Dance With the Tiger

Letting it go
Is jumping the train
Is to dance with the tiger
Letting it go
Though we won't be the same
Is to dance with the tiger
And laugh at the rain
        -- Rosanne Cash, Dance With the Tiger

I'm a big fan of Rosanne Cash's music and an even bigger fan of her writing -- she is a magnificent artist in every medium she employs. She's been posting to a songwriting blog on the New York Times site, and added a provocative and beautifully written piece last week on fact versus truth. What caught my eye, for our purposes here, is her comment about songwriting as discovery rather than self-expression.

Since I've written about expression as part of Slow Cloth, this made me think. Is discovery a better concept? Or exploration? I think they all apply. In strictly songwriting terms -- and I am not a songwriter, just a music lover -- I think she's saying that lyrics should not simply be a catalog of personal facts, but should strive to tell the truth of a situation instead. I believe that's true in textile art as well.

I see it this way: Art that is too specifically personal often fails. For example, a personally meaningful quilt about an experience, even a profound one like an illness or loss of a loved one, too easily becomes banal if everything in it is a literal reference to that event or person and it goes no further. I do not mean to be unkind here. It's the artist's tightrope to walk; can you take your experience and make it accessible, even universal in some way? Is the viewer just eavesdropping on your experience, or able to engage with it through some shared understanding or emotion?

I think this is why I've been shy about joining in some of the monthly journal projects that are popular -- I want to explore broader concepts rather than literal answers to narrow questions. I'm more attracted to the ones that offer a color scheme or method that can be a launching pad for many different directions.

So I like the idea of discovery and exploration in the Slow Cloth approach, and I think expression is still important too -- especially for women and cultures that have often been silenced. Maybe our expression has to include and assume an attitude of discovery and exploration. We discover things about ourselves when we create, and we discover things about other humans when we look at their textiles and the stories they tell in cloth. We see how they define beauty and what they value, what they fear, what they want to reveal or conceal.

And if we really look, we do get truth, not fact; questions, not answers; new maps and new territories with every authentic act of creation.

Comments

[jude]

i agree with your view here. being engaged in what you do is an important element in slow cloth but it is just a gateway. the personal part is the key to beginning. but it is a journey and part of it is the need to communicate something. i often get discouraged about that part because my original premise was that it must be possible to understand one another. but it is easy to fall short. the important point you have made here i think is that you must share part of the journey to get to the same place.

[truestitches]

What a beautiful post. (I better come ups with some goods here, don't want to fall into the trap of the banal compliment.) I agree that generally, distance and ambiguity and "openings" in a piece invite a viewer in to share and explore more so than work that is too literal and close to the artist.

But there have been some successful, very personal pieces I have seen that succeed, I guess, because they access the realm of shared experience. But they are rare, indeed.