Creation Finishes the Making of the Work. Publication Begins the Life of the Work.
There is a moment every artist knows.
You step back from the painting and realize there is nothing more to do. You write the final line of the poem. You listen to the final mix of the song. You type the last sentence of the manuscript.
It is finished.
Or so it seems.
For most of my life as an artist, I have thought a great deal about what it means to finish things. Artists are makers, after all, and making naturally gives us a very particular idea of completion. We begin with something that does not exist and work on it until it does. Eventually there comes a moment when we have to stop.
But I have increasingly come to think that this is only one kind of finishing.
Creation finishes the making of the work. Publication begins the life of the work.
That distinction has become especially vivid for me recently because I have teamed up with my son Zach to help him publish a country album and, more broadly, to begin developing a publishing company for our creative work.
Zach and I are very different artists. Our artistic visions occupy different territories, which is probably an advantage. My immediate interest is in helping him build the structure necessary to take his music all the way to the finish line.
But this has raised an interesting question.
Where exactly is the finish line?
The Seduction of Making
Creative people naturally want to create.
That sounds obvious, but it causes one of the central problems of the artistic life. Making things is exciting. Writing another song is exciting. So is recording another track, starting another painting, discovering an unexpected phrase in a poem.
On the other hand, entering information into a database, registering a copyright is not particularly exciting.
Photographing a painting, assigning an inventory number, organizing files, preparing metadata, maintaining a mailing list, creating a release schedule, checking contracts, uploading files, sending announcements and keeping track of income are not usually the activities that caused anyone to become an artist.
So artists tend to concentrate their energy where the pleasure is. They make things. Then they make more things. Before long they may have boxes of drawings, folders of poems, hard drives full of recordings, stacks of paintings, unfinished manuscripts and hundreds of photographs documenting works whose locations they can no longer remember.
I know this territory very well. The problem is not a lack of creativity. Quite the opposite. The problem is abundance and accumulation
The Other Half of the Creative Practice
If we want an artistic practice to become self-sustaining, however, we have to enlarge our idea of what making a work means.
There is the creative sequence:
Idea → Experiment → Development → Work
But then another sequence begins:
Documentation → Archive → Inventory → Publication → Distribution → Audience → Income → Reputation
And eventually that sequence circles back around:
Income → Time → Materials → Freedom → More Creation
Seen this way, publication and distribution are not unfortunate commercial chores attached to the end of the creative process.
They are part of the creative ecosystem.
The purpose is not merely to make money from art. The purpose is to create conditions under which the artist can continue making art.
That is a very different proposition.
Money becomes less interesting as a scorecard and more interesting as stored creative energy. It buys materials. It pays studio rent. It purchases equipment. It pays collaborators. It creates time. It allows experiments to fail. It permits the artist to undertake the next project.
A sustainable creative practice is a circulatory system.
If nothing leaves the studio, nothing returns to nourish it.
The Work Has Two Lives
This suggests that every artwork potentially has two lives.
The first is its studio life.
During this life the work belongs primarily to the artist. It is being invented, questioned, revised, destroyed, rebuilt, doubted and eventually accepted.
Then something important happens.
The artist releases it.
The work begins its social life.
Someone hears the song while driving home at night.
Someone encounters the painting in a gallery.
Someone reads the poem twenty years after it was written.
Someone sends the book to a friend.
Someone discovers a recording decades after the musician has died.
At that point the work is doing something the artist can no longer entirely control.
It is moving through other people’s lives.
That is what publication really means.
The word is related to making something public. Something private enters the shared world. Publication therefore isn’t simply printing a book or uploading a song. It is a threshold. Before publication, the artist is primarily responsible for the work. After publication, the work begins accumulating experiences of its own.
The Archive Is Part of This Life
This is also why documentation and archiving matter so much. I have spent many years thinking about artists’ archives, and I increasingly see the archive not as a storage facility for dead things but as part of the living infrastructure of an artistic practice.
An inventory number seems terribly mundane until someone needs to locate a work twenty years later. A date seems insignificant until someone tries to reconstruct the development of an artist’s thinking. A photograph seems routine until the original work disappears. A notebook seems private until it becomes the only surviving record of how an important idea developed.
Documentation allows the work to travel through time.
Publication allows it to travel through society.
The archive allows it to travel through history.
These are not peripheral activities. They are different forms of transmission.
Building the Machine
This is what interests me about the experiment Zach and I are beginning.
We are not simply trying to release an album.
We are trying to build a machine. Not a machine that manufactures art. The art must remain unpredictable, personal, strange and alive. The machine begins after creation. Its job is to catch the work.
A song gets written.
What happens next?
A system is set up made of a series of steps that must be practiced and followed routinely and uniformly. First documentation and archiving…
Where is it recorded? Where are the files stored? What is the definitive version? Who wrote it? Who owns what? Has it been registered? Has it been mastered? Does it have artwork? Does it have metadata? When will it be released? Where will it be distributed? How will anyone know it exists? How will income be tracked? Where will the master files be stored ten years from now?
None of these questions are as exciting as writing the song.
That is precisely why a system is necessary.
The artist should not have to reinvent the administrative process every time a work is completed.
The system should already be figured out, designed and waiting.
The artist creates.
The machine catches the creative work and brings it the rest of the way to publication.
An Experiment in the Creative Life
For me, this project has another dimension.
I have spent decades developing and practicing my own ideas about how artists might construct sustainable creative lives. I have done this in the visual arts ecosystem. Now I have an opportunity to test some of those ideas in a different artistic ecosystem.
Music has its own economy, institutions, technologies, traditions and problems. I expect we will have misunderstandings, make mistakes and miscalculations. I hope we make some interesting ones.
That is part of the experiment.
What actually happens when we try to move consistently from creation to publication?
Where do things get stuck?
What tasks do we continually avoid?
What procedures make those tasks easier?
What turns out to generate attention and income?
What turns out to generate attention but no income?
What creates long-term value?
What turns out to be a complete waste of time?
I don’t know yet.
That is why I am interested. I see it as part of the creative process.
A philosophy of the creative life should eventually survive contact with actual life and hopefully traverse from one ecosystem to another.
My Own Archive Suddenly Looks Different
There is another unexpected consequence of this experiment.
For approximately twenty-five years I have been working with collage poetry. I have accumulated a large body of fragments, poems, phrases, juxtapositions and textual experiments. Until recently I primarily thought of this material as poetry and visual language. Now I am beginning to look at it differently.
I find myself asking:
Could this be a song?
Sometimes the answer is clearly no.
Sometimes a single phrase suddenly sounds like a chorus or a strange collision of fragments begins suggesting a narrative or the gaps that seemed characteristic of collage poetry begin behaving like the ambiguities of song lyrics.
The archive changes when you ask it a new question. What appeared to be a repository of completed work becomes a reservoir for future work. That may be one of the great advantages of maintaining an archive in the first place. You do not know what your future self will need from it.
From Individual Works to a Body of Work
There is another reason publication matters.
Artists tend to think intensely about individual works.
Careers, however, are built from bodies of work.
One song is a song.
Twenty songs begin to reveal a voice.
Several albums begin to reveal a trajectory.
A decade of work begins to reveal a world.
The same is true of paintings, poems, films, photographs, novels or almost any sustained creative practice.
Recognition and reputation emerges gradually from accumulation.
People begin recognizing something. They hear a few seconds and know who made it.
They encounter a painting across a room and recognize the artist. They read a paragraph without seeing the author’s name and recognize the voice. That recognition cannot be manufactured quickly because it depends upon a body of work entering public consciousness over time.
Which means the artist has to keep finishing the job.
Not merely making the work.
Releasing it into the world.
The Finish Line Keeps Moving
Perhaps, then, we need two finish lines.
The first belongs to the maker.
The work is made.
The second belongs to the artistic life of the work.
The work has been prepared to leave home.
It has been documented.
It has been archived.
It has been inventoried.
It has been published.
It has been placed where another human being has the possibility of encountering it. After that, something wonderful happens. The artist loses control and the art takes on a life of its own.
Someone plays the song again.
Someone hangs the painting in a bedroom.
Someone copies a line from the poem into a notebook.
Someone discovers the work fifty years later in an archive.
Someone misunderstands it.
Someone understands it in a way the artist never imagined.
Someone loves or is influenced by it.
The work begins accumulating a history beyond the history of its making.
And perhaps that is the point at which the artist can finally turn back toward the studio and begin again.