The Art of Revelation

For the last year, the ghost of a prior failure haunted me every time I went into my garage. This particular phantom was a canvas that I had messed up while painting. It had a beautifully blended rainbow background, starting at the top with a deep crimson, melding into orange and yellow, then somewhat sharply changing to green, then blue, and a hint of indigo at the bottom. The idea was to depict a sunset over water, so that my Pride-flag colors could be projected onto a somewhat natural scene. The only flaw was that the transition to the "water" surface got a little too abrupt with a few misplaced strokes of green that were too high to make it appear intentional, and too dark to hide under another coat of yellow.

Finally fed up with its taunts, I grabbed my paints, determined to try again. I had a ruined canvas before me, but the original image and composition still interested me, so I turned it into an experiment to see if it could work in a different style: instead of a perfectly smooth gradient, I opted for something messy and chaotic. I layered on the paint, rebuilding scene on top of the previous one, but this time I didn't care about perfection. I wasn't painting—I was playing.

In perfect irony, the final image was much more visually appealing—even with the exact same issue that it had before: small green splashes of paint on top of the fragile yellow area. I had gotten carried away with my palette knife, just like I had with my brush last year. This time around, however, this doesn't bother me—it's not trying to be photo-realistic, it's trying to say something.

Wu Wei

In Dao De Jing, this phrase wu wei comes up a lot. It describes a concept of non-coercive action. It's about flowing instead of forcing. While I'm not going to do justice in explaining (or even understanding) this Taoist concept, what I have learned in trying to wrap my Western mind around it has been insightful and widely applicable.

The first iteration of my painting process was mostly me trying to force something. When I made a big mistake, it was unrecoverable. I had built a fragile system—a collection of decisions that could not adapt to variability. So when I prepared to try again, I tried tricking my brain into letting go by treating my canvas as if it were another being that I was going to interact with.

We can animate the painting (i.e. treat it as if alive) and imagine that it has a will of its own, and our job as artist is to reveal that painting: listen to it, pull it out. I think that's an intuitive way that many artists like to think of their work, especially after the Renaissance shifted the pressure to be the genius rather than to have a genius. It's much easier on your mental state if you can separate yourself from what you produce. Otherwise, you may get too deep into judgment or worry more about unachievable standards than making the art.

The second iteration of my painting had the intention of losing myself in the process: I wanted the painting to reveal itself to me through wu wei—flow—making decisions based on what was presented to me, rather than playing god and forcing it to do what I want even when it doesn't work. This method was more enjoyable because the stakes were removed. I wasn't trying to prove how technically skilled I was. I was watching the painting take shape over time and reacting to what I saw. I still had a basic composition in mind, but it was not about copying my imagination directly onto canvas.

Adam Savage, one of the hosts of the hit series MythBusters (2003–2016), had a similar experience on his YouTube channel, Tested. He was building a life-size "velociraptor" puppet, similar to what you'd see on Jurassic Park.

There's a moment in which the object tells you what it's going to be, he remarked. He had been set on creating a green-toned skin for his dinosaur model, but as he worked with it, he ended up changing the entire color scheme to a more sandy/desert style, and I personally thought it was the perfect choice.

In my mind, this is wu wei. It's a collaboration between material and artist.

Rawhide Drum Making

I took a community class last year that promised a rawhide drum that we would make and learn to play. It was quite simplified and most of the difficult work was done outside of the class by the material suppliers (all from Indigenous-owned businesses). We had wood frames already made and even the rawhide had been dyed and processed.

Even though we were really just assembling the drum, rather than making one from scratch, there was still a part of the process that tapped into this wu wei concept. The instructor showed us how to take our pre-soaked rawhides and pull them taught around the wood frames. It was a lot of pulling and folding and manipulating the hide, trying to coax it to conform to the circular shape without too many creases or bumps. Then we added the rawhide strings to the back to keep the tension and create the handle.

The animal will tell you about itself, my instructor said as she wandered through the desks. You can have an idea of what it will be, but ultimately, you have to work with the deer to let it show you what it will become.

This was the best part of the class: getting yet another culture's perspective of this wu wei concept. The hide of the deer told me a story: it has scars and bumps and spots that showed through the dye. In a way, the animal still had some say in its transformation from hide to drum. It didn't matter how hard I pulled, there were parts that would not lie perfectly flat or curve the way I wanted. After stringing and tensioning the back, I discovered that the hide had a natural hole on the edge (as opposed to the pre-punched holes from processing), meaning I had nine lines instead of the expected eight.

The sound of each drum would also be unique, and change over time as the hide settled on the drum and dried. Get to know your drum, became the instructor's refrain across each class session.

Once again, the final product was a collaboration, not a domination.

Cyborg

While this may seem to be art-focused, I believe that wu wei is widely applicable and useful in our lives. Perhaps art is just a training tool to help us practice recognizing the paths set before us and then taking the opportunity to follow where they lead. Not to be confused with inaction, non-coercive action is an attempt to work with what we have and to honor the agency or the dignity of other creatures and things.

In a modern context, we might be tempted to see things like a social media feed as following a path—after all, it is constantly providing you with things that are easily followed. This is inaction, however, because you are not collaborating. Your agency and your "self" are being rushed through a river that is designed to trap you in it. You are the material and the company is the artist that asserts its dominance over you. You will like this content, you will be distracted, you will be harvested for our gain without your true consent.

Not all technology must be this way. Wu wei is difficult when our agency is not entirely our own, but it can be practiced, and it can be brought into your circumstance through intention. I believe this helps us flip back into a more agentive role, where we can become actors in our lives again, rather than objects ready to be turned into profits by other agents who do not respect wu wei or the humanity of others.

I think wu wei can help us work with others in a non-destructive way. How else can we achieve something within a collection of other agents? When we respect the agency of other people, and even other animals or objects, we allow the art of revelation to work towards a positive outcome. We can still have our own ideas, but we allow each participant to reveal themselves in the process. We will never end up with what a single individual imagined, but that is not a loss; it's an improvement. There are better times ahead when we adapt, update, and move collaboratively. Anything else is ultimately destructive.