Last weekend, an art exhibition in Fort Worth featured art inspired by failures of all kinds: relationships, careers, bodies and creative processes.
It may seem an odd thing to highlight.
But curator Sarah Angle said the idea started about 15 years ago, when she and fellow curator Jocelyn Foster were making New Year's resolutions over dinner.
“At the time I was trying to build a journalism career and building that career requires pitching, requires interviewing," said Angle.
"Inevitably, it ends up causing a lot of failure and getting a lot of rejection letters.”
So Angle made a resolution to fail more.
Not because failure felt good.
But because putting yourself out there, trying something new, asking for opportunities and risking rejection, means accepting that things won't always work.
That idea eventually became The He(Art) of Failure. The exhibition asked visitors to sit with failure rather than immediately trying to fix it.
Failure inspires
One of the artists in the show, Erin Rattigan, was making a ceramic sculpture of a woman's body. But the sculpture kept exploding in the kiln.
What survived was a tiny ceramic nipple.
Rattigan began thinking about it; a part of the body associated with creation and nourishment. And suddenly, what she'd considered a failed sculpture became something else.
She created an installation featuring photography and relics from the exploded sculpture.
"It sort of became art in itself through failure," she said.
That shift from disappointment to possibility fascinates her.
“I think failure ultimately doesn't exist. I think that failure only exists if you are trying to achieve one specific outcome and you are measuring success as only achieving that outcome.
"Ultimately it's just a learning experience.”
A way of seeing
For artist Noble Menchaca, failure became a way of seeing.
Menchaca has a genetic disorder that caused his eyesight to deteriorate. He had to hold his artwork close to his face to see it.
Eventually, he underwent reconstructive eye surgery.
But Menchaca made an unexpected choice. He only had one eye operated on. He was afraid that getting his sight back would mean losing the way he'd learned to see a wholesome world.
“I started to wonder if I actually wanted to have my eyesight fixed; if I actually came to value its brokenness,” he said.
One of his works is a self-portrait after the surgery.
One eye is repaired. The other still has impaired vision. An exploration of whether something can be both flawed and valuable.
“Failure can mean a new way of seeing things," he said. "It can mean a new opportunity to value what you've already been given. Failure can mean a chance to see things differently.”
And that's about more than his eyesight.
Menchaca once planned to become a web developer. It didn't work out. Instead, he took a risk and started a coffee shop.
“I'm so much more happy and proud of that,” he said.
Failing into good ideas
The curators said they're seeing a particularly intense fear of failure among young people.
Angle teaches at TCU. She said students can be so afraid of getting an idea wrong that they become paralyzed.
“I'm not going to fail you for giving a bad idea. You're not going to get a C or D in this class for trying something different," she said. "I would reward that failure. I want you to try.”
Because, she said, the bad ideas are often part of getting to the good ones.
And curator Foster said that pressure isn't limited to students.
Play in the mess
“Can we release that demand and that internal pressure and just have fun and play?" Foster said.
"Life is just one big playful practice. I mean, it doesn't have to be perfect. We get to mess up. We get to be messy.”
The curators understand messiness. Angle included work in the show about the gradual failure of a marriage. Foster's work was about her career failures and disappointments. Both said that putting those experiences into the world can feel vulnerable.
But Foster believes there's something powerful about saying thedifficult thing out loud.
“When you bring something to light, when you have the conversation, when you're vulnerable, shame dies,” Foster said.
That's perhaps a deeper meditation on failure.
Not that failure is secretly success.
Not that every painful experience has a happy ending.
But that failure doesn't necessarily have to be the end of the story.
Angle said she's come to think of those experiences as iterations.
A next version.
And Foster takes that idea one step further.
“Is failure even a thing? ... Is it just redirection?”
Maybe that's what it means to trust failure.
To let yourself not know where the path is going.
To accept that the thing that broke, ended, rejected you or didn't turn out the way you imagined might still change the way you see what's possible.
