I sucked it; now I'm a master of Art History

Annie Dillard! I write in my notebook after a morning walk along the lake. I followed the train tracks towards the beach, where a maze of rocks are speckled with black algae, the smell of skunk and cottonwood thicken the air, and branches of red osier dogwood glow against wild yellow grass. I wish I wrote like Annie Dillard, and when I walk along the water as the sun rises above the ragged horizon, I feel like her; a pilgrim of wetlands and logs watching for the first signs of spring. She tries so hard to catch the first patch of green grass, the first willow bud. As early as February she searches, and still she misses it, the cracking of cocoons suspended in the reeds. I so romanticize Dillard’s attentiveness, her early morning walks, her desire to take life in.

When I read The Writing Life, published a decade after Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, my romantic ideas about Annie Dillard changed. She was not, as I thought, an austere philosopher roaming the banks of the creek, but a disregulated hedon who woke at noon. Fuelled by chocolate milk and cigarettes, she wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek during six months of night shifts locked in a windowless room. Actually, there was a window in her library carrel; she looked out, drew a picture of what she saw, then closed the blinds and taped up her drawing instead. She didn’t want to be distracted by the constant goings-on of the world. This is the problem of writing: A writer must live a full and meaningful life, punctuated by periods of solitude. These periods are tiresome, alienating, degrading. But at the same time, this solitude is spiritual, it is the singular purpose of my being.

I’ve learned a lot about writing by studying material culture, particularly through the study of craft. Writing and craft are essentially not about content, but form; the objects that emerge through these practices are unique responses to the discipline and regulations imposed by the maker. And once the form becomes second-nature—so embodied it disappears—intution drives the process. In a book about pottery, I read that form is the process; every movement of the hand, every gesture and breath the craftsman makes, is visible in the object. Writing and craft are connected in so far as the maker must follow the protocols of form before they are free to experiment with formal elements, and embrace the intuition of process. This is also the difference between art and craft: in art, form is a self-imposed limit, whereas in craft, the discipline adheres to technical protocols from which the maker strays only once they have become skilled, generally because technical proficiency is a way of honouring the teacher of the craft.

Art Historians are taught to see in a particular way, to pay attention to detail, to make meaning from the material aspects of the world. We focus on context, precedence, cultural exchange, lines, colour, and light. We are taught to say, isn’t this something, and, what if we looked at it this way. So often this practice feels trite: applying language to an idea that is already complete, attempting to ascribe meaning or draw out a theoretical analysis of an embodied entity. Why bother, I have wondered so many times. Should I have become a medievalist, or better yet, a plumber? But at the crux of it, an Art Historian is an existential philosopher, faced with the task of making meaning where there is not. The Art Historian understands the absurdist impulse, the cultural turn towards nihilism, and we know how to think with ambivalence. In this way, the Art Historian is apt to contend with “times like these,” to critique and work through the visceral chaos of climate change, fascism, colonialism… you fucking name it.

After a decade of study, I believe the Art Historian’s task is not to speak on behalf of objects, but to speak alongside them as though they are living subjects. It is to write in relation to the animacy of materials and the agency of objects, to interpret their narratives across time. All art is contemporary, and this is true in so far as time is relational, and our understanding of history is bound by the temporal limits of narrative and our experience of consciousness. I couldn’t be there when the Minoan ceramicist threw a pot on the wheel, but I know that I am here now, breathing in and out, just as the potter breathed into her clay. This is all we have: technical protocols, form and process, the imprint of the makers hands. If Art History had a manifesto, it would be this: Let objects speak for themselves. Words cannot contain the real. Embrace disorder. Be dogmatic, then apologize. Look closer, and closer again. Buy a microscope (like Annie Dillard did). Walk outside. Make more room in your abdomen for air.