Reading to Write

Typically, I don't read. Call me ignorant or uneducated, but anything that I can't stumble across while browsing the Internet isn't worth my time. Unfortunately, I'm an intellectual at heart, and hold a University degree in the Visual Arts from a school that was heavily theory-based (it was heavily practice-based too, but I'm talking theory right now, and that shit was heavy). When you're not the kind of person who enjoys picking up a book and reading it and your degree depends on it, you spend a lot of time searching through piles of books for snippets of information. My peers all know dates and artists and movements and events, but I am terrible to talk to about anything outside of my field of interest, because I never bothered to commit these things to memory. I was satisfied knowing that if it ever came up, I could probably Google it or--if worse came to worse--go to the library and do the fact-mining that got me through my degree. Yes, I was quite the prospector in my day.

But, much to my dismay, that's not enough. I say this as a bibliophobe that I am: I need to read more than just what I'm directly interested in. I've always known that the broad reading that is required of students is important for expanding one's interests, but it is only now, on the other side of the scholastic journey, that I realize it is absolutely essential.

As an artist I think I know what my work is about and no one can really tell me otherwise, because I made it and so I have a personal knowledge of my intentions. Yes, I'm sure that my art has elements that I'm not actively aware of, but my awareness of this unawareness is still a form of awareness; but as an intellectually-driven artist, this drives me crazy. Practices that are based in sound theoretical boundaries conform to more than just my own biases. And I need to be aware that not only are there elements in my work that I didn't intend to include, but that their inclusion is, in fact, the intention of the work itself.

Taking into account the holy-trinity of art: the artist, the art, and the viewer; I, as the artist, engage in an open dialogue with the art and the artist. But of these three members of the artistic trinity, only the art has a chance of living on indefinitely. My intentions and the interpretations of the viewer are subjective, transient, and insistent upon the art. The art however, exists only as itself. It doesn't take into consideration how it is being read or interpreted, and those readings and interpretations that it inspires do not change the physical dimension of a work of art.

For the sake of myself, and my ability to read and interpret my own actions, I need to read and interpret the actions of others like me, and others unlike me. I could sit around on Wikipedia reading all day about comics, and folklore, and popular culture, and link in back to my work easily. But art isn't about what something is, necessarily. It's about what it isn't. And for that, it's not good enough to read about the narrative structure of comics. I need to read about things that I don't consider when making art, and figure out why my work isn't that. In doing so, I might be able to figure out exactly what my art is and why it is that. Maybe, also, I will discover that my art is something entirely different than I would have ever thought.

Why?