Everything Is Incomplete
“All things, including the universe itself, are in a constant, never-ending state of becoming or dissolving. Often we arbitrarily designate moments, points along the way, as ‘finished’ or ‘complete.’ But when does something’s destiny finally come to fruition? Is the plant complete when it flowers? When it goes to seed? When the seeds sprout? When everything turns into compost?”
—Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
I was on my second reading of Leonard Koren’s work on wabi-sabi, when the quote above hooked me. The book’s context centers on the Japanese philosophy and aesthetic based on imperfection and impermanence.
As a Buddhist and a dad, this commentary resonated on a personal level. As an artist who has worn a lot of different professional hats over the last 20 years, it cut right to the center of what it means to be an artist.
Nothing is ever finished. Not me, not my work. It’s always in a state of becoming and dissolving, arising and passing. This is not a fatalistic observation. It’s a realization filled with hope and promise for us and our work.
I’m Not Finished
As an artist and as a human, I’m in constant change and constant growth. Am I getting older? Yeah. But, my cells are constantly regenerating. Every seven to 10 years, I have a completely new set.
If I’m not finished, then it’s not too late to start something new. It’s never too late to expand your work or learn a new discipline. Never too late to find new collaborators or turn your work on its ear.
Painter Philip Guston was one of the first abstract expressionists and he achieved fame for his blocks and hazes of grays and reds in the 1950s. In 1970, when he was 57 years old, he debuted an entirely new style of work — strange, cartoonish figurative paintings that shocked and annoyed critics and got little sympathy at first from anyone other than Willem de Kooning. He persisted, pushing further away from abstraction into wild parodies of Klansmen and contemplative studies of everyday objects from light bulbs to cigarettes. By the time he died in 1980, this work had finally clicked with critics and art lovers.
In 1978, Guston said,
“So one never forgets anything, one never goes forward and forward, you are always moving in a circular way, and nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever finished until you leave.”
Work Is Never Complete
“A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”
You’ve likely seen this quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Or Paul Valéry. Or Anaïs Nin, WH Auden, Oscar Wilde, Marianne Moore, George Lucas… it goes on. It’s likely been said by all of them in some fashion or another, because it’s a universal truth.
A work of art is never finished. This is readily observable in the performing arts. Although a play may have had its last edit and the staging is set, it continues to evolve in every performance. No two performances are completely the same, and this is the beauty of live performance. It’s always this time.
The same goes for live music. No matter how much an artist may wish to perfectly replicate a recording, it’s never exactly the same. And if you’ve ever seen any artist who has played the same songs for decades, you’ll know that they take great pleasure in playing with structure, phrasing, melody and more.
Works that create a physical final product, from books to sculptures, are also created within the reality of both impermanence and imperfection. And these are two separate states for art.
Impermanence means that whether the work is a Richard Serra metal wave, a Shakespeare play or a Billie Holiday recording, it won’t last forever. From the moment it leaves the artist’s hand, the printer or the studio, it begins to fall apart.
Andy Goldsworthy is a master of impermanence. Many of his outdoor structures and sculptures are made of ice, leaves and dirt. They’re built during low tide and washed away, or they melt as the sun arcs across the sky. He revels in impermanence.
Goldsworthy says,
“Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature.”
Impermanence means that you’re never really quite done with that piece. You’re never fully satisfied. There simply comes a time when you must stop. This stopping place may feel like a finale in the moment, but you will return later and wish you’d done something different. That’s ok. If you didn’t, you would probably just make one thing and walk away.
It took Leonard Cohen 15 years to write “Hallelujah,” and he still changed it when he played live.
British painter JMW Turner famously added a red buoy to his seascape Helvoetsluys in the middle of an exhibition. Granted, part of it was just to stick it to his rival Constable, who was showing in the same gallery, but it also illustrates an artist’s commitment to the living nature of their work.
James Baldwin told the Paris Review in 1984,
“When you’ve finished a novel it means, ‘The train stops here, you have to get off here.’ You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book you get. I’ve always felt that when a book ended there was something I didn’t see, and usually when I remark the discovery it’s too late to do anything about it.”
Even When the Work Is Finished, It Isn’t
Patti Smith says, “Nothing is ever solved. Solving is an illusion.”
Recorded music and film may be crystallized in a permanent state as a performance, but it still continues to change by spanning the small yet simultaneously cosmic distance from artist to audience. We will never dictate how our work is interpreted, nor the emotional effect listeners will experience.
The song “Conversation 16” by The National features the refrain “I was afraid I’d eat your brains / ‘cause I’m evil,” and the video, featuring Kristen Schaal, is comical — but the damned song moves me nearly to tears every time.
This is the great danger, the great leap of faith and hope that we as artists must take. We nudge our fledglings from the nest and hope that wolves aren’t waiting for them below.
Again I turn to James Baldwin. In “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” he writes that the price the artist must pay is:
“a willingness to give up everything, to realize that although you spent twenty-seven years acquiring this house, this furniture, this position, although you spent forty years raising this child, these children, nothing, none of it belongs to you. You can only have it by letting it go.”
But I argue that this, too, is beautiful. We have no choice but to relinquish ownership of our work. We have no choice but to turn back to the blank page, the canvas, the studio.
We have no choice but to reach within yet again and find another part of our unfinished selves, craft it, graft our soul upon it, and release it, knowing that it will never be finished but it will always be beautiful.
Need help defining your voice or reaching your audience? Give me a shout. I offer consulting and services for all kinds of individual artists and arts organizations.
