The past couple of days I've been thinking a lot about the conversation my ceramics teacher and I had about "tunnel vision." During my final critique he asked me to tell him a bit about how each pot was different and branching out in the sense that he could tell I was "taking a risk to see what the clay could do." I know "tunnel vision" drives him absolutely crazy because a student's reluctance to try new forms means that student gets stuck making the same pot over and over. That same student gets pissy about making any other form than the form he or she has appropriated as a comfort zone, which makes his life more difficult since the student becomes reluctant to being taught anything new.
The same happens to writing students. I imagine that "tunnel vision" is a problem of all artists in any genre in any part of the world. I did go through my little diddy of tunnel vision, though I remained teachable because I'm an idea thief. This means I listen, I read, I scratch my head and then take whatever I've observed and try to make it my own. I'm sort of a sponge that way. But, my first year of graduate school I wrote only from the perspective of a submarine. When I felt the submarine poems going stale, however, I ditched them. I didn't really have much of an emotion about ditching the submarine sequence. I just knew it had to happen. At first, the submarine poems were liberating, but as they grew stale I realized I was trapping myself.
My teacher is a firm believer that students rob themselves of spontenaiety and the pleasure of learning what clay can do--the ultimate chameleon as he calls it--because they get wrapped-up in the idea of grades and praise and the word "good." Yeah, I've gotten wrapped into those things before, but not for all that long because it's not worth the energy. I went through my "is it good?" phase until I realized I had no fucking clue what "good" really means. The only thing I know about what "Good" means is that the definition of "good" depends on who you are talking to. Personally, I'd rather explore the bounds of what can happen in generating and revising and tinkering than taking on the burden of effectively commenting on the nature of "good." People have been discussing what "good" means since people have been able to speak and we still don't know what exactly it means because the term is always in flux. And the idea of "good" will always be in flux because human beings are creatures of contradiction and change.
I told my teacher it was more effective not to have an opinion about my pots while making them because I was more interested in learning how to react to accidents while working. I think there are two ways to create art: 1. excercising control over the work; 2.) reacting to accidents. You're doing a favor to yourself if you manage to do both while creating the work. I agree that writing and making art, as Diana Jospeh puts it, is a series of choices and each choice has an effect. From my practice I have found that to be not only an effective route but a responsible one because that line of thought requires integrity from the artist. I'd like to feed off of that expression by saying that making art is also a series of accidents and your response to each accident will have an overall effect on your acceptance or resistance to tunnel vision.
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5 comments:
Hitting the nail on the head there, Dave. I've learned, while writing, that reacting to the mistakes and accidents that happen in the process is my process. A typo or a random word that pops in sometimes makes all the difference and can take a poem to Canada when you were headed to Mexico. Rolling with it, that's the key.
I don't really know what makes good art either. Sometimes I read some things that are supposed to be awesome and I think they are shit. Sometimes I think movies like Dumb & Dumber and musicians like Kid Rock are absolutely brilliant. It's weird. I think it's right to try to fight tunnel vision.
However, here is some food for thought. Take your favorite band. How come sophomore CDs usually suck? It seems to me that the band is usually trying to reinvent themselves, or they are just giving you the same old shit, just with different words. When the band tries to reinvent themselves, we bitch because they have become so different. If they stay the same, we bitch because there isn't much growth.
Tunnel vision, yes. Sometimes you just have to honk your horn, click on your highbeams, and floor it.
What bothers me in the problem of learning about art in school is when students spend more time trying to please each other or the teacher than they do just trying to please themselves.
I prefer the "reacting to accidents" approach, but there's something to be said for that control approach, too. Good post. I'll have to think about it.
When you're dealing with undergrad or inexperienced writers, what you are often dealing are people who haven't read anything, haven't written anything, and often haven't experienced anything. Breaking students out of their tunnel vision is hard, and only two out of those three things can be done in a classroom.
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