Joel Fisher - Success of Failure

The article deals with a fundamental question of the role of failure in artistic pursuit. Traditionally, "Success" has been defined as the achievement of a finished product or perfection. This definition of success inherently means that there are a lot more instances of failure in our world. All the risks to achieving a goal are termed as "failures".

Traditionally, unfinished work is viewed as failure because abandoning the pursuit of work is usually thought to be in recognition of the fact that continuing on that path to the logical end will lead to failure. However, another way of looking at this is to imagine a work to be complete at every point in its development and thus there is technically no "unfinished work" that can be easily categorized as failure.

This new, "non-definite" nature of failure can benefit us in a few different ways in the pursuit of art:
-- The fear of failure can be a good indication of how far we are comfortable to push ourselves. Perseverance through this point can lead to the "success" of an approach/idea/process and give us more tools for the future.
-- Having a goal that is almost impossible to reach can be another driver of failure (in the conventional - achieving perfection terms). However, pursuit of such a goal can lead to the opposite of failure as it can help expand the pursuit and the final work to a point that could not have been achievable otherwise

We tend to deal with success publicly and failure personally. However, the biggest risk is the risk of not recognizing a failure to ourselves. An acknowledged failure becomes a lesson and a stepping stone for the next pursuit (and hence doesn't end up being a "failure"). On the other hand, not recognizing failure and dealing with it makes the pursuit of any idea much harder. Every analysis of failure can teach us more about our self, or the pursuit of an idea, and thus can only benefit our growth.

A scientific method or inquiry relies solely on the pursuit of failure. Every hypothesis that is tested is with the expectation of finding failure. By failing again and again science inevitably leads to success. This is in contrast with the art world, where "success" is highly valued and stressed. This inhibits the pursuit of playful "experiments" in art. Public success in art is placed so high that it becomes difficult to pursue a path fraught with the idea of failures. This ends up resulting in creating highly skilled craftsmen rather than skilled investigators of ideas and curiosity in the art community. Even though a purely scientific approach to art might be an extreme, there is a middle ground of allowing artists to take liberties in pursuit and failure and taking pleasure in the little failures rather than create an expectation of epic success.

Jeff Wall Photograph Critique

This is an image by Jeff Wall. In this image, we see an Asian man walking down a sidewalk being overtaken by a white male who seems to be dragging along a white female. Its during evening along an industrial part of town. Presumably, all these people are going home after work.

Formally, the arrangement of the three people in the frame is such that our eye goes directly to the Asian person and then goes to the white male. Here we notice that the white male is slanting his eyes to insult the Asian person. We notice that the Asian person is depicted in such a way that is not entirely clear whether (a) He notices the white person and chooses to ignore it or (b) he is just in the process of turning his head but not yet registered the other people. We then look at the female in the photograph, who seems to be lagging behind the man and squinting her eyes. At this point, it is not clear whether she is squinting due to the sunlight or she is expressing disapproval/disgust at her companion's behavior

Jeff Wall is successful with this image in conveying something that goes beyond just the formal aspects of the image. He is calling into question the stereotypes that we hold and how we use them to denigrate other people. Also, maybe racial (and other kinds of) stereotypes exist in our community and sometimes we just haven't come across them (or we have but we choose to look away and ignore them)