I was talking over instant messenger with a friend. And that friend was talking over e-mail with an artist. And that artist and that friend were debating a piece of art. I won't say which one. I won't say what medium. It's probably not what you would expect. And it honestly doesn't matter.
My friend was asking about characterization, and unrealistic depictions and dimensions in the art. And the artist responded that there was a deeper philosophical truth involved. There was a psychological and theological underpinning which one had to empathize with. If one looked at the surface, they would see nothing but dross. But if one approached the work with an understanding of the underlying metaphor, it had the power to affect deeply, and should be considered on those merits, and my friend was unfortunate in that they could not approach the work that way. It meant they were missing out on the profound message.
I am a critic. I am a critical theorist. I am an art enthusiast. I am a writer.
And the response the artist gave to my friend, while powerful and seductive, is also unmitigated bullshit.
It is possible to create art that is experimental, with no other reason than the experiment. It is possible to create compelling art that way. But if you're going to couch your art in terms of story, in terms of narrative, and in terms of meaning, the art has to 100% work on the surface first. It has to work for everyone who shows up at the table. It has to work for the person who reads it quickly and likes the pretty pictures and the turns of phrase. Only through perfecting the surface can one create an artistic work capable of conveying deeper philosophical meaning. Only through creating a compelling narrative can one make a metaphor that will resonate with an audience. Only through believable characterization can one create a character the reader will empathize with.
"We had a message to tell, and we wanted to tell it. And so we decided to tell it. And if we failed to actually tell a story in the process, that's too bad." That's the semantic reduction of the theory the artist was saying. And it was heartfelt. But it was also wholly wrong. You cannot ever write anything with the idea that your audience has to approach it in a specific way. Audiences won't. Audiences don't. If you try to force the reader to adopt a viewpoint, you end up pissing off the reader, and their reaction isn't comprehension but disdain. And you cannot ever ignore the surface in lieu of the deep.
Heinlein's first novel, unpublished for many years, was For Us, The Living. For a long time Heinlein reader like myself, interested in the Dean of Science Fiction beyond simply enjoying his books, it was a revelation -- a gift. It was a great time.
If I handed For Us, The Living to someone who'd never read Stranger in a Strange Land, or Starship Troopers, or Time for the Stars or Time Enough For Love, they would come away from it convinced that Heinlein was a Utopist Liberal Crank who couldn't tell a story to save his life. It was at best an extended essay on how great life would be if we did things his way. It was, at best, worldbuilding. I wrote an essay on this, actually. It's right here. And it's a positive essay. I enjoyed the book. But it's because I spent so much time with Heinlein's surface that I was ready for a book that failed to provide it. And it's worth noting that this book never got published until long after Heinlein built his bona fides as a writer. And he explicitly acknowledges that later on. Half the essays in Expanded Universe detail Heinlein's hard learned lessons that you bring plot and story and character first. If you fail in that, you fail as a writer -- the reader leaves, unentertained and therefore unenlightened.
Even the seminal philosophical stories of our planet, ancient or modern, were good stories first. King David couldn't open with Psalms. First he had to kill a gigantic bully with a stone and spend a night next to lions with lockjaw. Sampson had to have adventures where he took down his enemies before his hubris and his sin in taking a non-Jewish wife who didn't have his interests at heart failed him, and the lesson could be told. Jesus died on the cross, but first he had adventures and evolution that interested the reader. Check out the Koran or the Book of Mormon. They're good reads even before they're religious testaments. For literally thousands of years, we've told Aesop's Fables to our children, because they teach messages to our children by entertaining them first. Greek Mythology contains the laws and philosophies of the people who created it, but there's a lot of sex, drugs and violence to keep the 11:00 matinee audience interested first. Mark Twain wrote some of the most profound stories of the human condition ever seen, and every one of them entertains on every page. "The Old Man and the Sea" is the most philosophical story you'll ever read, if you think about what you're reading, but every paragraph works as a story first.
If you want to say something profound with your work, I salute you. I really do. But if you're going to do it using narrative and metaphor, your first, most important job is to make it exciting and real for the reader -- to make it work as narrative first. Fail that, and you have a colossal waste of everyone's time, most particularly your own.
"and my friend was unfortunate in that they could not approach the work that way. "
Wasn't this the standard postmodernists' excuse if you didn't "get" his "art"?
I am neither a critic or even particularly knowledgable about "art", in any format or medium. At best I'm the equivalent of an berLuser in that department.
But hell, if an artist cannot invoke a basic sentiment in me, even if it's utter loathing, it isn't art, it's simply a kindergarten project made by a supposedly adult.
tell me I should "get it" first, and I *know* the person is talking only so much dross. If he sniggers doing it, he'll be looking at his teeth.
I think it predates the Postmodernists by a few thousand years, Grumblin, but otherwise I agree completely.
I agree wholeheartedly, though there's some little nitpicky part of me that wants to point out that Daniel was the dude with the lions, however irrelevent to the point that may be.
This post was startlingly timely for me, as mere hours ago I was searching desperately (and futilely) for a quote I once heard that had much the same sentiment in it. I don't remember the exact wording of the quote, but it was something to the effect of "If you are just starting off to write, don't try to put a message in what you are writing. Write first, and let the message come later."
In absence of being able to find the actual quote, however, this post was a more than adequate subsitute. :-)
"King David couldn't open with Psalms. First he had to kill a gigantic bully with a stone and spend a night next to lions with lockjaw."
I don't like to be too pedantic, because I wholly agree with your point, but... King David killed Goliath as a young man, but it was the Prophet Daniel that was thrown in the lions den. The Book of Daniel IS, by the way, full of great stories with good lessons. :P
Now someone else can correct me on bad grammar or something. :)
I don't remember where I first read it, but the following phrase sums up my attitude of your artist:
"The fact that nobody understands you or your work does NOT make you a genius."
jrleek -- you are of course correct. I'm going to lose my Religions Geek standing with this, you realize.
Look. Every fule know: when talking of David, you skip all the animals (I can see where the wire got crossed, what with the whole shepherd thing and all) and the giant and you go straight to the foreskins.
[Digression: how heavy are two hundred foreskins? I ask because, some weeks back, I was insomniac-dozing to TBN and they were running a bad life-of-David movie. So, of course, I wake up, and there are the foreskins in a sack, and the sack is just *huge*. It makes a satisfying, heavy *phwumfp* when David drops it in front of Saul. I mean, does he just completely lop off the full unit to save time, seeing as how the Philistines are too dead to object by that point? Or did the producers just not consider their foreskins and make a sensible assessment? Or...
hey, guys? Guys? Why are you backing away?]
Only through perfecting the surface can one create an artistic work capable of conveying deeper philosophical meaning. Only through creating a compelling narrative can one make a metaphor that will resonate with an audience.
*Thank* you.
(By the way, the argument between the artist and your friend sounds rather familiar. It wouldn't happen to concern this Japanease lady, kinda tall, dresses in purple with green highlights, friends call her "Eva"?)
Not to my knowledge, Meagen. But it's a very familiar argument to a lot of people.
Stranger in a Strange Land. My favourite sci-fi book. And, in my ever not so humble opinion, Heinlein's best work. :)
Oh, and the dude spills good bullshit... Thanks for cleaning it up Eric.
And if you're Catholic, you get to have an extra chapter in Daniel that is perhaps the oldest courtroom drama known (AND it brings a moral lesson or three). Not to mention full of puns in Hebrew.
It may not have passed Biblical muster for the Reformation, but it was good writing. :)
Very good post. I like that you didn't say something "isn't art" and instead just implied it's bad art. One of my biggest pet peeves is people looking/hearing/watching (sensing?) a work of art they don't like and say it isn't art when what they mean is this is bad art.
Sorry, I suppose that was sort of a tangent.
I have an artist friend who has made it his goal to not only avoid the BS that this artist gave, but too go so far as to make his work solely contextually appealing and devoid of direct motive or message. Although, now that I think on it, there is motive in that action... he can't do it with that intention!
I think you're mostly right here... but I want to offer a quick caveat, in the hopes that this line of thought won't devolve completely into anti-intellectual knuckle-dragging. As a critic, you have a responsibility to take an interest in the theoretical and structural underpinnings of art. Even if it doesn't work, if it isn't good art, you should be aware of what it's trying to do. You should *like* that it's trying to do stuff. You shouldn't just say, "This doesn't have guys wrestling lions, ergo it's boring, ergo it sucks."
I can't say your Biblical references work really well here. Psalms would be a great collection of poetry without the story of King David, y'know.
Some critics, especially young ones, do get caught up in the intellectual, esoteric side of art, to the point of failing to recognize whether a work is actually any good. But you don't want to shift to the other extreme and go around proclaiming your disdain of anything that involves experimentation or complex structure or Big Themes or whatever. (Which I have seen you do. Don't give me that look.) That's not serving criticism any better than making a big fuss over impenetrable art-wank crap.
That's not quite the point I'm trying to make, here. It's not a question of being boring, and it's certainly not a question of the theoretical and structural underpinnings being poor. Or anti-experimentation, for that matter. However, if you adopt the tropes of narrative and metaphor with the intention of sending a message, you need to make the narrative work, or the message isn't going to salvage the work.
It's not a question of whether or not there are lions being wrestled. It's the difference between good characterization creating something evocotive and bad characterization creating something hackneyed and preachy, with the artist claiming he should get a bye because the message is right there, and it's more important than... well, how he's telling it.
I also specifically said, above, that you can make experimental art and have it be good. That was to make it clear we weren't discussing experimentation or innovation, but traditional sequential art (as an example, though this particular thingy wasn't sequential art) with bad characters, bad anatomy, no plot to speak of and terrible dialogue. It doesn't matter how good your intentions are -- you've got dog feces sitting there stinking up the joint. Telling people who wrinkle their nose at the dog feces that they should be moved by the arrangement of the pile, which is meant to evoke the coming of the Messiah and the feelings of alienation the Jews feel as they wait, doesn't change the fact that it's dog feces and no one wants to look at or smell it.
Finally...
My disdain is reserved for experimentation without point. Or worse, something wholly unexperimental aping the experiments of others for the entire reason that they want to be 'experimental.' Someone who does their webcomic in Flash so that the 'next' buttons will make clicking sounds on mouseover just annoys me. Someone who does Apocomon, where the Flash is used in innovative and exciting ways makes me glad to be a powerslacker in the twenty-first century. Someone who does an infinite canvas to evoke incredible falling distance (a la Zot!) interests and sometimes excites me. Someone who thinks piling eight regular four panel strips into a thirty-two panel side scroller because they want to play infinite canvas earns a yawn from me.
To go back to my now infamous Comixpedia article:
I stand by both of those statements. I'm as excited as you are when Neil Von Flue or Patrick Farley experiment, because they're pushing the boundaries in exciting (often beautiful) ways. But if the only difference between your comic strip and a traditional comic strip is yours is a pain in the ass to read because you have to keep scrolling in odd ways, up down and over... well, you've got a long way to go to get me feeling charitable.
You had me all the way up to "Old Man and the Sea [...] every paragraphs works as a story first."
Sorry, but "He's fishing, He's fishing, He's Fishing, He's fishing... Oh wait he's Jesus!" never cut it for me.
Might I respectfully suggest you re-read the extracts from the novel you posted last November, while keeping your criticism of Heinlein in mind?
I've been searching for a way to say this, but now you bring up exactly the problem: they (at least the bits you made public) are almost all cyphers expositing at each other, expositing about history, about strategy, about technology, and about maps.
You've had some great critical insights about the work of others, but your own work would benefit hugely if you applied your own critical eye to it.
I just want to be a fly on the wall in the studio when the foley artists decide what sound to use for the *phwumfp*, and why.
SK -- you're hitting the nail on the head, regarding Trigger Man. Though don't forget that was very much a first draft being written for speed. There's a reason why the completed first draft hasn't been posted (or sent to Baen, for that matter). It's being revised, and worked on -- exposition hacked, interest and adventure and flat out stuff happening being added.
Nanowrimo is designed to get something done, not something good. The challenge now is to make it not suck. I'll keep you posted.
It's the Abstract Spoon Problem. Well, that's how I always thought of it in college, anyway--the art department was crammed with students who would, at the drop of a hat, tell you about how their abstract spoon represented the suffering of women in southeast asian sweatshops. (This was based on an actual incident, which I recall because of the voice beating at my brain that was shrieking "DUDE! It's a FREAKIN' SPOON! And it's not even done well!")
I feel a sort of ambivalence with this. On one hand, I believe firmly that any work of art where you have to sit and read the artist statement in order to understand it has failed right out of the gate. A painting should do SOMETHING. The artist's statement can enhance, can clarify, can provide interesting subtexts, can maybe explain the reason that the artist CHOSE the symbolism, but it has to work as a painting first.
They can have depth. Lots of depth. They can work on tons of levels that you won't see without careful analysis, but it's like a staircase--if all the stairs don't work, you're never going to get down there. The top landing is as important as the bottom step, possibly more so.
On the other hand, I write weird little one-and-two paragraph stories to go with my paintings, and even if I didn't suspect they were the best part, my viewers tell me they are. So I probably don't have a leg to stand on complaining about people using the artist statement as a crutch. *grin*
You seem to be missing one important thing: it is not necessary for the method of engagement to be contained within the art itself.
As an artist you can acquire that engagement through the past/outside experience of your intended audience. Your Heinlein example works with this quite well, in that you had the requisite experience outside the context of the book itself to form the necessary engagement. You knew what to look for, or even "how" to look, to gain the insight/enjoyment that the book had to offer.
It didn't "work as narrative first", and can't possibly stand on its own, but all the same you enjoyed it. It is a creative work that spoke to you; therefore, art.
(Note: This comes really close to the whole question of whether or not parody is art, since most parody cannot stand on its own, and requires the audience to have extensive background knowledge to provide engagement.)
For my two cents, I think that for the artist in question it isn't a bad thing that he/she created something that is unable to stand on its own. It is instead altogether unforetunate that the artist was unable to say, "look at it more from this side", or "please read the first two books in the series first" to help a struggling audience find the message that the artist obviously thought was there.
Ahzurdan -- the Heinlein work appealed to me as a student of Heinlein, not as a work in and of itself. I could relate themes and elements back to the works that could actually stand on their own, but I also recognize the essential weakness of this initial work.
I admit freely, I'm a New Critic. I always look for what is there, not for what I have to bring with me to the table. But the point has to be reinforced -- a solid understanding of the metaphor being pushed by a work that itself isn't good doesn't make the work good. It simply doesn't.
Parody is indeed art, but a parody that isn't funny is just sad. The jokes have to work before the skewering of the target becomes apt. Satire, which doesn't need to be funny, still needs to have solid writing, characterization and narrative to be effective. Without them, it simply isn't effective.
It's not that I need to understand Christianity or the works of Edgar Allen Poe to get the intent that's the problem with what we're discussing. It's that my friend was noting significant flaws in the art as art, and the artist was responding that the message forgave those flaws.
That is bullshit. And For Us, The Living is really neat for a Heinlein student to read, and still utterly fails as a Novel.
I would have to say that my biggest pet peeve about the art that Mr. Burns is describing is how little skill it usually shows. "Art" is just an old word for "skill," and I think that in order to qualify as art, a piece should show definite skill. Look at Michaelangelo and look at Jackson Pollack: two totally different styles of art, yet both show extreme amounts of skill. I think a lot of beginning artists use the obscurity bit as a way of disguising their lack of skill. The argument, "It's obscure, therefore it is art," simply doesn't fly with me. I'm reminded of Brent Sienna's definition of small-press comics: "Comics that suck, but it's okay, because they're art."
Since everyone's throwing in their two bits on this idea, I've got a little 0 and 1 of my own.
0: Why would a non-narrative work be unable to use metaphor? Having had to restate yourself a few times, Eric, you've kept that particular point and it sticks out to me. I'm thinking we aren't using the same definition for metaphor.
1: While this doesn't completely relate to the artist in question, there are "alternate" methods of characterization and modes of narration. Not knowing how to understand a work and subsequently considering it trash may owe to a different cultural context, rather than poor ability.
To give a quick example, an American might consider some German theater performances to have rather poor acting or characterization. Above and beyond typical cultural differences, a different theory of how the narrative message is meant to be portrayed and understood is at work. That is, theater techniques developed by Bertold Brecht call for a much different acting style than Americans are used to. While I believe the same logic applies to plenty of abstract art, that's a lot to get into.
Just ideas. :) Not trying to haggle a point.
A non-narrative work can certainly use metaphor. There are many ways that can happen. (Not the least of which is fine art or poetry.)
However, a narrative work meant to convey a metaphor must work as a narrative work before it can convey that metaphor. Similiarly, a painting that conveys metaphor must still be well painted, and a poem that uses metaphor must still effectively use imagry.
The metaphoric message doesn't absolve the artistic expression from artistic requirements. That is the core point, and I'm sticking by it.
This I agree with, wholly. Art doesn't have to be familiar, and nothing -- nothing -- stops the artist from using modes and expressions unfamiliar to the audience.
This all goes back to my initial point not meaning more than it means. The core is this: flaws in the execution are not excused by message being conveyed.
Or, to step into critical theory for a moment: Authorial Intent does not absolve Artistic and Aesthetic Failure.
hmmm.. wasn't it Heinlein who had Lazarus Long state that if an artists wants to get a message across, he had better use imagery and metaphor that the customer understands?
(And that poets who read their verse in public may have other nasty habits. but that's another issue. ;) )
Ok, so just about everything has been said except...you've read the Book of Mormon?
I've read the Book of Mormon, yes.
And Enoch, for that matter.
I'm currently working my way through the Talmud.
I am a total Religions Geek.