Art: The Flowers of Evil
“If art stays away from evil, it quickly becomes boring.”
“Every artist is profoundly guilty of placing the consumer in an unpleasant situation which makes the art non-boring.”
“Making art is the opposite of working. All the best works of art are efforts that went against real work. Therefore artists are like children before their parents. They are afraid of what their art might do, and they never stop until they have something real to be afraid of.” – Georges Bataille
As artists, we very often forget about the evil, I should say radical evil, of the situation. On the one hand, when I say this, I’m repeating Bertolt Brecht’s old and still true idea that art will, in some way, address itself toward the political evils of the day. This does not mean that Animal Collective will release a song about the healthcare crisis anytime soon, but that the Collective will, time and again, return to the evils of the sociohistorical landscape again and again, that the oppression felt in an everyday sense will necessarily provide a refrain for the truth that they provide, as when they sing “Guard my girl from muffler's black gas,” on Merriweather Post Pavilion.
But the more compelling, and less basic, argument to be made here is that evil is part of what the artist is doing. Artists perpetrate, as a general operational rule of their practice, acts of evil on a regular basis against themselves, their communities, and their society.
(This is not to say, first of all, that the artists are alone in this, that the suits down on Montgomery and Wall streets are not perpetrating acts of evil, but the difference has to do, again, with the issue of environment. On Montgomery Street in San Francisco, the “Wall Street of the West Coast,” where I recently worked, there is an enormous economic/political apparatus dedicated to the maintenance of comfort in the process: amidst the investment banks which were, minute by minute, ruining lives by the millions by selling them things they did not need for prices they could not afford, there were cute Italian bistros, new-age frozen yogurt shops, Panini cafés, and hundreds of other institutions devoted to creating the impression that everything is okay, your culture is alive. As Bill Hicks would say in one of his demonic voices, “Go back to sleep, America…”).
Artists do not have the money or the power to delude themselves from the evil that they do. This is why evil is such a prominent figure of the artistic process. There is, perhaps, an “art district” in the big cities, but this is a parasitic place, a place created by artists who occupy, sometimes forcefully, big, ugly, formerly industrial buildings, or, just as often, the former living spaces of low-income black and Latino populations. Artists cannot hide from anybody the way in which they are parasites. The blacks and Latinos are fully aware that these people are gentrifying their community, driving up the rents and property costs, and the white society which has, more or less, rejected the artists altogether, is glad to be rid of them even as it needs them for its own self-reflection.
You’re saying, “okay, but what’s evil about art?” This question can only be fully answered by participating in the process, by living with artists or by dedicating oneself to art, but if I were to summarize it I would use the arguments of that great theorist of evil, Georges Bataille, whose last name means “battle” in French:
Art is a commitment to the excessive character, not of Western capitalism or of American society, but of existence itself. It is a commitment to the effervescence of life, to the exuberance of the experience of reality and its engagement with destruction. There is no effervescence, no exuberance, no joy, rapture, or celebration, without total, irredeemable waste, expenditure without reserve. The artist does not wait until she has enough money or time to paint, she paints. If he’s getting evicted, he might write a song instead of look for a place to live. The logic of saving, taking account of one’s finances, rational calculation, is not dismissed all the time, but it is only one of many modes of experience available to the artist.
A large part of what it means to be an artist is present in the mindset and the phrase, “fuck it.” So when the sad, middle-aged, mid-level bureaucrat politician went on television for a press conference and proceeded to shoot himself in the mouth, blowing his brains onto the white wall behind him, he was finally ready to be an artist. Many of us do not become mid-level bureaucrats because we do not share his aesthetic tastes.
“Fuck it” was a large part of Francis Ford Coppola’s process in the making of his great films. He wanted to write and direct his own work, but, time and again, the only jobs he found for himself were “studio jobs,” which he avoided as long as possible. Eventually he relented, agreeing to make a film based on a novel about the Italian Mafia, having been selecting by the studio, he said, because he was Italian himself, and therefore would pre-empt criticisms by Italian groups who want Italians to be portrayed as something other than criminals (these Italian groups failed to realize that Italians are criminals in the American imagination, just like Jews, and they can only be seen otherwise once they become “white,” but that’s another story). Coppola came to direct The Godfather and Apocalypse Now out of a certain sense of surrender to desperation, after having been punished by a society and a community that seemed to threaten his every move as an artist, preferring that he become an accountant or a lawyer or a mortician or anything besides an artist, that panhandler who can’t be trusted.
That is how artists are seen by Americans. On the one hand they are the foundation and the inspiration for life: George W. Bush plays the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill on his iPod—but on the other hand they are a kind of foreign menace and a pathetic sight up close. People want to see Avatar but they do not want to live with or near artists, and their children’s fascination with art is another “phase” in their obsession with the abject, with the most grotesque, marginalized aspects of society. Children like art not because they are recognizing the true innovation of the human spirit but because they want to say “fuck you” by bringing a slovenly artist home to mom and dad or by blasting the Ying Yang Twins in white suburbia.
Of course, what this interpretation leaves out is the great space of overlap between the “fuck you,” the “fuck it,” and the pure meditations on beauty and the transcendental. Even, and especially, the “great” artists, the Van Goghs and Da Vincis, for instance, are based on a basic sense of rage which expresses itself in an impulse to destroy the highest values of paranoid post-industrial society and create something new, or create something new over it, without erasure.
No comments:
Post a Comment