Interrogating failure.

In the classes I teach, I often manufacture failure by getting people to draw ‘blind’ drawings, where you don’t look at the drawing at all. I often start new pieces this way - ostensibly to focus on the subject more, but I wonder if some of it is to get the abject failing out of the way first?

For a while, I’ve been wanting to record how a recent failure of mine unfolded and changed, and the resulting lessons I learnt but no sooner than I started, I quickly realised how trite and cliche the subject is: there’s a million quotes you can probably recall right now, all about the tenacity to continue after a setback, about the hidden failures behind success stories, if at first you don’t succeed: try try again. Am I that basic?

I suppose these quotes are so prevalent because a lot of failures are easily detectable: you tried a new skill, goal or activity and you didn’t achieve it. An easily classifiable and resounding failure, but luckily, just as easy to try again! Follow the recipe of the shit cake more closely; set 3 increasingly louder and more urgent-sounding alarms to get you out of bed on time; ease yourself in to running so you don’t get shin splints and quit your couch-to-5k. Success like this is measurable and quantifiable, failure is identifiable, and the solutions are simple. The lesson is clear: do better in the ways that you can and try, try again.

But what if the failure is more complicated? What if its many threads are interwoven with just as many threads of success, of new knowledge or realisation? What if you attempted something grand and encompassing, like a relationship, a new lifestyle, or a creative project and over time it began to feel ugly and cumbersome, and sat uncomfortably and angularly within you like a badly-chewed tortilla chip, until it ultimately… failed? When an undertaking is composed of a great many measurables, how do we even identify failure or success? With so many yarns to untangle, how do we stare failure in the face and try to learn from it?

Marlene Dumas’ Rejects, ink on paper, 1994 - present. Dumas regularly shows work she has previously ‘rejected’ in her exhibitions which is kind of a terrifying concept. Photo © Studio Dumas.

One way of measuring success is simple: we ask other people to tell us if it’s a success or a failure. We seek approval and praise from early childhood (and receive it, if we’re lucky) and we go on to be marked on our performance for not just some, but all of our formative years. We continue to get reviewed, appraised and vetted throughout our working lives and beyond, so it’s little wonder we’d try and find our markers of success in the opinions of others, and let’s be honest: good feedback is invaluable. It’s great practice to dig around in the things you do, to see if they’re working or not, to see if they’re moving you forward or keeping you stuck - but meaningful critique is hard to come by outside of structures like work and school. People struggle to be honest with their friends, people struggle to give constructive criticism or negative opinions lest it be construed as negativity.

There is one place where we can get this essential critique at breakneck speed, 24/7: (drum roll please, curtain raising, spotlight shining…) social media. The process of feedback here is crystallised and abstracted - we have buttons, muscle-memory-inducing double taps, ways to leave a quick verdict without processing or internalising what we’ve just seen. Within milliseconds of being faced with someone’s latest work of art (or selfie dump, whatever) we leave a little heart-shaped rabbit dropping of a ‘like’, and then move on. LIKE!

Do you ever wonder what happens in your soft little brain in the vanishingly short time between reading or seeing something, and then - chkchk!! - double-tapping away to show your approval? What is happening at a million miles an hour, between all the billions of neurons and synapses and little sparks of magic that constitute a human brain, when a person decides they “like” something on social media - or anywhere for that matter? 

I regularly spread all my work out and get rid of anything that doesn’t feel meaningful - a very quick way of assessing successes and failures without all this introspection

Our unfathomably intricate brains hold trillions of fragments of knowledge, experience, memory, emotion, dreams, language, sociality, fears, traumas. This complexity and variation is what gives us personalities, interests, our innate tendencies, abilities and flaws. Each time any of us decides if we like something or not, we unconsciously sift through these almost infinitely huge piles of mental STUFF in milliseconds to produce an opinion. And then, sometime in the 2010s,  someone stuck a heart-shaped button on it so we don’t have to think about why, or how this opinion came to be. Talk about reductive. Remember: every time you ask other people for feedback, or praise, or approval, each one of them is scrabbling around in a unique pile of a million different lived experiences to reach a conclusion. Every time you ask for feedback by posting something on social media and hold your self-worth in the outcome, you’re balancing your concept of success top of a teetering pile of other people’s STUFF, perhaps hundreds of times over, which; let’s face it, seems like a precarious place to put something so important. Discovering how much weight I was giving this was, and still is , a sobering realisation. I try my very hardest not to let social media response inform how I view the success of my work. And it is hard, and I do frequently have to try, try again to hold this measure of success lightly, but it is possible if you remember all the millions of conditions that must happen before your like count goes up.

Sometimes, the feeling of failure is less tangible. Sometimes, something will go well by the usual metrics: it makes you money or gets you a promotion. It gets real feedback, the positive kind, that people have actually thought about before giving to you. You accomplish the things you set out to achieve and did them well. Sometimes people can give you a literal or figurative round of applause and still, somewhere, a grey cloud starts to descend. It can take days, weeks or even months to form - the greyness kicks around within you, inchoate until, eventually it unmasks itself: you failed!! When something doesn’t land how you’d hoped, it can feel so painful that you want to erase it from your life, and you’re certainly not expecting anything good to come out of it. You’re ready to open a casket, fill it with satin and roses and the corpse of the failure, bury it into the cold, damp earth, never to be seen or heard from again. Weep a tear into your little lace hankie from beneath your black pillbox hat and shuffle back to the wake for triangle sandwiches and tea before moving the fuck on. But - there is much more to failure than moving on, and it runs so much deeper than all the embarrassing clichéd quotes we know.

my own work, especially when produced quickly, often includes evidence of past attempts to capture an expression - I’ve never considered them as failures before but I suppose they intrinsically are.

Recently, as a project I’d undertaken was just coming to an end, a friend suddenly accosted me in his direct and almost-arrogant way (I said almost!!!!) and said: I have three questions for you:

What did you like and what didn’t you like? 

Do you think it will change your future work? 

What did you learn? 

Firstly it was refreshing to be asked so boldly and simply these huge questions. I genuinely don’t think anyone had ever asked me what I had learnt through my work before? I blinked, and had to think for a minute to compose my answer, and was kind of surprised at my knee jerk response. I told him I thought maybe the content of this whole project maybe didn’t have a place in my work any more, that I wanted to work differently. This interaction, and in fact my answer too, sowed a seed of trying to answer that question, truly, to myself. As the project got wrapped up in the coming days, that grey cloud started to settle around it. Aside from missing the mark on some of the usual yardstick stuff, there was something that had just fallen flat. It felt like a huge and unsatisfying anticlimax, and my initial reaction to this was to bury it and run away from the pain of the failure. But, because of that question my friend posed, I started to interrogate this feeling. It happened slowly, through thoughts and conversation, through writing things down and discussing it with close friends and acquaintances too. I had to find and look at this ugly, dully painful feeling of failure and find out why I felt this way, in hopes of metamorphosing the grey into something recognisable, something brighter and more useful. So, over the past few months, that’s what I’ve been doing.

John Baldessari, works Wrong (photo, acrylic, canvas) and Solving Each Problem As It Arises, (acrylic, canvas), 1967. Baldessari glibly works with being ‘wrong’, destruction and a pleasingly cavalier attitude to one’s own work.

I discovered that a lot of the work I made during the project actually didn’t mean a lot to me. This may sound callous, but I’ve always found it useful to discern whether a piece of work is meaningful over ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - it’s a way of giving myself that feedback, of shuffling around within my own pile of STUFF to see what I really think. 

When I looked closer, the work I had made had meaninglessness in its essence. It’s the kind of work I can make with immediacy and rhythm, where I can easily access the ‘flow state’ of creativity, where all I’m doing is making the work, making it a response to a stimulus and not thinking of anything else. If you’re an artist, a musician, a writer, a dancer, someone who works out or cooks or tidies or cleans, even if you’ve ever had a day at work where things just get DONE, then you’ve probably experienced this state. Some people call it the zone. Flow state carries an ease, an elegance, a perfect balance between awareness and nothingness. I make some of my work like this, not assessing the outcome or battling with it too much, just doing and not thinking like a head-empty, zen little bimbo. It feels good, it feels almost spiritual, but it turns out: I need more than this. I need meaning, I need concept and symbolism, to forge work from parts of my psyche, experience and self and weave them together like a weird dream made flesh. And I learnt this by digging around in a sense of failure. I asked myself that same question, what did you learn, over and over, from different angles, to find out what this failure meant to me. Learning this about myself and my work is a huge progression, and has bestowed upon me a feeling of newness, refreshing the entire reason I make art in the first place.

Failure is not a corpse to be buried and forgotten. Once you find the essence of your failure, you can truly see it, and become inquisitive about it. Instead of reeling in agony or attempting to shut out the pain, I let it be pain. I turned the pain over, exposing its belly like a lover in a bed bathed in soft morning light, warm and ready to explore with curiosity and pleasure. There is no end, but just another side - something new and fresh, a hundred things that were already there, but are now ready to investigate, so that you might try, try again to uncover truth within yourself and move - constantly, achingly, slowly - forward.

More things on creativity and failure that I listened to/read/watched whilst writing this:

Blind Boy - Talking to a Psychologist about Creativity - podcast

Adrian Searle - Rapture and rejects - Marlene Dumas - article & video

Tate Podcasts - The Art of Failure - podcast

Lisa De Feuvre - If at first you don’t succeed, celebrate - article