Rule no.0037 – Think in Museum Time
Rule no.0037 – Think in Museum Time
I mentioned that I would write an article about thinking in museum time in a previous article back in Dec. 2023
This is apropos to the conversation related to Stick-to-itiveness – purposeful persistence.
As mentioned in the article about strategic patience (see below), once an artist has made the decision to establish their creative lifestyle and goes forward, that artist has no idea what lies ahead or what their fortunes will be once they have established themselves. However, there are a number of preparations they can make to maximize their efforts.
One cannot be sure that they will be able to become self-sustaining from these efforts except in rare cases so it is best, from the beginning, to assume that it may not happen or that it might take many years to achieve. You have to plan on your income from other sources until that day arrives if it ever does. For me and my wife who also works in the studio, we did not get to this point until in my 50’s. Even then, it takes a while to really trust that it will continue that way You always have to be working at it from that point forward and can never take it for granted. It is pure capitalism – asset production and market.
Considering this, an important element is to then consider sustainability. We have to be able to work economically in as unhampered a way as possible. This might cause us to consider what kind of budget we can dedicate to our creative lifestyle by the month and based on that budget learn to work in ways that will allow us to work on our art on a daily basis for two or three hours a day or more if you can do it.
So let us say the artist wants to leave the door open to becoming self-sustaining at some point or wants to sell off works along the way to help cover expenses and enjoys working and produces a reasonable amount of work over time. This growing body of work accumulates over a lifetime of working in the studio. That has to be considered whether you sell off works or not, things accumulate over time.
So as soon as you know you are establishing your creative lifestyle it is best to establish in your mind that you are building an archive that will be, over the course of time, your singular artwork.
When you think like this from the beginning then you will need to consider organization, inventory control, storage, documentation, etc. You are building a lifelong single work that will show all of the ideas, twists and turns and the evolution of your trail over time.
Usually early on, an artist thinks just about the work one is doing at the moment as a single thing but over time it is a part of a long continuum of works. Consider that you will be working for decades. Thinking like this starts to help you think in museum time and widens your conceptual horizons.
Thinking ahead and anticipating decades of time will allow for spending time to contemplate how you might go about building this body of work, care for it and use it as a map for looking back over what you have done to plot out where you might want to go next. This means that everything you make, every note, writing, poem, drawing, sketch and finished works of art needs to be dated, inventoried, documented, digitized and stored. You will need a plan for that and a set of procedures.
Almost everything in life is lost to the ravages of time if it is not caught into the net of your archives. It might at first seem daunting to add all of this extra effort to your artistic activity but if you think of the whole thing as a single artwork that you are constantly working on then that work eventually becomes normal and even fun and rewarding. You will find that the benefit of having captured your entire creative output in an organized way is incalculable in ways that you might have a hard time imagining.
Once you have digitized everything, as you go along you can start making your own catalog raisonne in a word document so that you can write notes related to the different artworks in the document. I would also recommend keeping a daily journal where you write things about your day, your ideas, what you did, things you are thinking about, new projects you want to take on, etc. Then when it gets to a couple of hundred pages you can self-publish it for your own use at least as a PDF. This has great documentary value over time.
Approaching your creative work in this way teaches you to respect your own work and be able to look back over time to see what you have done and how far you have come and some of the works will point you to ideas for future exploration. Even the first consistent year of this kind of documentation and organization will show you the benefits of it. It is a wonderful feeling to look back over a year or a decade of work and realize that you are making progress. This process also helps you to be accountable to yourself and is a big aide in making your Stick-to-itiveness even stickier.
In museum time you have your whole life to flesh it out.
related:
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about having an infinite canvas-type collection of my work, maybe in a Figma Board, or similar, where I can just look at everything, see similarities, make connections between works, all without digging through digital folders or having to unpack physical work.
I love the idea of „museum time.“ Thanks for sharing it.
I’ve been consistently sending out a weekly newsletter for just over two years and I have found it helpful in documenting my process, progress, my work and, over time, I am able to see patterns. That wasn’t the original intention but now I really enjoy and rely on having this historical reference and it motivates me to keep doing it. And it works the other way too: I need to keep making work, reading, learning, doing stuff! so that I have something interesting to share every week. Win, win 👏