Artworks Gallery
On “10,000 Things”
According to Lao Tzu, the interplay of the Dark with the Light - the Yin with the Yang - begat one thing and then another which led to the wanwu: the “10,000 Things.”
In Taoism, the 10,000 Things - i.e. the universe and all the stuff in it - is a metaphor for not only actual Things: Socratic Images, “mimetic phenomena,” physical representations, or in this case, art, but also non-Things: Platonic Ideas, “philosophical forms,” intellectual blueprints, or on the other hand, aesthetics.
Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs” from 1965 is the perfect examination of the relationship between Image and Idea.
Woven throughout Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, allusions to the tangible and intangible as well as their manifestations and concepts muse on these 10,000 Things; and, after some study, the book reveals to a conscientious reader that Ideas, rather than Images, clear the Way to enlightenment.
Artists maintain a practice rather than run a factory because Ideas - like Truth and Beauty - are only discovered during the process, rather than from the product or Image itself. Images are ultimately illustrations of Ideas.
Jasper Johns wrote a recipe from his practice, “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” His simple prescription is a master’s proscription: action without hesitation, Do by not Doing, pure making is the Way of Art.
In popular culture, there’s a couple of other familiar “10,000” metaphors - the 10,000 steps daily to maintain health or the 10,000 hours of effort to turn you into an expert. During a recent meditation, a thought floated by and stuck, “What if I made 10,000 things? Like a daily walk or an extended apprenticeship, what if I spent the next 10,000 days making a thing a day? Perhaps some days I’d make four and some I’d get to none, but what if…?”
It was freeing to think in such a large scale because 10,000 Things can be anything and everything, Ideas or Images. Its massiveness was liberating, and it allowed me to re-frame my studio practice where all explorations are both grand and miniscule.
As I played with that thought for a while, tossing it around my big empty brain, it also occurred to me that 10,000 days is a very, very long time. It turns out it’s about 27 years, in fact. As I’m currently 54, I’ve already had two 10,000 days’ worth of practice, and I’ve not learned anything yet except I know nothing at all, which is, apparently, the best time to start making.
I hope you enjoy my 10,000 Things.
Plein air oil painting made on location