Defining

Artist noun: an especially ambitious failure expert possessing great powers of creativity and imagination.

When I consider all the artists I know, writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and on and on, I ask myself, "what do these people all have in common?"

They make stuff.

But to me, creativity can't be the core of the definition, because people who are not artists make stuff, too.

I have always, ever since I was a very small child, been in love with arts & crafts stores. I was 6 and my mother was knitting sweaters and crocheting blankets, and she would take me to this magical place full of paints and chalks and canvases and sculpting clay and inks and papers and my mind would spin with the possibilities.

But I saw a deep and meaningful line between "arts" and "crafts": the "arts" side of the store was full of blanks: empty canvasses, unmolded clay. The "crafts" side of the store was full of "kits" with full-color pictures showing you exactly what you were going to make.

I hated being told what to make.

When I was 8 I won an art contest in my school with a shoebox diorama of the Mesa Verde indians (based entirely on books, I'd never been within 1,500 miles of Mesa Verde) and I used the $20 prize to buy my first ever personally-owned (not school-owned) art supplies. I kept the shoebox diorama until I decided I could use its parts for a new art project. Then it was gone.

Artists never rest. Some artists are perfectionists, some are constantly moving on to the next thing, then the next. Some, like me, have a terrifying amnesia for what they've done before. The past barely exists for me, only the future, the next thing and the next, is real. Ask me what I've done, I'll have to get my CV out to remind me. Ask me what I'm about to do, I'll nail you down for hours.

Some artists, like my boyfriend, are fairly obsessed with the past. Elements of the past are the elements of his composition, and he makes them live eternally. But always he is moving on to the next and the next. No artist sits upon a made thing and says, "I am artist for once I made this."

Artists are ambitious. They might not be ambitious career-wise, they might not be early risers, they might not like to shmooze. But when it comes to advancing their art, artists will stop at nothing.

But the core of my definition is "failure expert." That's because I believe it is the most important thing.

• To be imaginative is necessary, but not sufficient; lots of imaginative people don't even make stuff. They're just dreamers.
• To be creative is necessary, but not sufficient; lots of people make things that are more craft than art.
• To be ambitious is necessary, but not sufficient; lots of non-artists are ambitious too, but wanting money or sex or power is not an art (or if it is, it's a dark art -- an unholy cross of performance art and sorcery). 
• But to be willing to fail and fail and fail your entire life and never tire, to thrive on doing, and never give up, to hold up your failures as things of beauty, to see the value in those failures even if no one else can, to see that the route to success often lies through the minefield of a thousand failures, to go and let your soul be naked and to be unashamed, to become, in short, one who always practices and never perfects, a failure expert... this is necessary but not sufficient too. 

If they are all necessary but not sufficient, why is this last the core of my definition? Because few people outside of artists are willing or able to become experts in something whose rewards are internal or intangible. The only other examples are religious prophets and madmen, but I repeat myself (rimshot).

Kidding aside, artists actually are very much like insane prophets. They try to bring the light of a Truth to the eyes of others. They want to change not your life but your living of it, they want to change not your mind but your soul, even if they don't believe you have one.

In the ancient world they blamed the muses, an idea artists still play with today: the idea that artists are conduits for a higher mind, possessed of a genius that is not their own, that, once it's passed, they can't even very well remember.

But the muses, if they existed, would be wise in whom they chose to speak through, and I think they would look for someone like I describe in my definition: "a particularly ambitious failure expert possessing great powers of creativity and imagination." That tolerance for failure, that willingness to try anything in the face of anything, that strength, is the most central and essential part of it all.

Art that Makes you Squirm

It is not uncommon for artists to create work that aspires to disturb. And I believe this is a worthy impulse. Much of what we encounter from day to day does not move us. Often things that should move us do not, because we're used to hearing about such-and-such number of deaths as bombs blast some faraway land, or about the young lives cut short by a traffic accident on the highway a few miles away, or about the little child in the neighborhood, or related to a coworker, stricken by the terrible disease for which there is no cure. Always we are surrounded by suffering and pain, yet it is human nature to limit just how much we feel. It is good and adaptive. It gets us through our days. It keeps us productive. But to be human, we must do more than get through days and be productive; we must feel, even when it's inconvenient. One of the most important things that art can do is snap us out of our platitudes and euphemisms, even if just for a short time, and make us look at the naked reality of our lives: the fragility, the unfairness, the pain, the truth.


It is not uncommon for artists to create work that aspires to disturb. But it is very rare that I am disturbed.


The exception to this is Janis Brothers. Janis Brothers is an artist who is from and who works in rural North Florida, and, she told me, she worries that others won't get her work, that it doesn't have a universal appeal, because it is so personal to her. Brothers' art preserves and recreates the tragedies she's witnessed and suffered from, true, but just as a small town in the hands of William Faulkner can seem to contain the world, so can a single tragic car accident in the hands of Janis Brothers seem to crystalize the universal emotions, and questions, that we all experience in the face of death.


And none of us are untouched by death. You might just manage to dodge paying taxes, but death? It is the ultimate universal topic; the paradox is that every death is supremely individual. I have not yet seen one of Brothers' installations in person, but I had the opportunity to see images of her work, and to talk to her about it, and now she is the only artist who comes to mind whose installations I both fear and deeply desire seeing.

To me, the most disturbing project Brothers has shown is a film called "Squirm," an apt description both of the content of the video and the reaction it will evoke. Squirm shows a collection of dead mice stuck to a glue trap, surrounded by flies, as one last mouse struggles for survival and ultimately succumbs. 


Now I know what you're thinking: that's gruesome. Yes. But mousetraps are a big business in this world, and with good reason. Drive down any street in America and you are passing houses where rodents are being trapped and killed. It's a matter of what we choose to look at and what we choose to ignore.


Brothers found the opportunity striking because of the connection she made between the struggles of the mouse and a tragic car accident she'd witnessed. I'd like to quote her directly:

When I saw that one mouse was still alive but stuck to the trap, I decided to film it even though I did not have a particular plan as to how I might use the footage.  To remove the mouse would have been impossible.

In review, the struggle was similar to the experience I encountered with Cleansing, a reaction to the experience of witnessing a car accident.  All four of the passengers died.  The crash was so severe, the car had to be cut away to remove the victims.  The struggle to hang onto life only to die is a tragedy and very difficult to witness. 

The video of the dying mouse reminds me of the films I've seen lately (Fast Food Nation, Temple Grandin) where they show cows being slaughtered. No one likes this. Many look away. But those deaths are frequent realities we seem, as a people, in no hurry to stop. And we know, as a people, that we could save human lives by (for example) outlawing cell phones in cars and lowering speed limits, but we don't. We like to drive fast and talk on the phone. So some must die. We allow it. Why don't we feel this?


Tonight, while Brian and I were taking the lawn waste to the curb, we heard a series of screeches and bangs. Because I grew up on a busy street, I consider my familiarity with the sounds of car crashes better than average. "That's a bad one," I said right away. "They got several cars with that one." We walked out to the intersection (so did several dozen other people, by the way -- the first time I've seen most of my neighbors!) and there was one small Toyota terribly mangled, struck from several directions. Three larger trucks had their front ends smashed in. We watched for a moment, the emergency vehicles came, and we turned and went home. I told a joke, and he laughed. What could we do? Accidents happen... all the time. 


So yes, Squirm shows mouse death, but Cleansing is about the deaths of four human beings. I'm posting some stills from these pieces, but I encourage you to go to Janis Brothers' website and look around. Here are just a few photos:

This picture shows the medical equipment, and we get a sense of the four individual lives lost from the four stations.

This detail (latex obscures the news clippings, but not so much that you can't read them) shows that four were killed in a fiery crash -- the same kind of article we see all the time and usually think little of, the kind of information that does little more than put a barrier between us and the horror, the tragedy of the event.

The medical equipment drips its blood into religious vessels: vitrines covered with pristine cloth and communion wafers. The transmission of the blood from the medically to the religiously symbolic vessels is particularly meaningful I think, and says more than words can.

After the exhibition, the vitrines and wafers are permanently transformed, destroyed, bloodied. 


What I love about this piece is its layers: the news layer, the medical layer, the religious layer, the way the pristine thing is transformed/destroyed by the blood/wine while the news article with its emotional distance and professional tone is kept at bay behind latex, its words visible but muted while the things themselves enact the deaths -- that one-way movement through time -- the taking of a person with flesh and blood and hope and need and desire and fear and destiny down, via this destruction, to simply the blood and flesh. 


We have all lost people. I have lost people. Each of those deaths was individual, an event indivisible from the unique person whose life was lost. You can no more generalize about death than you can generalize about people. And I think that's why Brothers' art really works for me, why I feel she's managed to transform the personal into the universal -- her work is careful and respectful, and she never loses sight of the individual who lived and was lost. And through that care and respect and clarity of vision, she makes us feel that moment, that universal sense of loss and tragedy. The unwanted that came. The desperate desire to just reverse that one thing that happened whose consequences were so outsized, so awful, so beyond comprehension -- and so utterly irreversible.


And I both love it and am left profoundly unsettled. But it is an unsettling that I want to feel, because this is life, and it is too important not to.


Brothers also has a piece on sex offenders that would surely chill even the most hardened heart, but I would like to stop with these two pieces, and encourage you to view more on her website.

This is the third in my series on Florida Artists, especially the ones I just met. Previous posts here and here. Cross-posted to Incertus.

The Evolution of Art

The Science Times has an interesting article on some recent theories of the origins of art, as a human phenomenon (which reminds me, go check out my story, Venus Envy, now available online for the low low price of FREE at Fringe Magazine!)...

From an evolutionary perspective, what is the "use" of art? Why do we have it? How does it benefit us?

But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought [sic]. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems [sic] too important to leave to chance.

Like far too many stories in the Science Times, this one too personifies evolution (saying it "deems" something, for example, implies it is an active force with intelligence, which is fun to think, but not true; evolution is simply the inevitable effect of dead animals not reproducing, while live ones can, and can pass on some of their traits, too).

So is art adaptive? Does possessing artistic qualities contribute to the survival of the species?

Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one’s talented palette of genes. Again, Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas. To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.

Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.

This is an interpretation that appeals to my way of thinking: I've never liked the image of the artist as an ego in need of expression. I've always preferred the image of the artist as conduit for the needs thoughts and feelings of a time and place. But wait, there's more:

As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.

Talk about strolling through Amy's theoretical garden! I am of course entirely non-religious, but I absolutely love religion because it is the ultimate art form. Participatory, ritualistic, immersive, REAL. I don't think people would be ignorant of the wrongness of murder without commandments against it, but I do think that societies could not form without this kind of connective tissue. Some friendships are entirely based on a similar taste in music or films. More are based on similar tastes in God. Art can hold a society together. Religion is a closed system of art that take that on as its purpose.

So this leaves a final question: where does it come from? What defines its form?

Perhaps the most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.

After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.

To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.

To which I can only say, GOO GOO GA JOOB.

And go read "Venus Envy"! It's evoluta-riffic!