Getting the Word(s) Out

Before starting this project, I had a passing familiarity with blackout poetry. One of my colleagues does them regularly, and while I’ve always found the results to be “neat” in a novelty sort of way, that’s about as far as my interest went. When the assignment was given, I thought my biggest obstacle would be mustering up the enthusiasm to do the work, but that the work itself would be relatively simple: You take something (a page of words) and make it into less of that thing (a few words). If subtracting from someone else’s work counts as art, I could have cruised through my BFA with nothing but 10 minutes and an eraser. I’m being facetious, but I honestly wasn’t expecting too much of a challenge.

As is so often the case when I make dismissive assumptions about something I don’t actually understand, the reality proved to be much more complicated.

To start with, you’re not just “subtracting words” from a piece, obviously. There needs to be some intentionality to the words you choose to leave behind. Initially, my strategy was to scan the text trying to cobble something together out of words I was cherry-picking almost arbitrarily. This proved to be an exercise in futility, as searching for a handful of needles in a haystack is only negligibly easier than finding one. I refined my process to scanning for a “subject” first, a noun, and trying to work outward from there. I would often get to a place where I had built the beginning or the end of a statement, but rarely a complete thought. These little one sentence narratives I was constructing would hit a dead end, and I’d have to adjust what I thought I was saying and come up with something else I could say instead, adding and removing words as necessary. There was a lot of give and take, a lot of massaging, and a need to abandon preconceived notions of what exactly I was making, but in the end, I was amused by the results of this freewheeling process. I was also struck by how much effort went into crafting a single sentence.

I tend to think of poetry as an expressive medium, where the author is free to explore any thoughts or feelings he or she desires. Blackout poetry imposes constraints on this process. The author doesn’t have access to their full vocabulary to say whatever they want, but is forced to make thought provoking decisions about what they want to say with the limited words they do have access to. It was particularly fascinating to me when the entire class presented their work, and I discovered how wildly the messages varied despite being generated from the same general word pool.

This entry is too long, but I need to touch on the drawing element of the project as well. In short, trying to draw around blocked off sections of a “canvas” is, unsurprisingly, hard. This too was an iterative process, as I gradually became more confident using increasingly complex designs and expanding my tools a little beyond a single Sharpie marker. On the upside, whenever I messed up catastrophically, I could always color over my terrible doodles with ink. It is called a “blackout” poem afterall!

Hand, Made

The assignment this go round was to imagine a culture with a problem to solve, and then, using nothing but paper products, create a vehicle designed to somehow solve it.

I’m always amazed when I hear of artists who are able to envision their work emerging from their materials before they’ve even lifted a finger. There’s a well known story of Michelangelo, who when asked by the Pope how he created the statue of David, pointed to a block of stone and answered “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.” Well good for you, Michelangelo! When I’m presented with a stack of cardstock and told to make something out of it, what I envision is an abundance of Band-Aids and a recycling bin running over with crumpled, bloody paper. My approach with any medium is less about realizing the potential I’ve foreseen, and more about screwing up until I stumble upon a way to start screwing up with purpose. This project was no different.

The first thing I did was start cutting, tearing, rolling and folding paper, seeing how it worked and what I could do with it. For me and the way I like to work, this is an essential part of any artistic endeavor: figuring out the unique properties of whatever I’m working with. It’s learning the vocabulary before trying to articulate a statement. Of no surprise, I had much more success rolling cylindrical shapes than anything that required a high degree of manual dexterity or accuracy. I know from years of trying my hand at origami and wrapping Christmas and birthday presents that meticulously folding paper is not “my jam.” I’m like a surgeon trying to perform an operation after sitting on his hands for an hour, I know what I’m supposed to be doing, but my appendages aren’t cooperating.

Armed with a stack of paper tubes, I got to work on brainstorming the problem/solution aspect of the assignment. I knew I would be working with round, organic shapes as opposed to hard surfaces and sharp edges, so I tried to come up with something thematically relevant. A benevolent response to some issue. Ultimately, I went with the idea of addressing war/conflict/violence with an instrument so non-lethal it was almost silly. Rather than riding into battle by horse or by tank, my imaginary people would be mounted by saddle to robotic hands, settling disputes via thumb-wrestling or “rock, paper, scissors.” Enemy combatants invading your territory? Flick them, like paper footballs, back across their borders. Some miscreant is trying to flee? Grab him, and hold him still while you slap the cuffs on. Minor offenses? Enjoy your major spanking. The applications are endless.

It was still pretty tricky to construct. Attaching cylinders to other shapes was a particular headache, and I managed to get glue in so many unintended places that the final model was basically immobile. I learned a valuable lesson in paper craft by discovering that it’s much easier to improvise on your original design before it’s been assembled into a three dimensional object. Challenges aside, this was one of the more gratifying projects I’ve undertaken. Probably because it was the only time the piece has been able to offer a congratulatory high-five once it was finished.

Fair Lakes Menagerie

The task: “Start a collection based on the first found object you see on your walk, whatever that is. You decide what the connection between the objects is (can be based on shape, color, size etc.).”

I lucked out on this one. I had braced myself for the likelihood of something like this happening:

Of course I did.

Instead, when I walked out of my apartment door, I was greeted by a giant hawk perched atop a handicap sign in my parking lot. This bird has been a fixture in my neighborhood over the last couple of months, easily found sitting in a tree, sitting on top of the dumpster, sitting on the railing of a patio…Always sitting, always watching. I don’t know if it’s been displaced by construction, if my apartment complex is infested with rodents, or if one of my neighbors is a falconer, but it’s always strange to me to see animals I associate with “the wild” inhabiting the suburbs.

“Take wing, Lazarus! For today we hunt deals, and we shall find them at the Oldest of Navies!”

Whatever the cause, I was happy, as I’d much rather draw this magnificent bird than my other options: a discarded Big Gulp or a sock mysteriously tied to a tree branch. I decided to make my connective theme “animals.”

Despite living in the eye of a hurricane of strip malls there is an abundance of wildlife to be found around my residence. I seem to be located at ground zero of the squirrel uprising, but I frequently see geese, deer, raccoons, crows…Two summers ago there was a snapping turtle that regularly appeared outside of my door. I would put it in a box, drive it down the street to a pond and release it, only for it to show back up again a week later. I repeated this process so many times that, to this day, my 3rd floor neighbor greets me with “Hey, Turtleman!”

“Fancy meeting you here…for the 37th time.”

On this particular outing I encountered the usual menagerie, but also a couple of foxes and, oddly, a bunch of seagulls. An unexpected sight considering my closest connection to the sea is a Joe’s Crab Shack.

I brought my dogs along on my walk, in an effort to kill two birds with one stone. Instead, I tried to kill many birds (and squirrels, and rabbits, and especially foxes) with two dogs. Some days they wouldn’t blink at a grizzly bear, other days they react to a chipmunk like it’s an abominable snowman. On this trip they were feeling the latter, so, my doodles were fleeting as my subjects were played off the stage by a chorus of barking.

Friends of man, enemies of art.

Ignoring the fact that is was a logistical nightmare to combine a dog walk with a sketch crawl, and that I’m self-conscious about the results, it was fun to see an environment that had grown mundane over time with fresh eyes, and to take the time to appreciate the natural world thriving in what often feels like urban blight.