The Art is in the Ending

by James Wilkie

The Ar t is in The Ending.

T h e M e l o d y A p o t h e c a r y [~] I s s u e # 0 3 Methods for a sound imagination

Dot.

Artists are enders. Not creators.

This is a journey to the dot. My dot. I hope this helps you to find yours.

James Wilkie. Feb 2021.

The art is at the end of a cup of coffee.

February 2016 Peter: Yo! I can make it around 1pm, say somewhere close to Leicester Square station? Cheers and see you in a bit James: That’s great could we meet at Foyles on Tottenham Court Road? It’s got a good coffee spot upstairs :) Peter: Yes sir!

Peter: I’m there in 5, with an orange cap ;) James: Oh great I’m here drinking a pre coffee haha

A chance meeting with an old friend prompted an e-introduction to Peter, an artist who happened to be in London for the day and looking for a bit of company in between meetings and errands. We really hit it off. We spoke about all ranges of art and thoughts until Peter turned the dreaded question upon me: “So, what are you working on?”

I was working for Joy of Sound at the time on collaborating with a participant.

The experience completely shifted my sense of time and communication. My idea of what a sonic experience could be. I was completely out of my depth.

I confessed to Peter, that after spending months on this project and producing mountains of material, that I had no idea how to “make” the work.

Peter took his time to place comfort in his eyes before the words that followed: “In the end, the artist must put their hand in”

Be less Apollo.

The idea of the “maker” is pedestalled in our culture as kind of tireless robot Apollo: Apollo, is endlessly “creative” and “productive”, also good looking, but prone to “decision fatigue”. Apollo today is bearded, hip and he is artisanale in not even the broadest sense of the term.

Be less Apollo.

The process of making is a productive and machinic behaviour; one we fetishise machines for to tell ourselves: “wouldn’t it be amazing to see this all automated?”.

Be more Moirai.

“What’s the story?” I ask. Collaborators often think that I am helping them “make” something, but I am finding the “ending” to it, really.

It is the want of our economy to make make make unlike our human nature which is ever-ending. Just look at what we have done to this good Earth.

To end things is the art of being human. Along the thread of time we cast scissors across the tapestry, deciding where the ending is. To decipher a pattern of meaning for ourselves.

Snip.

The gift at the end of the river - Tim Burton’s ‘Big Fish’.

“The river.”

“The river?”

“Tell me how it happens.”

“How what happens?”

“How I go.”

Ed Bloom, a once loquacious character and teller of tall tales who now finds himself at life’s end with his estranged son as sole company in a quiet hospital ward.

Ed asks his son Will to recount the one story he had never told to anyone: The story of how his own life ends.

Will proceeds for the first time in their relationship to be the one telling the story and giving an ending to it. Will finds closure and forgiveness by giving the biggest character in the story of his life an ending.

The art is at the end of the river.

Hauntology of an Ending: Ghost Writing & Violet Evergarden Violet Evergarden, a young woman haunted by her past as a child soldier is ushered into a new life as a ghost writer where she is tasked with helping various characters who cannot read and write to compose letters for them. Evergarden’s letter writing becomes the catalyst for these characters to end the burden of carrying unfinished stories.

On one particular assignment, Evergarden assists a once famous playwright to finish his latest work. For the playwright to finish his play, his feelings for his late daughter must end. Violet Evergarden becomes the artist when she re-creates the atmosphere for the playwright to find his feelings’ end through finishing of his daughter’s dream: to fly across a pond.

Evergarden jumps across the pond “flying” to the end of the unfinished moment for the playwright.

Ghost writer - a helpful spectre helping a story to find its end.

Pretty Caden: Giving someone the ending they desire.

Sometimes it’s the ending we do not want but that which the other needs from us.

Playwright Kaden, visits his estranged and now dying daughter, Olive.

For years now Olive had been indoctrinated and manipulated by her mother’s lover to see her own father as an awful person worthy of every resentment.

Olive wants to forgive Caden, but she demands that her father apologise for being a homosexual, for abandoning her, matters which are untrue.

As Kaden recognises the impermanence of his own existence and his own daughter’s end, he asks Olive to forgive him for things he never did nor ever was.

This gives Olive the end she wanted to her own story. She promptly dies.

This is one ending in a film about a play Caden cannot find an end to: Caden forever looks for an ending to his play and yet all around him his life is elegantly (and often sorrowfully) punctuated by the witnissing of dot after dot without his noticing until he meets his own, final dot.

Kaden - “I know how to do this play now. I have an idea...”

Recoded Female Voice - “Die”.

When stories are never allowed to end - True Detective.

“I know what happens next. I saw you in my dreams. You’ll do this again. Time is a flat circle” Detective Rust Cohle repeats these haunting words of child rapist Reggie Ledoux, in the later monologue of his interview as he describes the trauma of living a story with no end: “Everything we’ve ever done, or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they’re gonna be in that room again.

And again. And again. Forever.” - Rust Cohle The grief that the detective feels is that of a circular story with no imagined closure from the criminals who created it. The ending art is undone and the character with it. That is the most wicked part of the criminals’ work in True Detective.

Let the story have its death Duncan Trussell Family Hour #301 “It’s good to convey to them that it’s okay to die”- Duncan Trusell marks the death of his father in an atoning episode. “If they’re worried about you, they will prolong their death [...] one of the things they teach you is how to say goodbye” Sitopia: Fighting to keep the story from ending makes the process worse for the person and their loved ones. Our obsession for never-ending stories are climbing out from our fictions and into our lived objective existence. People who plan for death leave themselves and their loved ones in a much better situation emotionally and towards moving through grief.

How many of us consider this point in our practice? Imagine doing the same for that painting you cannot finish, that piece of music - let it know it’s okay to end.

So, paint a dot on your thumb.

It’s clumsy, fair, but if you’ve never consciously used one you may want to try it.

A dot, To end your social media scrolling, To end your grieving, To decide the end.

You may find my gift wanting and begin to chisel and purpose it; this is exactly the point: magnify this dot and you will find your fingerprint.Make the ending your own. Perhaps people never get over things because they believe they were always supposed to be making more of it.

Take one picture. One text, or a photo, and place your thumb across it.

The End.

A Marvel Universe post-credits ending The artist sat at his desk looking at a collection of photos, images, and text.

One by one, trimming here, cutting there. He cuts away and snaps his thumb, and plasters over it.

An artist then helps an idea to die and inscribes its life. An artist is in the art of death, an ending to an idea.

The pen on the page is the end of an idea. The death mask of a thought: The pen inscribes the last lines of the face that appeared in the mind. The page documents what once was in the mind. what you lived through, what is no longer of the moment.

“Point finale”