Souvenirs that outlive us

Two stories about making (mediocre) art

Hey y’all,

The other day I was in the middle of a lengthy explanation of how my work has developed over the years when I paused and smiled at the person who was interviewing me and I said, “Now, please understand that none of what I’ve just said was in my head at the time.” Then I started laughing and admitted, “I was just making it up as I went along.” 

I am suspicious of stories about art-making that have clean plot lines. So much of the process is twisted and mysterious. But sometimes I think it’s fun in our work to try to reverse-engineer how certain pieces came into being, not because it’s all that illuminating, but because what comes out at the end is the realization that there is no real way to reverse engineer these processes! (And the pieces you can reverse-engineer are not necessarily the best pieces.)

I’d like to tell you the stories of a few pieces I made recently. None of them are even close to masterworks! But they’ll give you an idea of how I work:

I was hanging some of my riding gear out to dry on the line and started thinking about how the clothespin is a perfect technology. I got to wondering if people were skeptical when they introduced the new spring-loaded clothespin — “I don’t need this newfangled technology!”

I found my way to “the curious history of the clothespeg,” which pointed out that in his 1853 patent, inventor David M. Smith described his design “in almost erotic detail,” and even called the wind “an evil.”

Well, I gotta see this, I thought, and looked it up on Google Patents:

This material was just too good to pass up, so I printed it out and started making blackout poems from it:

Some people when they start making blackout poetry turn to novels or other poetry collections, but the fun for me is getting poetry out of mundane, non-fiction sources like this one. (You’ll see I took a few liberties and invented a couple of “O”s and turned “levers” to “lovers.”)