2003-03-10

 
first week in SF.
I am now going to try to recreate the pithy post that I lost because of the inadequacies of Blogger. Over the past week, my first span of days in San Francisco have been largely exciting, despite my not leaving the house too much. I have been helping create the Free Eats, Free Shelter, Free Pantry, and Free Medical Charts that the Free Print Shop puts out every three months. We are now working on a new one on Free Mental Health services in the SF area. It is astounding how great a resource these charts are. Some other projects I have been working on include participating in video editing, cooking vegan food, learning the Bengali alphabet (so challenging, but so interesting: the alphabet is organized based on how you use your mouth to make the sounds, not randomly ordered like the latin alphabet), and doing bookbinding.

In Search of Perfect.
I have a friend that is a book-lover and likes to collect and repair books for a community library, but sometimes I feel as if he is a perfectionist. Today, I showed him a journal I had made in the bookbinding class I had taken at GWU and he remarked "it's really beautiful! it really is... but I wonder about this binding, it just won't hold up, it's too loose." Books to him are artistic AND utilitarian, but his reverence of them is beyond me; I view them as an evolutionary tool yet he probably imagines that they are proprietary moments in history. He is very dissatisfied that I write in my books with pen and highlight them. To him they might be holy and should not be defaced nor altered. In my opinion, a book is not a projection of an author's absolutism but rather a subjectivity that reacts with our perceptive mind. By writing in a book, highlighting the good passages and writing marginal question marks and "are you crazy?!" notes demonstrates the plasticity of ideas. Without a beholder, art is a solemn street; yet with the integrated community of experience art becomes a busy boulevard. I feel that we should not shy away from settling for imperfection because perfect is unattainable. And commentary and criticism are only constructive. It is a selfish arrogance that is offended by criticism, incredulous that one's creation was not perceived as unanimously perfect, after all.

We had a dinnertime discussion the other night about making decisions in doing art: another friend (a video editor) remarked that only a bad artist says "Oh, it'll do". They all laughed, but on the inside I cringed: I say that all the time. I like to imagine that I have an artistic side, but deep down I know that I am always incapable of making trivial decisions that are supposed to be heartfelt (such as selecting the best font to layout a document with, or what vegetable or spice to add to a sauce, or what color to paint something). I think that the subjectivities of art and design are not a science and there is no correct nor best. Of course, we should all steer away from poor choices, but when it comes to picking between three mediocre choices, I have no qualms in settling. The folks here seem to rather want to spend large amounts of time in search of perfect.
posted by MM 10:51 PM