We all make lists. I have piles of notebooks scattered throughout my apartment full of to-dos, to-buys, to-sees, to-writes, etc, yadda yadda. I enjoy them much more than diaries, because the pressure isn’t there to produce a coherent piece of work. You can jot dot ideas on these lists, maybe try out a few sentences for your next essay/blog post, diagram a bench you want to design. Great fun. Oh, and you save them, because one day you’re definitely going to sit down and transcribe all those old projects that have collapsed over the years, order them, and get them moving again. It’s also great fun to track the evolution of your cultural taste, like when you first became aware of Justice, or when you thought you were going to learn to tan leather.
That’s why one of my favorite shows this year so far has been Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, currently on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. The lists displayed – from Picasso, Robert Smithson, Eero Saarinen, Elaine de Kooning, and many more – offer glimpses into the planning of projects that were in fact realized (Smithson’s notes include quotations on spirals), as well as the spark and ingenuity that truly creative minds bring to everyday, solitary pursuits (like packing a bag). These lists are wide-open windows into the minds of those we all would have loved to meet, and, in a very real way, offer a better kind of engagement with the creative process than viewing work ever can.
A preview of the lists can be found on the terrific website of the Archives of American Art, here.
Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art
June 3 to October 2, 2011
The Morgan Library & Museum
Above: An address list from the notebooks of Alexander Calder
