Hello, my gorgeous DrawTogether GUT-mates.
We were wowed by how you were all inspired by different songs last week. The contrasts that emerged as you switched between pieces were so cool! We were also glad to see you incorporate your own musical tastes into the process, and we will be working some of your recommendations into our own playlists for sure.
Here at the GUT, we are soooo excited for it to be spring! (Happy fall to our southern hemisphere folks!) But we have more complicated, maybe even rebellious, feelings about the annual rite of spring cleaning. Sure, we get it—nature gets a fresh start and so should our homes. And we’re not saying to leave your messes everywhere. But what if there were other ways to look at our clutter? Let’s get to it…
The beauty of clutter
In time for your possible spring cleaning urges, we want to revisit this dispatch from Wendy:
I have a confession.
Did you know that I, a creative person with one hundred various interests, can, from time to time, leave my space a bit messy? A tad cluttered? A wee bit “did a goddamn tornado touch down in here?”
Shocking, I know. Ask my neatnik parents, I’ve been this way since I was little. These days, I’ve confined my mess to “creative spaces” (read: Studio, Kitchen Table, Sofa, Everywhere, etc), but I still have a lot of stuff. Like many artists, I collect. Sometimes, those collections pile up and spread out. But I still know exactly where everything is. I swear, there is order in my chaos.
A mess is evidence of what’s happened before and a map of what might happen next. Now, if a space is unconsidered, left to build up over time, well that’s just careless. That’s when other people start to worry. But when someone is thoughtful about their spaces, they care about each object, label, and sort and arrange them just so… consider where they go and why, the meaning behind it all... it shows. That kind of clutter is a thing of beauty.
Today, we’re gonna explore the visual feast that is mundane clutter. Because if you can find beauty in the mess, you can see beauty anywhere.
To get started, we’ll share a few of Wendy’s own mess-inspired drawings, and then we’ll invite you to embrace the clutter and create your own.
Ready? Great. Let’s get messy.
Wendy’s “messes”
Electrical wires
Walking around Kyoto’s Gion district with its cobblestone streets and women in full geisha attire is like stepping back in time. Until you look up. Above the building lives a thick rubber rainforest of modern electrical wires, criss-crossing, twisting, winding their way down the streets and alleys.
From Wendy:
Of all the typically beautiful things I could have drawn on that street, the wire web called my attention. Why? Maybe because its lines looked like a drawing against the sky? Or maybe because the wires told a story? After all, each wire connected to a home, a business, a shrine, a cable TV. Drawing the wires felt like examining the city’s insides, its exposed guts. Beautiful.
Garbage stories
In 2012, a developer hired Wendy to research and create a drawn story about the history of Pier 70, a historic and underutilized area of San Francisco. The developer wanted to learn about the neighborhood’s backstory, who was living and working there now, what people valued about it, and the cultures it contained.
What does this have to do with messes? Wendy learned about the neighborhood, in part, by walking the streets, looking down, and documenting the trash and detritus on each corner.
Documenting each corner’s detritus offered a new approach to portraiture, and a fresh perspective on the neighborhood. Sometimes, our garbage paints a clearer picture of who we really are than the objects we display on our mantels.
That’s beautiful!
Garbage sale. Ahem, garage sale.
There are many ways to document a mess. It can be representational, like above. It can also be conceptual, abstract, text-based, or a map….
In 2012, the artist Martha Rosler held a Meta-Monumental Garage Sale in an atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The sale included objects donated by museum staff, the artist, and the public. Martha was on hand to haggle over higher-priced garbage gold. The garage sale/exhibition also included a newspaper designed by the brilliant designer/artist Kelli Anderson. She asked Wendy to create a “Conceptual Map” of a prototypical garage sale for the paper:
Wendy included not only the actual objects, but the emotional experience of a garage sale, with categories like “all the things we want to forget.” And “clothes we will fit in one day” next to “exercise bike.” And “Guilt (parents’ things).”
If you drew a map of your mess, what would you include? What would be too embarrassing to draw??
Alright. With that inspiration, let’s turn our attention toward our own messes….