Truly diving into the roiling ocean of the arts, more often than not, means intimate encounters with tentacled monsters of the depths. Just a few pertinent, and personal, examples: getting drunken 3 a.m. emails from a respected mentor telling me that everyone will love my new book because “people love bullshit.” Having entire video projects relegated to the realm of myth after unexpected hard drive failures. Dealing with hostile audiences who kept trying to rip the XLR cables from my audio mixer, or ones that didn’t know anybody was even performing. Trying to work up the enthusiasm to play for an audience comprised of one member. Constantly wondering if I will lose my day job and be unable to find a new one, should some busybody unearth decades-old associations with “controversial” colleagues. Working with a major publisher, only to find I could have sold more books from the back of a station wagon in an afternoon than their indifferent bureaucracy managed to unload after a year’s worth of pay cycles. And so on.
There have been much, much more personal and challenging side effects of “Art Life” (as David Lynch would put it) that I do not wish to go into here. For now, suffice it to say that I am not trying to be edgy or to serve up a desperate “hot take” when I claim this: doing what I do, without ultimately giving in to suicidal despair, has been one of my most meaningful accomplishments. I do not have any hard data on levels of suicide within “creative” communities that I can compare against the rates of suicide for other professions, though I feel this miserable outcome has to be dramatically higher within the former: I have lost or nearly lost more friends to their own despairing hands than I can remember anymore. Also, I know hardly anyone in any creative field that does not have some uncomfortable proximity to this phenomenon, either through personal attempts at suicide or through the suicides of friends and colleagues.
To be certain, the social and economic pressures of the post-industrial world have been asphyxiating, if the considerable expansion of the mental health industry is an indication of anything. Those pressures are applied with even more crushing force when, upon taking up the “artistic” mantle, you commit yourself to a non-utilitarian discipline in a rigidly utilitarian society, and by doing so voluntarily estrange yourself from the social support networks available to less vaguely defined professions or personality types. If you are at all serious about what you’re doing, you will probably have to be on the defensive even from the moment someone innocuously asks “what do you do?”, and will need to waste time constructing byzantine rationales for why you do it while “normal” people, so-called, are apparently being productive and contented. You will probably also be sick to death of dealing with people who enthusiastically but vaguely thirst after “something new”, and who become offended or disappointed when the “something new” you propose is new in a way that they wouldn’t have predicted. All of this alienation is a recipe for constant low-level anxiety, at the very least.
It was with all this in mind, and with recent (again, personal) incidents that the below inventory of “dos and don’ts” spilled out of me. None of these individual pieces of advice are ones that I’ve lived up to fully, but to the modest degree that I have succeeded in any of these tasks, they have probably saved my life. I hope they will rise above the level of self-help banality to others who need to hear these things, or who may be thinking similar things without the reassurance that anyone else assents at all.
Ignore the “star” system. “If you can dream it, you can be it”, has never been the best advice, even in the elementary schools where this is just one among many glittery platitudes. If, for no other reason, this advice confuses the voluntary act of focusing on an ideal professional future (what is “actually” meant here) with what I have found to be the more valuable involuntary, chaotic state of dreaming. More importantly, though, subscribing to this belief sets up those who believe in it for a lifetime of bitter resentment if they do not secure one of the very few “dream” spots available. There are very few individuals with the right (read: marketable) combination of charisma, talent, timeliness and luck needed to become paragons of mainstream / popular culture, and even fewer spots are available for those seeking to earn comparable rewards while engaging in challenging expressive activities for which the public does not even have a name yet.
In reality, most artists will never be able to subside on the fruit of their more visionary moments, and we have to remember that many of those now considered legends of their respective media were stuck in comparatively unglamorous, menial routines and jobs. Some of which, it’s worth noting, contributed to the most memorable work of these individuals: see for example the novels Factotum and Post Office from Charles Bukowski, or the stark commentary on endurance offered by TehChing Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece (One year Performance 1980-1981).
Paradoxically, I feel that if people are being the best they can be at a pursuit which is not already certified as being “creative,” they will in fact raise what they are doing to something that might be more widely acknowledged as artistry. I feel this is a healthier approach to take than to court any kind of mass public recognition by the established routes. For all else that is going wrong with the world, there seems to be an increased tolerance for formerly mundane activities being understood as part of a more expressive / creative culture (e.g. it was not that long ago that something like “parkour” was just written off as contrarian urban goofing without its own set of aesthetic standards). As such, relegation to a mundane day-to-day reality should not be seen as a death sentence, but as a challenge to poeticize this mundane reality and to use its very restraining features as creative tools.
Understand that becoming an interesting person may happen spontaneously. The belief that one can follow a pre-set template of actions to become a seductive persona is at once one of the most comical and pathetic features of the era in which “the artist is the artwork”. One problem with this is that the actions suggested to “become interesting” are generally forays into “limit experience” that are just as likely to result in serious harm, madness or death as they are to provide lasting glimpses of enlightenment.
We are told by thinkers like Heidegger that profound jolts of anxiety can cause all assurances of the phenomenal world could be thrown into question, and then ultimately bring about eigentlichkeit or what we now know as “authenticity”. The problem with piling on yet more anxiety in order to reach an “authentic” state is that, among other philosophical traditions, “authenticity” is seen as something spontaneously arising rather than willed into existence. It does seem counterproductive for an artist to “become what she is” by going on some arduous, maybe lethal, spiritual quest when similar (or even superior) insights could be gained from just expressing compelling reactions to those changes which organically occur within her existing environment. This is, paradoxically enough, an act that involves as much artistic agency then the “hero’s journey” of authenticity: believing that one can change and effect those things which spontaneously, “randomly” fall into one’s sphere of influence is every bit as important as modulating the changes that occur in the self after personal trials.
Realize that you may achieve things other than what you set out to achieve. The annals of science history are full of happily accidental discoveries like that of the benzene ring and penicillin; triumphs that were not the intended, targeted result of given research (in the case of the latter example, a hypnagogic vision set the “wheel” in motion). Art can, and should, also be open to these types of occurrences.
The examples I can extract from my own experience are not nearly as heroic or infused with a special narrative quality, but are maybe illustrative enough. In one instance while “snowed in” on a barren town along the Czech / Polish border, with my host complaining about my irritating sleep-talking, I got a brainstorm to contact the record label Ash International about releasing some record of these utterances. I had no idea there was already a documented history of others’ similar activities, and label boss Mike Harding politely turned this project down on the grounds that they were already working on something similar. What did happen is that my name was passed along to Swedish artist Leif Elggren, who was involved with a more ambitious, serious, cross-disciplinary art project on parasomnias to include sleep-talking, sleep-walking and others. It was a rare instance of an established artist willing to hear what I had to say solely on the basis of how well my ideas adapted to a larger plan, rather than waiting to see a list of credentials and professional accolades.
This single “detour” away from my planned goal of releasing a novelty audio document turned into my first venture onto Scandinavian soil, a lifelong friendship, and several more long-term relationships with other compelling and unique people. The lesson to be learned from this is simple and, I hope, an indicator that concentrated creative effort is rarely wasted if your expectations about reactions are broadened (something very different from expectations being “tempered” or “reduced”).
Work with the tools you have at hand. A while ago I was treated to a rehearsal for what was to be a landmark solo concert for a local friend. For this purpose, a daunting barricade of music synthesizers and black-box assemblages were put into service, and this excess was, I guess, something to be proud of: “anything worth doing is worth overdoing,” the synth wizard winked and grinned, in the process quoting Keith Emerson or perhaps misattributing the business acumen of some San Fernando Valley pornographer to said prog-rock guru. The catch here (and you may see it coming) is that this dramatic increase in force projection did nothing to make the music sound qualitatively different from shows done with a more compact set-up.
I’d like to contrast this approach to something suggested in an intriguing interview with electronic sound artist Mark Fell, who makes an analogy to cooking preparations when describing his creative process:
When I first left home, and I was a young kid with no money, I couldn’t afford frozen food – I just had to go to the market, on the last ten minutes of the market on a Friday night, [and get] two carrier bags of whatever was cheapest and see what I could make out of it, and that’s how I learned to cook […] And that’s kind of how I make music (laughs).
This analogy does get at something important, which again has to do with the aforementioned idea of working with, rather than against, restraints. Becoming a debt slave in order to finance wall-to-wall studio equipment is not an attractive proposition, and less so when all this accomplishes is to merely reinforce existing creative habits or allow one to say something familiar in brighter colors. Romanticizing the nature, and particularly the quantity, of your creative tools is a fool’s errand, whether this refers to “a film made on a shoe-string budget” or a gargantuan sculpture that required a battery of 3D printers to make it manifest. This is all the more tragic when we realize where attempts to achieve either extreme of folksy “authenticity” or superhuman giganticism truly lead: that is, to blind alleys of conformity, to a world in which displacing your personality onto your tools and machine extensions only dilutes your personality, while (if you’re lucky) temporarily presenting a mirage of technical superiority to an audience who will abandon ship once an incrementally better technical presentation comes along.
So, be done with the worship of accumulation or minimization (don’t even bother with printing lists of “gear” utilized in an artwork if you can get away with it), and do not let anxiety arise from insufficiencies in either department. Ideas with sufficient expressive quality and relevance will find their mark whatever their provenance is. As the Situationist philosopher Raoul Vaneigem pronounced, “The qualitative is our striking force”. Is it yours?
Reject conventional “sell-by” dates for creative output. The expectation that an artist should reach “x” goal by “y” age, I’ve found, is one of the most self-defeating of all the modern anxieties which curtail creativity and destroy self-worth. Insofar as art is meant to have a goal, it is one that tends to rely more upon increased understanding of one’s experiences than on youthful energy: see for example the simple contention of filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky that “the goal for all art […] is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his experience.”[i] So…does that experience become less valid with age? Do only the experiences occurring during our most photogenic periods matter? Do periods of maturation, with their increased sense of responsibility, tame some kind of anarchic creative impulse within us – or could it instead be the case that a deepening sense of responsibility increases our relatedness to limitless types of phenomena, fortifying our ability to communicate something actually profound?
In addition to this, keep in mind the kinds of people most reliant upon cults of youth. Uncritical worship of youth is often a residue of consistently violent, militarized societies, wherein the heightened reverence accorded to those of “cannon fodder” age is a good enough way to instill loyalty to the State. Ignore, then, the artificial age limits set on when you can or should be producing your best work: these limitations are meant to serve forces hostile to the genuinely creative process. The didactic propaganda that these forces churn out is antithetical to the aims of art.
Experiment with masks. One of the major themes of my next book is that deceitfulness or fakery in the service of art is not always a moral failing, even when this involves mutating your public-facing conception of selfhood. The idea was cleanly articulated by Dadaist Hugo Ball, who opined that we need to “lose ourselves” in order to “find ourselves,” and that “[the Dadaist] knows that life asserts itself in contradiction, and that this age aims at the destruction of generosity as no other age has ever done before…he therefore welcomes any kind of mask…any game of hide-and-seek, with its inherent power to deceive.”[ii]
Spasms of anxiety often arise from the feeling of being relentlessly observed and criticized, and therefore I feel it is no vice to take up masks, pseudonyms, alter egos etc. to give oneself enough psychic privacy in which to try out new ideas without accompanying fear of failure. One of my favorite works of “experimental” fiction, Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum, proceeds more or less from this idea. Writing as a literary critic of a diverse body of actually non-existent literature, Lem is here given free rein to touch upon concepts that may not have worked as full novels / stories, yet needed some sort of outlet regardless. The fake works reviewed in …Vacuum include a sort of post-modernist “make your own novel” kit, a novel in which the reader is personally addressed and harangued on every page, and a novel in which every action mentioned is in the negative (e.g. “the train did not arrive…he did not come”). It’s amazing how projecting something actually of your own creation onto some fictional entity can be a liberating act; temporarily offering freedom from the societal demands for your experiences to be represented in extremely specific forms.
Explain yourself later. Tarkovsky again insists that “aesthetic structure has no need of manifestos…the power of art does not lie there but in emotional persuasiveness.”[iii] This can be an easy thing to forget during a time in which artists are no longer expected to simply create, but also to act as their own promotional agents or really as their own “interpreters.” I have found this is another activity that multiplies the poisonous little bubbles of anxiety into a dense suffocating foam, as it forces every new work or each new creative phase to be explained as something distinct from the rest of art history.
This is not to say that all kinds of rigorous self-evaluation are harmful, but serial self-justification often proceeds from the assumption that everyone interfacing with a new work is asking “why should I care about this in particular” before considering anything else. As low as my estimation of modern aesthetic and philosophical sensibility can be, I really don’t believe that all participants in the artistic experience are responding as if to a sales pitch, though I do believe they want to be seduced in ways that only well-considered art is capable of. Explanation and exposition very often get in the way of immersion.
Consider this, as well: though you may live in a ruthlessly “solutions-oriented” society, you are not obligated to make your work or its secondary / explanatory documentation the communicating medium for a solution. Take advantage of the fact that some of the most lasting art exists rather to ask new questions. There is value to art that unexpectedly interrogates the viewer, which draws out and crystallizes aspects of that viewer’s experience and which makes this process all the more cathartic by not announcing beforehand what exactly is going to be revealed. After this process takes place, I think- after you begin to receive bewildered but sincerely curious “what the hell just happened” emails from individual seekers – this is the time when self-exposition is more meaningful and impactful.
One final note here, which I hope will wrap things up with a not too tacky bow. The idea of artistry, as far as I understand it, is deeply concerned with synthesizing elements, of poetically harmonizing experiences and objects thought to have no relation to one another, until qualitatively new realities emerge. Many of the anxiety-inducing phenomena I’ve mentioned above are products of a decaying culture that expects you to look within for some poorly defined “authentic” self; to self-examine oneself into a state of inadequacy, torpor or worthlessness. Do not focus on some tantalizing but static image of the “inner self” as this is simply an embrace of oblivion. Look outward to a phenomenal and chaotically changing world where not everything in fact “has been done,” and where there are more than enough unknowns to provide a lifetime’s work of material to sculpt from.
[i] Tarkovsky, A. (1987).Sculpting in Time. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin: University of Texas Press.
[ii] Ball, H. (1996). Flight Out of Time. Trans. Ann Raines, Ed. John Elderfield. Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press.
[iii] Tarkovsky (1987).