The Naming of Things

Giving new work a title is not an easy task for me. It’s usually the last part to happen—just after I photograph the piece. I’m genuinely surprised when people tell me they like the titles, and often at a loss when they want to know more about them.

In one sense, they exist as a way for me to remember what I was thinking about as I made the piece, or something that is hovering adjacent to its making. Sometimes it’s something one of my kids say. All parents say this, of course, but from my kids’ mouths and brains come the most interesting and honest thoughts. The little one is home sick today and, just before falling asleep for a nap, said to me, “Next time I’ll be you, and you be the meteorite.”

Yes, I will be the meteorite.

In another sense, titles exist as an entry point for the viewer. I’m a big believer of the personal becoming universal. My experiences are not shared, but my processing of them—as art—can be. The title holds the door open and allows others to enter.

So. Okay. Come here—I’ll hold the door—and look at this new thing that came out of the studio this week:

Percussive Foraging. Black paper, 36” x 36” x 3”.

Yeah, I know, there’s a lot going on. I’m 50/50 on it. There are nice moments, but it’s also A LOT. My wife hates it and my old assistant thinks it looks like one of those things that eats cars. I’ve tentatively titled it Percussive Foraging.

I had the idea for the shapes of the piece when I heard Metacosmos by Anna Thorvaldsdottir at the Detroit Symphony in January. The program notes that the piece is “the speculative metaphor of falling into a black hole—the unknown—with endless constellations and layers of opposing forces connecting and communicating with each other, expanding and contracting, projecting a struggle for power as the different sources pull on you and you realize that you are being drawn into a force that is beyond your control.”

It also sounds like not a lot happening, then builds to a lot of things happening at once. It’s a storm inside a volcano, and also there’s this searching happening—patterns repeat and grow.

Earlier that week my daughter (who is now me, btw, and totally asleep) taught me about the aye-aye, a terrifying lemur that uses its long finger to tap out insects from a decaying log. She loves all animals, even the nightmare ones. It uses “percussive foraging” to gather insects.

Trigger warning: click here only if you have capacity to handle a long fingered lemur.

Connecting the musical searching action that happens for both the animal and the orchestra made sense to me visually with the searching that is happening with the piece.

I’m using two shapes, and the shifting patterns of light line up—or don’t—to create new patterns that form a Morse code–like quilt of rattan and rudiment weaving visuals and sounds into something new. A foraging takes place, a visual search. I understand it—visual, auditory, and word link together, and I can Voltron my idea into a physical object with a title that (maybe) works. 

Like many pieces I make, I don’t feel a strong connection to it yet. I channeled it into being, and I like parts of it, but want to spend more time developing the series to see if something lasting is there.

Counterintuitively, this is a good thing. If I love something right away, it’s a summer pop song, fun—until you’ve heard it enough. I want a piece like that album you first heard and went, “I’m not sure,” and then listened to again because your friend said they loved it. And when you re-listen, it’s still opening up and there’s something there . . . doing . . . something, but it’s weird, because why is he singing like that? And why does it keep repeating the same thing? And what’s with the Wilhelm scream? And then there’s this sense of space and time stretching . . . and the song unlocks, or it unlocks you, and then it’s ten years later and you are falling falling falling—like the meteorite you eventually become.

If you are out there and reading this, leave a comment below. Let me know this isn’t going into a black hole.

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