Manufactured objects are generally evaluated against a predetermined purpose. Their completion is based on their optimal or desired utility. But artworks do not necessarily have a fixed endpoint, an objectively measurable standard of success or an identifiable moment at which making is completed and must be ceased.
According to Pliny the Elder, ancient artists like Apelles or Polyclitus signed their completed masterpieces using the imperfect tense faciebat rather than the completed past tense fecit. They did this out of modesty, faciebat is the Latin imperfect tense for were making or was in the process of making, implying that the work was a perpetual work-in-progress and could always be improved. The tradition carried. Michelangelo famously signed the marble sash of the Virgin Mary in his 1499 masterpiece the Pietà in this way, the only sculpture he took lengths to sign.(1)
Then there are the examples where incompletion itself is completion. In traditional Phulkari stitching, a small section of the textile or motif is intentionally left unfinished to ward off evil spirits, demons and the evil eye. According to superstition, art that is flawless invites bad luck, jealousy or the attention of malicious spirits.(2)
So, completion is a nebulous concept. I can set down my needle whenever I want to. I can declare my work, on my authority, complete – despite my own true aspirations. But I but art is about upholding instinct and honesty. I have felt the neat closure of a project needing no further addition or refinement only after intensive labour. It takes a combination of thought, work and resolve – otherwise the message is desertion. Perhaps St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica is regarded as his finest work because he had a lot of it done before its mysterious abandonment.
After a long string of discarded works, I promised myself I would complete this one. See it through – fill the given space out with intensive hand and machine work. Add to the work every day. Work with minimal colour. Paint experimentally. Add trinkets. Enjoy, expand, struggle, appeal, test. But how to know if it is complete? An internal thrum of momentum beyond the work? A sense of maturation? The pressing sense that further intervention would no longer contribute meaningfully? Or is it simply pain, insurmountable fatigue, or the exhaustion of materials? These are my personal compasses. Then, as Marcel Duchamp once said, it is up to the spectator to bear the work out through the doors of the gallery, forming catalysts and loops that can’t fully be controlled.
Well, I’m not thinking about it too hard. It is all conditional to the experience of making. So far, this intensive approach seems right – but must be seen through to be seen at all. Resilience, pacing, trust, integrity, connection to materiality… I am happy with these pillars. I have spent much time with this work already, shifting it slowly enough toward close. But I do hope I’d know my own work’s completion best of all.
Now back to it.
- Irving Lavin, “Divine Grace and the Remedy of the Imperfect: Michelangelo’s Signature on the St. Peter’s Pietà,” Artibus et Historiae, no. 68 (2013): 277–328.
- University of Michigan, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, “Deliberate Imperfection,” Less Than Perfect, 2016–2017, https://exhibitions.kelsey.lsa.umich.edu/less-than-perfect/deliberate.php
Bibliography
Lavin, Irving. “Divine Grace and the Remedy of the Imperfect: Michelangelo’s Signature on the St. Peter’s Pietà.” Artibus et Historiae, no. 68 (2013): 277–328.
University of Michigan, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. “Deliberate Imperfection.” Less Than Perfect. 2016–2017. https://exhibitions.kelsey.lsa.umich.edu/less-than-perfect/deliberate.php.