Failure

Artists and writers on staring down failure

When I started writing about art, I wasn’t aware of it but I often made the mistake of treating artists like they had everything figured out. It came from a kind of reverence and respect I guess, but it wasn’t respectful at all. All artists, if they plan to stick around, have to make peace with failure somehow, or at least figure out a way to make it useful. (Or this is what I tell my six-year-old when he screws up a picture. He doesn’t believe me.)

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“Doing art is pretty much humiliating. The whole enterprise is one continuous embarrassment.”
—Artist Charlie Sofo in the ProPrac panel talk On Being an Artist: Putting Yourself Out There at ACCA, 2019

“It has taken a long time to get [the paintings] strong, and survive the stress of showing them.”
—Painter Prudence Flint, Art Guide

“I make a lot of mistakes. It's quite awkward. I'm thinking through things with materials…I gained confidence very slowly. I was never one of those guns to come out of art school and be ready to take on anything. It's not my disposition. I very slowly developed a relationship, a familiarity and a confidence with materials.”
—Artist Teelah George, interviewed for Art Collector, MAF special edition, 2018

“I found the art world quite terrifying. I think that’s why I was so bummed out by the early criticism...because I was a newcomer. I felt that power balance for a long time, but you have to stop because otherwise, you won’t make anything. You get ‘analysis paralysis’.”
—Photographer Yvonne Todd, SpinOff

“Persistence has a lot to do with it. This fascinates me. Who keeps going? I picture a motorway. At some point all the cars are travelling together, and then one of them bursts into flames, another one runs out of petrol. One of them just pulls over into a parking bay and never comes out again. And before you know it there are not so many cars travelling on that road.”
—Curator and critic Justin Paton, SpinOff

“It’s in knowing you might fail. It’s in knowing you haven't read as much as you should’ve and others have read more, and who says you’re such a great judge of what a good book is anyway? Knowing all that and deciding to do it anyway—it's that sort of courage.”
—Novelist Kim Scott, interviewed by Charlotte Wood in The Writer’s Room

“I think in the end what continual rejection did for me was drive me back into the basics of who I was.”
—Novelist Pat Barker, Paris Review (free via ProQuest with SLNSW membership)

“Sometimes I think getting older is a process of learning why the cliches are true. I’d like to say something like ‘be true to yourself,’ but that’s only meaningful once you’ve figured it out for yourself.”
—New York-based painter Jenna Gribbon, The RealReal via Fredericks & Freiser

“I have failed as a wife...woman... hostess...artist...I have not failed as a truth seeker. Lowest ebb.”—Louise Bourgeois, handwritten note c1958, exhibited in The Pleasurable, The Illegible, The Multiple, The Mundane at Artspace, 2021

“Maybe it wasn’t a failure after all, although it certainly wasn’t a success. Maybe, like most things, it was neither.”
—Writer and critic Alison Croggon, On Failure in Overland

“There is no success in writing. There are only better degrees of failure. To write is to fail. An idea is a perfect thing...But it will never be right. There is no way that a writer cannot injure that idea as they wrestle with it.”
—Poet Kae Tempest, On Connection

“In terms of the highs and lows, there is good spin and bad spin, there is success and not success—they are the same thing. Success is more pleasant, but it is also a trap too, and lack of success is unpleasant but it is a trap to think that is what you are. You have to just get on with that task, you have to be present and turn up to your own life.”
—Artist Lindy Lee, Artist Profile

“But you know, if this sort of thing didn't happen I would know I was dead. I’m getting just what I ask for—a reaction.”
—Painter Colin McCahon, writing to his dealer Peter McLeavey about the criticism of hiw work Victory over death 2, quoted by Justin Paton in How to Look at a Painting

“Sometimes, the creative compass, a wounded pride and fragile ego feel similar. They all want you to prove yourself. How do you know which is compelling you? ... You learn by getting it wrong. Once you've gone miles down the wrong path and ended up in a creative dead end, you learn something about how it feels to have got ahead of yourself.”
—Poet Kae Tempest again, On Connection

“Be prepared to be foolish sometimes; learn when to be quiet and listen and not get defensive. Be realistic about how it is that you have arrived where you have; be grateful, find ways to pay those opportunities forward. Be prepared to emerge and emerge and emerge into the next-size-up nesting doll of insecurity and self-doubt, ever-increasing, never reaching your final shell.”
—Short story writer Elizabeth Tan, Liminal

“Every failure gives me the potential for something, a new discovery…For me, time isn’t important. I know there'll be an occasion where that will be resolved, if there’s an issue with my practice. I’m not going to put pressure on myself to have to conform to a certain way of being or a certain way of making things. It has to come from me.”
—Artist Louise Weaver, interviewed for Art Collector, Issue 89, 2019

“This creative self can be supported or obstructed...[T]he acquisition of knowledge of creative nature is especially an act of self-reliance.”
—Academic Jeroen Lutters, Creative Theories of Just About Everything

“I could be writing away one day, and think I’ve done very well, I've done more pages than I usually do. Then I get up the next morning and realise I don't want to work on it anymore. When I have a terrible reluctance to go near it, when I would have to push myself to continue, I generally know that something is badly wrong. Often, in about three quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I’m going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad depression, grouching around. And I think of something else I can write. It’s sort of like a love affair: you're getting out of all the disappointment and misery by going out with some new man you don't really like at all, but you haven’t noticed that yet. Then, I will suddenly come up with something about the story that I abandoned. I will see how to do it. But that only seems to happen after I've said, ‘No, this isn't going to work, forget it.’”
—Writer Alice Munro, Paris Review, Issue 131 (free via ProQuest with SLNSW membership)

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What I’m writing…

Last year I had the pleasure of writing an essay for Robyn Stacey’s exhibition Just Light at Darren Knight Gallery. After many, many covid delays, the exhibition is now open. The works are really something to stand in front of, and the exhibition continues to 9 April.

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What I’m reading…

I’ve been safe in Sydney, scrolling the news and feeling heartsick. A lot of what I’ve been reading has been about trying to make sense of things. It’s been an unsettled month. We also had covid through the house again. I thought Omar Sakr’s Losing Touch in Meanjin was a thoughtful response to pandemic whiplash, and weirdly this piece on depressing maths has also helped. Other than that I’ve been reading:

• Babel - a brillant essay by Meghan O’Gieblyn on AI and writing

• Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season - a masterclass in voice (but be warned, the story grapples with homophobia and misogyny, not a light read!)

• Diana Reid’s Love & Virtue - a debut deserving of the hype

• The Liminal Volume II anthology is so good and so pretty!

• Siri Hustvedt blew my mind when she told the How to Own the Room podcast she spends four hours every afternoon just reading, can you even imagine??

• I also tuned into a fascinating MAF panel talk on art criticism - the last word goes to the writer and editor Dan Fox:
  
  “Art criticism isn’t the puzzle that is one day going to be solved. We’re not going to one day arrive at this moment where we [say] ‘That’s it! We've solved art criticism!’... It's always going to be many things.”

Thanks for reading. I’m not really sure if I’m singing into the well with this, but I’m just going to go ahead as if I am because it feels all cosy and early internetz. (Although maybe without the purple tiled backgrounds and flying dragon gifs.)

If you’d like to send me any thoughts or book tips or exhibition recs, you can get in touch here or find me on Twitter and Insta at @sightlined.

x Jane