I did not do my art today

photo by the author’s daughter

I’m inspired by Australian Madeleine Dore, who wrote a great book about the productivity craze called, “I didn’t do the thing today.” (Madeleine Dore: I didn’t do the thing today, Murdoch Books Australia, Crows Nest, 2022.) Still, I will be more specific about the motivation for creating artistic and design processes.

How do we get from “I didn’t do my art today” to “I did do my art today”? It’s about motivation, lurching, creative doing and creative not doing.

Today I would like to give you a few thoughts that hopefully will inspire us all to see our “outcomes” in a more relaxed way and to get into an artistic-creative-mediating activity that feels right. That we don’t do “just because”, or because of our job title, or because we have to talk ourselves into it, or because we want to post something on Instagram, but because we just want to live well.

1.Forget self-discipline, forget perfectionism.

Disciplining the self is completely absurd. Discipline comes from the Latin disciplina “teaching, discipline, school”. How can you play school with yourself? Have you ever resolved to do the same? Starting today, I will draw a picture every day. Starting tomorrow, I will draw in my sketchbook every day. From now on I will go to an exhibition every week. Such plans can only fail. Especially when art, which is otherwise beloved, feels like just another item on the to-do list.

The only thing that often comes out of such endeavors is that we evaluate ourselves, feeling more overwhelmed and inadequate than before.

Perfecting art is just as absurd. The Latin origin of perfection is perfirce as a verb is “complete and achieve.” But do you really want to be finished with art? There, that’s it. Finished. How boring life would be.

2. Groundhog Day — The Beauty of Repetition

In the summer I was at the Musee d’art modern in Paris. There were hundreds of small sheets on display, marked with felt pens in sometimes more, sometimes fewer colored lines. The sculptor Xavier Veilhan, had made it his mission in the long French lockdown to draw a picture every day. Every day in his Paris apartment. The result was so beautiful and fascinating that I would have loved to take all the drawings home with me. How did he manage to make art out of a boring small piece of paper? He kept at it, even though the days in Lockdown were probably confusingly similar to his boredom. “Every day a drawing” routines may not be sexy, but sometimes they are incredibly purposeful.[i] So maybe a little self-discipline is okay after-all?

We might as well do like in Groundhog Day, the 1993 film in which Bill Murray relives the same day repeatedly. After a long time of being annoyed at being trapped in his mundane life, he eventually decides to approach each day a little differently.
We also sometimes feel like we’re on Groundhog Day. Same same every day. We think there is no room for adventure or art. Yet every day we can choose what to do with our day. Annie Dillard says “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”[ii] Are there small changes that would transform your daily life into an artistic one? Try to do it every day.

3. Expectation Management

Have you ever tried to start the day with thoughtful actions to set you on the right track? Getting up after 8 hours of sleep with the sunrise, 30 minutes of journaling, then yoga while listening to an inspiring podcast, a round of jogging in fresh air, grated ginger tea, while reading a poem, deep artistic studio work for 4 hours without internet interruption, only interrupted with push-ups or breathing exercises every 25 minutes.[iii]

If we plan the day with self-optimization, where is the space for the unknown, the new, the spontaneity, the frustration, and yes, the love for the world, for the real art? Leo Tolstoy already writes in War and Peace: “When we are thrown out of our accustomed paths, we believe that everything is lost; but it is only here that the new and the good begins.”[iv] Or Zadie Smith writes in “On Beauty” that we should not manage our time. Instead, she advises us to manage our love for the world.

Yes, I know, it can be scary not to fill the day with so-called necessities. But it’s often these unplanned gaps of unproductivity that make us artistically productive, isn’t it?

And if they don’t make us productive, maybe it’s not so bad. We can’t be artists every day, writes Madeleine Dore[v] Maybe it’s time to accept that not everything happens every day.

I love the quote from artist Sylvia Plath who says: “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experiences possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”[vi]

This realization is perhaps not exactly uplifting. But it is relaxing and realistic. Expectations need to be lowered. Maybe not everything is instant Instagramable.

The slightly depressed happiness researcher Eric Wilson writes that when he creates, he always expects nothing and is then grateful for the very moderate results.[vii]

I would like you to have the courage as artists or educators to also convey the joy of the non-result. That you set tasks, as the writer Kurt Vonnegut once did with a group of high school students.

«Write a poem. Don’t show it to anybody. Tear it up into little pieces and throw them into the trash can.” You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.” [viii]

4. The Beauty of Non-beauty

We’ve all had a very challenging time in recent years because of Covid-19. Maybe that’s a kitsch cliché: But how can we derive positivity from this collective blow? Can we, even if the pandemic and staying home have driven us to the brink of madness, recognise artistic potential?

As an example serve Carl Jung, who hung out depressively at Lake Zurich a hundred years ago. He understood that nervousness, excitement and malaise help us to form our identity.[ix] Once again I quote Eric Wilson, who says that the greatest tragedy in a life is actually to live without tragedy. We need tragic times to grow, to become creative and artistic.[x]

The painter Gerhard Richter states in the Documenta catalog as early as 1982: “Art is the highest form of hope.”[xi]
Hope is not knowing exactly what will happen and thinking that we are on the safe path. Hope is the exciting task of moving forward with uncertainty and the prospect of change. It is precisely when we stumble, fail, and feel uncomfortable, precisely in these moments, that there are also opportunities for great artistic growth.

I found the time when we couldn’t do much other than look at the screen or out of the window melancholy. Emily Dickinson formulates melancholy as a muse, albeit a difficult one.

5. The Curse of Irony

There’s something else I observe, something like postmodern irony: We never really get involved in anything. We stand aloof. We mock. We prefer to do nothing ourselves, but criticize others instead…

That is boring in the long run. How can I get involved in true appreciation or true artistic activity if I always see myself only as a commentator on world events, but not as a part of them or of shaping the world? Participation is more strenuous and it also hurts sometimes — but it also feels good.

It might help to follow your own individual drive instead of raising your eyebrows ironically. What do you get up for in the morning? What gets you in such a rage that you have to act? What do you do anyway without thinking? Maybe the things, topics, materials, and questions that inspire you are not the ones that are in fashion today. But that does not matter. You are you and that is good.

6. Go, Go, Go

Okay, now let’s get going. There is no use to stick to explaining, analyzing and meandering. We have to do something. And how? Switch to your flight mode. Our desire for noise-free space is not new. The art critic Gertrude Stein already complained in 1946 that we all receive so much information every day that we could only lose our minds.[xii] Airplane mode doesn’t just have to mean muting the phone. Airplane Mode is a lifestyle to aspire to.[xiii] Maybe it needs an undisturbed hour a day for artistic and creative work? That is allowed.[xiv]

I love the following anecdote from Le Corbusier. Supposedly, he always spent his mornings’ painting in his apartment and his afternoons as an architect in his office. To understand, you must know that Corbusier always signed his paintings with his birth name Charles-Édouard Jeanneret. One morning, a journalist knocked on Corbusier’s apartment door and asked if he could speak to Corbusier. In response, the latter said, “He’s not here.”[xv]

7. Doing instead of Being

I would encourage you to be more interested in activities and less interested in job titles or things.

Let yourself be inspired by the formulation of the visionary Buckminster Fuller who said: „I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process.”[xvi] To be, instead of to have, as Erich Fromm already told us.[xvii]

Not all creativity needs to be immediately converted into social media, job title, money source, or product. Sometimes it doesn’t take much at all. Emily Dickinson wrote her novels on old envelopes.[xviii] Dada artist Hannah Höch stole sewing patterns at her day job to make her collages in the evening.[xix]

You don’t need an extraordinary life, the perfect job, the studio, the perfect pencil or whatever to finally make good art. Rather, we need the ordinary life as an impulse to DO extraordinary art.

8. For Whom?

If you could think of one person for whom you are doing all this, who would that be?

For me, for example, a day I had a good conversation with a student is worth much more than ten new news about our institute on the Internet. So: Which one person exactly do you want to open up a change of perspective on the world and your own creative scope? For them, it’s worth going.

So how do we get from I did not do my art today to I did do my art today?

To answer it briefly with children’s author Amy Krouse Rosenthal: „Pay attention to what you pay attention to. That is pretty much all the info you need.”[xx]

Pay attention to what you are paying attention to. This is the work. This is the art. This is the doing.

And if you now say, YES BUT now is Corona, war, inflation, blackout, climate change, 2022… Now, I just cannot. Then not I answer, but Toni Morrison with: „This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.»[xxi]

Thanks for reading!

[i] See Christoph Niemann, on Twitter, April 25, 2021, 11:54, https://twitter.com/abstractsunday/status/1386257366451200001?lang=en, accessed on September 8th, 2022.

[ii] Annie Dillard: The Writing Life, Tikkun, Duke University Press, Volume 31, Number 3, Summer 2016.

[iii] See Madeleine Dore: I didn’t do the thing today, Murdoch Books Australia, Crwos Nest, 2022, p.30

[iv] Leo Tostoy: Krieg und Frieden, War and Peace, Volume 4, Part 4, Chapter 17, zitiert bei , Madeleine Dore: I didn’t do the thing today, Murdoch Books Australia, Crows Nest, 2022, p.35.

[v] Madeleine Dore: I didn’t do the thing today, Murdoch Books Australia, Crwos Nest, 2022, p.21.

[vi] Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Anchor, New York, 2000.

[vii] Eric G.Wilson: Against happiness, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p. 28.

[viii] Writers write quote Kurt Vonnegut, on https://www.writerswrite.co.za/kurt-vonnegut-on-making-your-soul-grow/, accessed on September 10, 2022.

[ix] see Carl Jung: The Secret of the Golden Flower in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, rec. and ed. Aniela Jaffe, New York: Pantheon, 1961, p.197–198.

[x] Eric G.Wilson: Against happiness, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, page 37.

[xi] Gerhard Richter im Text für Katalog documenta 7 1982, Text 1961 bis 2007. Schriften, Interviews, Briefe. Walther, König, Köln, 2008, p.121.

[xii] See Gertrude Stein, Reflections on the Atom Bomb, 1946.

[xiii] Austin Kleon: Keep Going, Workman Publishing, New York, 2019, p.55.

[xiv] Moyers, Bill and Joseph Campbell. The Power of Myth (1988). Betty Sue Flowers(ed.). New York: Doubleday, p.92.

[xv] Retold in Austin Kleon: Keep Going, Workman Publishing, New York, 2019, p.57–58.

[xvi] From the cover of R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb, Bantam Books, New York, 1970

[xvii] See Erich Fromm writings

[xviii] See Austin Kleon: Keep Going, Workman Publishing, New York, 2019, p.104.

[xix] See Austin Kleon: Keep Going, Workman Publishing, New York, 2019, p.104.

[xx] Amy Krouse Rosenthal on twitter, March 15, 2103, https://twitter.com/missamykr/status/312564535242395648?lang=en, accessed on September 10, 2022.

[xxi] Toni Morrison: No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear- In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent. In The Nation, March 23, 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/no-place-self-pity-no-room-fear/, accessed on September 10, 2022.


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