Artists Only
Talking Heads

I'm painting, I'm painting again.
I'm painting, I'm painting again.
I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning again.
I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning my brain.

Pretty soon now, I will be bitter.
Pretty soon now, will be a quitter.
Pretty soon now, I will be bitter.
You can't see it 'til it's finished.

I don't have to prove...that I am creative!
I dont' have to prove...that I am creative!
All my pictures are confused
And now I'm going to take me to you.


What is the purpose of the Talking Heads Lyrics "Artists Only" after the Goals and Choices and before the Process Sketches?
This choice acts as a "transfer-boundary" from rhetorical text to image/sketch. "These" lyrics play nicely with the idea as representing poetry which is a completely different form of writing than prose and acts as a "heads-up" that the images are just up ahead. "I'm painting" as I draw my sketches and "I'm cleaning" out all the rhetorical choices I made in forming "this" communicative objective. For me, it is equivalent to doing a "memory dump." I have to account for each decision made and each decision not made, therefore I am "dumping out" all the logic and showing others how the entire concept came about.

         The process is anything but random as I demonstrate how connections are made crossing boundaries and crossing modalities and medium. "Pretty soon now, I will be bitter." Bitter in the sense that whatever the final concept becomes I worked in tension between what I wanted the concept to be and what the concept reflected back to me what it actually was. Rarely does one achieve the actual concept that was in their mind. Along each step of the way a new constraint arises and the mode also reflects back what is possible.

         "You can't see till I'm finished." "This is typical of the process because no one wants someone to see the failures, we want one to marvel over the finished product. No one wants to admit that there were failures in between, that concepts were scraped or modified, that materials were thrown into the garbage because the designer did not achieve the intended effect. "This" part of the process is reserved to an elite few. Those who's opinions we value. Those who look at our work not with negative criticism but positive criticism. We ask the rhetorical question: "Is it good?" Our beloved critics respond with "You need to teak here and there..." or "This is brilliant. I understand the meaning and it is this..." or the critics tell you the meaning they make and you find that their meaning is completely different than your intended meaning, i.e. "This is fucking crap!"

         "I don't have to prove...that I am creative." This concept is anything but random. Could have someone else chosen "this" word, annoy, and come up with a fairy tale radio sketch, a cereal box, a grab bag surprise, a geometric drawing game specifically designed to annoy the listener? Probably not, as I do not think someone else would have seen the specific boundary crossings from mathematics, to old time radio format, to geometry, to free masons, to the middle ages, reflecting back to the fairy tale, to Saturday Night Live, to the cereal box design of the late forties/early fifties. From text to sound to image to construction. Only the human mind could take items that seem totally unrelated and connect them together creating a congruent whole. My concept and my "pictures" are anything but "confused." And so I have "taken (me) my mind to (you) your mind showing you all the processes that were involved in creating "this" communicative objective. Now you may read through the socio-political-ideological-historical-logical process that designed "this objective."