Stretching

::: warn This is a draft. It may always be a draft. And that is fine?

:::

When will this mess finally congeal into something solid, elegant, graspable? When will I stop feeling panicked when people ask what it is I’m working on? When will I stop feeling like an impostor, like I’m boring people and wasting their time? When will it finally be good?

We’re told that doing the work of creating something — a text, an artwork or anything else — we need to pass through a series of stages. For instance, in the academic world, we may be told that following the scientific method requires us to pass through the stages of developing a hypothesis, gathering data, testing the hypothesis, and drawing inferences. Each one of these stages builds on the previous one in a logical progression, and if we follow the process we will eventually have a robust set of findings that are publishable. Even when we don’t do null hypothesis significance testing, we need to develop a research question, review the literature and come up with a conceptual framework, establish the phenomenon and do all kinds of other things that will eventually result in a convincing or compelling analysis. With an artwork like a sculpture, we go from concept to sketch to prototype to a raw cast sculpture that we must sand and polish before it can be put on display. Each stage requires a different set of skills, tools, collaborators.

If this is our understanding of the work we do, it can be easy to be trapped in what we may call a stadial consciousness, where we are aware that we are at an early stage in a process and eagerly awaiting salvation into the higher, more developed stage. Then we will no longer have to feel the discomfort that comes with still having to figure things out, the panic that comes from not having an “elevator pitch,” not having anything to show for our efforts. Salvation implies a temporal rupture that separates experience into a before and after, and if we have stadial consciousness, that is what we are working toward or yearning for. Anything before then carries the blemish of being incomplete, disjointed, ill-informed, not yet good.

Because of this, the working life of writers, artists, researchers can be full of moments of self-loathing, insecurity, feelings of stuckness. We look for that easy fix, the one weird trick that will allow us to get unstuck, experience flow, finally have a breakthrough. Instead we labor over sentences, sketches, shitty drafts. The work proceeds like a series of ebbs and flows, never a watershed moment. Recurrence, not rupture.

Instead of hoping to haste the day when our work will finally be good, what if we stretch out the duration and find comfort in it? If most of the work happens in this time, we should make ourselves at home in it rather than have it fill us with feelings of alienation. One way to achieve such stretching is to ask a different set of questions. Instead of when is it good? we may ask:

• When does it create a space that I feel good in?
• When is it something I enjoy talking about?
• When does it make me laugh?
• When does it get me out of my own head?
• When is it something elegant?
• When is it not boring anymore?

Importantly, these are questions we don’t just ask ourselves, but that we address with others who may usually ask us (implicitly) whether our work is good yet. When we come into situations where our work may be judged according to a stadial conception, we can take the opportunity to instead have the kind of conversation that would actually help us and allows to feel at ease with where we are.

[contributed by Henriette:] Especially with highly ambitious people, there is a risk of trying to be complete. On paper, that sounds like rigor. In practice, it often flattens the work, or even kills it completely.

If we begin to edit out anything that feels too specific, too strange, too provocative, too unproven or too hard to defend, we remove exactly the parts that make the work vital. Those elements are the wild ones. Imbalance creates character, tension, and spice.

“Stretching”— as in postponing the moment of finishing a work and remaining open to other outcomes — can keep the process more vital and more pleasant. Energy becomes a useful angle here. Stretching as a form of energy management.

And energy management is important as artistic work (and perhaps also a scientific work?) will reveal the energy with which it was created. Many artists work based on how things feel rather than whether things are “right”. They operate in ambiguity. It is not about eliminating unknowns, but about gradually shaping a work step by step.

Process creates direction and energy in itself. It is about timing and kairos.

In co-creation processes — where artistic research involves people or more-than-human contributors —the work has to stay flexible in order to allow other directions to emerge during the process.

Journeys, formats of sharing those can be the project with leaving conclusions to the audience. Laurin Böhm's ‘Flößern (In-Fluent)’ An artistic river research and cross-border exchange stretched / floating along the Rhine. https://lina.community/projects/4632b31a-5089-46d4-9621-48d9e714a581/

I don’t think artists enjoy uncertainty per se. It is more that artistic methods are built to function inside it. The real stress is whether I can allow enough stretching to happen, and whether there is enough time/money/space for that big stretching within the work.