Michael Shelby Edwards

Shaken and Stirred: A Quick Mix of Thoughts on Art, Literature, Journalism and Morality

2008-10-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

Art and literature have something in common. Art, like literature, is not a call to action. At least not in the sense that an advertisement, a sermon or a news report is a call to action. In Literature and the Right to Death, Maurice Blanchot explains exactly why the writer of literature “ruins action;”[1] why “it is futile for him to take the seriousness of an ideal as his guarantee; futile for him to claim to have stable values.”[2] Literature and art both require the presence of an author, which dissolves in the face of the mission to serve the reader or the viewer.

In other words, its impossible to exist as author at the moment of authorship and also identify with the audience at the exact same moment. As in stage performance, the real creative moment happens when the actor is neither self-conscious nor conscious of the audience. The audience cannot grant the artist the creative authority needed to get the job done. Only art can do that. What Blanchot seems to be saying is that any literature that’s worthy to be called literature will place the service of the demands of literature ahead of any other moral obligation.
I put this theory to the test when I reflect on my own experiences as an artist who happens to be in the midst of cultivating a commitment to art while also cultivating a moral philosophy. Here is my experience so far: thinking about my moral obligations whilst in the studio is about as stimulating as thinking about my grandmother whilst in the bedroom.

Here’s another experience. I had occasion to see a slide-talk by Sophie Jodoin when she came as a visiting artist to The Pennsylvania Academy while I was a grad-student there. At the end of her presentation, in which she showed slides of her challenging paintings of war-wounded children and Iraqi torture victims, one of my classmates questioned her about the relationship between her images (which she appropriated from various news sources), and the project of journalism. Jodoin fielded the question with an impressive mixture of honesty and tact, but her difficulty in doing this was not lost on me. I knew as well as she that the drawings and paintings that she created all by her self in her studio have hardly anything to do with journalism. What Blanchot says about the writer applies precisely to the artist: “what interests him about the Cause is the operation that he himself has carried out…”[3] That means artworks like Jodoin’s drawings of images of suffering Iraqi children have nothing to do with any cause except that of their own existence, and, calloused as it may seem, they really have nothing to do with any actual child that might be actually suffering somewhere in Iraq. And that’s art. Sorry grandma.
While the journalist swears to seek out and expose the truth in the world--by the chance capture of information, the artist’s only promise is to seek out and expose the truth in art--through deliberately contrived relationships. It doesn’t even claim to be benevolent like journalism does. Art is not ‘fair and balanced reporting.’

Really, both genres rely on a mixture of chance capture and deliberate contrivance, but art is different than journalism because it says what its really about right up front: artifice, illusion, interpretation. And although art might share journalism’s interest in a ‘Cause,’ art treats the ‘Cause’ like a cause—a circumstance, a starting point, and never an end in itself. According to Blanchot this “baffles” people[4]—people that are more accustomed to being ‘served’ by journalism.
All this is not to say that selfishness is a virtue in art. On the contrary, the artist cannot be self-satisfying; she must be selfless. I’m not talking about selflessness in the old church mouse way of pretending to be non-existent, but the kind of selflessness that presents the self with out fear of scorn; without the fear that comes from false pride. The artist must embody the kind of selflessness doesn’t just deny the false-self but affirms the true-self without fearing that loss of face.

Already we can begin to speak of a kind of morality in art; a preferred code of conduct guided by some basic assumptions about nature. Robert Stone makes a very compelling defense of the operation of these basic values in both art and fiction in The Reason for Stories. He illustrates how “the laws of both language and art impose choices that are unavoidably moral.” One of these is “the law that requires the artist to constantly choose between symmetry and asymmetry, restraint and excess, balance and imbalance….The same law operates the scales the blindfolded woman in the courthouse holds.”[5] Art and justice are inexorably intertwined. Not only that, good art demonstrates virtues that are valued by humans: honesty, integrity, transparency, selflessness, constancy, rigor, commitment, and so on.

Of course the danger of naming virtues outright is that the artist may be compelled by the laws of art to immediately negate them (as I’m already itching to do). Blanchot reminds us that the writer’s work is essentially that of negation; “denying books as he forms a book out of what other books are not.”[6] This kind of self-denial, or temperance, results in a virtue not unlike justice. The symbol for justice that Stone recalls for us also evokes the symbol for temperance: a female figure holding a chalice in each hand pouring liquid from one cup into another, as if to mix and balance the contents.[7] Temperance is an extremely important quality in art. Its image evokes art’s ceaseless counter-activity. Whenever something is filled up, art rushes in to empty it, wherever something is empty, art rushes in to fill it up. Art abhors a vacuum.

The qualities that art and literature undeniably share come from the fact that art is the sovereign principal of the artist, as literature is the sovereign principal of the writer. This gets tricky for am artist with moral allegiances outside of art. Perhaps this person is attempting to live up to the one about not serving two masters, and knows from experience what it means to be a “wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind,…a double-minded man; unstable in all his ways.”[8] But if there is a primary Principal that governs art and literature and everything else, than the paradoxes that we encounter in art and in life pose no threat to our integrity as artists or as human beings. The truth in art may require different action than the truth in say, accounting. And, what’s more, the Truth over all is absolutely rife with paradoxes.

[1] Blanchot, 36.
[2] Blanchot, 29.
[3] 30.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Stone, 5.
[6] Blanchot, 34.
[7] See The Ryder-Waite Tarot Deck.
[8] The King James Bible, James 1: 6, 8.

Wanna See? --Some Thoughts on Contemporary Visual Culture

2008-01-11T08:27:00.000-08:00

Its apparent that visual culture today insists on revealing the ‘real’ underneath the artifice, until the real becomes the artifice. Increasingly, we are compelled to strip away the skin of artifice to reveal its “sticky contents,”[1] but while the outer skin and all of its signifiers are stripped away, its meaning is stripped away too, because, well, its artifice, and skin is all there is. Just ask Andy Warhol. Visual culture, aided by critical discourse wants to play doctor on a manikin—there’s nothing but air in there (unless we put it in there). We are only pseudo scientists, dissecting a dummy. There is a definite masturbatory appeal in this, which I know most artists would attest to. As amusing as this scene is for both the artist and the onlooker, in the last century, its activity has taken a distinctively sinister turn. As Virilio suggests in A Pitiless Art, we have bee only practicing on our limitless probing on dummies, but soon we will and already have begun using ourselves as guinea pigs. He suggest that art itself in reflecting its creator’s destructiveness, will eventually destroy its creator, as we have done ours-- the proverbial Frankenstein’s Monster.

But we mean so well. Why not strip away the artifice? In the age of the spectacle, when all is excess and fabrication, of course we should want to shuck off the husk of the unreal to reveal the truth. We are only like the idealistic young Dr. Frankenstein, who will sacrifice even his own happiness for the pursuit of his project of science, of truth.
Sounds good in theory, but in practice—especially in the practice of art, the results are not what we hoped for.

What starts out as a seductive strip tease winds up being a cervical exam. Once the novice anatomist gets past the initial ‘shock of the real,’ there is little left to do with the except play with variations of the same forms. Its analogous to the way in which sex without love or some kind of transcendent concept or aim gets old fast (for some at least). There is only so much you would want to do with all these empty parts. That’s one description that seems to be a hallmark of contemporary art – emptiness, vacancy. Virilio says the art of this past century is “contemporary with the shattering effects of mass societies, subject as they are to the conditioning of opinion and mass media propaganda…”[2] In other words it is massive, malleable and empty. Once form and meaning is reduced primordial substance, the contemporary artist, like the contemporary lover—or fucker, more accurately, is reduced to scatology. Instead of conceiving of new life we distractedly occupy ourselves by making mud pies.

Of course, there is something inherently scatological in painting, sculpture in any art making. The accumulation and arrangement of base materials and parts. What more could there be? Aren’t we just precocious children indulging in our own fantasies of perversions and variations of nature? Isn’t the violence and pitilessness of contemporary art akin to the twisting of ones features in front of the mirror, pulling the legs of crabs and tying cans to the dogs tail? The grotesques have always been with us in art, but now these ideas are no longer relegated to our secret diaries and to our dark carnival side shows and to our private viewing booths. Thanks to the spectacle, the ever present eye/I, these private asides have taken center stage. What was private is now public.

The motives of the dominant visual culture have changed. The role of art may have at one time been the adornment and costuming of the figure in power, as in royal portraiture and production of elaborate ceremonial garb, but now art seeks to overtly strip the ruling figure of its power signifiers.[3] Note the significance of the tabloid fascination with British royal family for example. Now we are no longer satisfied with exposure of the Princess’s flesh, we want to see her gore, her entrails. If we could we wouldn’t stop at squishing it between our fingers and making new little fake princess figures out of the minced meat. And we have already begun to do just that sort of thing in contemporary art.

We might try to ennoble the idea of all this gory destruction by calling it alchemy, the dissolution of the body and of meaning being just a phase in the creation of a new and better body of meaning. But real alchemy works only in secret. Thanks to the presence of the spectacle, there are no secrets.

The question that seems to hang in the background is, where are we supposed to draw the line?[4] Just like the neurotic or sensitive child through his endless assaults and perversions of nature, always within view of an audience, is seeking the line, the boundary. In our society where technology’s ever present eye/I has rendered us virtually omnipresent, everywhere and nowhere, we can’t help but react like latch-key children, acting out, desperately trying to find that life giving, moral boundary line. But if Nietzsche is right, and our cosmic parent is dead to us, who or what will provide that guiding line? Will we continue to act out our anxiety on inanimate objects, nature, and ourselves as neurotic, bereaved adolescents do?

A private aside: kids who are like me that can’t or won’t make a unreserved effort to raise God from the dead have a tendency to blow their brains out once the drugs stop working.

[1] Georges Bataille, “History of Eroticism,”149.
[2] Virilio, “A Pitiless Art,” 35.
[3] Lynn Hunt “Pornography and the French Revolution,” 306.
[4] Lynda Nead, The Female Nude, 106.

Grimm Tales

2008-01-10T19:56:00.000-08:00

During this past summer, my first spent in the east coast humidity, I took to languishing in used books stores around Philadelphia. I wasn’t just languishing, though, I was on a mission. I was looking for narrative. Seems I’d lost it back in school somewhere, so I thought what better place to find narrative than in a bookstore? I wanted children’s stories; things that I read or would like to have read when I was a child. I stumbled upon a translation of the complete collection of Grimm’s fairy tales translated by Jack Zipes. These contained tales that are almost always edited out of other ‘complete’ collections or rewritten during translation to make them more acceptable to the editor—and mainstream culture. This began a mild obsession with tracking down as many varieties of English translations of the original Houeshold Tales as I could find. I wanted to find thew the most authentic version available. Stories with objectionable content like The Jew in the Thornbush and The Virgin Mary’s Children were only included in the out of print, scholarly translations. Some translations were Americanised to make them more accessible. Others, were kept quirkily close to word-for-word German. After months of perusing, Zipes came out the winner in my estimation, with a translation of the story of ‘Hans mein Igel’ as the awkward but authentic ‘Hans my Hedgehog’ instead of the appropriate but bland ‘Hans the Hedgehog’.

Ironically, the brothers themselves, who were also mildly obsessed with the idea of authenticity, took to editing and rewriting these tales, sometimes smoothing out their transitions, or adding rustic elements in order to render them as authentic reflections of true German culture. Perhaps the Grimm’s a work contains a sinister premonition of the German Nationalist fantasy of true ethnic purity that got out of hand about a hundred years later, perhaps not. Of course the brother meant well, and they had to keep ‘authenticating’ the stories they collected from their neighbors (most of whom were middle class, educated women--not rustic peasants, and some of them French--not German), in order to secure their tenuous employment as national librarians and scholars to the Emperor. [1]

Nonetheless, the Grimms were great storytellers. Like magicians, they drew around themselves the smoky glow of pseudoscience that attracted the attention and admiration of generations of readership, and the influence of their work has penetrated deep into the psyche of the modern western mind from Freud to Disney. Here is an example of how the identity of the author, the ‘Brothers Grimm’ becomes a created character itself; what the author has written becomes a story within a story.

But this idea of fame and public identity is for me, as always, an afterthought. It must be important because as an afterthought it inevitably appears the longer I think and write about the work I admire. Maybe, I tend to avoid looking at it outright because is dtracts, in my mind from the ‘authenticity’ of the artist or author that I’m admiring. You see, as a product of my own culture, the one not too many years apart from that o the Brothers, I also crave a good spectacle. And as far as fascinating specaclte goes, nothing beats the real, the ‘authentic’. Looking directly at the idea of the symbolic self, the fame of the artist, reveals a reality that undercuts the ‘holy’ cathexis for any particular work of art or literature. Like all repressed content, it shows up just after the fact, and is always the most distasteful and the most promising. Its like secretly watching the back gloved hands of the puppeteer while simultaneously trying to be taken in by the illusion of talking dolls. But in order to court this shadow and not to dash it away with the sudden flip of a switch, lets just talk about repressed content some more.

Just knowing that the puppeteers’ hands are there, and trying not to know it at the same time, offers and experience of the fascination of hidden knowledge. Repressed content is always ‘occult.’ While I was digging through bins of books searching for the real Brothers Grimm, I stumbled across another book, A Dictionary of Symbols by Chirot. When I saw it I felt a chill despite the humidity. I was certain I had left that occult stuff behind me. I wanted to put it down. It wasn’t what I was looking for first of all, and, it was…forbidden. Well, the practice of occultism is forbidden to me--fooling people with tarot cards and calling down unclean spirits upon myself and others is no longer my cup of tea. I’m still making amends for all that. But exploring universal symbols and signs within a scholarly, art historical context? Well, I wasn’t too comfortable with it at the time, but I took the book home anyway.

Fortunatley, the introduction by Chirot proved that it wasn’t written by an occultist, but rather a poet and critic. There are many books with a similiar title, most of them would have to belong to a kind of occult or pseudo psychological genre, this belongs to better to an art historical one. It stands not so much as a comprehensive dictionary, but rather as a collection of thoughtful essays, written in the 1950s by an accomplished Italian? author with a focus in symbolism as it applies to art—especially that of the symbolists painters and writers of the early twentieth century and later the surrealists.

Not exactly grounds for being burned at the stake, but just the fact that I was now delving into occult symbolism again definitely raised some delicate philosophical scruples for me. My fascination with myth and symbol has always been there, in fact, I am extremely sensitive to certain visual symbols, and have paid some heavy prices for the way I have sometimes used them. Messing around with certain symbols can have very real impact on a person’s life, just like telling lies can jeopardize one’s sanity. Symbols speak to our unconscious mind, and they can tell us things that are either positive or negative. Symbols can be healing and hopeful, they can also cause harm. Studying symbols too obsessively, or in a certain light, can bring about very unhealthy consequences for a person prone to extremes. But the act of bringing this book into my studio signaled a reconciliation between the dark escapades of my past and the new, relatively sane life I was now living.

It was this same quality of the secret, the forbidden, the repressed and its promise of the real that attracted me to the Grimm’s tales as a child. I found my first copy of the Grimm’s Tales buried in the bookshelf of a nun, Sr. Maureen, at my Catholic grade school, I took it home in secret and never gave it back. A good, ‘authentic’ translation of the tales can be as crude and artless as a dream. They can transmit the quality of the mute, blunt, vulgarity that reality that always startles someone that lives mainly in the imaginary and the symbolic. Yet they are immanently symbolic and imaginative.
I began making little ink drawings based on the stories I found in these collections. Soon, I expanded my range to include collections of English and also Italian tales. I even tried my hand at etching and was pleased with the result--how feverish the look of tiny etched figure can be, reminiscent of those ghastly Tineal illustrations that I loved and hated as a girl. I keep a copy of a Alice in Wonderland in my studio now along with my other hoardings.

Thanks to my reunion with these Grimm’s tales and other stories from the European unconscious, my studio work began to breath a the breath of narrative for the first time in years. The little pen and ink free associative drawings that I’ve been making since always are no longer restricted to my secret journals and the margins of my papers. At the same time, thanks partly to Chriots little book, my more objective work is becoming infused with symbolism. In some cases, these first attempts have seemed to bees too obvious or allegorical. However, the opportunity for symbols and signs to act as concreate forms which can be used to compose new arrangement of forms is boundless. Now more than ever, I am seeing that nearly every shape can become a symbol, and that symbolic forms are all around us. Therefore, every choice I make concerning the construction of a piece, starting with the size and shape of the ground, carries symbolic content. Every material I use, besides its inherent capabilities and practical uses, carries symbolic content.

Content: narrative, symbolic, forbidden, hidden, repressed, buried, forgotten, ignored—until now. Up until recently my ‘serious’ work has been rigidly restricted to the pursuit of form. Now I’m after the other half of the picture as well. As an undergraduate, I was always taught that form is content. Now I want to see how content can generate form.

Since I was a kid, I always suffered a kind of guilt from not seeing how my being an artist could ever be construed as a form of service to others. A doctor heals people, a fireman puts out fires, what the hell does an artist do? Well, now I know: I collect things. I gather things and reassemble them. Always have. Now I’m beginning to do that for my ‘serious’ work (and can actually laugh at my pictures again, as grim as they might be). In the same way that I collect books, toys, memories, songs, stories, dreams and experiences, I collect content, then I dish it up. Like every other server in this age of information-accumulation, I am a content provider.

Bibliography:

Lacan
Carrol
Chorot,
Zikes,
[1] Get reference fom Zikes