Tom Waits said in an interview somewhere (can’t find it online but have a copy of this so I think it’s in here) that the problem with having some deep familiarity with a tool or instrument (talking there about guitar as a songwriting tool) is that after a while your hands keep automatically going back to the same chords on the fretboard like old dogs returning to a resting place.
There is a descending riff from C to E minor to A minor that I learnt in a guitar lesson in my early teens, basis of many acoustic folk tunes, that was so magical to me when I learnt to play it that the imprint of that first joy has led me back to variations of it for decades. Admittedly I’ve got a lot out of those changes over time on lots of different musical devices but they are also hard to avoid whenever I pickup a fretted instrument.
On one hand this is just craft skill, a thing you are fluent in and know how to do automatically, a little like body memory. The thing that allows you to drive a car or use a fork without thinking too much about it, the basis of much in our daily autopilot. On the other, you can also view these these techniques and habits as zombie ideas, still trying to animate whatever you are trying to do long past their useful lifespan. These are commonplace in mental models of finance and markets (this Krugman book is a heroic attempt to unpack them) which perhaps share with creative arts practice deep unknowable uncertainties about what might happen next at any moment. Both being so in the moment for different reasons that any scaffolding from the past that might guide the future or the next decision can be a welcome life raft. Though possibly a counterproductive one that’ll just lead you down the same paths.
Over the past few years between working on more archive derived projects I’ve produced a series of video works that lean into a more abstract visual music style approach to moving image. Part of a landscape painting tradition is how I often think of them, the source material is often field footage of flora textures, rivers and clouds. Then so processed in coding, scripting and software that they can appear to be entirely synthetic, procedural pieces made formally from carefully defined processes.
Given the mind bending open ended complexity of the layered techniques, I sometimes wish the outcomes and ways there were more defined, but the long way round seems to be the only satisfying way to stay true to the feel of the underlying imagery. Even though I can easily see traces of this imagery going way back in my video work in particular it seems often that inventing these complex winding processes is a way to get lost in a mode that breaks the habitual way things have always been done.
At this point in making things there are now some fairly deep craft skills in lots of different areas and fields with some tools I’ve been using for decades. Circumventing this baggage while keeping the long accumulated fluidity of practice that this history brings you can be a complicated dance. Ways forward always appear but you never know from where or who or how they might emerge.
The pic above is taken from the Chair (see previous post) where as pov pictured I’m sitting & staring at 10 Perfect Storms which went out to a couple of shows in Europe late last year. That piece seems now to be the end of that body of work, though that is a very recent realisation. The next thing is certainly coming, appearing in titles and phrases, it’s bulk still underwater there somewhere. No doubt full of hundreds of the previous things that I didn’t know were connected.
Leave a Reply