“The world is already full,” Stacey D’Erasmo writes, reflecting on Fred Sandback’s moving, visually transformative yarn sculptures. “All you have to do is recognize it. Open your other eyes.” As might be expected from a book on craft, D’Erasmo’s The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry explores the varied ways that we, as artists, open our “other eyes” and widen our fields of vision. Yet what makes D’Erasmo’s book unique is its extended inquiry into how a wide range of artists have managed to sustain their vision — how they’ve kept their other eyes open throughout the length of their artistic careers.
One of the greatest challenges in writing a book on craft is that the subject requires you to name the unnamable. You must find a language to describe the mysteries of art-making without trying to “solve” these mysteries, a language that does not attempt to domesticate the wild zone of the imagination. D’Erasmo’s approach to this paradox is to provide a generous space for artists, herself included, to simply tell the stories of how they built and sustained their careers, and to emphasize the shared strategies that emerge in these stories of negotiating the “long run” of making a life as an artist. The result is a linked collection of narratives that offers useful insight for emerging and established artists alike on how we make art and how we find ways to keep doing so over the course of our lives.
In each chapter of The Long Run, D’Erasmo’s narrative of how she has sustained her career is braided with the stories of important artists who have come before her: dancer Valda Setterfield; landscape architect Darrel Morrison; writer Samuel R. Delany; actress Blair Brown; composer Tania León; painter Amy Sillman; musician Steve Earle; and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña. D’Erasmo’s interviews with these artists unfold as richly detailed stories of resilience, of the long run of growing and maintaining an artistic career. As she weaves her own craft memoir with those of the other artists interviewed in the book — what she describes as “a fugitive, occasional memoir” — D’Erasmo affirms that while artistic vision might begin inside the privacy of one’s own imagination, our ability to nurture and reframe our vision can be deepened by listening closely to the stories of those who have come before us. In both form and content, The Long Run honors the solitude required to make art, but it takes care not to fetishize this solitude.
Each artist D’Erasmo interviews has their own singular practice, but what they all share in common is a finely honed sense of adaptation. It’s not so much a skill as an enthusiasm for these artists: they are maestros of adaptation in large part because they’ve created entire careers out of a relentless need to innovate as they move from one piece of work to the next. “I think it is a kind of metabolism that drives me to change and change and change my forms,” Sillman says, “searching rather earnestly for something I don’t quite know already.” The most successful artists over the long run tend to be those who are allergic to stasis — those for whom the embrace of continuous aesthetic innovation is a reflection of their enthused acceptance of impermanence. Like the urge to innovate, artistic adaptation can be seen as a collision of willfulness and vulnerability, a “continual friction” that “generates considerable heat for making art, if you can bear it.” D’Erasmo’s metaphorically rich and empathetic prose acknowledges that the heat of an artist’s life sometimes can feel intolerable. Each of her interviewees has experienced sacrifices that arose from being pushed to the margins by oppressive social forces or inner demons — and at times both. D’Erasmo’s book recognizes the need to acknowledge the historical forces that can marginalize us, and to consider how our efforts to resist those forces can produce this artistic heat and also, in most cases, can help us forge strategies to adapt and thrive. The ability to sustain a long run, the book suggests, is through a dialectic of adaptation and resistance.
[Left — Stacey D’Erasmo] In this way, the book reminds artists that the craft elements we need to produce work are rarely matters solely of technique. Our artistic practices and our day-to-day life practices are extensions of each other. Just as most of us need a combination of both solitude and community in our social lives, so, too, do we need both to make art. Throughout The Long Run, D’Erasmo emphasizes how important it can be for an artist to nurture the imagination in isolation and also to be part of a creative community whose vitality encourages experimentation. The famous versions of such an artistic scene are well known — Bloomsbury, the Harlem Renaissance, Warhol’s Factory, among many others — but every generation of artists finds ways to make its own collective scene, and such communities can be a model, D’Erasmo writes, for how our life practices and our artistic practices are interconnected modes of craft. They inspire the possibility of “inventing new ways to live,” which, in turn, can lead us to create new modes of art.
Whether a community consists of two artists meeting regularly to critique each other’s work, or a full artistic collective such as the Factory, what these communities share is a mutually encouraging effort by which artists can help each other find a unique voice. Such communities offer a “unique alchemy” of social and aesthetic exploration, providing artists “a shared sense that here, only here, can we be entirely ourselves.” Finding an artistic community where you can be entirely yourself — whether that community consists of only two artists or a large group — is for many of us a necessary step toward developing a voice that sounds entirely like ourselves. The Long Run offers rich, inspiring examples of finding a voice through a combination of the solitary imagination and the steady company of other artists. D’Erasmo’s accounts of how her own communities, especially the queer community, helped her develop a sense of voice and vision crucial to the book’s inquiry into how we might turn to each other to sustain — and survive — the long run of an individual career. Looking back on coming out during the hostile early 1980s, D’Erasmo writes, “In a world where so much remained covert, coded, forbidden, endangered, and closeted, we had to trust our own instincts to get what we wanted … Our other eyes were open.”
[Right — Michael Cunningham] D’Erasmo’s emphasis on community, on the social aspects of craft, also extends into the intimacies of friendship and mentorship. The Long Run itself is, in many ways, an extended narrative of mentorship: D’Erasmo warmly and deftly constructs each interview as if it were a conversation with an older mentor. Taken together, the interviews offer varied and generously illustrative models of making a life as an artist. Particularly striking, too, are those moments when the boundary between mentorship and friendship becomes porous. D’Erasmo’s mentorship-turned-friendship with fellow novelist Michael Cunningham is a moving example of the potential effects of such a relationship on one’s art. “The fact that [Cunningham] was more famous than I was, then and now, felt in large part like permission: I could run as fast, hit as hard, and demand as much of the world as I wanted without ever being in danger of losing him by going too far, because he had always gone farther.” The accomplishments of fellow writers too easily can breed competition and envy. But D’Erasmo’s account of herself and Cunningham offers the important reminder that our relationships alternatively can offer a generative source of permission — an opportunity to find a way to sound entirely like ourselves: “There was nothing I could write, and very little I could do, that would shock or dismay him,” she continues. “For a woman in this world, or at least for this one, that’s life giving.” Artists find mentors and critique groups to hone our craft; and we tend to create communities as acts of artistic survival, finding like-minded makers who can provide mutually inspiring fellowship in a utilitarian world often indifferent or even hostile toward art-making. The choice is not between the salon or the isolated atelier. The choice is both.
But as D’Erasmo suggests, exile can also play an significant role in sustaining the long run of our careers. In this regard, her chapter on exile is possibly the most important in the book — not the least because D’Erasmo herself seems torn on the subject when the chapter opens. Interviewing composer Tania León, D’Erasmo emphasizes that León’s unwelcome exile from her native Cuba in 1967, at the age of 24, became a crucial breakthrough moment for her. She had planned to fly from Cuba to the U.S. as the first step on a larger, more ambitious trajectory that, she hoped, would lead her to study piano in Paris with famed teacher and conductor Nadia Boulanger. León was unaware, however, of the Castro government’s policy that those few Cubans who managed to leave the island were not allowed to return. Her Cuban passport was invalidated by a border officer as she prepared to board her flight to Miami. “From the moment her passport was canceled,” D’Erasmo writes, “unbeknownst to her then, her life as a composer and conductor began.”
[Left — Tania León] Still, as D’Erasmo traces the narrative of León’s artistic life — and, as in other chapters, braids it with her own — she is aware that focusing on the need for exile, and the sacrifices that come with this need, can be mishandled. Tread without care down the path of exile as an element of craft and suddenly you might find yourself praising the too-familiar narrative of the tortured, heroic artist. With this risk in mind, D’Erasmo admits to hesitance as she posits, early in this chapter, that exile might be a craft element that artists draw from. Whether exile is external or internal, political or emotional, D’Erasmo eventually recognizes how crucial it can be for artistic development, that “some sort of intense velocity is required to hurl a person out of the orbit of conventional life and into the weirdness of art as vocation.” Such is the need for books like The Long Run: when we find ourself hurled from conventional life into the strange and satisfying world of art-making, the sacrifices made along the way can be debilitating if we try to fight them. Instead, D’Erasmo conversationally engages them, all the while reinforcing that the most successful artists often are the ones who find ways to adapt to adversarial conditions. Among the most difficult of these is exile.
[Right — Amy Silliman] D’Erasmo’s detailed discussions of making a life as an artist would be incomplete without her equally substantive focus on making a living as an artist. Her interview with Amy Sillman, who, in addition to her career as a painter, has made a living in higher education as a professor and an administrator, launches a discussion of the significant role that colleges and universities have played in the past century educating future artists and serving as de facto patrons for working artists. Too often, discussions of making a living as a writer treat teaching as a laboriously necessary evil. The cliché of the tortured artist that D’Erasmo so deftly swerves from in The Long Run is part and parcel of another cliché she deconstructs: the teaching writer who treats the classroom as a mere day job. While such a stereotype might serve well in Hollywood, it is out of touch with the reality of what it means to teach and make art. My own experience as a writer who also works in academia is typical: my writing must be balanced with my teaching and administrative work. I bring my imaginative energy as a writer into my teaching, and I return home inspired by the imaginative energy of the classroom. As D’Erasmo’s interview with Sillman demonstrates, students and teaching artists are best served when the classroom is an extension of, rather than an obstacle to, the imagination. Sillman emphasizes that “my work as a teacher and co-chair of a department at Bard was part of my art work: it was very empowering and really startling to think of my whole life as the expanded field of painting.” While the upper-level administrations of many colleges and universities are less likely to be patrons of the arts in our current era, administrative leaders rightly know that the teaching artist who does not see the classroom as “the expanded field” of their art is denying their students a vital element of artistic mentorship. D’Erasmo and Sillman’s conversation emphasizes what we rarely see in Hollywood portrayals of artists reluctantly making a living in higher education: teaching artists who see the classroom as merely a day job prevent themselves from experiencing the aesthetic growth that comes from working as mentors for emerging artists.
What D’Erasmo could not have anticipated in her chapter on artists making a living in higher education is the astonishingly rapid decline of arts and humanities programs, and the increased closure of small colleges, in just the past year alone (as The Long Run likely was in press). This recent development does not devalue D’Erasmo’s project; instead, it makes The Long Run more urgent, given D’Erasmo’s emphasis on the importance of adaptation, resistance, and exile as elements of craft. With colleges and universities increasingly abandoning their prior roles as patrons (and as stewards of arts education), those of us in academia need to be willing to adapt to new ways of making a living that can enable the making of art. “Forces arise, within and without, and it’s that willingness to turn in their direction, to yield, that seems to foster resilience,” D’Erasmo writes. The artists she interviews each demonstrate in different ways that the threat of exile — from our homes, our families, or our patrons — can either silence our voices or breed a willingness to adapt that can generate innovations in our body of work. Academia’s role as a patron has diminished remarkably in just the past couple of years, and it doesn’t seem to be an institution poised to reclaim or reinvent the patronage model anytime soon. Yet D’Erasmo’s epilogue is not a eulogy for past patrons or disappearing ones, but instead a call to rethink what resistance can mean for contemporary artists as we craft the long run of our artistic careers. “In this time and place under these circumstances, for artists,” D’Erasmo writes, resistance “might mean something more like the belief in the inherent value of one’s own work, no matter its instrumental use in producing money, group identity, clicks, tuition-paying students, or valorization according to the terms of the most influential critical opinions of the moment.” To develop this kind of resistance as an artist while earning a wage (and, one hopes, health insurance) employed in an economic system such as capitalism requires “the deep stamina of the double agent.”
The Long Run is a primer for thinking about the varied ways we might craft artistic careers without being subsumed by the organizations and institutions that employ us, whether these institutions are situated in the art-biz or the vanishing olive groves of academe. The book dramatizes how varied artists, and D’Erasmo herself, have worked to “open their other eyes” — and of how they adapt to changing conditions to keep them open. As such, it offers an encouraging narrative for emerging artists and a series of important reminders for established artists. It brings us all together as a community of makers on the page. Through its fusion of interview and memoir, The Long Run offers a model for what we can provide each other as we nurture the long run of our art-making lives: “a shared sense that here, only here, can we be entirely ourselves.”
[Published by Graywolf Press on July 9, 2024, 192 pages, $17.00 paprback]