We were lucky to catch up with Matthew Muñoz recently and have shared our conversation below.
Matthew, so great to be with you and I think a lot of folks are going to benefit from hearing your story and lessons and wisdom. Imposter Syndrome is something that we know how words to describe, but it’s something that has held people back forever and so we’re really interested to hear about your story and how you overcame imposter syndrome.
Learning about an exemplar and their particular ignorance can help; doubts are nebulous, so specific stories can be convincing. Here’s one if you run out:
Art requires imposition. Blake learned sweeping lines from secondhand woodcuts (artifacts of translation) and applied them to relief printing (where lines were technically convenient). Limits on knowledge and experience were instrumental (and inevitable).
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I’m a formalist. Poetic forms are little word-structures that teach themselves, minimal procedural gestures that invite imitation. The best ones make an illusion of coincidence between language their own rules: the perverse pleasure of a limerick’s wordplay overlaps its metrical delivery (and you want to repeat it to hear it land again). Or maybe they run that idea in reverse: arbitrary rules (“use only randomly-selected five-syllable words”) can expose unnoticed assumptions (long words are overwhelmingly ominous and technocratic). So I can write gospel verses as limericks to speculate about their origins as gossipy sayings, or generate sonnets with random, long words to show how English is a sort of bureaucratic nightmare—or how you can coerce nonsense into sense with only punctuation marks. Visual art can be formal in the same ways: shapes can recur and differ by legible rules to create complex, unexpected wholes that articulate something about their parts.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Plasticity: it’s easy to get excited in the early days of learning a skill or topic, to form all of your opinions at once, and to denounce whatever doesn’t interest you with quick rationalizations. But when the zeal wears off, you still can’t appreciate the things you dismissed. If you find artists who are at the outer edge of what you believe (they always exist), you can work your way back.
Patience: thoughts work themselves out over long stretches of time, without you glowering over them.
Curiosity: you’re collaborating with material, form, process, and concept, each of which has integrities and affordances you don’t understand (except by finding them out).
Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser made me love poetry. Its plot, characters, and themes never develop, but exist to unrelentingly indulge in language and form, for thousands of pages.
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