Finishing / Ending

I often think of a common saying, that one doesn't finish a work of art, but merely abandons it. This points to the simple fact that the idea of completion is a grey area surrounded by ambivalence. After time and energy is poured into something we want to have a sense of completion, of seeing the product of the effort, but we simultaneously want to keep it going because to finish is essentially to abandon a relationship that has been built up with the work. How does one define such a complex concept, something that is so bound up with interpretation and a lack of a truly correct answer. That idea is in and of itself part of the answer - that the definition of finishing, the sense of an ending, is as much an artistic choice as anything else involved in the creation of a particular work.

The psychology of finishing is integral. It requires one to stop working, to let go, which is counterintuitive in a sense, because isn't the work a constant process? If things are practiced correctly, one recognizes that one is never actually done, because the goal isn't necessarily to finish but to develop. The approach of an idea ends up branching out into a myriad of other ideas, rethinking the original intent and refining it, so how can one simply stop and say this is now ready and there is nothing left to do?

Walking away and considering a thing to be finished is not to say that there is nothing left to do. It is to say that part of development, part of growing as an artist, is being able to end something and begin something new. Leaving a work is bound up in creative development because if one spends all their time on one idea they cannot progress as much, and can easily get bogged down in some abstract sense of perfection, attempting to find that elusive concept within one object of their efforts. I prefer the idea of perfection as being the best approximation of the creative goal for that specific work. No thing can be everything or all things to all people. No artistic question has only one correct answer. We make many choices in the process of creation and the assumption that there is always one correct choice is false, especially when considering that choices can become dependent on one another. One decision changes the scope and possibilities of the next decision, and so on.

Since some of the anxiety around finishing can often be connected to a desire to continue thinking along a certain path, to keep reworking an idea, finishing can be reframed as completing a piece of something larger. You are working on one part of a continuum, which leaves space for more to happen while still fulfilling an individual potential. You are not walking away from something completely but merely a section of a longer arch that you will return to. The accumulation can add more meaning and development to your body of work, which can in many cases be seen as one piece of material with many facets to it, many wrinkles that act as the means of exploring everything you want to do in a single track, but simply cannot.

Everyone has a personal moment of recognizing, or accepting, that something is finished. It is as much a part of one's individual creative process as choosing sounds to work with, and needs to be developed over time. The way something is mixed, the amount of closure or strands left undone, the way sounds are edited, and every other decision that happens, is both part of one's general style and approach to finishing. Each moment adds up towards the whole, and what is completion if not some sort of resolution to that whole?

As you finish more pieces you realize what your work sounds like when it's at that point, and what you want it to sound like in order to be deemed so. Reaching the goal of completion helps to bring about a definition of it, which makes it more likely to happen in the future, which continually reinforces and redefines that definition. You begin to develop a means of arriving at that place over time through trial, error, observation, experimentation. It never becomes a rote process, hopefully, but perhaps can become clearer when something is completed, when it has reached a suitable end.

Assignment:

Flesh out the loops you have from the previous two assignments. Try to concentrate on developing one further into some sort of complete thing. It can be a complete progression or a song or whatever you want to call it, but seeing as there is no specific time limit, ideally you will develop it into something that you see as finished.