This is a jig I made for welding caster wheels centered onto the end of a 1" square tube: It's not so pretty to look at, but it got the job done. Each wheel ended up square and mostly centered without having to do a bunch of tack welds. When I was a kid and making things in my Dad’s shop I never got why he wanted to make jigs for making repeated pieces. I was under the impression that to measure each thing was a far superior method to creating than to put into the world the visual turbulence of a jig that I then became coconspirator with, like small robots building up to become a larger robot.
It is now with joy that I make a jig; push a few things together and weld or screw or staple like Michael Jordon taking free throws: eyes closed and tongue out. Absurd confidence.
But maybe the creation of jigs at all times is a bit like camouflage: it makes me disappear in the flow of my work; the texture of my hands starts to become the texture of the material and my heart beats at the rotation of a flywheel. There’s this give and take between to jig and not to jig; to be consumed or to stop the flow of the river and float above the mangrove.
For two years I’ve wanted to write a book How to Become a Failed Artist in Five Years. And for two years I’ve almost started. At first I didn’t start because I was scared I would ruin it. Now I’m scared to start because I don’t think I remember the details and point to what I was trying to write about. And I’ve been wondering about this tension in me about forgetting, but also wanting to honor the original scope of what 2-year-ago-Mark was thinking. Maybe I built a jig in my mind and then never used it and now looking back at it is a bit like this jig in the photo with no context: haphazard cuts and some charred wood.
This whole process feels a bit like snakes eating themselves, where the jig then becomes something to talk about and observe. Like that guy who wrote reviews of Pitchfork reviews. Maybe making jigs isn’t only about process but scale. Jigs at a certain scale are not just a tool, but also an idea themselves: a dedication to seeing a process have a concrete step.
Like most things we do, though, steps flatten or steepen. Stairs turn to slides turn to elevators.