My new book, Advice for Young Artists (2024), has a deceptive title. I don’t have any advice. Instead of playing the role of wise elder, this book was an attempt to remind myself of how I felt when I first discovered artmaking. Here are five books that put gasoline in my engine back then:
Silence (1961) by John Cage
When I was young and hungry for inspiration, I didn’t read books in a linear way. I was a hummingbird plucking nectar where I could find it. The great composer, artist and mushroom enthusiast John Cage was an author that rewarded that kind of serendipity. He scattered his words across the page so that the reader can assemble their own meaning. When he set about the task of creating a manifesto on music, Cage wrote:
Nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music.
“ “ “ “hearing” “ “ “ “
“ “ “ “playing” “ “ “ “
In Silence, Cage shares a lot of wisdom, but like the Zen masters he admires, he also seems dubious of its value. ‘As far as consistency of thought goes,’ he writes, ‘I prefer inconsistency.’
Stand Still Like a Hummingbird (1962) by Henry Miller
Speaking of hummingbirds, this book of essays might be the creative inspiration I return to the most. When I was young, I was attracted, like everyone else, to Miller the swashbuckler. In an essay about reading, he waxes nostalgic about quitting college and learning more from his ‘comrades of the gutter’. Oh the reckless romance! But I didn’t quit school. Nor did I live a life of epic adventure. Could you imagine what Miller might make of me living my entire life in the same Midwestern state with the same girl I met at age 16. And yet Miller’s words are the ones I come back to the most as I get older.
My favourite essay in this collection is the short preface to a book of his watercolours that he published when he was seventy. If he could live his life over again, Miller asks himself, ‘would I approach my love life the same way?’. But the one thing he is certain of is that he’d still paint watercolours. What’s inspiring about his passion as an older man is that it’s been stripped of ego (as much as possible for Miller). ‘I have no ambition to become a masterful painter,’ he writes, ‘I simply want to go on painting, more and more, even though I may be committing a crime against the Holy Ghost.’
This pure love of making is what I felt when I first discovered art and what I hope to keep rediscovering as I get older.
Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees (1982) by Lawrence Weschler
The title of this book about the California light artist Robert Irwin suggests a Zen-like meditation on non-verbal experience but this book of words is, ironically, devoid of pictures. After becoming a paratrooper in 1946, Irwin joined the army’s travelling baseball team and became a competitive swimmer. He later voyaged through Europe extensively and had a passion for cars and women. He was famously competitive and for many years his principal source of income was playing the horses. Irwin, it turns out, is the kind of unconventional spirit that Henry Miller would have admired. In other words, he was a contradiction. Weschler writes,
‘He is a master of irony and a devotee of serious play… He has an extraordinary tolerance for ambiguity… In short, he is an artist who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it.’
What’s comforting about reading about another artist’s journey – be it the fearless adventurer or the timid monk – is that there is no set path.
Beauty in Photography (1981) by Robert Adams
The first book of writing about photography I ever read is still one I return to regularly, though I’m always a little embarrassed by its subtitle: ‘In Defense of Traditional Values.’ Adams is a moralist. But as a young artist I found wisdom in his sermons.
My favourite essay, ‘Making Art New’, is about fighting the temptation of trendiness. Adams writes about how art is marketed and sold like cars. Were we able to abandon this model, he says, ‘we might additionally do a better job of interesting an audience in actually looking at pictures instead of reading about trends. Perhaps most important, we might enable young photographers to find their direction and waste less pain.’
As a young photographer, I did indeed waste a lot of energy looking for newness. It was only after I accepted Adams’s wisdom that there is no real progress in art that I ironically began to make my own progress.
Weegee: An Autobiography (1961) by Weegee
If Robert Adams is the solemn angel on my shoulder, the legendary New York freelancer Weegee is the devil. Writing about the overnight success he achieved after the publication of his first book, Naked City (1945), Weegee is as blunt as his photographs: ‘My two-dollar whoring days were over. I now had women who would go to bed with me for the sheer love of it, not for the two dollars. (They wanted to find out what genius was like in bed.)’
Weegee is crass, but joyously so. He is full of himself, but also full of life. And in the end, this is his wisdom. In the final chapter of his autobiography, Weegee addresses the question he’s so often asked – the secret of his success. ‘It’s very simple,’ he writes, ‘I’ve just been myself.’
About Advice for Young Artists: 'Between 2022 and 2024, Alec Soth visited twenty-five undergraduate art programmes across the United States. Advice for Young Artists comprises work he made there. Its title – perhaps like the visits themselves – is misleading: rather than wisdom or guidance, Soth offers an angular and unresolved reflection on artmaking at different stages of life and the relations of photography, time and ageing.' – MACK
Main image: Alec Soth, Advice for Young Artists, 2024, book cover. Courtesy: MACK
