Art Comes From Communication Breakdown
Why I Became a Filmmaker and Not a Pamphleteer
Some days I wonder what place an artist has in a capitalistic society. I.e. is being an artist a “real job?”
And then I wonder what it means to have a real job. And then I wonder about this pull on my psyche that convinces me that creative work is not legitimate work. And then I wonder if I’d feel more settled in a job where I am very linearly contributing to our national GDP or something (read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber for more on this tangent).
I’m used to this kind of thought process. It was familiar to me as a philosophy major in college when people questioned why I would choose such a pursuit as philosophy, and even earlier as an adolescent who obsessed over things that were never extrinsically rewarded. Music. Movies. Illustration. Skateboarding.
In these moments, sometimes I think about this clip of an interview with David Bowie where Bowie says art is a “rarefied” thing to do. Bowie says that most people move through the world looking to feed themselves and provide for their families. And then artists want to do this incredibly strange other thing that has nothing to do with subsistence. It’s painting, film, video game tutorials, illustration, and flower arrangements. It’s stacking macaroni.
The thing that drew me to art as a child was I felt I had a lot to say and not a lot of good ways to say it. I was very shy as a kid, something exacerbated by the language barrier I faced as Russian was my first language. But even as I went to speech therapy in elementary school and would later become far more verbal, I still felt words never captured what I wanted to say.
As an adult, I turned to images to tell the stories I wanted to tell because I felt it was the best way to communicate, and that journey led me to believe the following theory:
Artists are born out of necessity, out of a failure to communicate in traditional ways, even as they can be some of the world’s best communicators.
My classic example of this is a poem. Poetry is a rarefied form of language, and it is interesting because it’s a verbal and intellectual game that works on you in non-verbal ways. That’s to say that words are merely the vehicle in poetry that are meant to convey images and it’s the images themselves that enter into and work on your psyche. Words can fail us, but somehow poems succeed.
The sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin has solidified this point for me recently. She discusses this paradox, that writers of fantasy and science fiction (but really all artists) use words to enter wordless realms.
And what’s the evidence for all of this? Well, you can’t truly summarize a poem. Likewise, the written synopsis of a film is not the same as experiencing the thing itself.
The point is that the art experience somehow transcends its verbal/intellectual packaging. Of course, the poet’s medium is language and the filmmaker’s medium is light, but they essentially do the same thing: create images. When we are affected by a story or a sentence or a scene or a shot, we lose the sense that we are reading or watching anything. All we know is that we’re having a sublime moment of connection that is somehow stamping our psyches.
In my mind, then, an artist is not a logician or a debater, though they often offer novel arguments and ideas. The crucial distinction is that the artist’s process starts with having something so badly twisted up inside of them that they depend on strange mediums to untangle it, to somehow purify it before it can be delivered to the world. That’s why we go to these absurd lengths to chase these elaborate, sometimes decades-long projects. We’re dying to say the thing, and yet we can’t just simply say it.
And so art drags you into its process out of a kind of frustration. It’s a refuge for people who find themselves fed up with ordinary language. So they dance, paint, draw, design, sculpt, collect, cook. And then they lay the art at your feet.
“Try this. Watch this. Listen to this. Tell me what it does for you. Do you understand now? What do you feel?”
One of my favorite hip-hop artists, Aesop Rock, has a great quote that I think about often.
In his song “Dorks,” he raps, “We’re just a bunch of weirdos on a quest to belong, these songs are echolocation up in an impregnable fog.”
The truth is we’re all living in the fog of our singular and unique consciousness, and the artist responds to this reality by dedicating their lives to sending messages across the fog. And when the message connects and reaches someone else, it feels like a miracle.
I recently ran into Percy Shelley’s essay “A Defence of Poetry” in which Shelley, writing in 1821, compares the merits of poetry (but really art in general) to the merits of reason and science. Writing as a poet, he wants us to see the value of his life’s work and the work of all artists. I love this passage from the essay:
In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and splendor of their union. Even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.
Shelley is saying that art acts “in a divine and unapprehended manner” which both the artist and their contemporaries may not understand. It’s only the wisest people across generations who can see the true value of the work, which is likely not recognized adequately in the artist’s time.
And then this image of the nightingale. An artist is a bird that sits in darkness and sings “to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.” And the people who can truly appreciate the artist’s work will probably never meet them, and might not even understand why they love their work so much. They are “entranced by the melody of an unseen musician,” not even knowing how that song, poem, painting, or film is working on them.
Pretty rad.