From Scratch

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and we've
been remixing his work ever since. Artists who work in physical media
(clay, paint, wood, iron girders) never "create" anything from
scratch. I took a "painting materials & techniques" course in
college. It was actually a lot like cooking. We mixed our own paints
from beautifully colored pigmentary powders, but we didn't actually
make the materials. Mounds of colorful powders were already waiting
for us in the studio at the beginning of the semester. They must have
come from roots, or berries, or clay or something. I imagined our
professor trekking across the globe collecting rare berries, grinding
them up, and making all these brightly colored powders. Of course he
just ordered them from an art supply catalog.

Now this begs the question: were our paintings that semester more
"creative" because we made our own paints? Would our paintings have
been even more "creative" had we found the berries and crushed them
ourselves?

Digital artists sometimes claim superiority to physical/analog
artists because digital artists work in a virtual, non-physical
realm. This makes their art less dependent on physical matter, and
thus more "pure" (or so the argument goes). Yet digital artists
create their art using software written by other people. Even
hardcore digital artists who hand-code in C++ are still using a
programming language written by somebody else.

Conceptual artists often claim superiority to all other artists
because conceptual artists traffic in pure concept, sidestepping the
need to even create an art object – physical, digital or otherwise.
But the conceptual artist still has to write his obligatory "artist
statement" using a written language developed by someone else.
Furthermore, the conceptual artist conceives his concept using his
mind, a mind that he himself did not create. From whence comes the
conceptual artist's mind is a matter of some debate (God, Satan,
sheer dumb evolutionary luck), yet the fact remains that no one
creates his own mind from scratch.

However close to or removed from scratch an artist chooses to work is
entirely a matter of personal preference. A painter paints with
brushes. A web artist paints with Photoshop filters and Flash action
scripts. A conceptual artist paints with interns and apprentices.
Note that making one's own paintbrush does not necessarily make one a
good painter, any more than hiring a third-party construction company
to implement one's architectural blueprints makes one a bad architect.

The trick is to find a balance that leads to the creation of
interesting work. Work too close to scratch, and you'll spend all
your time crushing berries (or programming in binary). Work too far
removed from scratch, and you'll never be intimate enough with your
medium to know what it's good for.

- Curt Cloninger



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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Editor

Since the artist makes nothing "from scratch," it can be argued that,
on some level, every artist is merely remixing pre-existent material
(paints, clay, code, words, whatever). Most House DJ's spin records
that they themselves didn't record, so what makes one DJ different
from another? Most of it has to do with editing – which songs are
chosen, the order of the songs, the transitions between songs. There
is a modicum of physical dexterity involved, but most of the "art" of
House DJ mixing is simply good editing – the artist as editor.

What exactly does an editor do? It depends on the industry. A film
editor establishes pace by cutting and splicing footage. The editor
of a novel does much more. She keeps the big picture of the novel in
mind, making sure that all the little vignettes along the way add up
to a consistent whole. This may mean cutting, adding, revising,
rewording. It may simply mean recognizing where the author took a
wrong turn in the narrative, and sending him back to that place to
start over.

These days, software itself can act as a kind of artist,
automatically generating an endless stream of output. The more I use
such auto-generative software:
http://www.n-generate.com/
http://www.auto-illustrator.com/
http://www.altsense.net/library/generative/alt.sketcher/
etc. in my own digital art, the more I act as editor. I set a few
rudimentary parameters on the software, and then the software itself
begins generating output. My job is to decide which stuff to keep,
which stuff to trash, and when to re-tweak the parameters. Later, I
take this auto-generated source material and incorporate it into
something larger and more purposeful:
http://www.playdamage.org/35.html
But initially, I am merely harvesting chaos.

Editing the output of auto-generative software may seem an extreme
example of the standard artistic process, but is it really? A
photographer tweaks a camera's parameters and frames his picture. He
selects which images to print from a roll of negatives. In the a
darkroom he crops, accentuates, mutes, burns, dodges. All these
actions are primarily editorial.

As a rule, the more "assertive" an artist's tools of production, the
more that artist is acting as editor. Turntables and auto-generative
programs are assertive tools, but a rigorously defined formal process
(a la John Cage or Steve Reich) can also be an assertive tool.

All artists are editors to some degree, which is why opinionless
people make poor artists. The artist who believes that all paths are
equally valid is going to wind up indiscriminately shepherding his
art up some pretty banal paths. As Joe Jackson bluntly observes,
"You can't get what you want till you know what you want."

- Curt Cloninger

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Both articles previously appeared at http://www.artkrush.com
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