what's in a doodle?

How do we know what will come of a doodle? The prolific doodle that hides in the privacy of journals, leaves trails in the margins of boring textbooks, reclaims beverage-stained napkins and elevates grimy bathroom stalls. Lurking in the corners of the most mundane, these notes live amongst us in places most not of note.

Last week, I was unexpectedly drawn to a doodle inside Ruth Asawa’s Retrospective at the MoMA. The entrance expectedly showcased a few pieces of her signature suspended woven wire sculptures. The curators knew what they were doing, of course. They opened with the obvious crowd pleaser, but teasing just little enough so as to breadcrumb delight as visitors discover more from her series throughout the show. The odds of the doodle catching my attention were low. An ordinary sheet of paper with pencil-drawn lines. Nothing of note. I noticed things though: finished lines and unfinished lines. The lines were short, angular and connected in a way that created a mosaic of squares and parallelograms (say that three times fast). Some ran from edge to edge of the paper. Some were lone patches scattered across the page. I noticed the unfinished lines reminded me of loose threads. I noticed it also looked like deconstructed origami; folds intact, but the shapes hard to imagine. It seems like I’m glorifying a doodle right now or cosplaying a pretentious art school kid. Is this going anywhere? Is this a review of her show and are you telling us it’s worth going to see?

Doodle is a funny word. It’s whimsical, it’s silly, it sounds suspiciously made up. It has German origins (dudeltopf or dudeldopp) and it’s what people in the early 16th century referred to as The Fool. The Fool can be traced back to the French fol—the mad and insane. The Fool might be full of shit too, we realize, as we notice follis (Latin) is really just a bag filled with…wind. Nothing of note, one might say. My silly suspicions are starting to make sense.

There was another doodle that caught my eye next to the one with squares and parallelograms. Parallelograms. Parallelograms. Parallelograms. This woman loved to draw things over and over again, I tell you. This doodle immediately looked like faces. There was one with a side-eye, one with a doe-eye, another with a cross-eye. I noticed they all looked bald or like they were wearing a beanie before I noticed they were just shapes repeating over and over again. I noticed the triangles and zig zags reminded me of the unfinished lines from before. And I noticed she formed the ears from spiraling squiggles. I was seeing the method to her madness starting to form.

When she told us “everything is connected, continuous”, I wonder if she felt that from the start. It’s easy to say that in retrospect, but in the thick of it, mid-doodle, is that conscious?

Retrospectives are reflective like that, the threads all make sense and between each piece, each series, each part of her life, you piece together how she got from A to B to C to D. When the pieces are laid out in front of you, it’s not hard to see how they all fit together. It feels a bit reductive to even consider someone’s thought-process could be mapped out so logically like that. And yet, I find myself looking for the method in the madness. Ah, this, here, was the beginning of a thought. This, here, was the budding idea from that thought. This here she explored but discarded. And this, here, is where she finally landed. That’s my own mind trying to reverse engineer creative genius.

I’ll admit, I don’t want to be made a fool. So the reverse engineering feels like a deceptive way to game the system—to crack the code of creativity in place of diving headfirst into the madman’s arena. To lay bare in the center of the ring, exposed alongside my unfinished bits and bobs, trying to make a show out of things not yet of note. It feels like the ultimate con, like selling you a bag full of wind. But the Fool is no con artist. The Fool is the Artist before they know who they are. And the Artist is the Fool who forgot who they once were. The Fool (the Artist) knows that the only one they could possibly fool is themselves. And that’s by sitting idly on the side watching as others take their shots inside the ring.

My home is scattered with doodles: a personal library of unnotable notes that I have both collected and scribbled myself. I have post-its Easter-egged throughout the rooms like little divination messages to be unearthed. I have a wall of square brass plates filled in with Sharpie squiggles, mounted in a neat constellation of white frames across from my living room couch. I have a collection of rainbow flowers and potato people flanking my window, courtesy of my friend’s daughter’s delightful mind. I notice that I am surrounded by doodles. I notice all the silly things that caught my eye. I notice I just notice a lot of things. Nothing really of note, yet.