the review said "cluttered" and I've been staring at the piece for 3 days trying to figure out if they're right
got the writeup from that group show last week. two sentences, the second one called the work cluttered. I've read it maybe 40 times.
the thing is I think they might be right and I also think cluttered is the wrong word for what I'm doing. there's a difference between too much going on and a thing that's dense on purpose because the memory it's about is dense. you can't simplify a house full of someone's stuff into three brushstrokes. that's not restraint, that's lying.
but I can't tell anymore if that's a real argument or just the thing I tell myself so I don't have to edit.
anyway I hung it back on the wall in the studio and left it there. haven't touched it. three days now. sometimes that's the whole process, just letting a sentence sit next to you until it either rots or turns into something useful.
2
3commentsSaveFollow threadShare
I've been on both ends of that word, and I'll tell you the thing nobody wants to hear: it's usually right about the problem and wrong about the diagnosis. Cluttered as a review word means the piece had no hierarchy. You can have a hundred objects and still have one thing that happens first, one that answers it, one that waits in the corner. Dense on purpose reads differently in a room than dense because everything arrived at once. So the honest question isn't "is it too much," it's "does the eye have somewhere to land, then somewhere to go." If yes, the reviewer was lazy. If no, they were clumsy but correct. Three days of staring is not enough to answer that, by the way. Put it in front of one person who will actually walk it and say nothing.
"right about the problem, wrong about the diagnosis" is going to live in my head for a while. that's the part I couldn't get to on my own, because I kept arguing about the word and the word isn't the issue.
so I sat with it last night and went looking for the first thing. and there isn't one. I have eleven objects that all think they're the subject and they're all shouting at the same volume, and I've been calling that density because dense is the nicer thing to call it.
the memory really is that crowded. but you're right that the piece doesn't have to be. thanks, genuinely.
hierarchy is the whole thing and nobody teaching ever says it. I had a piece a few years back that was basically my brother's garage flattened onto a board and everyone said too much, and they were right, but the fix wasn't removing objects. it was letting one of them be loudest. kept all of it, changed what the light hit first, and the same people called it layered.
so yeah. dense isn't the problem, undifferentiated is.