just purely bad at making brief statements. Does it go on some sort of syllabus, where you could extrapolate and define your terms underneath it, or do you have to fit it into limited space as part of a workshop description?

The middle line beginning "When art fails..." strikes me as...almost the hinge in it; in essence what I am getting from it is "Here are the things art needs. When art fails one of these things has failed, but failure isn't necessarily terrible because it will sometimes lead you to those things." But I think the description of what you mean by compassion, curiosity, and rigor is part of what makes the whole statement feel accessible perhaps, or at least not particularly intimidating or scary, without making it sound like you approach it lightly.
...
This whole "here is my random attempt at reading comprehension" thing is probably not much more helpful than suggesting that you use run-on sentences and a really small font, though, in which case I apologize and feel appropriately silly.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

I definitely also wondered whether I could get away with using a small font and run-on sentences. I have, for now, settled for taking into account the hinge you mention and just using the first and the last line. I do hate losing the definitions of curiosity, rigor, etc., but am hopeful that people will extrapolate correctly from the words themselves. Gah! Why can't I write something the length of the Declaration of Independence? That's reasonable, right?