the transcript
Carmen Giménez (CG): I'm Carmen Giménez, executive director at Graywolf Press. Today, I'm talking with Aisha Sabatini Sloan, author of Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, published by Graywolf Press in February of 2024, and Roberto Tejada, whose book Carbonate of Copper will be published this spring with Fordham University Press.
Today's Lab will consider the relationships between writers and visual artists through writing. Aisha is also the author of The Fluency of Light, Borealis, and Captioning the Archives. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan. Roberto Tejada is the author of numerous poetry collections and several books on art and media history. He is a professor of creative writing and art history at the University of Houston.
I have long been an admirer of both of your writing, particularly because you both have made a career out of investigating the fluid boundaries between criticism, memoir, and artistic practice. Roberto, you have spent decades examining the intersection of visual culture and literary arts across the Americas, and Aisha, your books have redefined how we write about art, race, and personal experience.
Today I want to talk about the nature of writing about art itself and how you view your practice, whether as criticism, collaboration, or something totally different. The gem of this podcast was a curiosity about how you both navigate between analytical distance and personal interpretation, and how your own identities as artists inform your engagement with others’ work.
I hope what emerges is not just a conversation about writing about art, but about art as dialogue: between viewer and artwork, between different mediums and between personal experience and cultural analysis, which I see as a more general move in contemporary criticism. I'm excited to jump in and explore the complex ecosystem where criticism meets creativity, where personal vision meets artistic interpretation, and where writing itself— whether it be poetry or prose—becomes an art form when in dialogue with other arts.
But before we jump into questions, I wonder if you could each read from your work. Roberto?
Roberto Tejada (RT): Thank you, Carmen. Yeah, I think I'll read a poem from my forthcoming book of poems, Carbonate of Copper, many of which I considered sound sculptures in the sense of the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Her work is the epigraph to the book itself, which says, “to make sounds rather than what sounds to make.” The poem's called “September.”
Mirror symmetry in the wilderness.
The marauders with their sirens
and sticks. An astrolabe
for the constellation
of cancer—for the one
true calibrated
mercy of my immediate
and overfamiliar
shadow cast in autumn
fern: hexagonal.
I could no sooner bring
myself to imagine it
was just as well to them
I was disappeared
or barely discernible
along the causeway
than to dwell confined
in the animal recesses
of my vesicular sleep. Only
then am I entrusted
to shelter consigned to
the rattling outer reaches
of my nerve in turquoise
uncovered by lamplight a body
outnumbered by octaves
(CG): Aisha?
Aisha Sabatini Sloan (AS): Thank you so much. I'll be reading from “A Clear Presence,” which is the first essay in Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit.
When he was a young man, the Olympic diver Sammy Lee was allowed to use the public pool only on a certain day in the week reserved for people of color. After that day, the pool was drained and refilled for the comfort of the white patrons. My father remembers hearing, during an interview with Lee, that the diver returned years later, after his win, and confronted the people who maintained the pool, to ask why they felt the need to drain it, as if his Korean background and the Black skin of his friend had somehow infected the water.
They told him that to the contrary, they always considered the order ludicrous. Rather than draining the pool as they'd been told, they would lock the doors for a couple of hours and add a little extra chlorine to satiate the people in charge. But the fact of Lee's exclusion, the lie of his body being a contaminant, had already influenced his understanding of the world.
In a recurring dream, I am swimming in somebody else's pool. The city is always Los Angeles. The grounds are always well-maintained. There is often a flourishing garden filled with climbing vines of jasmine, bougainvillea, and bird of paradise. The house to which the pool belongs is empty. I might get out of the water to wander around, always with the sense that while I've been invited, I am not supposed to be there.
Thank you.
CG: Thank you both so much. To start, I wondered if you see your writing about art as an extension of criticism, a form of collaboration, or something else entirely.
RT: I like the question very much because I think it's really germane to this idea of the art essay. It is a collaboration. It’s an encounter, as you said, Carmen, in the introduction. The closest analogy that I have that helps me think about what kind of format or genre it is, is translation. It does have its own particular entity, but it's about this critical transposition of something that is without words, that's speechless, but that we have to try to find the words or give a voice, trying to find contradictions and resemblances, but not in a one-to-one relationship.
I tend to see art writing of a particular sort that Aisha and I are interested in as coming out of the surrealist tradition of collage, in that it involves both the alignment of one's particular idiosyncratic processing of experience and perception with what's actually in front of us. That indisputable fact of an artwork. I love that about your essays, Aisha. The word ‘flow,' I think, is one that comes up at the end of “A Clear Presence.” It's remarkable how you move from this very canonical image of these nude swimmers in the paintings by Hockney. It's linked to a way of inhabiting an artwork, which you align with luminous dreaming. The art writing I see in your work is a kind of luminous dreaming.
AS: What’s the word? Luminous is a better word, what is it?
RT: Lucid dreaming.
AS: Lucid dreaming. I like luminous, though. I’m so glad you brought up collage. As soon as you said translation, that really brought to mind the process that I know I follow when I'm doing art writing, and that I asked some students to do recently in a class where we're using collage as the lens to think about essay structure. I asked them to translate a collage into a writing prompt. I do think it was exactly what you mapped out. Visually, the idea is to translate whatever constellation of images and sounds and sensory experience you receive from an artwork into language.
I was sitting with Carbonate of Copper and marveling at how it feels like your writing is witness. We are witnessing the act of painting. Not only is it musical, but it's so colorful. There’s something about it that feels just as much an articulation—not of just witnessing something visual, but it's visual in and of itself.
If you could put into language what the quality of visual creation might sound like, that's what your poetry is doing. It does feel like a collaboration with the art, but also a collaboration with the inner landscape that art creates or imprints on your brain-body as you're receiving it.
RT: Aisha, do you have a sense when you’re composing, when an association happens that you didn't predict and it transforms the writing that follows completely? I get the sense in those essays that's kind of the process.
AS: One of the things that makes my own relationship to the writing process so long is taking every association equally seriously. There is that sorting through images and associations that show up, that takes a long time to whittle down in terms of what will create a sustainable structure for the essay. How does that work for you when something shows up?
RT: It’s very difficult to articulate, because it usually happens in that jump cut, to use a cinematic term, or in that gap. You know something's being articulated just by the temperature or the energy of, say, the two paragraphs or the two units. I see your essays as very musical, or choreographed, because they move from one tone or one palette to the next. They're moving forward a knowledge about the artwork.
For me, the art essay that's not necessarily following conventions of art criticism or art history works best. The metric of success is, “Does the artwork look differently by the time you get to the end?” Now, I can't look at a Hockney without thinking of Rodney King, of the 1992 uprisings, of that very profound image at the beginning of you and your mother at a pool in Hancock Park. We both have Los Angeles in our background. All that informs the way I view those Hockney paintings.
AS: I’m happy to have participated in that new lens for Hockney, although I know a lot of artists have inserted themselves into his rendering of Los Angeles. There's been a new generation of people engaging with his Los Angeles vernacular and then inserting their grandmother in that space and repopulating that landscape. I'm glad to be part of a new grouping of people who are trying to talk with Hockney.
RT: You do it with Richard Diebenkorn as well, that Ocean Park No. 6. By the time you get to that end of that essay, it has all this personal processing of both personal and social experience that gives what might have seemed simply abstract landscapes a completely different set of parameters.
I'm glad you saw there was a painterly aspect to the poems in Carbonate of Copper. That term is from art history. It’s the blue pigment that was lesser than aquamarine. It was treasured and coveted in the Renaissance period, but it was seen as lesser than because it didn't last as long. What I really wanted was a real, earthy, material feel and volume to the poems that I do see as sculpted, but sculpted by way of sound.
AS: I was going to ask if “painting” was the right verb for what it feels like when you're mapping visuals, images, or colors.
RT: It probably is more than photography, even though I tend to follow photographs. Carbonate of Copper is informed in some way by these photographs from 1939 to 1942 of the FSA period: Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee.
Because of my relationship with living painters from my generation and being in the studio with them, I see the idea of moving brush strokes and mark-making around. To me, that's a very suggestive way of seeing language as something material that can be moved around, tested, mixed, blended, removed, attenuated, all these verbs that painters use. To get painters in a room talking about painting can be a very specific kind of conversation, but often it's evocative of the relationship they have to actual pigment and materials.
AS: That’s a pretty explicit collaboration if you're there when the painting is being created.
RT: I have learned everything I know about both painting and photography by being in the studio with artists. Or in the dark room, for those photographers who still use the dark room.
CG: I love how you both have an almost synesthetic relationship to writing that's informed by seeing artists and learning from artists. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how other art forms, or maybe specific pieces of art, have influenced or transformed your creative process. I think that you pointed to this, Aisha, if some artwork becomes a co-author or participates, I feel like you both are speaking in that direction. Has there been a moment in which that voice, that speaker, of the artwork has also shown up and pushed you around or sent you in directions that you didn't necessarily want to go to?
AS: The first thing that jumps to mind when you say that is Adrian Piper, because so many of the first performance artists that I encountered were Black women. It might have been one of the first times that I was able to locate myself in my voice. In some ways, that is what led me to writing, because I was in an interdisciplinary program that was largely studio art oriented and art history oriented. But I wrote my master's thesis about Adrian Piper. Through that, I went to creative writing.
There’s something about Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Adrian Piper. The way that they state their authority through the silence of white space and pure visual juxtaposition has felt really powerful to me, or that I'm now noticing as I look back, was a delicious model to follow in terms of what writing can feel like or create in the viewer. This is something I'm writing about right now in my work in process for Graywolf, is the ways in which I was unwittingly giving myself performance art prompts in order to explore the cultural critique and the ethnographic questions that I was grappling with as a undergraduate.
Once I had Adrian Piper as a lens for understanding the juicy space of awkward situations with strangers, which is such a fraught illustration of how race plays out in daily life, I understood that what I was doing was a kind of art making just by going out into the world with these strange assignments for myself. Those are the people that come to mind.
RT: I love that. There is something strong in terms of a force, and I love this idea of the artist being a co-author for the artwork itself. In the best situations, one has to surrender to the art object, and it becomes a possession. Then there's a struggle, because one wants to affirm one's own unique, irreducible way of thinking about the world or moving through it.
My earliest training in this regard or thinking about it goes back to my years in Mexico City, and really thinking about both modern photography and the modern master photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who I had the opportunity to meet. Particularly some of his images that are these puzzles or parables.
He's got this very famous image from 1931 called “Optical Parables.” It's from the passerby looking upward at an optician’s shop. In an oval, it says “Optica Moderna,” which is the name of the optician shop—the modern opticians—but it can also mean parable, because parábola is both parable and the oval shape. Álvarez Bravo famously inverted the image, so you're looking at it in a negative. It’s inverted. It’s flipped, and you've become the photograph itself. Or you're inside the photograph, looking out. That blurring of subject and object is a way I like to think about attending to the force of the artwork as a co-author or participant.
That's one of the predicaments that art writing is involved with. Allowing or surrendering oneself to the object. The art historian James Elkin has a book called The Object Stares Back. In a sense, it really does. It begins to speak in a way, or demand a particular kind of attention, on its own terms, even though we have our own particular curiosities and method to approach it.
AS: Something that's coming up, listening to you, imagining your encounter with artists, and even imagining you in the dark room, I’m wondering what your relationship is to John Berger. Specifically, I'm thinking about photocopies and the portrait of the artist either at work or out in the world on the subway. It seems similar to what you're describing in terms of your method.
RT: Interesting. Well, the work of John Berger has been meaningful to me, in part because he was trying to figure out that observation and insight by Walter Benjamin that what is so particular about the photograph is that it is endlessly reproducible.
It gives a specialness to the artwork but also diminishes that specialness at the same time. In this struggle between that “aura,” which he calls it, and its contradiction or its opposite. Photography can be viewed in a book because through photomechanical reproduction, you're looking at an original in a sense. You're not looking at a copy of the original. All these elements have always been part of the critical draw, charm, or mystery around photography that has caught my attention.
Then working both in the dark room and following a photographer like Graciela Iturbide, with whom I've worked closely, and thinking about the ethnographic mode. There’s something particular about Graciela's being in the world that allows her to enter into spaces where she might not otherwise, but for the camera and the ability to prompt this encounter with others that is an invitation, not necessarily an imposition or a coercion. That's quite remarkable. It takes a certain kind of personality, and to watch it in action is an instruction itself.
AS: For her to manage that with a witness, with you witnessing, is all the more impressive. Did you have to make yourself somehow psychically invisible?
RT: The most unspeakable photoshoot was when I accompanied her to this ritual slaughter of goats in Puebla. There was a frenzy. I was going to be writing about this body of work, so I was both in it and outside of it. It's an indigenous and colonial practice that continues to this day. It's hard to extract oneself and to see oneself observing in that moment. I remember that being something quite indelible and unforgettable.
AS: I don't know if I'm going to be able to forget that either.
RT: That body of images is The Goat’s Dance. It’s one of her most brutal depictions. It's evocative of other kinds of brutalities in the colonial aftermath of Mexico.
CG: I want to build off that, because you're talking about seeing art and the occasion of being there in the artmaking brings you to the work or brings you to the process of engaging with it.
I wonder when you first encounter an artwork that you're not present for, and it's something that moves you—it could be any in any form, performance art, photography, visual—what is your initial process? Do you begin writing immediately, or do you let it percolate? How has this approach evolved over your career?
Roberto, I'm also thinking about you in particular because there's a way in which your career is as an art historian in the traditional sense of the word. There are places in which your work as an artist either very clearly interlocks with it or glances at it. I’m curious about your process.
RT: It begins usually with the attraction, draw, or proximity to an artwork that elicits some emotional and intellectual response. It immediately begins with language. Inevitably, there are words or phrases that come to mind.
If possible, I try to get those down on paper as quickly as possible. There is a kind of schizophrenic phenomenon that occurs if I haven’t been commissioned to write about this work or is not involved with my research. Are the words going to lead to something that we could call a poem, or something that's on the side of the lyric, or will it lead to something more critical? That's sort of unclear at the time. Constellations of words become larger noticings, like notetaking, that’s fragmented and chaotic.
I often think of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who spoke of confusion but with a clear sense of purpose. To me, this has always been one way to work through something whose end point you have no sensation or image of yet, but that you're working through all these confusions with a clear sense of purpose.
If it becomes an art essay, I start creating these landscapes of paper, almost like storyboarding, because I know often I'll begin with a paragraph that is polished to set up the kind of relations, syntax, and topics that I want to cover. The rest is pure disorder.
Then I can see, okay, if this needs to be about ten pages, I need to get to this image description by the fourth page or so. I want to come to this sense of conclusion around this duration, or by this page. It becomes a sculpting. It’s bringing these very disordered and fragmented observations into something that coheres, reflects, and conveys, to my satisfaction, the way I think or process that experience or information.
Is that similar, Aisha?
AS: I'm thrilled you mentioned Gordon Matta-Clark because of our earlier conversation in the description of the oval and looking through the oval in the Bravo photograph. Lara Mimosa Montes in Thresholes has spoken about how the reason she ended up with that title and with that concept of “looking through a hole to another reality” was because she had a photograph by Gordon Matta-Clark.
The way in which that image was a collaborator with her as she was writing the substance of that book—thinking about the Bronx, trying to render a certain moment in space and time—it ended up providing a very literal frame for her to enter into the themes of that book. That relates so much to process to me, because sometimes, there's a mystery like you're describing. When you first have that encounter, you're not sure which way it's going to go.
There is that quality of the uncanny that art speaks to or allows for. It's like a magic wand. It’s acknowledging. Art acknowledges. You might have an image, a feeling, or a collection of feelings. Then you encounter a piece of art, and you realize that collection of feelings and images exists for somebody outside of yourself. There’s a sense-making in that. I’ll often have an experience that an encounter with art validates. It’s that sense of familiarity, like, “I've seen this before.” With “The Clear Presence,” I had been trying to write about Rodney King and David Hockney for a long time. When he died in a swimming pool, it was this moment of, oh. That had been the frame all along in a weird way.
There's something about the nature of our encounters with art that feels like it's in conversation with our deeper knowledge reserves or universal truths.
RT: I agree. I would say that your writing has art historical grounding. What I often convey to art historians who are a little agnostic about this kind of writing is that the minimal requirement is visual description.
When I get to that description about the quality of mark-making that produces the transparency of water in David Hockney's work, that's telling me something about the entire project at this point. Of the ways in which clarity and opacity come into view only through a body moving through space as the swimmer.
All these things are elements that could not be conveyed in a more conventional critical mode. I love the image of the “threshole” because it has both negative and positive space, like Gordon Matta-Clark’s interventions into architecture. They are both ruins, and yet he creates a positivity from a negative space.
AS: It’s in such a similar way as what you're describing with the inversion of the image. The image that that she had spoken about for Thresholes was looking through a circle in the floor down into another floor of a building.
RT: Visual description sounds self-evident, but for anyone who practices it, it throws everything into chaos. We believe that the object in front of us is self-explanatory. But where do you begin? Do you begin in the middle? Do you begin in the corners? Let's say it's a two-dimensional object. It has its own particular syntax only insofar as you begin somewhere and narrate what we're seeing through materials, placement, location, where it is in the general scheme of one's own looking. I love that. When I feel that I've reached a cul-de-sac or some obstacle, I return to describing. Describing will tell me something about my larger questions that I didn't have consciously present at the time.
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CG: This is Carmen Giménez, and I'm talking with Aisha Sabatini Sloan, author of Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit published by Graywolf Press last February, and Roberto Tejada, whose book Carbonate of Copper will be published this spring with Fordham University Press.
I see you both at a formal vanguard in how you are using different threads and different approaches. You both work in hybrid forms, blending memoir, criticism and poetry. How does this blending flexibility allow you to engage with art in ways that traditional forms might not?
You both have talked about the way in which you're pulled in a specific direction. I’m curious what does the collage, the translation of this work, give to you?
AS: I was visualizing in our last stretch of conversation the way in which Carbonate of Copper, for example, feels to be a translation of not just an art object but also natural phenomenon. There's invisible strands between things. There's something about a rendering of elements of physics, or experience, that we haven't quite caught up to in science. I haven't done mushrooms, but when people do mushrooms, all of a sudden they can see waves of energy in a way that sounds similar to heightened senses of hearing in dogs or the way an insect can see 100 times better than the human eye can.
I get that sense in your poetry, Roberto, that there's a rendering of the invisible forces at play that connect things to each other. Genre ambiguity allows you to speak to that experience. When we're speaking from an academic voice, we have to verify everything.
There is something about lingering in that space—not quite uncertainty—but of not being pinned down by genre distinctions that feels like it allows you to do that cross-disciplinary and ephemeral work. To make connections that can't necessarily be quantified somehow, but make perfect sense on some level. Poetry has always been doing that, but I do feel like pointing out the ways that different disciplines or entities are talking to each other.
You have to be nimble. You have to be prepared to move out of your normal mode in order to track those connections. I sound like I'm on mushrooms. I’d like to track those connections.
RT: Absolutely. I really do believe in the surrealist projection of the derangement of the senses, and artworks at best do that. There is a kind of derangement that takes place.
I appreciate your remarks, because what I've learned from attending to artworks—visual, performative, and otherwise—is this idea of the immersive. What does it take to be in a sense of experience or subjectivity that doesn't need to narrate any kind of antecedent of a before or after, cause and effect, but to be completely immersed in the environment of both visual and textural surroundings?
There's something appealing that comes out of the sensorium and the intermedia nature of surrealist practice. With Carbonate of Copper, it wasn't until about midway that I began to look on the Library of Congress where all the FSA photographs are available, many of them.I was writing this book and the poems in it in proximity to the US Mexico border, particularly the Texas-Mexico border in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa. I saw that these legendary and important photographers like Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee had spent significant time in the Rio Grande Valley.
I wanted to think about what this might be along the lines of Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation. How can I arrange photographs that are historic, part of an archive, and hopefully convey something about my own understanding of history and how it is inflected in the present? That comes out of an immersive way of approaching the artwork from within, not from without.
CG: Are there art forms or specific artists you haven't written about yet that you feel drawn to and wondering what draws you to them? There’s so many things happening at any moment, even TikTok videos. Are there cultural products outside of writing that you’re thinking, someone needs to take this on?
RT: I'll circle back to my referencing of Pauline Oliveros. I’ve wanted to write about her improvised music and her electronic music. I serve on the board of an arts organization that she founded in Houston twenty years ago with David Dove, who is the current director of using these methods of improvisation.
The mission of Nameless Sound is with neurodivergent or refugee youth. This allows expression to happen, because we're not worried about what sounds to make. We’re more invested in making sound. However, sound and sound-making are abstract, but physical and time based. It has been a very distinct challenge to try to write about that which is not visual, but that we would consider in the realm of artmaking in ways that writing about other kinds of music in strict musicological conventions provides some guidelines.
Have you written about music, Aisha? It structures some of your essays, like the soundtrack of the essay with you and your father, with Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” leading one of those pathways.
AS: Yes, for my book Borealis. It was the first time I had a subscription to a music streaming service. I got it because I was there, and I was quite bored. A lot of that is essentially me meandering through the playlist that I was listening to when I was in Alaska. When I was writing Ocean Park No. 6, I was trying to write about Diebenkorn in a coffee shop. I was listening to “Grizzly Bear,” and they had the record for “Grizzly Bear.” It was a Diebenkorn painting on the record.
RT: That’s like one of these GIFs. It’s uncanny.
AS: It’s completely uncanny. What's even stranger, and what I was referring to earlier, is it was at the heart of the essay. It was a Diebenkorn rendering of a spade, which feels in conversation with his experience as a soldier in World War II.
Because of the atomic bomb, he didn't have to go out and do this scary mission. There's something about that shape that seems to have haunted him. It's a similar shape as the plume from the explosion. But also, I’d had that image in my journal.
I was talking about the image of a spade in my journal when I was in my twenties.
There's something about tracking the meaning of a shape over time. I feel like I'm trying to write about a collection of artists that I've always wanted to write about currently for my book project.
I’m thinking in particular about neurodivergence, which is a big part right now of my relationship to teaching and my own art practices—noticing the ways that my brain might be better explained to me by studying different types of neurodivergence, which is a tricky label for different kinds of intelligence.
I'm being very associative right now, so pardon all of the jumping. That brought to mind my friend Ariannes Orchez, who lives in Houston and sent this podcast exploring the connection between autism and telepathy. This again gets at those invisible strands of connection. What that made me realize is that I come from a family of people who are constantly recounting stories of telepathic experience. I’ve always wanted to talk more with my cousins about what that looks like for them, because I've always trusted in their intelligence and their sensibility.
They're very sharp thinkers, and they’ve all articulated a relationship to seeing things that aren't necessarily there or that can't be quantified. They aren't explicitly artists, but I've been curious to chat with them. I don't know if they would let me, because now that I've written about one of them, maybe they don't want to be written about again.
RT: I take seriously all these alternative forms of knowledge. It's what the surrealists called objective chance. There are connections, correspondences, that are just waiting for someone to bring the frame of reference into the field. This involves magic, the unconscious, as well. These are all the ways we tend to repress what we consider reasonable, critical discourse. When we loosen up on the pedal on reason, some very interesting connections and correspondences can take place.
CG: I love how that term can be a tenet of the kind of writing that you're doing. It’s the move between the subject and the object, and the idea of receiving. I'm thinking too of that idea of different kinds of knowledges. I appreciate, Aisha, that you situate that with neurodivergence, because I think it's important to distinguish that the divergence is about the world being set, and all the multiplicity of the ways in which we receive the world as both in flux and also unique to the self.
I love the idea, Roberto, that you talked about, how where you look at a painting or an artwork is where you begin, and that is also very specific or subjective. Someone might say, ‘I'm going to start with the frame because the frame tells me about the curation and how this ended up in a museum,’ or ‘I'm going to look at the colors because it tells us something about the historical moment and the fabrication of colors.’ That's super, super exciting. That's also a way that distinguishes a writer's work. It informs the style, so that's where the form and content is in conversation with the type of writing that you're describing.
I wonder about writers who are just beginning to write about art. Aisha, you talked a little bit about your students and the frames you give them. What advice would you offer? How could they find their voice while staying true to the art they're engaging with?
RT: I’m very excited that there's been a tendency and a movement towards this idea of attention. I’ve been following the work of the Strother School of Radical Attention. They're based in Brooklyn and use techniques, for example, that would be similar to those of Pauline Oliveros and her sound meditations of how long one can be present in the long duration of looking or attending to an object.
One of the key thinkers around this is D. Graham Burnett, who talks about our attention being fracked by technologies, by the social media. This is now the Strother School of Radical Attention speaking as well, which is this idea that one can world-build if we attend together.
I would recommend choosing an artwork first as an exercise alone, but possibly an exercise with others, and find a vocabulary and a shorthand to observe the changes that take place while you're observing, almost to test the limits of one's ability or capacity to be mindful. To have that kind of energy, the sense of focus, and the shorthand to be able to write down those changes in oneself and how that change is inflected from actual material objects in front of us.
If possible, if you know living artists, many may be in MFA programs for creative writing at institutions that also have MFAs in the visual arts. If you can find someone who will welcome you into their studio, get a sense and begin that dialogue with an artist. One can't learn to be an artist, but one can think like an artist. That means attending to the very practical decisions that you make in terms of preparing the material for the outcome, the performance, or the action, and finding the metrics of what, for the artist, makes a successful endeavor. Sharing that in the studio, which is a very intimate space, is a learning that one can't get in schools.
AS: That is very similar to what I would say. When we were talking about artists, painters who are engaging with the legacy of David Hockney's rendering of Los Angeles, Romero Gomez’s “American Gardeners” is the painting in particular that was coming to mind. A very explicit reinterpretation of Hockney's work, including the gardener who would upkeep that property, but put into the center of the frame.
What you're describing of actually visiting a studio and witnessing an artist at work feels like the next step that I would hope students could go to. I think a lot about using visual art practice as a model for the writing process.
I'll often try to teach a class where we'll pair a visual discipline with writing or essay structure. For architecture, looking at how architects conceptualize of their blueprints of space, and thinking about how you want the reader to inhabit the spaces of your essay. Really allowing yourself to be an amateur in that investigation, in putting those two disciplines together.
Right now, I'm teaching a class on collage where we're thinking about: How do they achieve that texture How do they achieve that jump? What would that feel like on the page? It often involves somatics. C. A. Conrad is one of my absolute favorite artists and poets to go to for prompts and for thinking about the importance of somatics, being in your body, noticing things, and not discounting discomfort and what's possible. How you can sort of shift and change your relationship to what you're looking at and experiencing by being intentional about how you move in space and what it means to prepare to write.
I don't know that this is necessarily how C. A. Conrad articulates it, because they've talked about getting out of the sense of being a machine and making out of habit. Once you get to a certain point in your writing process, it can be hard to get out of that. My principal concern, especially in MFA workshops, is getting us out of the concerns of the ego. I see a lot of damage done by the fear of what it might look like to mess up in front of other people.
I try to make things as awkward as possible in my classes. My students yesterday put their head in their hands and did ‘heads up, seven up’ for five minutes while they thought about a relationship that was over. Then I was like, Oh my God, I don't know if this is okay that I'm asking them to do this. I had them walk around the museum narrating their experience, thinking about this person that they'd lost, all in the spirit of trying to replicate one of Hilton Al’s sentences, because they're so meandering and associative and verbal.
Artists, performance artists, conceptual artists, and poets are really my biggest teachers when it comes to what can it look like to—to borrow your phrase, Roberto—immerse yourself in the process and in that subjectivity? Not looking at it from afar and being nervous about what it can accomplish, but going deep down into it and seeing and smelling and feeling, without worrying so much if what you make out of that is pretty.
Really, even questioning whether something has to be pretty and why. Going back to the body: why do you want to make in the first place? Get back to that urgency. So much editing can be accomplished by coming back to the source and feeling like what you're doing is what you mean and want to be doing.
RT: I love that. This is why I love that artists can refer to the studio in a way that we writers cannot. When they say, “come to the studio,” you realize that one is allowed as an artist to spend a lot of time in the studio doing absolutely nothing but reviewing magazine cutouts, if you're a collage artist. Ceramics, the different kinds of clay, if you're a ceramicist.
Maybe just moving the physical body around in the space to see what begins to call, taking things apart, putting it back together. It's taken me a very long time. I can't say I've attained the kind of transparency or openness about process. Even though I'm so invested in trying to crack that open, I wish I had what artists can do in that regard. It's allowing that messiness, that disorder, and allowing it to be viewed and seeing if it opens up a conversation. It’s why having somebody else come into the space is important.
Something you mentioned Aisha, made me think of the idea that we can be fictional characters as well. The degree to which by looking at an artwork or having a dialogue with another artist, we're already becoming someone else. I'm not exactly who I am. I'm adjacent with myself. Sometimes using the fiction of the character that I need to be in order to address what's in front of me as an object or action is truly important.
AS: That makes me think about playwriting as another art-making practice that feels off to the margins or genre-ambiguous in a lot of ways. Over the summer, I was watching the playwright Nathan Alan Davis perform this piece that he was commissioned to do. He’ll work with a historical figure, and it feels like he's a medium, like he’s tuning in. That must be part of the fictional writing process that I hadn't really understood before. Thinking about fictionalizing yourself, what does it look like to tune into how someone moves in the world? Thinking even about acting, because there are times when I feel like acting is a fascinating thing.
I don't know how that meshes with explicit genre distinctions about nonfiction, but I'm constantly fascinated how actors use this technique of slipping into different characters, and how that is in conversation with what writing is up to. I don't know in the nonfiction context what that would look like or manifest as. But in terms of experimenting, there's something about looking to anyone outside of your genre to see what they're up to and what that's like for them.
RT: Definitely in playwriting or for actors. One of the aspects that does align with our writing is this idea of method acting, and in particular, when the object that you might be holding is meant to convey a memory. That's not necessarily the memory that is available or prompted by the situation or the artwork, but it puts you in that fictional character and allows you to perceive it in the way that it's calling one to perceive or experience it.
CG: Thank you, Roberto. Thank you, Aisha. I'm so inspired. I want to go look at art books, sit in a studio, and think about what corner of painting I start looking at when I write about art. Thank you so much.
RT: Thank you, Carmen. Thank you, Aisha.
Our music is from “Expiation,” from the album Terrain by Jacob Cooper. There’s a short feature on Jacob’s music on the Lab site. Check it out, and check out all things Lab, on graywolflab.org. Thanks to our podcast producers Edie French and Paul Auguston of IDream.tv. And thanks to the donors who have generously contributed to Graywolf Lab.
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