Almost without exception, seeing a book with the subtitle “On the Creative Life” I’d take a pass. But who can resist a book like Sally Mann’s Art Work Art Work: On the Creative Life (New York: Abrams Press, 2025), that begins with “This is a book about how to get shit done” ?
Sally Mann, already known to many as a great photographer, is also a great writer. That first sentence is followed by “Or, more particularly, how I get shit done. Or didn’t.” And thus, we enter a book written with a depth of candor, humor, and intimacy – a gem of a book for anyone at any stage of a deep, complete commitment to an art practice. (Or, for that matter, a life practice or life vow.)
No punches pulled about this art-life: “It is about more than technique or practice or even, yes, hard work. It is about how you live your life, because the life you lead is your art and the art you make is your life.” That is, as I see it, why this art-making – painting, writing, music-making, photography – is serious business: it is inseparable from how one lives a life. It – and it’s not right to call it “it” since “it” is not an object apart from the person! – exists with the fullness of emotion, thinking, striving, frustration, joy as the life and person that one is.
Yes, as Sally Mann observes, this art-life is much more than technique or practice (which, of course, do matter and must be a part of one’s ongoing training and experimentation). The art-life is a wisdom path: one is taught by the art-life one commits to. In a strange way, similar to a spiritual path or a marriage, one, implicitly or explicitly, makes a vow, enters into a path of development unforeseeable.
Art Work is filled with great quotations, as Mann has been collecting and writing down these gems for many years. The chapter on Early Promise, for example, begins with an epigraph from Cyril Connolly: “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.” Mann’s rise to recognition as a photographer was anything but swift. Her perspectives on slow growth should be required reading for all beginning artists:
My total lack of promise is exhibit number one in the prosecution of my argument that it is work, and more work, that makes an artist. Proust became Proust that way, indeed furiously working himself to death. But you don’t have to do that – don’t kill yourself in your cork-lined room, don’t be Mozart dying from exhaustion at thirty-five, just put your head down and steadily resolutely, pull the load.
I cannot overemphasize what an important lesson Mann transmits, verified by her own experiences. Our American culture promotes and destroys its whiz kids. Our MFA programs have a persistent ambient music: get a book published by the time you’re 26 or 27 or you’re a failure and you won’t find a place on the (illusory) teaching/accomplishment/prizes carousel. It’s good to remember that Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost did not publish their first books until they were in their forties.
Hank Lazer
I began my college years at Stanford as a math major, drifted through a pre-med curriculum, and ended up an English major with aspirations of becoming a poet. In part, with a blurry foresight that amazes me now, I chose that path (or it chose me) in part because I saw it as a long path, a way of writing – with examples such as William Carlos Willams and Wallace Stevens – that would allow for a lifetime of change and development. In my creative writing class at Virginia (where I was in the PhD program, as there was not an MFA program, and I knew I needed to do much more reading if I ever wanted to do the kind of writing I hoped might be possible) there was a “promising” student who, at 21, was already being published in Poetry. Two or three years later, he was finished as a poet. I did not publish a first big book of poetry until I was 42; that long time of development allowed me to ask what a book might look like. My first book, Doublespace, was nearly 200 pages long, contained wide-ranging ways of writing, and the book itself opened in two directions (like the old sci fi paperbacks).
What matters in the long run is not how great your work looks when first setting out. The depth and integrity of your commitment to the art form (in its infinite and unpredictable variety) and your ability to evade the pitfalls of ego and accomplishment and recognition. In short, work hard to be a great amateur, resisting professionalization.
Mann’s summary of the liberating nature of slow recognition is spot on:
If you are willing to accept that your success, if it comes, will be later in your career, you can make your art or write your books without regard for the all-consuming, and often fickle, marketplace. Being unrecognized and especially not being identified with a particular style allows us to make the work that matters to us, irrespective of whether or not it would sell.
It reminds me of a favorite line from the poet Theordore Roethke (in the poem “The Dying Man”): “a slow growth is a hard thing to endure.” Hard to endure but utterly affirming and strengthening.
As for those beautiful quotations that pepper Mann’s book, she notes that she keeps a list of quotes “presently 257 pages long.” These quotes are incredibly well-chosen. I have always thought that one of the key aspects of one’s writing, especially prose but poetry too, is to let the best writings of others have a say (and to let that saying become integrated into and present in one’s own writing). Not to explain one’s own writing, but simply for the wisdom one has encountered over many years of reading – what, in sports terminology, we might call cherry-picking. Here’s one from Mann’s book (via William Wharton in The Washington Post):
I say to a lot of people, the secret to the good life is: find something you really like to do. Find out if you’re good at it. If you are, work hard to become very good at it. Then hope you can find someone to pay you to do it. But almost everybody does it the other way. They look for a job, and then they hope to get good at it, and then they hope to learn to like it.
Isn’t this precisely our life and art-life enigma? How to feel and know what we’re called to do and be? How to identify and affix to a passion (rather becoming or choosing to be something that others tell us we “should” be or do)? And then comes the hard work – truly, through love of the activity, not through calculation, the lifelong effort to become better, or, at very least, to remain fresh to the activity (Zen’s beginner’s mind) rather than repeating a voice or a style on and on. And, assuming one has not won the lottery nor been given a massive trust fund, there is the complex balancing act of being paid for doing something while protecting the time and energy for that chosen art-life. Not easy. Nor should it be, as rigorous testing – perhaps years of non-recognition? – ensures the depth of one’s art-life commitment (or the alternative, which might also be a wise choice: leaving that path behind).
One way to have a better (if inevitably incomplete) understanding of our art-life path is to do some writing and analysis and self-reflection. Many art/writing programs discourage such thinking and writing, suggesting that it might interfere with the alleged purity or unselfconscious instinctive art-making itself. I’m with Mann in thinking the opposite; she writes, “I want to impress on anyone who is still reading this that being able to write, especially about your work and why you do it, is important.” While I am a partisan of the Zen koan “not knowing is most intimate,” some of that intimacy or proximity is created by the intensity of one’s writing and thinking in the direction of knowing.
It is an admittedly arduous path that Mann describes (for us and for herself). The hard work that she touts is not easy: “gutting out Malcolm Gladwell’s ten thousand hours. It is unfortunately essential that those hours comprise difficult acts, of increasing miserableness, in order for any of us to improve.” Mann threads the needle perfectly, neither glorifying suffering and difficulty, nor ignoring its necessity. As for the art itself,
If it’s to be built by the hardships, by life’s slings and arrows, then by god I’ve got a ton of it, and my kids do, too. Beyond entertainment, there’s value in that. It gives you something to say in your art. It gives you the right to be saying it.
Why would anyone make such a choice, submitting to what will inevitably be a difficult, trying, (nearly always) non-remunerative life path? “Not entirely unlike an addict, you crave the almost illicit high, the skydiving exhilaration of art-making.” And Mann does not shy away from noting the material circumstances – the non-art labor – that often is necessary to support the high of art-making:
We work soul-sucking jobs to buy us the relief of a few hours of creativity, and it’s not just us – it was Philip Glass, who worked as a plumber and once showed up to install a dishwasher for an astonished art critic, Robert Hughes; or the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who worked night shifts in a steel factory to fund his films; or William Carlos Williams, a physician who wrote poems on his prescription pads in between seeing patients.
Economic difficulty is not the only challenge Mann and most artists face. It is almost inevitable that with our absolute commitment to our art-work that we will produce work that meets with painful misunderstanding:
Sally Mann
As an artist, you have an obligation to the viewer to offer up a different sensibility (why otherwise would they bother to explore yours?), to call their closely held belief systems into question (not gratuitously and, to whatever extent you can, with respect and a lagniappe of beauty), and to challenge and subvert. The more effective you are at this, the more agitation, possibly even anger, you may cause.
In this sense, the art-work path is an ethical way. We listen to what and where we are led to explore, and, particularly if one has developed a certain art-identity, if led in a new direction, we must find out what is there. Our work is not meant (merely) to please, entertain, and console. It should be disturbing – to us, and to our so-called audience. We must be willing for this surprising change to happen; if not, we lose our way and the depth of our relationship to art-making.
Ultimately, I love this book because it is so beautifully written, honest, and inspirational (or, as in my case, at age 75, affirmative of many of my choices and experiences along the way). What my review leaves out is what a great storyteller Mann is. She is particularly adept – with quite a few astonishing examples – of transmitting something that is almost impossible to teach: trust in beneficial coincidences and how one might find the ability to sense when these coincidences are occurring. Mann’s own art-career benefitted multiple times from the most unlikely coincidences. (Read these for yourself!)
This is not a How-To book in any traditional sense, because the item being produced is the artist herself as much or more so than any specific photograph or piece of writing. It is more along the lines of what Keats called soul-making – the gradual and essential making of the artist’s interiority (heart, soul, mind, consciousness, sensitivity) through “pains and troubles,” and through submission to the surprising, complex relationship to the world around her as it becomes known, slowly, and often retrospectively, through the making of her chosen art-life.
That complex path, over many years, will inevitably take turns – in subject, materials, methods – utterly unexpected and unforeseeable, ways of making art that quite likely will prove alienating or confusing or disturbing to whatever audience one might have already developed (including one’s own understanding of the art-work being done). In an oblique sense, this book is a memoir tracing the development of an artist’s sensibility or soul. I think of it as a spiritual autobiography, minus the typical trappings of that genre.
For the artist is a thing (person) made as much as the maker of a thing. And that artist – I’m tempted to say “true artist” though all artists perhaps partake of this experience – is an odd thing in this world, and her living in the world with her unusual passion, dedication, seemingly absurd commitment to her art-work, is not an easy or even fully explicable path.
One way that, over many years, we are made is through our relationship to place, a topic that Mann addresses via her reading of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos:
Within all that Pisan derangement, Pound gets one thing unquestionably right: what we love is what remains, our true heritage. Our place on earth is alive with the dead and haunted by the living: where we are is who we are, and who we are, what we do, is defined and enriched by the exigencies of place. It is not a commodity, a resource to be used and discarded, but a beneficent and enduring value – in my view, among the most important.
For Mann, that place has been rural Virginia. For me, surprisingly, after 48 years in place, it has been Tuscaloosa and Carrollton, Alabama. In “The Gift Outright,” Frost opens by writing “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” I think he gets it wrong. The land is never really “ours,” and it shapes and makes us before we are fully aware that this process is underway. It is, as in Mann’s photography and writing, a source of sustenance and inspiration, particularly as we embrace that relationship, submit to it, and listen and see what it – our place, chosen by us and as it chooses us – has to teach us.
Art Work is a wisdom book, with very little arrogance or egotism. The advice that Mann offers, in telling her own story along with the bolstering of insights from many other admired artists and writers, is suitable guidance for beginning artists, middle-aged artists, and old artists. Perhaps her best advice occurs near the end of the book:
Passion, however, does allow you to indulge in your task, a seemingly incompatible pairing of verb and predicate; but my argument is that passion can be domesticated – it is manageable and requires both the application of inspirational fuel and a steady hand to alternately stoke it and control the damper.
To stoke and damper that passion: the task, challenge, and joy for a lifetime. Thanks, Sally Mann, for sharing with us the wisdom acquired and instantiated from your lifelong effort to get shit done.
Leave a Reply