art, meaning, despair

yet another diatribe against the question, 'what is art FOR???'

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-Archaic Torso of Apollo, Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Stephen Mitchell

This is an English translation of one of my favorite poems. Every time I read it, I feel a bit as if I’ve been hit over the head. For me, there is intense force in this idea, that an ancient, fragmented statue (or any piece of art) manifests its own positionality, its own gaze, a gaze that demands something from the viewer. The simple mandate of the final line is painful, yet it feels to me as if it forces open a window — an invitation into a different state of being.

Something about art has been bothering me. There is so much of it, we are surrounded by abstraction and mimesis to an absurd degree, and yet there is no condemning or embracing it. Sometimes art brings you into a closed loop, or a dead end — there is nothing available but the story, it leads nowhere. On the other hand, sometimes art asks something of you, sometimes it brings about clarity, and there is a sudden sense that you have managed, with this work of art as your tool, to cut through the noise and see something real that you wouldn’t have seen without it. To have a piece of art look out at you and ask you to change is an extraordinary experience. Yet to spend time with art that nullifies and soothes is to forfeit time and to forfeit life.

People talk about work as something that steals and colonizes one’s time and this is true. I think it is important to acknowledge that art — let’s say, any piece of media that relies on some degree of abstraction or fictionalization — can also steal your time. Especially now that media platforms are designed to keep us engaged, to keep us streaming or bingeing, it seems to me very high stakes to engage with cultural output. There is the possibility that we are buying into systems that are stealing our time, funneled into narratives or artistic experiences that lead nowhere. To be well read, or to know a lot about film or television — are these virtues? Is erudition being warped, repackaged, and sold back to us as omnivorous consumption?

I worry that even the experience of discovering clarity in art has become misaligned. Recently, I read Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth. Like the Rilke poem, this book demands something from the reader, in this case seriousness in the face of despair. Hjorth frames despair as a kind of isolation borne of looking away from the immense pressure that being alive puts on the individual. She articulates flatly, and thrillingly, that life is something to live up to:

… I fell and I hurt myself, but I got up again and now I was here. A mere mortal, but perhaps that was enough? Might life be a serious business that required something of you, a daunting enterprise? The thought, however, wasn’t oppressive but liberating because it’s good to have a purpose, to be given a purpose, it’s a declaration of trust because you don’t entrust a task to someone you don’t respect. It was almost as if I, too, was standing on the bottom step of a dark staircase and could see dawn creep under the door at the top, and I was filled with great faith that I would make it all the way up and step out into the bright ground floor.

-from Long Live the Post Horn!, Vigdis Hjorth trans. Charlotte Barslund

Hjorth and Rilke both tell me that I am not enough, but that this is a good thing — that being alive asks something immense of me. But when I finished Hjorth’s book, after sitting for a moment with the most important thing that I have always known, that being alive is ‘serious business’, I thought, ‘I should read more Vigdis Hjorth’. My energy was funneled away from the insight, and towards the bookstore. In the end, if I have read as much as possible, does this mean that I am erudite and wise, or does it mean that I have turned away, time and time again, from an invitation to wisdom in order to fulfill my role as a consumer of fiction, a role which means nothing to me but has nevertheless structured my entire life?

I don’t think there are easy answers to this, like, ‘get out into your community!’ or, ‘make something!’ or, ‘be more mindful!’ Community, making, and peace of mind are three things that are fetishized because a lot of people lack them, not because they are always and inherently good. I have no desire to push away abstraction in favor of some life in the ‘real world’. Art reflects and shapes the real world. This is something to take seriously, too.

What I do think, though, is that I should be conscious of moments when art seems only to be pointing me towards more art, especially on any sort of ‘platform’. Maybe we should all rethink this impulse to engage further, not in the sense of rejecting anything beyond what we already like, but in the sense of asking: where is this leading? What do I want the end point of this artistic experience to be? Is it more novels on my shelf, or more shows in the queue, or is it something else, something more exciting? For myself, I am thinking now that art should make me want to write, but this is only a first step.