Susan Miller: Banal Details

John Waters, 35 Days, 2003, Color Durst Lambda digital photographic print, 27 ½ x 31 ¼ inches (69.9 x 79.4 cm). © John Waters, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York / Photo: Taylor Dabney
John Waters, 35 Days, 2003, Color Durst Lambda digital photographic print, 27 ½ x 31 ¼ inches (69.9 x 79.4 cm). © John Waters, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York / Photo: Taylor Dabney
This topic is inspired by John Waters’s photograph 35 Days (2003) and a question he posed in his essay “Roommates” from the 2011 book Role Models: “Isn’t art supposed to transpose even the most banal detail of our lives?” What are some examples of a “banal detail” that inspires intriguing artworks in this exhibition? Which works are your favorite and why? What do you think these works say about aspects of ordinary daily life, as, for example, Suzanne Bocanegra’s drawing pictorially inventorying all the towels in her house?

Susan L. Miller is a Russell Teaching Fellow at Writers House in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She teaches poetry and expository writing. Miller has previously published poems in Iowa Review, Meridian, Commonweal, Sewanee Theological Review, Black Warrior Review, and in the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality. More poems are forthcoming in Voices in Italian Americana, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and Image. Her prose has been published in Literature and Medicine. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Susan Miller on John Waters

John Waters, 35 Days, 2003, Color Durst Lambda digital photographic print, 27 ½ x 31 ¼ inches (69.9 x 79.4 cm). © John Waters, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York / Photo: Taylor Dabney
John Waters, 35 Days, 2003, Color Durst Lambda digital photographic print, 27 ½ x 31 ¼ inches (69.9 x 79.4 cm). © John Waters, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York / Photo: Taylor Dabney

The Most Banal Detail

John Waters’s 35 Days shows a grid of index cards on which he wrote his daily plans for 35 random days. Each day, Waters writes an itemized list of tasks on an index card, and as each task is completed, he crosses it out. The first thing you may ask yourself about this piece is, “Why is this art?” A little context might help you understand something more about Waters himself and the project this photograph embodies.

Waters is probably most famous for writing and directing a movie called Hairspray, in which a chubby teenager competes on a dancing show in 1960s Baltimore and racially integrates her community in the process. The second thing he’s most famous for is getting the actor Divine to eat dog excrement in a film called Pink Flamingos. There are lots of things that Waters has done, though, that have flown under the radar of mainstream America. He’s a very entertaining writer, a collector of artwork by such notable artists as Cy Twombly and Mike Kelley, a stand-up comedian, and a hobbyist hitchhiker. He’s the leader of a renegade band of actors known as the Dreamlanders, many of whom have pre-purchased tombstones in an area of a Baltimore graveyard they refer to as Disgraceland. He’s a justice activist who has repeatedly petitioned to get repentant criminals out of prison. He’s been sued for obscenity in multiple countries and has never won a case. He’s a provocateur, a raconteur, and an all-around hero of the most “under” of the underdogs in our society. All this from a man who was raised to be a good Catholic boy in upper-middle-class Lutherville, Maryland!

If this description hasn’t intrigued you, I’d like to add that he’s arguably one of the funniest people alive. If you’d like proof, you have only to check YouTube for the public service announcement he made for movie theaters: “No Smoking.” Smoking a cigarette throughout the announcement, he purrs and drawls: “I’m supposed to announce that there is no smoking in this theater, which I think is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard of in my life. How can anyone sit through the length of a film, and especially a European film, and not have a cigarette? But–don’t you wish you had one right now? Mmmmmmmmmm-mmm-mmm-mm.” He takes an enormous drag off his cigarette and then French-inhales the smoke right back up his nose, taunting the audience.

Here’s the kicker about this work of art. This piece is a record of the days and tasks of a man who is perhaps the preeminent symbol of anti-bourgeois, countercultural effrontery in American film, and he’s the most organized fellow! Each of these 35 index cards represents one day’s tasks, all neatly written down in a list; each task is crossed off upon its completion. Our culture often promotes particular notions about what it means to be an artist, usually a collection of stereotypes: the artist must be a moody, brilliant person led by flashes of inspiration and sudden whims. He can’t possibly be methodical, ordinary, or bound by routine in any way. His genius comes from his unconventional way of life. For example, the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí claimed to sleep for brief moments with a key in his hand, which would bang into a pie plate once his sleeping hand released its hold. The pie plate’s clanging noise would wake him up, and he would continue his madcap pace of painting and profound psychological exploration. (Dalí himself promoted this idea, perhaps in a reaction of deep shame to his extremely traditional–and excellent–art education. How could one possibly be a Surrealist with a conventional life?)

As a writer myself, I know that any creative project I want to accomplish takes a lot more than inspiration. It also necessitates careful planning, deep thought, organization, hard work, and revision. Art doesn’t really make itself out of some magic fairy dust exuded (or, for that matter, snorted) by naturally talented artists. It’s a process, a plan, and a system of execution. Even obscene art needs a plan. That plan is what Waters allows us to see and understand in this work of art–which encompasses not only the visual aspects of the photograph, but the experiential work that those little index cards represent. Each of the 35 cards is the symbol of a day in the life of this artist–his plan, his system of collating and prioritizing the things he needs to do to make the art-machine go. As he wrote about the work of Cy Twombly, “This exclusive, violent, erotic handwriting that may seem illegible to others can be read if you just give it a chance.”1 This statement applies equally to Waters’s work here. Look closely. Under the spastic scribbling and crossing out, you can see some of the details of his days. Among them are friends to call, speeches to develop, and even “3 pills.” Try to find all the references to cameras. You might even discover your own name beside Ricki’s and Patty’s. I only wish that the note “Call NY apt for Susan” referred to me! You can ask yourself, where did that red pen come from, and does it designate something important, or did it just come to hand? What goes on in Waters’s brain, and how does he put this life together, and why did he turn out so deliciously different from the rest of us if his day, just like ours, merely depends on a little list on an index card?

Or you could just ask yourself, as Waters does in the essay “Roommates” in his 2010 book Role Models, “Isn’t art supposed to transpose even the most banal detail of our lives?”


1. John Waters, Role Models (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), 247.

John Waters Biography

John Waters (b. 1946, Baltimore, MD) is a filmmaker and visual artist. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis (2008); Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2009, 2015); Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles (2009); Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts (2009); C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore (2010); Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco (2010); Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans (2011); McClain Gallery, Houston (2012, 2013); Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York (2014); and Sprüth Magers, Berlin (2014). Recent group exhibitions have been held at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2010); the Baltimore Museum of Art (2011); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2011); McClain Gallery, Houston (2013); Boca Museum of Art, Boca Raton (2014); and the Edgewood Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven (2014). Waters lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
Susan Miller Biography
Susan L. Miller is a Russell Teaching Fellow at Writers House in the English Department, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She teaches poetry and expository writing. Miller has previously published poems in Iowa Review, Meridian, Commonweal, Sewanee Theological Review, Black Warrior Review, Image, and in other journals. She also has poems in the anthologies Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality and in St. Peter’s B-List. Her prose has been published in Literature and Medicine. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.

Susan Miller on Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, <em>Suspended Sheet Stained with Ivy</em>, 1973
Ed Ruscha, Suspended Sheet Stained with Ivy, 1973, gunpowder and ivy on paper, 14 x 22 1/2 inches (35.6 x 57.2 cm). © Ed Ruscha, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery / Photo: Ellen McDermott

The Pleasure of the Empty Page

For any artist or writer, a blank piece of paper offers the possibility of expression, which is part of the reason it can be terrifying. The drawing Suspended Sheet Stained with Ivy (1973) by Ed Ruscha allows us to reflect not just on art as text, but on art as the absence of text, which has the potential to strike fear into any artist.

During the time when he was making this drawing, Ruscha was experimenting with new pigment materials, so he used gunpowder and crushed a common ivy plant to create a stain for this work. This process demonstrates an attempt to change methods of production, and perhaps also to see things anew. In discarding his usual tools, pen and ink or brush and paint, Ruscha forced himself to regain a sense of play. The drawing also evokes a return to the origin of art itself–the first impulse to create which caused ancient people to invent basic methods of production. In the cave paintings at Lascaux, for example, pigments formed from minerals allowed early humans to record their world. In the present, we often use materials made in factories–fine papers, special paints–but Ruscha, in a rare act of primitivism, decided to go back to the natural sources of those materials, in order to create his art in an unfamiliar way.

It’s compelling that his subject here is the blank page, since it is at the center of the artist’s practice. There’s something witty about drawing the image of a piece of paper on a piece of paper, but it’s the kind of wit that exposes an anxiety about the artist’s potential to create. The term horror vacui means “fear of an empty space,” and it’s a familiar feeling both to painters and to writers. (This feeling has been blamed for a proliferation of imagery and for an obsessively decorative approach to the visual arts.) The tabula rasa or “blank slate” of a clean piece of paper can be paralyzing to an artist who is searching for something to communicate. As a poetry teacher, I often hear the question, “What can I do about writer’s block?” Almost anyone who’s ever wanted to write has faced a blank page–or the blinking cursor on a computer screen–with the feeling that nothing he or she could write would be worthy of being written. The great French writer Colette thought her father had written a dozen books with exotic titles–My Campaigns, Elegant Algebra, Zoave Songs–which he kept on a shelf in his office. After his death, she opened them, and except for a dedication to her mother, every page was completely blank.

The poet William Stafford, in correspondence with Ursula K. Leguin, a poet and science fiction writer, said something along the lines of: There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Lower your standards. On a practical level, this is good advice. It soothes the fear of having to make work that matters, and it allows the work to regain its proper shape and size. But for a blocked writer, that empty page can seem like a monolith, and instead of a clean slate to be filled, it can seem like an impermeable barrier between the self and the writing that one wishes to do.

Ruscha’s drawing, however, lightens this subject–literally. His piece of paper is floating in air, weightless, defying gravity’s pull not for a moment, but indefinitely. It’s an illusion made real, and it’s delightful because it allows us to share his act of imagination. The piece of paper, which can seem so heavy if you don’t know what to do with it, is weightless in this depiction. Ruscha, in the process of liberating himself from traditional methods of drawing, allows us to see that approaching the means of art making with curiosity can infuse a certain levity into our existence. Without the baggage of our writing, our experiences, our depictions and imitations, this piece of paper defies all the false weight with which we’ve invested it. It floats, and we wonder at its potential. Fear is replaced by new feelings–disorientation, maybe, but also a sense of awe, or even a sense of the humor in our own intimidation by a simple piece of paper.

One of my hopes for this exhibition is that it will help people to apprehend their own relationships to art and text. So often we think of art as something outside of ourselves, practiced by “real artists” or “real writers,” usually people whose work has been bought and paid for by others. A gallery show or a publication, we think, is the mark of a “real” creator, and how are we supposed to match that? But art making and writing are as approachable and immediate as any piece of paper in front of you. If a child draws a picture, it’s no less an act of art making than the Ruscha piece you’re currently viewing. Anyone can do it, if he or she chooses to, and the practice of writing, painting, drawing, sculpting, or photographing is a life-long pleasure. It allows you to express the things that are truly unique about you: your perspective, your experience, your understanding of the world. When you leave the museum today, challenge yourself. Pick up a piece of paper–not a computer or a cell phone. Return to the ancient process of writing or drawing the first thing that comes to mind. Give yourself permission to care about it, and equal permission to give it away. You’ll be surprised at what you’re capable of creating, if you give yourself the chance.

And if you have trouble? Lower your standards.

Ed Ruscha Biography

Edward Ruscha (b. 1937, Omaha, NE) studied at the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles (1960). He has received grants and fellowships from the National Council on the Arts (1967); the National Endowment for the Arts (1969, 1978); the Tamarind Lithography Workshop (1969); and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1971). Ruscha has been awarded the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Award in Graphics (1974); the Achievement in Printmaking Award from the Graphic Arts Council, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1988); and the Achievement in Visual Arts Award from the California Arts Council (1995). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001) and was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005). A major exhibition of Ruscha’s work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004) and traveled to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. A retrospective of his work took place at the Hayward Gallery, London (2009) and traveled to Haus der Kunst, Munich, and to Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Other recent solo and group exhibitions have been held at Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm (2010); Sprüth Magers, Berlin (2010); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2011); Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, California (2011); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2012); Peter Lund Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); Gagosian Gallery, New York (2012, 2014); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (2012) and traveled to the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts (2012); Brandhorst Museum, Munich, Germany (2013); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2013); and The Getty Center, Los Angeles (2013). Ruscha lives and works in Los Angeles. More information about his work can be found at www.edruscha.com.

Susan Miller Biography
Susan L. Miller is a Russell Teaching Fellow at Writers House in the English Department, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She teaches poetry and expository writing. Miller has previously published poems in Iowa Review, Meridian, Commonweal, Sewanee Theological Review, Black Warrior Review, Image, and in other journals. She also has poems in the anthologies Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality and in St. Peter’s B-List. Her prose has been published in Literature and Medicine. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.