The ability to look deeply
is the root of creativity.
To see past the ordinary and mundane
and get to what might otherwise be invisible.
- Rick Rubin, The Creative Act
Last week I had the honour and privilege of participating in a Kenyon Review workshop. In one session, our tutor Ada Zhang shared a piece by Mary Gaitskill entitled ‘The Deracination of Literature’. It’s an intense title, but beneath it, there is a lot of very valuable insight into the role of context in good writing. Through this discussion, Gaitskill raises an interesting point about artistic looking.
It comes in response to a student who doesn’t wish to describe the appearance of a person in fear of engaging with contemporary beauty standards in a negative way. Gaitskill says she understands why you might not wish to be rude or improper towards a subject, but suggests this “confuses social looking with artistic looking.”
She says:
Artistic looking is about care and respect. It is like saying: I see this human in my mind’s eye and this particular human is worth the most precise attention I can give them.
I was struck by this simple characterisation of this experience: There is something particular about the type of looking that artists do. Having said this, I’m not sure I agree with Gaitskill that social looking is always so clearly separated from artistic looking, in that I never assume my ‘looking’ is without its social conditioning - of course it is, and that does not absolve me of the responsibility to question how I see things and why I see them that way. We see things as we are, after all, not as they are.
But the idea that care and respect must come first is close to the way I hope to approach ‘artistic looking’. This care and respect is not a given; it is its own process. A ‘precise attention’, as Gaitskill calls it, requires a sense not only of curiosity and focus on a subject, but also of a deeper awareness of the conversation we are always having with anything we pay attention to - as we bring our context invariably to each and every subject. How can we ensure we are giving a subject the right care and respect if we do not know ourselves or understand our own context (i.e. what we bring to the fore in our own act of looking)?
This reminds me of the words of Audre Lorde in The Erotic as Power:
“To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused and the absurd.”
It seems to me that going deeper into our own feelings is inherently tied to our ability to ‘look’ more clearly. Leaning into the discomfort this might provoke becomes a necessary risk of treating others with more care and respect, as we treat our own histories, our own biases, and our own baggage, as worthy of interrogation. I do not wish to be reduced, and I have no wish to reduce others. To give others their due, I must engage deeply not only with the process of artistic looking, but also by honing a self-awareness and interior looking that can enable additional clarity and nuance.
In a more simple sense, Rick Rubin says:
“If we aren’t looking for clues, they’ll pass by without us ever knowing… When something out of the ordinary happens, ask yourself why. What’s the message? What could be the greater meaning? …An integral part of the artist’s work is deciphering these signals. The more open you are, the more clues you will find [and you will] begin to rely on answers arising within you.”
Noticing itself is a practice - as is noticing how you notice. The artist’s work is to go deep in two directions: outwardly and inwardly. This is a difficult thing and often cannot be achieved simultaneously. But it does sound like work on yourself will ultimately benefit your art.
Finally, to pick up on something Robin Wall Kimmerer said of the importance of ritual (which ‘looking’ or ‘paying attention’ invariably is):
It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine. The coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle…
There is a lot to be ‘seen’ in the mundane. The clues Rubin mentions are everywhere. ‘Artistic looking’ is hard to hone in a world where we ‘take in’ (rather than ‘see’) thousands of images a day. When I was in Finland for a month without a phone or internet, I discovered that one strange after-effect of this experience was a sudden and marked improvement in my recall of language - and not just recall, but the entire act of plucking the right (and most interesting) word in the right moment. This sounds simplistic, and yet, the huge amount of noise we experience in a single day in the modern world does make it hard to focus either on what we really feel or what is really going on around us. It becomes harder to access the feeling, and to name it.
How do we practice ‘artistic' looking’ in a world where speed is everything, noise is everywhere, and there is a growing fear of ‘getting it wrong’ before we’ve even thought about trying to get it right? This is clearly a challenge - but ‘artistic looking’ has always been a challenge. This is not new; though the bar has certainly shifted, and we would be right to question whether someone is exerting care and respect, there must be some room for development and experimentation with this skill. And so much of this will begin with ourselves.
Until next time.
Be well,
CCx