What Art Is

What exactly is obscene?  Since the early 1960s, they’ve told us that you know it when you see it.  That’s the definition of obscenity that we’ve all become accustomed to in post-Reagan-era America. For the most part we have accepted it – rightfully so in most cases, I might add.  (It’s the same answer that my college art teachers regurgitated to me when I asked what art is, by the way.)  Most people do not want to or can’t appreciate what others see.  Others make art, right?  That in a nutshell is what separates art from pornography or any other media or idea or perception really.  The seeing is why art is wonderful.    

The best art makes us uncomfortable though, doesn’t it?  Agreed, there is a fine line between art and pornography in some cases and Helmut Newton danced along its edge more prolifically than any photographer before or since.  A much more productive writer than I once said of Newton’s work, The magic of his art is its complete elusiveness, its cunning refusal to admit the true nature of its subject matter: the failure of reality juxtaposed against the triumph of desire. Only a genius can see nearly the exact same reality as every other nobody and express it as art.  That was Helmut Newton’s genius. That’s what art is.

Trent Reznor once famously wrote my whole existence is flawed... The preceding lines of Closer have gained much more notoriety but these are the words I was always more clued into.  Not because I identify with them in the pure sense but because I think I understand what he was trying to say.  By verbalizing the opposite of what he truly felt, he shined a light on our collective (uncomfortable) view of sex, at least our public acknowledgement of it.  At some level and maybe this is a Judeo-Christian hang-up (maybe even more so than just a Southern hang-up as I’ve always thought) we are ashamed of our most basic desires.  When Trent sang I want to f*@k you like an animal, he may well have been verbalizing the emotional connection that he felt with his partner but more likely it was to shock you into listening to what he didn’t think he could say.  My whole existence is flawed?  Yes.  It is flawed because you do not play the same game as the rest of the world.  (I didn’t write the rules but I am very aware of them.)  I believe that Reznor’s acceptance of his supposed depravity is in his own weird way an effort to make the rest of us accept (again) the uncomfortable actuality that we are all depraved on some level, at specific times.  Art is taking the obvious and turning it on its ear to see it more clearly in a way that forces everyone else to see it too, from a different perspective.  That’s why it’s important.

F*@k you, I won’t do what ya tell me…f*@k you, I won’t do what ya tell me…Zach de la Rocha isn’t anyone’s bitch and he made that explicitly clear with every lyric.  He believed in the possibility of this country, its citizens and was justifiably pissed off that it / we did not square with his expectations of that prospect.  He was so committed and assured in his disdain for what he saw as an American ideal, more so a human ideal, that he left Rage Against the Machine – possibly the most important political band ever.  He freaking walked away from the ultimate holy grail of being a rock star to stand with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a revolutionary leftist group in Southern Mexico.  At the height of his career, his individual confidence in personal freedom and expected justice and definitive autonomy insisted that he turn his back on the fame and the stardom and the public acclaim he had garnered through his inimitable talent and concentrate on what he saw as the principal dilemma in the world – he could not resist the call of his own deeply-held conviction to social obligation: he couldn’t not offer a hand up to those less fortunate.  Do you want to know what art is? There it is.  To his devoted fans, this did not come as a surprise – to everyone else in the world, it didn’t even register as having had occurred.  Since jump, I’ve wished for the balls this guy has – the fortitude to believe in anything the way that he does. 

She emerged from the creative Mecca that was the San Francisco Bay Area punk / art scene in 1977.  She shared stages with Jello Biafra early and Supreme Court cases against Jesse Helms as a member of the NEA Four later.  Karen Finley is a performance artist, writer, director, extreme feminist – a lightning rod of controversy.  Upon hearing the news that a 16-year-old girl who had recently been found alive in a garbage bag covered in her own feces but was being accused of staging the incident, Finley took to the stage; naked, smeared in chocolate so as to expose the injustice she saw being perpetrated against young American females.  Her work touches on every single aspect of life that we don’t want to talk about: abuse, sex, disenfranchisement, suicide, politics.  Yes, she exists on the very far reaches of even the NYC art community and only in another galaxy to most people.  (Her writing has made me blush.)  Why should that matter?  Though decidedly extreme, is her brand of art less artistic than any other?  In a world where what’s shocking has become commonplace, I’m surprised that more artists haven’t followed her lead – how else can you expect to get a reaction?  She once squeezed milk from her own swollen breasts to paint a black canvas.  Does that make her more an artist or less a mother?  Should there be a difference?

I saw a video recently of a young lady recounting why her old man rocks.  It was spoken word across the canvas of a single image.  The photograph was of her dad asleep with her oldest sister.  Her sister is (25) years old but has the cognitive ability of a small child.  Pops hates his job but never complains.  Every night he comes home, cooks, eats dinner and watches TV with his little girl curled up against him in her favorite chair until they both fall asleep because that’s what she wants to do.  He’s been a single parent for (13) years.  If that’s not art, I don’t know what is.

Frank Lloyd Wright said to me a thousand years ago in a dream, that space is the breath of art.  I’m not sure I understood it then and I may not yet.  I sure do like the sound of it though.  That statement embodies everything you need to know about anything.  Aristotle had spoken to him prior to our encounter and had relayed this bit of insight; The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.  And then music happened and I heard words like, I don’t believe in the existence of angels…but looking at you I wonder if that’s true…and I knew that Nick Cave must also be art.  I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel; you were talking so brave and so sweet.  Giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street.  If I ever get old, I hope that I’m half the bad ass artist that Leonard Cohen is.  The first time I saw Kahn’s Kimball Art Museum, I cried.  At Rowan Oak when I was a kid I heard Faulkner whisper, Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries…try to be better than yourself.”  That is art. 

Art is everything I’ve written to this point but it is so much more than that too.  Art is the crack of a wooden bat breaking the stifling stillness of a smoldering summer day and the resultant eruption of the crowd.  It’s not only paint on a canvas but also the firmness of your handshake and what that handshake means.  It’s looking a person in the eye or juggling the mania of getting your kids to a piano recital and ballet class and soccer practice all at the same time, on time.  Art is sunsets and dawns and tall grass blowing in autumn wind and early frosts and cricket chirps and the gentle crash a beer can makes when it’s opened.  Art is the feel of sand beneath your feet or the smell of freshly cut grass and the love you feel for your parents and the crush you had on that girl in third grade or last week and every song ever written about anything.  It’s a warm bed on a cold night, the other side of the pillow on a hot one, clean sheets and naps with your dogs or kids on Sunday afternoon.  Art is getting your hands dirty and waking up late and hitting your deadlines, taking care of you and what’s yours.  It’s being stopped in your tracks by simple beauty or your memories of yesterday or whatever it is that stares back at you from the bottom of an empty glass.  It’s the form and function of your life; the silence and the cacophony.  Am I an artist just because I did a bang-up job of mowing my lawn?  No.  But the lawn having been mowed is a wonderful reality that is unequivocally full of art.  Art is possibility; hope for a better tomorrow and a strong belief in the power of yesterday.  It’s a lover’s touch but also the distance between.  Art is whatever is happening to you at this very moment.

Right this second, you are art. 

I may live for only a minute longer than I write this.  If that is fact or I have another summer or another fifty years of summers I will always marvel at art because I see it as life.  My heroes can’t tell me anymore than they already have, can they?  Did Newton and Reznor and Wright or any other human know more about what art / life is than I do, more than you do?  Of course not.  What we do on the regular is a fascinating, unequaled thing. 

If you’ve read this far, chances are better than average that you’ve done so only to see what kind of a mess I would make of this conversation.  We are sadly, trained to expect a negative.  The period at the end of this sentence is a series of question marks.  Are you art?  Would you know the difference?  What do you see when you look at your reflection in the mirror?  Do you want to be anything other than you are?  Who is stopping you?  No matter the answer on a personal level, the answer in the greater sense will always be art. 

If you have any desire to understand what art is, open your eyes – art is everything that you see.

I guess you do know it when you see it after all, eh?

I love art.