How to Work

“'I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.' Roth’s concentration on the task was absolute. When a friend left him with a kitten, he couldn’t endure the distraction of having to provide food and attention. “I had to ask my friend to take it back,” he recalled. I once asked him if he took a week off or a vacation. “I went to the Met and saw a big show they had,” he told me. “It was wonderful. I went back the next day. Great. But what was I supposed to do next, go a third time? So I started writing again.” Roth kept a little yellow note near his desk. It read “No Optional Striving.” No panels, no speeches, no all-expenses-paid trips to the festival in Sydney or Cartagena. The work was murder and the work was the reward."

Nothing feels like a race to me. I’m not rushing. There’s no secret to making art. It’s just, if you want to make some art, make some art, humans have evolved towards art. Avoid things that drain and do things that feel fulfilling, put those fulfilling life experiences into a small piece of art, and perhaps, even the most common type of life (my own) adds up to something grander, because I was paying attention, documenting, trying to learn from it. If I had children, I’d be teaching them these experiences. I don’t. I put it in a poem, a story, a novel. To be more productive, just to do a little bit of your art, when you feel like you can. Don’t beat yourself up. Make your goals tiny. And I really am saying, write three hundred words a day. Fill up ONE index card a day with chicken scratch. That’s all it takes. Retype the things that pile up. All of a sudden you have something. Have no hierarchy of importance when it comes to your work. Make whatever. Be at play, always. Get comfortable doing sloppy work, malformed, phoned in, wonky work—believe you can fix it later. Because you can. And then when it does pile up, actually fix it later, as if harvesting a crop you get to correct once more, twice more, impossibly, luckily, till you’re happy with the harvest.

"The buzz of a studio is why I fell in love with being a designer,” Bowen tells us. “At the studio, I felt I belonged to something."

I feel the way in which the show has a legacy is in how there’s a lot of people who come through here and learn how to do stuff, and they’re off making stuff. I don’t know if this is a publishable anecdote, but last night I ran into this restaurateur named Andrew Tarlow, who’s kind of this notorious figure in the New York restaurant world because he had the first of the schmancy restaurants in Brooklyn back in the day. He had a place called Diner, then Marlow & Sons, and all these people came through and went on to run other restaurants. So if you’re in the restaurant world, you’re constantly meeting people who trained with Tarlow because he was at the time doing the, like, We can do this thing, we’ll have very high standards, it’s gonna innovate, that’s the experience I’m going to sell. Apparently, Chez Panisse is the same thing on the West Coast, probably at a much bigger level...

I think if you laugh at something, you understand it on a very basic level and you find it accessible. A problem with some people looking at contemporary art is that they find it inaccessible and I think that one of the virtues of what I do is perhaps that people do find it accessible because they’re able to see the humor in it. Hopefully it’s more than just comedy. I mean, it isn’t comedy necessarily, but it is comic. But I wouldn’t necessarily advocate that all art should be comic, because that would be tedious. There is room for everything.

I started drawing after a really like frustrating time in school — and in retrospect, I realized that I was desperate to communicate something. And humor seemed like the fastest way to communicate something very quickly and efficiently. The idea doesn't work unless I chuckle at it, unless I can laugh at it. Even if it's a sinister situation or something, there has to be a dark humor to it because then I know it is speaking somehow, rather than wallowing.

The problem with expanding in a serious way is simply, he says, that “I never wanted to miss anything.” In the past when he was traveling, if he landed in New York at 6 p.m., he could be at the restaurant by 7:15. “It was my little hive,” he says. “I just want to work here and fucking die. I’m going to tell everyone that if I drop dead, keep working. Don’t even close that day — just keep going.'

Here’s my theory: the only sad story is a falsified one.  What makes a story hopeful, heroic, uplifting, is when the writer has perfectly lived into her story – has responded truthfully to a story’s DNA.  She’s not afraid to go where the story leads her. The uplift comes, in a sense, from her fidelity to her task, and from the resulting feeling of honesty in the story, and from the pleasure of watching the artist perform her task with panache, bravery, flair.

I also find it hard to look at my work repeatedly. I find it tiresome and nauseating, and can barely bring myself to go over it again, but I do it because I think you’re right – it makes the book better. I always feel like each sentence has its perfect form, and each paragraph has its perfect form, and so does each chapter, and so does the whole book, and the only way I can see to it is with these constant tweaks. I feel like the perfect form exists right behind the sloppy thing in front of me. I never actually achieve the perfection I’m aiming for, because it becomes time to publish it, or because I realize I’ve accidentally started making it worse. By this point, I basically have the book memorized, and I hate it so much – it feel so empty to me.

If you work with a bunch of people who all know what they’re doing, yes they’ll know what to do, but they’ll make the thing they know how to make – which is usually a thing we know already. If you shift the power to people who haven’t done it before you tend to get more interesting results. And, if you’re in a position of seniority, use that experience to defend those ideas, explain them (often you even have to explain them BACK to the people who are making them), and protect them if it goes wrong.

Maybe there’s such a thing as too much “good taste”. Too much curation. Too much collective agreement about what “good work” is, what it should look like and how it should behave. Too many blogs and social media algorithms that confirm those biases. Too much confidence in the opinions of senior decision makers, and the hierarchies they’re atop of. New ideas are rarely found by a bunch of people who “know what they’re doing”. Actually, it’s quite the opposite in my experience. Tibor Kalman said there are ideas in high art and low art (vernacular). He spotted that a few years before vernacular design became the only thing that you saw. I think what he meant was that “vernacular” is untrained design, people who are unaware of the “rules” which trained professionals are taught. Therefore these individuals tend to approach problems from a different – and less formal – viewpoint, and “new ideas” emerge from that naivety. But I’m not sure this approach works anymore. Are there even any subcultures left to colonise? Any more rave flyers to mine for inspiration? Any bits of culture left waiting to be recontextualised? (As an example of the drought, as I type this Kanye is back to mood boarding homelessness to get attention for his latest Yeezy drop – a preoccupation of his collaborator Demna.) But the untrained point still pertains. Perhaps the more experience you have, the less you’re able to see.

If you do choose to pull back from projects you’re getting at work, then make sure you use the energy you’re saving elsewhere. Somewhere which will benefit you. I started a newspaper when I got so sick of decks that I couldn’t breathe at work. Personally, I equate creativity to compound interest; you get a little bit and you grow. That growth gets added to the principal and so you grow a bit more, and that adds and grows. Sometimes you get a big bit of growth. All the time your confidence is growing. But if you’re letting yourself get kicked around then you won’t grow. You’ll stumble around – and it takes time to build yourself up again.

Surviving in the creative industries is the art of juggling the left and right sides of your brain. Your instinctive impulses from your logical ones. Making creative decisions is almost entirely about relying on your instincts. There are a whole set of rational, intellectual choices you make alongside, but in my experience, the “thing” people are looking for you to find is a “thing” that forges a connection with those in contact with the “thing”. That connection is more often instinctive and emotional than cerebral.

Everyone is a designer (blah blah blah), they design every day of their lives. Anyone who applies stickers to an Instagram story is designing. There is more recognition of design and visual signals than ever before. More discussion of cultural signifiers (say, memes). So you have both a tools-led public skillset shift combined with a fascination with visual culture. And the visual culture most see is predominantly what an algorithm has deemed viable for distribution. So as the “pros” you’ve got to dig in different places. I know of someone who only looks at 18th-century art. I know someone else who refuses to look at anything, ever. They both make really great stuff. The people who don’t make great stuff can usually be found with tiny shovels at the same barren earth everyone else is digging in. Mood boarding It’s Nice That articles, following typography accounts on Instagram, etc. You have to be careful what you put in your brain. What goes in, comes out. Dually, the need for every meeting or check-in to be accompanied by visual aids or some form of deck is really corrosive. Structured thinking works sometimes for sure, but not all the time. It’s important to include different thought processes, when coming up with ideas and discussing those ideas with whoever you’re making the ideas for. If you’re not careful, a deck will build into itself a sense of finality, of conclusion. I think this also taps into the psychology of creative teams, who tend to want to impress through having low self-esteem, so bias towards coming out of meetings with some sort of sign they’re doing the right thing. Ultimately, decks have got in the way of a decent chat. Put the slideshow away and talk. Talk about the problems. A meeting does not always have to be a presentation of empirical fact-finding and conclusions. Instead a meeting is a moment to discuss how far you’ve got with the problem at hand.