Yield (1)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Yield by Anne Truitt.
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Dissident Muse Journal Asynchronous Studio Book Club. What follows are some notes-to-self made as I read the first part, titled “Winter” (through page 27), followed in turn by prompts for your own responses in the comments, though you may respond to any promptings you feel inclined to share.
How to live
Rachel Kushner, from the foreword:
I wanted to know, at my age - right now, fifty-two - how to live, by drawing from the wisdom and determinations of a woman at age eighty. I was looking for hygiene, perhaps, of a particular kind: in thought and habits, in temperament and mood. I wanted instructions, silly as that might sound, for parsing the world with care, and honoring my own life.
Kushner and I are Jews born in the same year who studied in Italy and subsequently entered creative careers. It strikes me that we’re still wondering how to live and hoping against hope to find the answer in a book. Fortunately, for a certain understanding of “fortune,” we don’t have to know how to live in order to continue living.
The validity of the world
Truitt, p. 5:
The validity of the world we find ourselves living in has its origin in the uniformity of our nervous and sensory systems, not in its intrinsic objectivity.
I wonder if this is a mild rebuttal to Greenberg’s claims about the objectivity of taste. I’m not aware that he wrote about it in such terms, but I think he takes for granted that the world’s objectivity is self-validating. If you accept the idea of the objective world, there’s no reason not to. I’ve come to think that the subjective-objective split is a faulty model, and that we are merely the portion of a material world that has become imbued with the capacity to know itself to a greater degree than, say, a rock. That said, Walter Darby Bannard wrote in the Aphorisms, “Everything around us, everything we are, and everything we do has evolved together for millions of years. We have more in common with a rock than we think.” Truitt seems to be getting at something similar. On page 17 she notes that it “appears that people have 99.9% of the human genome in common,” astonished emphasis hers. That commonality may go all the way down to the stones.
One could write a whole book on this.
Japan
In Daybook Truitt confessed to not enjoying her time in Japan. Hence it’s surprising to see the evocative recollections in pages 6-7 and following. Clearly the experience informed her subsequent creation, however difficult it was socially and practically.
Attribution of motive
Page 8:
Attribution of motive always bothers me: any person attributing motive to another person has prepared a Procustean bed and has the axe ready.
This is in defiance of Michael Fried, quoted by Rosalind Krauss in an Artforum piece from 1972, and in apparent defiance of Krauss as well. That willingness to attribute motive is the essential difference between critics and artists. Few critics can pull it off, namely the few who have spent time in the trenches of the studio. Nowadays much criticism is merely protracted attribution of motive. It is of no value.
A world unnamed
Page 10:
The experience on which I depend for living and for work remains perfectly immediate, and I like living in a world unnamed.
I’m going to try to remember this as I age, should I be blessed to continue working. Though by the end of the page she has left the oven on and ruined a batch of cookies she was making for her granddaughter.
Remembering being born
Page 13:
My memory is long. I don’t know anyone else who remembers being born. I wish I did so we could compare notes.
I am gobsmacked at this. My early childhood may as well not have happened for all I remember of it. Her notes lead to a description of a kind of out-of-body experience that she used to have regularly. It receded, but returned all at once to her in old age. “I recognized the tide.” I’m prompted to wonder if the depth of her art is connected to experiences like these, and if so, if it’s a general rule that an artist needs such experiences.
The inheritance of life
Page 15:
My deepest satisfaction now is entering into the inheritance of my own life. A realm over which time has no sway.
This is a comforting thought: the more time passes, the more all becomes the present. Plants grown, nurseries painted, babies birthed, all fresh in the mind. Though the injuries grow fresh as well. On the next page she is visited by cruel ghosts from her history, and “death has not improved them.”
Wood
Pages 21-22:
When I made the decision to make my sculptures out of wood, I remember calculating that eventually their individuality would be embodied by the determination of their material. Now I have lived long enough to see this determination beginning to happen. Only beginning: sculptures hold their own. And the fact that they record time is intrinsic to their essence.
Mine Also. We - they and I - are individually on our way to disintegration. I am different in that I have the privilege of consciousness of myself relinquishing my own individuality.
Speaking of commonality with rocks. Also, Hokusai: “If heaven had granted me five more years, I could have become a real painter.”
Between recognition and revelation
Page 24:
James Joyce noticed that certain things in the world matched him. Manet is master of a precise territory between recognition and revelation.
Compare the recently quoted Harriet Shaw Weaver:
All things then are purely individual. The “nature” which things are supposed to have are the inverted appearances of our own potentialities in regard to them; how far we are able to mold them to our heart’s desire; create them in uniformity with our purposes, that is.
I continue to feel that a crucial aspect of individualism has been lost to the contemporary age, something that will make art impossible if we don’t recover it. More on this to come.
Prompts:
Are you at all tempted to start a diary at this point? I am, but I know about my track record of attempts. (Besides, my blogging serves a similar purpose.)
How important is memory to art? How important is memory to your art?
How is it that we come into this world wondering how to live? How are some of us not sure about it in the midst of our sixth decade of life? Is this a Gen-X curse or a perennial one?
What is your take on the objectivity of the world, and of art? Do you agree with Truitt about the source of its validity? If not, what is yours? Or does the world have none?
Respond below, to these or anything else germane that moves you.
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I have read through page 146 and, to my mind, it is an important page. "The concept, remaining merely conceptual, falls short of the bite of physical presence. Just one step away is the debilitating idea that concept is as forceful in its conception as in its realization." She goes on to say "the poem has to be written, the painting painted, the sculpture wrought." It is the making that interests me. Bringing an idea into something physical, real and authentic.
Thank you for recommending this book.
Perhaps a challenge in being a student--one sees the whole in painting tradition and just can't get there--I am sure that's what Kurosawa and Scorsese feel at the cusp of the big picture.
I think about time a lot and there's a lot of writing about time, but time and painting I do not know.