From the book Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over 30 Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin by Lawrence Weschler, p.77:

Irwin’s entire progression had been dictated by upsurges of boredom; bored with the figurative, he’d moved on to the abstract, and so forth. Now, he mobilized boredom itself as one of his means. “I put myself in that disciplined position, and one of the tools I used was boredom. Boredom is a very good tool. Because whenever you play creative games, what you normally do is you bring to the situation all your aspirations, all your assumptions, all your ambitions–all your stuff. And then you pile it up on your painting, reading into the painting all the things you want it to be. I’m sure it’s the same with writing; you load it up with all your illusions about what it is. Boredom’s a great way to break that. You do the same thing over and over and over again, until you’re bored stiff with it. Then all your illusions, aspirations, everything just drains off. And now what you see is what you get. Nothing more. A is A and B is B. A is not plus plus plus all these other things. It’s just A. And suddenly you’ve got something showing you all its threadbare reality, its lack of structure, its lack of meaning. And then you have a chance to… Boredom’s great. It’s a silly tool but finally it’s a very good one. There are possibly more sophisticated ways to get at something like that, but when you come from where I came from, you take your tools where you can find them.”

July 27th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL