False And Other Starts

In which I share a few pieces of writing and give an update from the tea front

I spend a lot more time on thinking about good writing than you might imagine from either these emails or my articles on CPhMag.com. Mostly, it’s based on reading other writers and thinking “man, I wish I had written that.” One of the most inspiring and devastating pieces of art writing I have ever read is called Forty-One False Starts, written by Janet Malcolm and published in New Yorker magazine in 1994.

When I first found the piece, the magazine had just published Malcolm’s portrait of Thomas Struth, which in various circles of photoland was not very well received. I don’t remember all the misgivings. But if memory serves me right, Malcolm was faulted for not being more deferential to the German photographer, an accusation that at the time I found, well, weird (I still do).

After all, it’s not a writer’s job to butter up any photographer’s ego, however well they might do in photoland’s commercial circus. (You see, this is exactly the attitude that prevents me from getting a lot more commissions to write about photographers. But I digress.)

Around the time, there was a collection of Malcom’s writing being published, and I thought I might as well get and read it. As I indicated above, I don’t remember all of the details now, about ten years later. But I think in a review of the book, there was a mention of Forty-One False Starts.

The piece solved a lot of problems for me, without offering a way out. Good art writing ought to not only live with but also solve its own contradictions. Good art writing ought not to buy into art makers’ bullshit. Good art writing ought to be centered on the idea of having self-respect.

These ideas are all pretty good. But as Malcolm demonstrated, the lived reality is very different. If anything, the piece centers more on what you’re going through as a writer than on the artist discussed therein (painter David Salle, now also a writer/critic).

In a nutshell, Malcolm proceeds to write her piece in pieces, each of which breaks apart once the amount of bullshit overwhelms her sense of self-preservation as a writer.

As a writer, you’ll inevitably have to allow for some bullshit to creep in. After all, unlike a serious political writer, you cannot call out each and every instance of bullshit — unless you want to be out of a job right away.

Let’s say a photographer tells you they explore something in their work. For me, the word “explore” is a trigger. Photographs or photographers typically don’t explore anything — scientists or actual explorers do. Photographers might posit an idea, and I think that’s where photography has an edge over what explorers do.

If I addressed this problem every time I wrote about photography, I’d end up with a lot of false starts. I’d have to stop and start all over. But I can’t (or rather I mostly can because I tend to not get commissions that require you to disable your critical facilities).

Malcolm’s piece take this idea lot further, by producing a number of vignettes that each lead to their own dead ends. It’s sheer genius. But of course, it’s not something that can be easily replicated — after all, as a self-respecting writer, for sure you don’t want to copy (rip off) another writer’s gems.

Actually, not all parts break down in bullshit or in their own contradictions. Consider the following part (this is section 5 in its entirety):

The artist David Salle and I are sitting at a round table in my apartment. He is a slight, handsome man of thirty-nine, with dark shoulder-length hair, worn tightly sleeked back and bound with a rubber band, accentuating his appearance of quickness and lightness, of being sort of streamlined. He wears elegant, beautifully polished shoes and speaks in a low, cultivated voice. His accent has no trace of the Midwest, where he grew up, the son of second-generation Russian Jewish parents. It has no affectation, either. He is agreeable, ironic, a little detached. “I can’t remember what we talked about last time,” he says. “I have no memory. I remember making the usual artist’s complaints about critics, and then saying, ‘Well, that’s terribly boring, we don’t want to be stuck talking about that’—and then talking about that. I had a kind of bad feeling about it afterward. I felt inadequate.”

There is a lot going on here, including the magazine’s odd obsession with describing what its subjects are wearing (Ever noticed this? It drives me crazy.) But there is a lot more. At the time, Salle was one of the most admired and successful artists in the US. To read him say “I felt inadequate” and to read him complain about the very thing that has become a standard of US art writing (consistency)… Well, that’s simply absurd — if you have any critical facilities left and don’t buy in on the art-writing-circuit bullshit. If you do: you end it right there.

Perfect.

Genius.

Seriously, read the whole thing.

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Much to my surprise, many of the readers of these missives responded positively after reading what I had written about my tea habit. To be honest, I did not expect this. It’s not that I anticipate how my writing will be received — by now I’ve learned that whenever I do almost the exact opposite is going to happen. But I almost didn’t write about my enjoyment of tea at all — because who would care?

Regardless, I just received a shipment of tea from Japan. I had toyed with trying gyokuro, a type of green tea that is said to be especially exquisite. But so far, its associated high-maintenance factor had me deterred. Looking into the tea, I had Googled how to prepare it, finding such a large variety of widely different preparation techniques and temperatures that I thought it would be too annoying.

Still, though… Japanese culture has this uncanny ability to trigger the obsessive perfectionist in me. I thought I might as well try the tea. As long as I don’t go overboard with the preparations…

With the first of the two gyukuros I had orders, I figured I might as well follow the instructions on the packages. One said it needed to be steeped at 40 (100) degrees Celcius (Fahrenheit), so I went with the 70 (160) degrees one first.

The first thing I noticed was the tea’s sheer beauty. I don’t know how many people look at tea, but it’s actually very beautiful with its variety of shapes and colours, especially if it’s green tea. This particular one has ranges of green and yellow-green. In fact, the word “green” contains such a wide range of shades that it’s more a concept than an actual colour.

The tea leaves smell amazing, with very fragrant aromas of sweetness. It’s almost like smelling candy. And the taste… Incredible! Just so very pleasant.

A couple of days later, I ended up making the other gyokuro. I thought it would be weird drinking tea that’s slightly warmer than my own body, but it wasn’t. Very delicate, very pleasant. But to be honest, the amount of production got a bit annoying — getting the water temperature right etc (I have a water heater that allows me to pick temperatures at or above 70/160 degrees, so I needed to use a thermometer).

I think I now know how far I want to go with all of this. Some more preparation is OK, but there clearly is a limit. I’m not going to bring obsessive perfectionism to my tea.

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More reading: this article entitled “Carl Broke Something”: On Carl Andre, Ana Mendieta, and the Cult of the Male Genius” is already a few years old. But it popped up in my time line on Twitter again, and I re-read it. It’s very, very good:

In the art-historical context that Andre emerged from, Vergne might feel entirely justified in not dealing with Mendieta’s death. Andre’s sculptures exist as the Viewer’s Body qua Body encountering Art Thing qua Thing — outside of time, history, cultural context, memory, morality, responsibility. Andre is the perfect artist for institutions that are not courts of law.

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Lastly, Brad Feuerhelm reviewed Vaterland, my first photobook, for America Suburb X. Seeing people’s responses to the book is possibly the final experience of the whole process. It’s wonderful to see people pick up on things I attempted to put into the work, just like it’s wonderful to see reactions I couldn’t have foreseen.

The images in Vaterland feel charged with apprehension. The pervasive mood of anxiety is exemplified by the use of dead space-the hinterland navigations within the urban reminds the viewer of wars and walls and the paucity suggested by elite ruling empires that their plans and visions  of a city, nation and its people are soluble and without being prone to collapse.

I’ve now noticed that similar words pop up in discussions of the book: apprehension, anxiety… When I worked on the book, I might have felt apprehensive, and I thought that I wanted to convey a charged atmosphere.

That this atmosphere would be seen as filled with anxiety I couldn’t have foreseen. This is good. I know my own thoughts and ideas. Maybe I live in a state of anxiety that has become so familiar to me that it doesn’t register any longer.

(Honestly, much like many other people, I feel just one short step away from being completely numb after having lived through almost a year of this awful pandemic.)

But anxiety is good. Or rather: if there’s a sense of anxiety conveyed in the work — I have no reason to question what (re-)viewers picked up on, then this teaches me something not only about my photographs but also about how I feel about Germany as a whole.

I think when you make a piece of art of any kind, you have the chance to learn something about yourself at any stage. For sure, this final stage has offered me much, and I’m grateful for that experience.

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This is the end of these missives, nearly at the end of the first month of 2021. I would have loved to write how things have turned a bit for the better. But if you’ve followed the news from the US, you know that they haven’t — a reminder that calendars are constructs that are often far removed from lived reality.

Still I hope this email finds you well and safe. Take good care of yourself and others!

As always thank you for reading!

— Jörg

I’m a freelance writer, photographer, and educator currently living and working in the US.

This Mailing List is my attempt to bring back some of the aspects that made early blogging so great -- community engagement and a more relaxed and maybe less polished approach to writing and thinking about photography. You can find the bulk of my main writing on CPhMag.com.

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