The Art of the Kludge

Kludge:

‘a workaround or solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain.”

“accumulation, aggregation, assemblage, collection” (Wikipedia)

I was listening to a podcast the other day about the Buddhist practice of accepting the transience of everything and I guess I have to think about that some, but not today. Today I’m banging on about kludging and art and entropy. Today I’m still resisting the tyranny of capital and time.

The porch is falling down. Get the armchair.

Is art a kind of kludging? That seems a bit unkind, doesn’t it? Nobody wants to be clumsy or inelegant. But, at the same time, the world throws a lot of decay at us, a lot of erosion of our foundations, and sometimes you just gotta prop up your porch with an armchair so you can get the groceries into the house. Sometimes kludging is about responding creatively to exigency and sometimes art is that, too. A friend just showed me his signs for the No Kings protest he’s on his way to and they are the art of exigency. What statement can fit on a piece of printer paper that can express existential anxiety and determined, peaceful defiance? What if the printer is out of cyan? The march starts in half an hour. The times bully us forward to kludging, to making do. The porch is falling down. Get the armchair.

But, beyond exigency, there’s something else about the idea of kludging that seems applicable to the making of art.

Art is the hard way to go about, say, getting a flower.

Art is by definition inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain. Its purpose is to be inefficient. Art is the hard way to go about, say, getting a flower. The easy way is to go pick a flower and, voila, a flower. Put it in a vase. Give it water. Watch it wither. Entropy and transience nibble nibble nibble away at your flower. Aha, you say, but there’s a way to fight this slide into decay! I can make a painting of this flower and it will last forever in the Louvre, or in someone’s attic until it finds celebrity on the Antiques Roadshow.

The inefficient way to get a flower is to squish several million bugs or mollusks, mine ores, heat and pulverize them, mix them with media for pliability and fixatives for fastness, make cloth, mill wood into slats, stretch canvas on that frame, make brushes, apply the science of botany and perspective and colour theory and optics, commit hours and hours of meticulous work and, voila, a flower.

It will not wilt. It may fade. It’s difficult to extend. If it weren’t, who would line up to see an original Van Gogh sunflower? Is it clumsy? Yes—all that stuff and experimentation and ear-chopping. Is it inelegant? Compared to the blossoming of a flower, very. Is it inefficient? Hell yeah.

It must be a practice, an endlessly renewed commitment to doing the hard thing again.

The artist perceives the world, sees the dirt washing out from under the foundations of the porch, needs a “workaround” for the ephemerality of existence and the relentlessness of entropy. She picks up stuff that is lying around at hand and she comes up with an inelegant solution to mortality. That is: the determination to occupy time in defiance of its supposed scarcity. She nails her shoes to the earth and insists that her time is not money, that she is concertedly inefficient, that what she makes and how she makes it are difficult to extend, and that this whole shambolic, quixotic enterprise is difficult to maintain. It must be constantly tended and shored up and defended. In short, it must be a practice, an endlessly renewed commitment to doing the hard thing again.

It is not the permanence of the resulting artifact that is the act of defiance, but the persistent commitment to inefficiency, to accumulation, aggregation, mucking about, doing things the hard way, finding unexpected solutions to existential problems. It’s about looking at the tools and materials you’ve been given and using them in ways that they were never intended to be used. Coal and bones and mummies have their uses, but have you tried mixing them with resins to paint a hellmouth or the pupil of a courtesan’s eye?

Maybe it’s healing to encounter something that jars us with its clumsiness and inelegance

The kludged solution may be purely for the nonce, a one-time response to exigent circumstances that can’t, and probably shouldn’t, be repeated or transferred to other spaces (Seriously, don’t turn mummies into paint). But the kludging mindset is an infinitely adaptable and pliable tool. There’s a nimbleness in it, an alacrity, a practical creativity. In a world where smooth and seamless processes soothe us into inattention, in a space of mass-production and endless growth, where we are assured that anything at all can be wasted except time, it’s maybe a good thing to stumble. Maybe it’s healing to encounter something that jars us with its clumsiness and inelegance, arrests us with its absurdity, that makes us tilt our head and squint until we see the genius of its insistence on another way, another path.

The kludging artist reminds us that things are not just what they are, that anything can be something else, and, incidentally, so can we. 

Visit ThereIFixedIt to see some spectacular kludges.