Fear of Failure and the Need of Inspiration

Photo of pavement taken on my morning walk - 2024.10.09

Designing Fear of Failure and Need of Inspiration out of the Process

The following is an article that started as comments on Charley Rose’s article: Dear Writer from late last year. I just reread the notes while looking for a different note and thought this would make a good article. So here we go…

One technique I use is designing failure and need of inspiration out of the process, I take a scientific experimental approach. I am primarily a collage artist. I decided on a 'What if" and then I contemplate ways to test it out, then I do experiments. I am usually figuring out ways to use chance. Then, without judging too early I try a bunch of different approaches to the 'What if".

Then I formulate a method and I make stuff to test what might happen. I try to avoid having any expectation, therefore I can't fail, it is just an experiment, I don't know what is going to happen and therefore I don't have an opinion about the results. I maintain a ‘Results Pending’ attitude.

Then after a bunch of experimental results, I lay everything out and look at them as a set. I study them to see what happened and what I like and what I don't like. I figure out what exactly it is that I don't like and then put the ones I don't like off to the side then look at the ones I like and figure out what is appealing about them and then change the parameters of the method to get a similar acceptable result as frequently as possible. After arriving at a satisfactory process, I keep tweaking, refining, etc.

Then I try other experiments on those experiments and never run out of something new to discover. That builds wisdom and understanding. Then you can approach almost anything with that wisdom and say "Ok I know this works and I know this doesn't work (at least for me). I am looking also for what is efficient and hence most elegant - as in a scientific way; a solution to a problem that is pleasingly ingenious and simple.

In my case, the other thing is, since they are all experiments, I figured out that the results are all interesting. I might have my favorites, but other people like the ones I don't. So I practice you might say 'Chance Aesthetics". Everyone is attracted to something slightly different. So I decided I don't need to try to curate other peoples’ tastes based on my own biases. Hence I never throw anything away. Everything gets documented.

How do I assess the results for myself?

As an artist, I consider that I have to start with myself as the center of the universe just like we all do since we all are…

“God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

attributed to Voltaire or maybe Hermes Trismegistus or Saint Augustine of Hippo or the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles, the medieval philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, or possibly the French philosopher Blaise Pascal.

What I am always trying to do is unlock and explore my inner depths with my intuition as much as possible. I am not so much looking for or trying to express my own individual voice, so to speak, but trying to express that deeper universal voice - or let it express itself through me as a conduit. Outwardly it is expressed in chance or what I would call the Great Harmony or Tao, or the Force which is animated by an all pervading consciousness by which everything is ordered and harmonized moment by moment.

I think all of the different types of divination such as I Ching, Tarot, Runes, throwing bones, reading the tea leaves or entrails, are designed around the idea of communicating with this living force that lives as individuated consciousness through all living things including us. A variety of modern artists and writers and composers etc. have experimented in this way such as the surrealists, dadaists, the composer John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp and many others but it is kind of subliminal in the art conversation because it sounds like mumbo jumbo when trying to explain its workings.

Jean (Hans) Arp. Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance). 1916–17

I saw an exhibit and bought the catalog of a show called Chance Aesthetics (which is still available) some years ago (2009) that clarified for me this trend among some artists and gave me the language to think about what I had already been doing. I just didn’t have a clear conceptual framework till I read that catalog.

Meredith Malone with essays by Susan Laxton and Janine Mileaf, and contributions by Bradley Bailey and Emily Hage 

 Chance Aesthetics embraces the role played by chance in modernist art from the beginning of the 20th

So all of that is the background context to how I might assess things. I remain in a continual flux of suspended judgement because I know a conclusion is beyond my puny understanding when I have my fingers dipping into the infinite. As an artist I am just trying to make funnels to pour it through.

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