Do you want to ask your favorite question?

(Frank to Ryan) What’s your favorite question?

Are you satisfied creatively?

Yeah, let’s talk about this. I think this question is bullshit, man. I know that this is sort of the namesake of the site, but the reason I think it’s bullshit is because the way you frame a creative practice should not be in terms of whether you’re content or not. I think everyone has a window of approval for their work; sometimes that’s years and sometimes it’s months, days, or hours. Your approval of your work metabolizes no matter what, and it doesn’t matter how good you are. That’s why I hit you up on Twitter recently to say “What if we’re thinking about this all wrong? What if contentedness about your creative work is more like eating?”

Yeah, Josh Brewer mentioned your comment when we talked with him.

Right! I read that this morning. It doesn’t matter how good the meal is. A few hours later, you’re going to be hungry again. Maybe the reason you’re dissatisfied is not because the burger you just ate was bad, but because you’ve already eaten it—your body processes it. Doing the work makes you better, so of course you’ll be dissatisfied with what you’ve already done. You’re better!

Any creative pursuit is like solving an endless puzzle. You don’t know where to start because there are no edges. So, you start with the two things in front of you that fit together, and then build off of it. And no edges means no obvious stopping point. Any time you step back to look at what you’ve done, it’s an intermediate step. When you’re “done” is a completely arbitrary choice. Creativity is a quagmire.

So, does it make sense to have your criteria for success be something you can never reach? I don’t think so. If you’re forcing me to answer “Am I content with my work?” then right now I would say yes—absolutely—but that has very little to do with what I’ve done in the past. If there’s anything I wanted to make right now, I feel like I could do some version of it. That flips contentedness on it’s head; it becomes less about the work you’ve done in the past and more about the opportunity and ability to do the things you want to do in the future.

If you’re looking for contentedness, I’d say stop worrying about your portfolio. Portfolios are super important in explaining yourself to other people and getting new work, but my body of work doesn’t really fill that role of fulfillment. If you expect to find contentedness there, you’re facing in the wrong direction. That’s about the past. You need to face forward. Personal satisfaction comes from putting yourself in a place where you can multiply the opportunities you have and make yourself available to whatever comes up. You want to be in a spot where you can respond to the world. If an idea hits you, then you can do it in some form. That’s what the Kickstarter campaign taught me: you don’t need permission from anyone to do awesome things. All you need is the time and space to work on it.

That’s my kind of contentedness. At this point in my career, I don’t care about getting more awards or whatever. I want to stay interested, challenge myself, and do things I think my friends and family would like. I want to be good to the people who like my work, help my peers do what they think is interesting or important, and make a living. But other than that, it doesn’t matter much to me. So, am I content? Yeah. But not for the reasons you’d think.

I agree 100% with what you said. The Great Discontent has nothing to do with the work you make. It’s a vague question on purpose and it’s interesting to see how people interpret it in different ways.

Let’s be honest. Your question “Are you content?” is really, “What do you want?” Hopefully the person would know and could tell you; the next question would be, “Are you in a position to do that?” Those questions both play into being content.

Any creative person I know feels a bit of shame about his or her past work. That’s the genius of John Baldessari burning all of his work halfway through his career as a work of art—it’s a disavowal and an honest assessment of the creative practice. So what about shame? This is something I think about as a writer. When is it okay for me to delete something I’ve written, something I don’t like any more? Archives are good, but I don’t need to stand behind all of my work forever. Kafka wanted all of his writing burned when he was on his deathbed and who could blame him? I hate that as a reader, but love it as a writer. Maybe that discontentedness is a form of shame, and maybe that shame is good because it shows you’re growing. Even if you’re not growing, at least it implies that you’re changing. I don’t know. How do you guys feel about the first few interviews you did?

There’s stuff I want to go back and redo.

I won’t read them. I know I’d edit the shit out of them now.

What if you didn’t care about the story?

The content is still really valuable, though.

Aha! So if the work was all from you, then you would’ve deleted it a long time ago?

If it was some stupid poem I wrote, then it would be gone.

Yeah. Sometimes I look at my old stuff and feel like I have a bunch of stupid poems on my hands.

I wonder if every creative person hits this moment, when, for some reason, they don’t make the work for a while. Could be family or personal stuff, a giant vacation, a service trip, god forbid an illness, or anything else that separates you from your body of work for a period. They step away from all that work and when they return, they want to pull everything they’ve made back in. Undo the work. Unsay the words. And once you realize you can’t unsay things, even if you’ve deleted the work, there’s a period of wanting to revolt against your old self to clear the slate. I’ve been there a few times.

Something I’m fascinated by right now is how bands follow up really huge hits. What did Michael Jackson do after Thriller? What was Fleetwood Mac like after they finished Rumors? Another example is Radiohead doing Kid A after OK Computer.

That’s also a conversation that revolves around art and commerce and the pressure to commercialize things.

Well, I think those bands had a specific benefit. After such big hits, they had carte blanche—a genius license to do whatever they wanted. With the exception of Michael Jackson from Thriller to Bad, the follow ups are much different. Radiohead’s Kid A and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk seem like knee-jerk reactions, like they were uncomfortable or bored with the success. They tried to do something on the other side of the coin to say, “You’re wrong for paying attention to me,” or, “This idea is bankrupt. It was successful because we wrung everything we could out of it.” The only option they had was to do something completely different.

I’d agree with that.

I have no work that comes anywhere near any of those things, but I think I’m similar to a lot of other creative people in that I’m deeply uncomfortable with attention. It’s one of those things where if you gain any attention, you start to subconsciously—or maybe even consciously—make creative choices to have people stop paying attention to you.

I think that people’s expectations can feel like chains. When we create something, we want to have total freedom, right? We don’t want to feel like our audience is putting pressure on us to do something. We want to prove that we’re still free and can make our own choices.

Exactly. Attention creates expectations that feel like a saddle. And most horses buck the first time a saddle is put on them. It is a natural inclination. Maybe it’s immature behavior to want to shake off other people’s expectations? I don’t know. But, if I’m really honest about where I am creatively, that’s what I want to do—I just want to buck. I want to fuck with shit: I want to put illustration in the rearview or do it in a completely different way; I want to write, but not about the topics people expect me to; I want to make websites, but not in the way that people are making websites now. I’m kind of bored with the web. It feels homogenous. People want to be successful and, currently, success is measured through money and attention. That’s not a bad impulse; it’s the most logical one. It’s commerce, after all.

But I’m in a position to buck a little because I’ve restocked my “fuck you” money. So I’m closing the studio for a few months and walking into the lab to experiment. I’ve been keeping a text file of a bunch of small, provocative phrases I’ve wanted to tweet, but haven’t. I thought, “I like these. What if I elevate them instead of letting them get buried?” I think they deserve more consideration, and Twitter’s the wrong spot for that. These snippets have charm. Or insight. Or, they’re just really base and uncomfortably honest.

Did you try some of them out last week? You had some good ones.

No. The ones I worked on today were: “You have to burn something to make light.” The second was: “The danger we’re listening for is the danger we created.” There’s another one that just says “Love me.” They’re morsels of text that deserve consideration, I think.

One of my favorite artists is John Baldessari and if you look at his work, you would say, “Oh, this is where Frank gets some of his mojo.” (all laughing) I’m taking Baldessari’s hand-lettering, and juxtaposing my phrases with images from the Commons I’ve been collecting the past few years. I’m calling them “Baldesorrys” right now, until I think of a real name or know what it’s about.