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THE COUNTERPOINT TO transcendence, in the language of religion, is immanence: believing that the sublime is not outside the bounds of the humanly perceived world but manifest within it; that the timeless is also present in the immediate and ephemeral. “The artist rummages through the world, attends lovingly on everyday things and tells their story,” Han writes. What defines an artist may be not so much the snatching at eternity as the tinkering, the grubbing in the dirt, the quiet attention to the most seemingly ordinary and insignificant details — not the grand unfurling of the universe but life at its smallest.
And so the architect Toshiko Mori plants carrots in her garden as “part of the habit of creation,” and the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly waits for the subway, contemplating the uncertainty of arrival. For the artists in the pages that follow — not all of whom necessarily consider themselves to be artists — life unfolds, eddies, sometimes stalls. There are chores, along with reprieves from work of any kind. The procession of minutes and hours doesn’t quite add up to what we think of as a workday, in part because the border is drawn not between work and life but between making art (which might happen anywhere, at any time) and the living that sustains it. In some ways artists must function as athletes, building in moments of recovery, ice baths for the mind.
Work itself is unmoored in time and place. The conceptual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija doesn’t even have a studio: “I don’t wake up and go to a place where I sit down and make things.” Instead, a day — a life — is a continuous act of creation, of work that never properly ends but is neither fully visible. The 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert once took five days, working 12 hours a day, to write one page. (Note that he was single and had no children.) How to explain the song that somehow emerges out of the same chords strummed over and over; the commotion and sense of impending doom backstage and then the pin-drop hush on opening night; the vast stillness that precedes the decisive gesture?
For 30 years, the artist James Nares, now known as Jamie, has made paintings that each consist of a single, giant brushstroke, minimalist and maximalist at once. It’s “made in a matter of seconds,” she says, but it takes days to find the shape, engage the muscle and, perhaps most crucially, to make mistakes, each squeegeed off so the canvas is blank anew. The finished piece or performance, the artwork is just the iceberg’s tip, leaving unseen the labor below.
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