The Parable of the Mower
On the editing of artworks.
Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Cuauhtémoc Medina and Rafael Ortega, When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando la fe mueve montañas), April 11, 2002 ©Francis Alÿs www.francisalys.com
A decade or so ago I was participating in an art conference in San Francisco. The organizer of the conference had made the bad decision of including his partner on the roster of speakers— a fact that became more of evident when she started presenting her work, which was not exactly relevant to the topic of the conference. What I recall the most, however, was that she shared a common trait with amateur artists: wanting to show their entire life of work during what needed to be a 15-minute intervention. After she spoke for nearly 30 minutes, the moderator started gently gesturing to her that her time was up (trying to be extra gentle, I assume, given her connections to the organizer of the conference). After 35 minutes, the moderator became more vocal, to no avail. At 40 minutes he stood next to the lectern trying to interrupt, while she, unfazed, continued speaking. At the 45-minute mark, we saw the strange scene of the moderator trying to pull her laptop away while she grabbed on to it and pleaded to him, saying that she only had a few more slides left to show.
This anecdote often comes to mind when I think about how we edit ourselves as artists— not just in speaking, but specifically in the work we produce. In other words, our quality control process.
The ability to be one’s own editor, while a basic aspect of the art practice is nonetheless one of the most difficult skills to master. It is also a process that remains not very well understood. The behaviorist term “self-editing”, however, can help us understand something about how quality control occurs in the creative process.
The famous American psychologist B.F. Skinner devoted a lot of his time in discussing self-editing in speech. Among many of the important points that he made as a result of his research was the fact (which might appear self-evident) that the effort in editing oneself in speech is greater when there are unlimited time conditions, and it suffers when there are severe time constraints—this means that we can say things poorly when we are under pressure, and we are likely to present them in a thoroughly edited form.
This observation rings true when we look at the creative process. It is not uncommon for artists who receive a lot of attention in their careers to produce a great deal of work in a short period of time, and as a result loosen their self-editing standards to produce less than satisfactory works. Somehow there is a slight ego-driven delusion in the artist who at times might believe that anything that comes out of their mind is necessarily going to be celebrated or admired.
For these reasons artists who are particularly demanding of their own work deserve great respect. A prime example of this kind of rigor is sculptor Jackie Winsor. Winsor, who is Canadian born but has lived in the US for most of her life, is generally associated with post-minimalism and received a mid-career retrospective at MoMA in 1979, the first woman to receive a retrospective at that museum since 1946. Winsor only produces two or three works a year, and her process is extremely demanding and time-consuming. Of her process, she once said in an interview:
"Maintaining integrity toward the perfection you envisioned in the beginning is a constant concern. I spend an enormous amount of time just trying to imagine if an eighth of an inch at some point is going to make a major difference in the completed construction of the piece.”
Jackie Winsor, Circle/Square, 1987, Concrete, pigment 34 x 34 x 34 inches (86.4 x 86.4 x 86.4 cm). © Jackie Winsor. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Outside of an artist’s self-imposed editing discipline, the curatorial practice is what we depend on to ultimately give shape to the works that are ultimately presented to the public. Successful curator-artist relationships are like the one between an editor and an author, and at times the collaboration and dialogue between them is so deep that it becomes hard to discern the line between what constitutes a strict editing procedure and what is really an artistic collaboration.
An example is the work by Francis Alÿs Cuando la fe mueve montañas (When Faith Moves Mountains) was a performative action consisting in moving a 1,600-foot sand dune four inches from its original location in Peru. The project was a result of a collaboration with the preeminent Mexican curator (and close friend of Alÿs) Cuauhtémoc Medina and artist Rafael Ortega. The piece itself, which I regard as much as a performance as a work of land art, is also one where authorship is somewhat erased to be presented rather as a collective action.
In literature, the hand of the editor is mostly invisible, but usually much more present than the reader would imagine, such as the role that editor Tay Hohoff played in the crafting of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Ironically, Hohoff’s largely unacknowledged role in the production of the final version of the book became much more evident until 2015, when Lee’s 1960 book Go Set a Watchman was published— a novel that is striking in contrast to Mockingbird, ostensibly because it did not go through Hohoff’s editing process. As literary critic Jonathan Mahler notes in an article about the editing story of this book, “Publishing lore is filled with stories of famously headstrong editors imposing their will on authors. Maxwell Perkins, the longtime editorial director at Charles Scribner’s Sons, told Ernest Hemingway to “tone it down,” and cut 90,000 words from Thomas Wolfe’s debut novel, “Look Homeward, Angel.” Gordon Lish rewrote entire passages of Raymond Carver’s stories, and later boasted about it to friends.” In a sense, the editor’s profession morphs into the one of a method actor who learns the voice of the author and can speak in that appropriated voice to complete the work.
Thinking of the role of editing in literature and acting led me of course to the central role that occupies in another art: filmmaking. I thus spoke with Justin Krohn, an Emmy-nominated film editor who was introduced to me by the great filmmaker Jennifer Reeder. Krohn has worked with like Martin Scorsese and other leading film directors and has worked as editor of high-profile television shows and feature films such as American Horror Story, Bloodline, Twin Peaks: The Return, and Mr. Robot.
For Krohn—as I am sure, for many other in his field— film editing is a process of “constant invention and reinvention or defining and redefining.” As I mentioned Jackie Winsor’s work to him, he also compared film it to a three-dimensional artistic practice “because you are sculpting in time, like Tarkovsky once said.” He remembers a 10-minute, unedited take, in Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker— a experience so transformative, he said, that after watching it “my view of the whole world had changed.”
To a large extent editing is the key to the success or failure of a film. Krohn cites the film “The Current War”, the 2017 film produced by Scorsese starring Benedict Cumberbatch about the historic rivalry between Tesla and Edison, and a film that was to be distributed by the Weinstein Company but shelved and sold after the sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Krohn’s work on the final version of the film, which went through a re-editing process of its ending thanks to a final cut privilege clause in Scorsese’s contract, led the director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon to tell Krohn, “I thought I had lost my film and you gave it back to me.” For film directors, Krohn said, “your films are your kids.”
Russian Ark, film directed by Alexander Sokurov (2002)
Film of course has lots of famous examples of single shot (that is, unedited) films. Reeder and Krohn offered this list: The Russian Ark, Victoria, Birdman, 1917, Son of Saul, Rope, and Enter the Void. “Also, we did an episode or Mr. Robot as a one shot”, said Khron.
In terms of famous unedited opening shots, Krohn cites the opening of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, “one of the most famous single takes, with Welles fighting with the studio to not have the credits over the shot. He lost that battle in 1958, but when the film was recut by Walter Murch in 1998 according to Orson Welles 1958 memo to the studio, the shot was restored without the credits/title.”
The decision of foregoing editing, either in film or art, is in fact a highly risky and daring approach, one that requires great skill. In film, those long shots produce a “hypnotic” effect, in Kohn’s view. They give us a heightened sense of reality, foregoing the dynamism of editing to present a slice of real life.
Something similar can be said of certain conceptual projects in art where the procedure might not be as artful, but the container is conceived in a way in which anything can fit in it. This is the case of Andy Warhol’s novel “A”, which is in essence a series of transcribed live recordings made by Warhol over a two-year period. In the area of artist books, perhaps the most famous series of unedited conceptual publications, was onestar press, an editorial project created by Christophe Boutin who produced, over the course of about 20 years, (2000-2019) more than 300 “strictly unedited” artist books, consisting in printing the exact submission from the commissioned artists.
As you might have noticed, I have mentioned a few of the many varied ways in which editing plays out in art making, ranging from the inability to self-edit to strict editing (Jackie Winsor), to the editor acquiring the voice of the author, to sculptural editing (in film), to the conceptual decision of foregoing editing altogether. But regardless of the medium, the modality, and the relationship between editor and artist (including when the artist is their own editor), for those who pay attention to the subject it soon becomes clear not only that editing is almost impossible to separate entirely from the artistic process, but also the extent to which editing, as the means, also often determines the ends of the work. It is the theory and practice of the work that determines the creative balance between role of elimination and addition in the editing process, or determine when we need to stop adding to it, or even determine when a total lack of editing— or appropriative editing— can be a generative conceptual choice.
In the parable of the sower, which appears at various points in the Bible (Matthew 13: 1-23, Mark 4:1-20, Luke 8:4-15) Jesus describes the Gospel as the seed that is sowed indiscriminately on a field. Some seeds, he explains, will land on rocky ground, and will not grow; others will fall on thorny ground and others on fertile, good ground. With this parable we may be able to extrapolate its message to the artistic process. If we think of seeds as ideas for art works, some do not take hold, others grow almost by themselves, and yet others require careful nourishment and pruning. Editing is that process of care. And while on the religious topic, we might also add that the process is aided by a certain faith— which, while it might or might not move mountains, it can certainly help in the process of completing an artwork.