A handful of thoughts from the studio: maxims, mess-ups

Something I didn't realize about Milo Carney until recently, even though it was right in front of my face, is that he collects and invents maxims all the time. I was eating a green curry lunch on the sixth floor near his studio a few weeks ago when he came up with, "It's still foam core to me." He wrote that line in sharpie on a nearby wall, underlined "me," then decided it was better without the underline and tried smudging it out. For Milo, anything is a potential proverb, even, or especially, seemingly inane sentences. 

My interest in maxims began to develop just before realizing what Milo's project is. One saying that can be read as a maxim is the sentence Herman Melville had pinned next to his desk, "Keep true to thy dreams of youth." Or what Will has written in his studio, "If not a thought does your mind elicit/ make not your speech too explicit." Which, as he pointed out to me, is a variation of Lincoln's, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."  Or the simple mantra I have nailed above my studio, "Be stronger! Be stronger! Be stronger!"

Maxims have to do with rules for how one should live. This is in part why I find Milo's sense of humor so sharp. It's funny to me to be constantly picking up little sentences and claiming them as rules for how one should live and it's funny exactly because it's simply a more exaggerated version of what I actually do in life, and what most people probably do too.

This idea of moral art making has been rolling around my head this year as I become more and more of a "moral" artist. This can go off now in a different direction, and maybe I'll take it there sometime soon, as this blog begins to transition into summer time. But I do want to talk about one other statement with a moral, which is the clichéd or platitudinous version of what Alexis was telling me the other day, which I collected, and which I'll pin up here. Failure is a good teacher. Alexis was telling me that it doesn't matter if my work is no good because I'm only a sophomore. And while I don't agree with the sentiment that it doesn't matter—it matters to me, of course— I think the meat of what she was saying is that if you aren't willing to make a lot of ultimately weak art, you're not getting a very good education. That's right, I think, but it doesn't stop at being a sophomore or a student in school. It seems to me that you always have to be willing to make bad work and that's just one of the potential obstacles when you make art for a living.

Henry