the great stumbling

I began a recent project, a series of costumes, crying in the bathroom after a rigorous critique for which I was not prepared. At the time my failure seemed much bigger and meaner than I know it to be now. Today, with all the wisdom and clarity of hindsight, I can identify that moment as a turning point, an excellent catalyst, and a good lesson in the importance of presentation, especially to strangers.

My failure was born out of two rookie mistakes (which I will no doubt recreate before my art life is over):

1. Putting up very new, unfinished, and mentally unprocessed work for an important critique with strangers


2. Not setting the direction of the conversation, but rather limply waiting for them to tell me what they saw

Writing that now, it seems minor and easily remedied. At the time I described the experience as “being torn a new one.” Once I finished massaging my bruised ego, I was able to answer some of the questions that had stumped me. Why was I interested in imagining post-apocalyptic culture? Why garments? What was the desired outcome?

I think post-apocalyptic fantasies are a roundabout way of ignoring or riffing on what I consider to be colossal problems of culture. What is the desired outcome? To change people's behavior. Why garments? I believe costume gives us permission to behave differently.

The costumes began their lives as thumbnails, from which I worked steadily with little iteration or consideration of better forms. In some cases (i.e. the mourning sleeves or the despair blanket shown at left), the image was so loose and non-specific that I was able to work towards the essence of the image. These were, I believe, the more successful objects. The cases in which I focused more on making the specific thumbnail into a costume (i.e. the eating and feeding duet and the seed collecting costume) were les eloquent and required more explanation. As I worked on the costumes, I spent little time designing their contexts or their afterlives. These are the very things that matter so much.

This time around I hope to work more towards the essence of things in hopes that the end form (a book, a show, a website, a farm?) will speak well on its own. I hope to remain open to failure and multiple iterations. I’ve watched a bright class of sophomore graphic designers work this semester and we share a common impulse of not wanting to commit fully to an idea until we know it’s the right one. It doesn’t work that way. You have to commit fully to an idea—even one that will fail to deliver—in order to arrive fully at the next step. And then you must take that step.

In my graduate review this fall we talked about applied and non-applied research. Tony Brock expanded the topic to include experiential research, which I take to be a sublime crossing over of disciplines and methods. Dancing about population control, running data animations to compliment short stories, bringing in the spiritual to look at the molecular, and so on. That’s just the thing. I see in my current topic (mapping local fruit and nut trees) the potential to develop entire systems. In order to do that I need to consider the topic and ideas from multiple vantage points and frames of reference. How do botanists consider these plants? What historical significance do they have? Where do they fit in various chemical cycles? I also worry that I will become enamored of the labyrinth-like process of research and fail to recognize when it is time to put down the book and make something.