Rule no.0037 – Think in Museum Time

I mentioned that I would write an article about thinking in museum time in a previous article back in Dec. 2023

This is apropos to the conversation related to Stick-to-itiveness – purposeful persistence.

As mentioned in the article about strategic patience (see below), once an artist has made the decision to establish their creative lifestyle and goes forward, that artist has no idea what lies ahead or what their fortunes will be once they have established themselves. However, there are a number of preparations they can make to maximize their efforts.

One cannot be sure that they will be able to become self-sustaining from these efforts except in rare cases so it is best, from the beginning, to assume that it may not happen or that it might take many years to achieve. You have to plan on your income from other sources until that day arrives if it ever does. For me and my wife who also works in the studio, we did not get to this point until in my 50’s. Even then, it takes a while to really trust that it will continue that way You always have to be working at it from that point forward and can never take it for granted. It is pure capitalism – asset production and market.

Considering this, an important element is to then consider sustainability. We have to be able to work economically in as unhampered a way as possible. This might cause us to consider what kind of budget we can dedicate to our creative lifestyle by the month and based on that budget learn to work in ways that will allow us to work on our art on a daily basis for two or three hours a day or more if you can do it.

So let us say the artist wants to leave the door open to becoming self-sustaining at some point or wants to sell off works along the way to help cover expenses and enjoys working and produces a reasonable amount of work over time. This growing body of work accumulates over a lifetime of working in the studio. That has to be considered whether you sell off works or not, things accumulate over time.

So as soon as you know you are establishing your creative lifestyle it is best to establish in your mind that you are building an archive that will be, over the course of time, your singular artwork.

When you think like this from the beginning then you will need to consider organization, inventory control, storage, documentation, etc. You are building a lifelong single work that will show all of the ideas, twists and turns and the evolution of your trail over time.

Usually early on, an artist thinks just about the work one is doing at the moment as a single thing but over time it is a part of a long continuum of works. Consider that you will be working for decades. Thinking like this starts to help you think in museum time and widens your conceptual horizons.

Thinking ahead and anticipating decades of time will allow for spending time to contemplate how you might go about building this body of work, care for it and use it as a map for looking back over what you have done to plot out where you might want to go next. This means that everything you make, every note, writing, poem, drawing, sketch and finished works of art needs to be dated, inventoried, documented, digitized and stored. You will need a plan for that and a set of procedures.

Almost everything in life is lost to the ravages of time if it is not caught into the net of your archives. It might at first seem daunting to add all of this extra effort to your artistic activity but if you think of the whole thing as a single artwork that you are constantly working on then that work eventually becomes normal and even fun and rewarding. You will find that the benefit of having captured your entire creative output in an organized way is incalculable in ways that you might have a hard time imagining.

Once you have digitized everything, as you go along you can start making your own catalog raisonne in a word document so that you can write notes related to the different artworks in the document. I would also recommend keeping a daily journal where you write things about your day, your ideas, what you did, things you are thinking about, new projects you want to take on, etc. Then when it gets to a couple of hundred pages you can self-publish it for your own use at least as a PDF. This has great documentary value over time.

Approaching your creative work in this way teaches you to respect your own work and be able to look back over time to see what you have done and how far you have come and some of the works will point you to ideas for future exploration. Even the first consistent year of this kind of documentation and organization will show you the benefits of it. It is a wonderful feeling to look back over a year or a decade of work and realize that you are making progress. This process also helps you to be accountable to yourself and is a big aide in making your Stick-to-itiveness even stickier.

In museum time you have your whole life to flesh it out.

related:

Rule no.0027 – Follow the Inner Trail

When we look around us there seems like there are many possible trails in life to follow. Frankly there are infinite numbers of trails you could follow in life. Many trails are put in front of us from an early age, other people’s ideas about what trail they think we should follow. But should we just follow whatever trail someone else points us toward? Each of us has only one trail that we can reliably follow and that is our own inner trail. It might not be well marked, its destination may not be clear, we may not know how we shall follow it, but it is there for the discovering. As you develop your intuition and grow inwardly, your trail becomes clearer and more obvious and, at a certain point, inevitable. All of life will point you toward it.

I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. For the creator must be a world to himself and find everything in himself. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet from Letter One - Paris, February 17th, 1903

‘At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are, and you know what you want.’ Lao Tzu

From the unpublished manuscript 4,040 Rules of Art Conduct

Rule no.0029 - Confront your Fear.

When it comes to being an artist: What do you fear? Are you afraid of failure, what others will think, that you will not measure up, of revealing yourself, self-criticism, of losing your inspiration or your purpose? Perhaps investing your time with no pay off, of giving up?

We often maintain our fears through justifying them to ourselves. We come up with excuses for why it is rational for us to maintain them.

Fear is a phantom with no substance. It is an internal barrier, a thing we try to ignore. While it is something we resist, it is best to examine our fears, bring them out into the open where they cannot sustain themselves. Fears live in the dark places from our indulging in them.

We can start by acknowledging them, accepting that they are there. Try to pull them out one at a time and look closely. Name your fear. Ask yourself what it is about and why it is there. Then ask yourself what you can do to overcome it. Often it can be overcome just by examination and then realizing that you needn’t fear that thing after all.

Another thing one can do is build a defense against it. Figure out another way to think. Often our fears come from an ingrained pattern of thinking and acting based on some event from long ago. Perhaps it is time to restructure how we are thinking and feeling about something we fear.

Fears remain because we accept them and honor them through our behavior toward them, allowing them to hold sway over our actions. But they don’t have to. Consider it a creative problem to solve just like you would in a painting. Reduce its emotional importance and preciousness. Because it is not important nor precious except in the overcoming of it.

‘Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.’ Marie Curie

From the unpublished manuscript: The 4,040 rules of Art Conduct

My secret plan is to eventually make the posts in the Touchonian a book about the Creative Lifestyle for Artists. You, my favorite readers, are privy to the book in it’s formation. I would really appreciate your help by making comments, asking questions and suggesting topics I should explore and write about. It is hard for me to dream up what artists need and want to know to keep going and keep creating. I have fifty years of figuring out all of the details I needed to keep going and become self-sustaining as an artist and want to share enough insight to smooth the path for others facing this complicated, daunting task of being a self-sustaining artist. I know from experience it can feel overwhelming, unreachable and even depressing. So feel free to say or ask something! Thanks in advance.

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Rule no.0035 - Stick with the Fundamentals

It can sometimes feel intimidating to consider all of the complex things that a creative could learn from the other masters that have come before us. But all you really need to do is stick with the continuous practice of the foundational elements and principles. This is where all of the power is and always has been.

I studied a Japanese martial arts called Yamate ryu aikijutsu for a few years in the 1990’s. Our dojo was in the beautiful mountains of southern Colorado. Our sensei used to tell us that he was going to always repeat certain principles and certain techniques throughout our training because they were the core of the art. He said the core of the art, the fundamentals of the art must always be practiced, mastered and fully ingrained in the student because all advanced practices, the more complex practices were all merely extensions and variations of the foundational teachings.

All others arts are the same way. The most powerful part of any of the arts is that part which is the seemingly most simple, rudimentary and basic techniques and principles that form the foundation of that art. These foundational theories, ideas and techniques when deeply examined, questioned and practiced will open endless vistas of exploration.

from the unpublished 4,040 Rules of Art Conduct

My secret plan is to eventually make the posts in the Touchonian a book about the Creative Lifestyle for Artists. You, my favorite readers, are privy to the book in it’s formation. I would really appreciate your help by making comments, asking questions and suggesting topics I should explore and write about. It is hard for me to dream up what artists need and want to know to keep going and keep creating. I have fifty years of figuring out all of the details I needed to keep going and become self-sustaining as an artist and want to share enough insight to smooth the path for others facing this complicated, daunting task of being a self-sustaining artist. I know from experience it can feel overwhelming, unreachable and even depressing. So feel free to say or ask something! Thanks in advance.

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“The Art World was recreated in 4 Days in 4 Sections, 40 years ago, and originally in 4004 B.C. Today minor Artists have 400 Disciples and more favored mediocre Artists have 44,000 Devotees approximately. There are 4,040 Rules of Art Conduct…

The Four Sacred Art Texts are Confusionist, Doughist, Tantrumist, and Sham-Buddieist. The Four Art Castes are Purehatpriests, Guruteacherhats, Sunnyascetichats and Bighatdevotees…”

So proclaimed an astrological chart created by Ad Reinhardt in the May 1956 issue of Artnews when I was 3 months old.

Later, in 1987 we, the founders of the International Post Dogmatist Group, thought of Ad Reinhardt as a quintessential example of a post dogmatist. We studied the above image and noticed the 4,040 Rules of Art Conduct and I set out to contemplate what these rules might be and how to excavate them from the ethers and collect them together.

At the time, after a session of pontificating, speculating and theorizing we came up with the first rule:

Rule no. 23 - Shut up and Paint.

Then we went back to our easels to practice the rule.

So I have been thinking about and working on this idea for a very long time. One of the problems is that, if you identified a new one every day with commentary it would take a little more than 11 years to complete. So that is a consideration. Perhaps it is a multi generational project.

Of course, the number 4,040 is completely arbitrary and the idea of the Rules of Art Conduct is a complete fabrication. There is no such thing as the 4,040 Rules of Art Conduct. So that is my pet project which might forever remain an unpublished document. Just make up the rules as needed. That is basically what we are all doing. By not writing them down they remain esoteric.

Another Post-Dogmatist innovation was the idea of operating, at least in appearance, as a bureaucracy (ruled by desks) that is based on invented rules, procedures and policies with as much tongue-in-cheek red-tape and tedium as possible to simulate, critique and interact with the institutional powers within the art world. Hence the need of the 4,040 Rules of Art Conduct. This is of course completely antithetical to how the actual community of creatives work. Hence the humor of such a futile project.

So while thinking about it, in the meantime I have had the years since that time to experiment with being a practicing artist, collector, curator, archives builder, gallerist, writer, poet, publisher etc. A pretty good spattering of at least homeopathic experience with some parts of the art world at large at least within the scope of my own interests.

Post Dogmatism was originally founded by three painters who had a strong interest in and studied the spiritual traditions of the world. Our thought was to reorient the idea of the avant garde toward a movement inward, exploring one’s spiritual depth through the arts and away from an outward looking forward movement which no longer makes any sense if it ever did. At the same time being more playful and exploring, experimenting and critiquing with self deprecating humor as a foil against egotism.

See: ‘Avante Garde?’ (1994) – Ceciliano Touchionini

Therefore, at some point, I will invent an organization called something like Department for the Research and Development of the Rules of Art Conduct - the DRDRAC which might be directed and desked by Dr. Drac or some such thing.

In terms of ‘art conduct’, I think of conduct mostly in terms such as in the meaning of definition #9 below, as in how to be a conduit for creativity but to some extent, all of the other definitions as well.

NOUN

1. personal behavior; way of acting; bearing or deportment

2. direction or management; execution - the conduct of a business

3. the act of conducting; guidance; escort - The curator's conduct through the museum was informative

4. obsolete a guide; an escort - A train conductor

TRANSITIVE VERB

5. to behave or manage (oneself) - He conducted himself well

6. to direct in action or course; manage; carry on - to conduct a meeting to conduct a test

7.  to direct (an orchestra, chorus, etc.) as leader

8.  to lead or guide; escort -to conduct a tour

9. to serve as a channel or medium for ( heat, electricity, sound, etc.) - Copper conducts electricity

INTRANSITIVE VERB

10.  to lead

11.  to act as conductor, esp. of a musical group

So the ‘rules’ might in turn address one’s own behavior, one’s ethics. one’s self control and self disciple, one’s ability to manage, direct. guide, lead, execute one’s creative lifestyle and creative activity.

This post is based on responses to the previous article Rule no.12 - Things Accumulate

Rule no.0036 – Strategic Patience

It is all about patience and believe me I have spent a lot of years developing it. At this point I am thinking of it as a strategic approach, to not work in sprints but more like a lifelong marathon runner not really a marathon runner - forget running - a lifelong walkabout, at the speed of a saunter with the knowing that accumulation will do the trick all by itself. It is trustworthy. You don't have to overwork it. Which means you can be more contemplative, more internally peaceful and just move along at a slow steady constant speed and never burn yourself out and still be always at work without rushing.

This really opens some new conceptual vistas because you can take your time, think it over, spend a lot of time working things out, develop skills and be willing to take on potentially massive lifelong endeavors (like being an artist or a writer). I think about it as thinking in museum time that projects across centuries instead of seasons.
(related: Rule no.0037 – Think in Museum Time)

As artists we can get frustrated that things don’t move faster, that we cannot move faster. But it might be a better strategy to move slower, think over a longer vista of time. When you think about big museums they are not looking at the moment (although that is often included) they are looking across an entire culture or a time frame of centuries, even millennia.

As artists – seeing in that context of the big picture - we can benefit from thinking of our work in relation of the broader culture and our place in the expanse of time. We are all just a tiny piece of the whole thing. A few artists or writers will become famous as poster boys and girls, maybe even for a long time, become a part of the cannon so to speak. But only a few or else the general narrative becomes too unclear and confusing when there are too many players. As time goes by circumstances and perspectives are constantly being sifted, reduced and distilled to the narrative of a future generation not yet born. None of us has any control over any of these processes nor can we anticipate how humanity will develop or for that matter even understand how it is currently developing because we are in the middle of it.

The idea of developing 'Strategic Patience' is an interesting way of thinking. I know when I was younger, I wanted to build, build, build. Maybe it is just enthusiasm driven by impatience. But then you get worn out. Then I thought; ‘Wait a minute, I can't keep this pace up! I am going to have to change my rhythm or something’.

In the early years it is hard to realize that you can go slower if you are willing to commit to the long run and have faith that there will be a long run. Now I say, 'If you have to keep a to-do list you are doing too much.' But some would say that is a little extreme in the other direction. Still, I move slowly and peacefully through my day shifting from painting to collaging to writing and back to painting, etc. from morning to night and taking care of the documentation and the little things of daily life a bit here and a bit there. Then every once in a while, clean things up and reorganize if things start feeling a little chaotic or out of sorts.

If I hit a block in one thing I have two or three other completely different things going to switch over to. So that I am never blocked or frustrated. I just come back a little later. I think I got that idea from Picasso who was a production maniac. He took breaks from one thing like a painting by doing another thing like drawing and then came back to the painting when he felt refreshed. They say he produced six works of art a day on average from birth to his death on April 8^th, 1973, at 91 years old. I was a junior in high school then. That was a lot of accumulation.

from the unpublished: 4,040 Rules of Art Conduct

Rule no.0012 - Things Accumulate

As artists we need to account for accumulation. Over time, if we are working, things accumulate. It is best to plan on accumulation, to document it, to organize it. We don’t realize at the beginnings of things how they will grow and multiply.

At the start we feel small and unaccomplished. Of course we are. When we compare ourselves with the older masters we wonder how will we ever accomplish it. How will we ever come close to what they have achieved? They seem great because of the rule that ‘things accumulate’. Day by day they work, day by day things accumulate. The masters accumulate skill, they accumulate disciple, they accumulate reputation and wisdom. Little by little, day by day, a little more and a little more and soon it seems like a massive and deep body of work. But it is just accumulation. Slow, steady, continuous.

But the secret is to think of it all, a whole lifetime’s worth, as a single work. Where does everything fit? How does everything relate to each other? How has the trail developed?

Start now and keep things organized. Lay out the trail behind you, calculate where it is going, read the entrails, study the tea leaves. Intuit the next step. Make notes, speculate, ask questions, face the answers, keep working. What gaps need to be filled? What questions need to be answered or resolved? What has yet to be explored? We cannot know until we get there, until we have to overcome an obstacle or work our way through an impasse. Your life itself is your art, the whole of it. What you do, how you do it, what you make of it and make out of it. Those are the things the old masters have done and are doing now. Be patient, be resolved, continue forward.

From the unpublished manuscript: The 4,040 rules of Art Conduct

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