Wordkeys - Art - Act

Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts, October 27th, 2023

by Gus Mitchell

Art comes out of act. The act of making images, of making sounds, the act of making words and symbols. And these "acts" are really accretions, many individual "actions", acts in a process, acts which don’t often seem like "acts" at all. The acts of doodling, of scribbling, of sketching, of humming, of reading, looking, listening, playing, feeling, thinking, sitting, talking, walking.

The Greek verb artizein means "to prepare". Aside from an obvious etymological reading––a work of art is something that has been fitted together by "skill" or "craft" implied in the Latin artem. The making of art, any art, means to engage in an incalculability of acts of preparation.

"To prepare", though, carries the sense of a forethought and foreseen nature to the act which is very often not part of the artistic process. We don’t know what we’re doing, a great deal or the time; at others, we don’t even know what we want. And if we do happen to have an idea before us, a definite plan to carry out, then we just has often have no sense of how to get there. None.

This is where preparation meets iteration. If "art" as an act only arises out of and ultimately consists of preparations, it is then true that the "work of art" (a product and evidence of learning, skill, craft, and tradition) is the child of iteration. That is, of doing again. And again, and again and again.

If nature’s glory and mystery is in its effortlessness, its spontaneity, what Daoism calls Ziran ("that which arises of itself") then perhaps we might claim ours in sheer and bloody effort. (Beethoven, Nina Simone.)

The word "act", the Latin actus and agere, both tell us, carries inside it the sense of impulse, of "setting in motion", of "drive on, draw forth, incite". In other words, they are as much or more to do with the split-second preparation before action. To make something happen, setting something going. That is the decision, the "act", that lies before us. After that we cannot say.

There must always come a moment, when we begin, when we sit down in a chair or enter a studio and spend some time laying out our materials, our resources, our tools, our ideas, our thoughts, our wishes for our work––that is, when we begin, and we decide to begin. This is the crucial hinge at which one point of our imagination must give way to another point. This, maybe, is the "act" of art (the point of deciding to begin) and it is often accompanied by a squirm of anxious feelings: imposture, perhaps, the awareness of self and of trying to another self, or another kind of self––and the question then arises, irrepressible sometimes, could it possibly be that this self-unselfing, this act which is perhaps the only act in art deserving of that name, is just that, an "act"? Is my art, am I as an artist, we then ask, only an "act"? Am I only ever "acting" being an artist? (Am I fake?)

The beginning, the middle, and the end of art, then, is a process. A poem is never finished (only abandoned) because we are never finished (we only die.) And the outcome, like all our outcomes, singular and collective, is always unknown. Success cannot be summoned or willed into being. And yet Leonard Cohen says: "I only know that if you stay with a song long enough it will yield."

So, we iterate. We try something. It doesn’t work. We try something else. We try again, and again in another way, and something else again, and something else. Every time and every try is different, yielding different results. But nothing is wasted. Just as to lament a wasted day is to lack respect for life, so to bemoan a wasted attempt is disrespect of process.

10.

But what of the goal? The goal, we might quickly say, is to create a beautiful, powerful, moving work of art; something that gives somebody, even one person, an experience of greater meaning, a sense that their own process, their own life, is meaning-full in ways that our everyday human (and political) indignities tend to obscure. Or it is to change the way someone sees the world. Or even (in our giddiest and most unguarded moments) to maybe change that world itself––somehow.

11.

All these goals, these ideal outcomes of the ongoing process of art, can be defined as political. The desire to illuminate meaning presupposes itself (at least in secular art) as resistance to a greater lack of meaning. We might call this lack structural, societal, and therefore, political. The desire to communicate, illuminate or agitate the world assumes a wider world that needs the artist’s work.

12.

"My fate depends upon this book," Arthur Rimbaud wrote to a friend while writing A Season in Hell in 1873. Rimbaud was 19 at the time, but artists do often feel this way. If you are lucky enough for your art to also be your profession, you may literally depend upon the goal you have set for your novel or your film coming to fruition––and more than that, upon its being "successful." Rimbaud, his poetry was mostly ignored during his short time on earth, was one of those artists who believed that he had "secrets to change life." When he failed to achieve this––to achieve his recognition from others around him, which amounts to the same thing––he abandoned poetry.

13.

What comes first is the joy, the process, of being. For the artist actor, much of the process is solitary. For the political actor, it must be mostly collective. For the political actor, the process is being and working together, and the act is the decision to do this, despite the ennui of progress, of slowness, of the non-appearance of change and the non-realisation of goals, of the awkwardness of collective decision-making and co-organisation––and to keep doing it. The outcome is secondary.

14.

I don’t mean that the outcome doesn’t matter. Activists of course correctly understand that a great deal (everything even) is riding on the success or failure of their efforts. But we should remember that the principles behind any art project and any social movement are as organic as the world in which they exist.

15.

The artist is reaching for something transcendent, in that it is just over the horizon of imaginative possibility; just as a society, and the social movements that seek its course-correction, are always pursuing broad, differently conceived visions of "progress", which is equated with "the good": both (as far as they are conceived at all) remain utopian. The artist is constantly running up against impossibility; the reach outstrips the grasp; hence the priority of process over result and of iteration over completion.

16.

All art is political, a saying goes. (I would amend that: the modern artist is always political, whether they are or not.) Walter Benjamin famously diagnosed fascism as the aestheticization of politics. As culture becomes ever more politicised, as politics mutates into culture war, we should be suspicious of any attempt to conflate the two. But that does not mean there are not certain truths which may productively overlap.

17.

I have both seen and been the activist entrapped in a kind of matrix of hopelessness. We are so desperately alert to the covalent urgency of our time, so full of dreadful awareness as to the stakes, so conscious of how much must be done, and all at once, and so quickly, and in so many simultaneous and overlapping directions, that it is very easy to lose hope before we are even aware of losing it. Before we’ve even begun, before we’ve even decided to act. Without hope, yet still somewhere adhering to our highest expectations, and because of our necessary lack of ability to apply that urgency ourselves, individually, with any hope of making the important difference which our individualised culture dictates we each must make (or why bother?), many efforts, many contributions may lost to inertia and guilt; to the utterly inescapable uselessness of social media; to an imagining of change in the fancy dress of dead culture and non-art.

18.

If the would-be activist committed to nothing else but living––daily life, being with and for the people in it, deciding each day to be as aware and attentive––prepared, in other words, for the process which is the art of living. To allow themselves to be moved toward things as they really are, to avoid the traps of a hyper-politicised culture and a politics of culture and their braying outlets and dead artefacts and the time and the energy and the people they waste. To begin by living, with the process of living, to treat life as the ongoing and interrupted progress that it can be if we take the soul as seriously as an artist does. That may steer us truer toward seeing what needs to be done––and then to act in whatever best direction we find ourselves able to act in, out of the world, as it appears in front of us.

19.

Once the decision to act has been made, things (at least some things) get easier. It may require constantly remembering that we are engaged in many acts, not a single act. If we lie down in a road full of angry drivers, smash the windows of a bank, put an uncorrupted candidate up for election, join or support a strike, march against police violence––we can’t tell what will happen. We may win, we may lose, we may get something or nothing. And after we try, we try again. Differently, better. We stay with one another and learn. We iterate.

20.

If we allow the process of process to move us forward and be aware that the process is a part of the goal. Then the temptation may ease of building cramped ships in bottles of self-policing ideology and all-or-nothing expectation, of feeling boxed in an abstract matrix rather than look around us at something that can be done. Neither art nor politics fare well on abstractions. Today most of us live and mentally interact mainly in a world of hyper-super-abstractions.

21.

The beginnings of a counterforce of more good art and more popular political action also resemble one another. First of all, attention. Awareness of the near-universal threat of abstract information overload: the buzz of thoughts, opinions, commentary, anxiety. Mistaking world for earth, and "people" for human beings.

22.

Just as the artist is often––or at least, often feels like––an outsider, so it is from the fringes, the despised, from the forgotten, the abandoned, the outskirts of order and reason, the debris and damage of our way of life, that the voice of something different always announces itself.

23.

What of the goals of politics? The kind of politics of the left that I’m talking about, which grasp that nothing less that great change will allow for a world in which we can really live rather than exist either in a fantasy or a nightmare––the necessary politics of revolt in the strongest sense. The end that lies behind the end, the reason for goal––I would suggest it is the same idea of a future, of a held-out promise, which has lain behind every social movement or great artwork the means of which, at bottom, are always love––call it freedom. Freedom for each human being to truly be a human being, experience the transcendence of one, unchosen and mortal existence, they are capable of being. To create things. To love and care for others. To enjoy being.

24.

The plain fact of limitation in artmaking and in any honest attempt at politics: we create our conditions out of alien tools; often, the tools of our enemies. The conditions for a response arise out of scarcity.

25.

What unites artist and activist must be a patient impatience: an impossible sense of possibility.

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