Keep or chuck?

At the moment we are committed to moving house at some time in the near future. Not surprisingly, I find myself faced with the decision as to whether or not I want to take all of my hoard of work with me. I was startled last night, reading in preparation for a talk on the Italian artist Alberto Burri, to discover that there was a point at which he decided to throw away most of his work, keeping only two three pieces. During the war Burri was captured by Allied forces and sent to Texas as a prisoner of war. It appears that he was quite productive there, and certainly confirmed his inclination to make a career as an artist. For some reason or another, however, he decided that the body of work he had built up as a POW no longer satisfied him. It all had to go!

Let’s be clear about this: I am not comparing myself directly to Burri, as an artist. I imagine, however, that the decision he made was not made lightly, and he will have confronted the same sense that this was a significant decision, which did not only involve some kind of judgement as an artist, but also required him to overcome any emotional attachment he might have had to the results of his own creative efforts. We are not considering here some kind of “box-ticking” exercise based upon a list of formal or technical criteria.

I admit readily that I have been pretty unselective in preserving my efforts. It is one thing to assent to a “sheep and goats” exercise and quite another to engage with it. I have wondered if the criterion of whether or not a piece was judged good enough to exhibit could services a starting point, but I am not confident that this is appropriate … or sufficiently stringent. I shall need to wrestle with that question for some time to come.