An edited version of this essay was published in the June issue of FotoNostrum.
In hindsight, art became my vocation because I had no choice. There are always choices so, like most high-sounding statements, that first sentence isn’t even true. But it feels this way — like if I hadn’t become an artist I would have been eaten from the inside by some sickness.
That’s not to say I didn’t do other things. Not having chosen my parents wisely, I needed to work for a living — survival being the artist’s first imperative — so I had a day gig for years, working as a psychotherapist. A tough job though not boring. Unless you count workshops and part-time courses, I didn’t go to art school but I’m grateful for the proverbial eclectic education I received; it cultivated my tastes and curiosities, which I like to think go wide as well as deep. That was good for my art practice. It also helped me stay amused, no small thing.
Being irrationally relentless — artist imperative #2 — combined with living enough years means I’ve had a pretty long career. It’s been difficult, but a privilege as well: I’ve been lucky to spend all this time carousing in the corridors of my imagination, losing myself in a life of art.
Of course, that begs the question of why I wanted to get lost this way in the first place. Here’s my guess: for many of us inclined to the art grind, the world-as-it-is just isn’t enough. Either it hurts too much or it rings too false or it seems like there’s something hidden and essential that you need to find, or even just catch a glimpse of. For me, it was all of the above, and more that no doubt I don’t even realize.
Pain is a big part of it. I don’t mean that art is a way to expunge that pain; I don’t believe in the art-as-catharsis model. But what art does is give new form to pain, it tilts the angle of engagement, leaving suffering more supportable. Sometimes it feels as if it very nearly gives the pain some meaning or, if not quite that, some cousin to meaning. That feeling can be fleeting, but it returns. And on it goes. It’s enough to keep me going, enough to keep me curious (that most underrated of feelings) and, once in a while, almost joyous.
Also — I’m not being glib here — it helps to pass the time. And in a way that’s less destructive than other ways of passing time, or blocking it out entirely.
My pictures are markers of my life, a breadcrumb trail. Human beings, we have this need to do something that remains. Some people have children; some build businesses. Or cathedrals. Some tell stories. Others make war, big and small — they destroy, which is another kind of trail. I make images. I do other things too — I write sometimes, I share stories, I’ve tried to take care of a few companions along the way. But art is this intimate thing I do where I primarily engage myself, my interior life. The result is the pictures, a few of which are there for people — like you— to see if they care to. I’m pleased when they do.
Photography chose me more than the other way around. I grew up with cameras — my father was the proverbial avid amateur — and, maybe more important, I grew up surrounded by photographs, mountains of them, mostly in the tens of thousands of books my bookseller parents kept in their house. Imagery was as native a language to me as English. For people growing up in the digital age that’s probably normal now.
I knew how to work a darkroom before I learned how to ride a bike. If photography hadn’t been right there I might’ve picked something else — maybe writing, or another visual medium. My guess is it probably would’ve worked out alright.
To make images I pull material from everywhere. I’m talking about content, yes, but about more than that — formal elements, technique, and, most important, the sensibility you find in other art media and human experience. I look to all visual media (for a while I studied film but I was too solitary a cat to be a filmmaker, especially the way it worked back then) but also to literature, which has probably influenced me more than any other medium. I can remember finishing a few books — Piotr Rawicz’s Blood From the Sky comes to mind, pretty much anything by Thomas Bernhard, my first reading of The Brothers Karamazov — and feeling: my life won’t be the same again after this. That’s pure magic. Who wouldn’t want to somehow be a part of that enterprise, even if it feels like a dream?
If we’re talking about inspiration — a word I dislike, but we can use it as shorthand — let’s not forget just taking in life: really listening to someone’s story, closely watching the way someone moves when they’re afraid or hopeful or angry, committing to memory the way a tree cast its shadow on some night when you were young. There’s so much right there. Everywhere.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s not a matter of creating art “about” these experiences. It’s about allowing the experiences to weave their way — mysteriously, unconsciously, unpredictably — into the tapestry of our own lives and then creating something from that life. Or letting it be created. Making art can be about shaking the tree, sometimes violently; but more often it’s about being still, still enough to receive what’s in front of you and inside you. Even when — especially when — it’s painful or fearsome. That pain, that disquiet, can take so many forms, shading and related: grief, doubt, rage, bewilderment. Loneliness. But there can be exhilaration in this process. That exhilaration comes not from lifting the fog — it’s always there — but from seeing the fog itself and the forms moving inside it.
Something I’ve learned to articulate better is that I like to work in a way I call aphoristic. Unity, consistency, messaging — those things are useful in some fields, but in art they can be traps if you let them dominate the process, seductive but life sucking. I work on each picture as if it stands by itself. If it leads to another image — it usually does — then fine. But my goal isn’t to make a series of anything — photographers especially can get carried away with this, and there are lots of external incentives that encourage it. When I’m working I’m trying to make a single image that I want to look at, that I can live with. That image also becomes my best teacher in the here-and-now for whatever follows. I don’t ruminate on unity — I figure my own sensibility will be a kind of thread that ties the work together, somehow. Besides, that’s what a good curator does. I like to let my curators curate; they’re good at it and, for me, making pictures is hard enough.
I’m uncomfortable with work that feels didactic or moralizing. There are too many images out there that feel like essays with illustrations. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good essay. But an image that moves me is different: it’s like a drug hitting my veins. I want it to feel that way. The gold standard isn’t a lecture. It’s heroin.
The artists whose work I’ve loved, they all had serious skin in the game. Tracy Emin comes to mind. Diane Arbus, especially those untitled 1970–71 photos. Michelangelo’s Slaves. Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev. Henry Darger. Emil Cioran (an essayist but really a poet). About six months ago I finished Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy, The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie: it took my breath away. Of course, they’re all different. But they have something in common: they worked as if their lives depended on it.
Here’s something that several artists have said before me, and when I have students I always paraphrase it: If you want to make art that’s really bad, just create something to show other people how smart you are or what a good person you are. First of all, you’re neither; nobody is. And, at best, the results will be puerile but it can get worse: condescending, preening, bullying. Examining the contours and crevices of something like your own doubts is a lot more interesting and, dare I say, moving than telling people you know stuff they don’t. Flaws and faults — especially intimate ones — are more alive than any imagined purity.
Here’s the best tribute I’ve ever heard someone give an artist. It’s Harold Pinter, speaking of Samuel Beckett:
The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, way outs, truths, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going, and the more he grinds my nose in the shit, the more I am grateful to him. He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty.
I’m not too embarrassed to say that when I read this I get a little weepy. I keep these words close to me, and if I could look back and feel I lived up to some tiny fraction of that, well, then maybe it wasn’t a waste.
And no maggot lonely. Let’s not forget art’s most generous gift: leaving someone feeling a little less alone than they might have been otherwise. Lives have been saved that way. Mine was.
For the last twenty years I’ve started my work mostly with found photographs — some from family archives, others from places like flea markets and used bookstores. These starting points anchor the work in time and physicality; they get me out of my head. Then I work them over — and over — using things that are digital and analog. I don’t previsualize, at least nothing I’m committed to. Though it makes me anxious, it’s better if I’m looking for something but I don’t know what it is; it sounds romantic, but I’m hoping it finds me.
Again, it’s hard to articulate in words — a good reason to make images — but in hindsight the pictures that move me are emotive. They channel states of being that are multiple and overlapping; things like dissolution, transience, resignation, tragedy.
A little over ten years ago, I began making the images I collectively call Frances. Frances was my mother, and many things besides: brilliant, sensitive, a destroyer. She was soaked in pain and fear; this tragic history running through generations poured into her veins. The images I created felt to me afterwards like a fusion of her voice and mine, including my fears and pain, my delirium. I feared her, I hated her, and I courted her. I mourned her life, but her death not for a moment.
A single life plays itself out within a narrow band of chaos. It’s not easy to see that storm. Or live inside it.
As I worked on The Moons of Saturn — my latest work—it felt like a coda. An elegy. Over the past years, I’ve watched some of the people closest to me endure pain I can’t properly fathom. Some didn’t make it — eventually none of us do, right? I know it sounds dramatic but parts of me died with them. And the only thing worth labouring over was putting some of that experience, my experience, into my work — not necessarily in a literal way, that might’ve been a bore and we have daily life for that. My father said this thing — actually he wrote it because he couldn’t talk anymore — just before he died. I put those words in an image (constructed from a photo of him as a boy) eleven years later: I wanted to see. But he never finished. See what? Maybe he just trailed off, leaving out something banal. He was very sick, dying. But I prefer the way I see it now: We keep looking, looking — but for what we don’t know, and that might just be all the more reason to try.
Out of all that, all that thrashing, I wanted to see something. To see a little more depth or breadth or both, I’m not sure. If it turns out there’s nothing, well then, try making a picture of that. If you fail, you fail. (It’s art not paediatric surgery.) But some failures are better than others. And some failures are richer than things we call success.
I like what Annie Dillard said: What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? That’s not easy, and it shouldn’t be. I don’t know if The Moons of Saturn is really my coda — it probably isn’t and I have to laugh because saying so sounds practically operatic.
But I don’t mind if it feels that way. Every piece of work should feel like there’s desperation in there, like it’s your last.
For more information on Frank Rodick and his work, visit www.frankrodick.com.