Art as Practice for Life
A metaphor before a nap.
The outlines of this concept came to me as I laid down for a nap today and I figured I’d just kick this out as an exercise.
A music video I directed was released today — always fun, hope you’ll check it out — and a notion occurred to me about the life cycle of a work of art. When an audience receives it, we can presume that most of them take it for what it is. Perhaps other artists and critics may approach it with a sense of “wish it had more of this” or “I thought it could’ve done less of that,” but by and large the work is taken as it is: a complete thought.
But when the artist looks at it, there’s another perspective altogether: there’s the line down the middle of what it is, but for several degrees on either side of that line, there’s an ever-disintegrating angle of possibilities for what it might have been, made up of the choices we didn’t make.
At the start of any work, we have essentially 360 degrees of possibility, and we’re positioned in the center of that circle, spinning like some kind of an asshole, looking for an idea worth pursuing. And at some point, we have to start moving in one direction or another.
This is one way to look at the nature of the process of making art: a gradual narrowing through choice, until arriving at the ultimate realization of that work. If we consider our work to be a subtractive art, like hewing a hunk of marble into a statue, we are chipping away at the infinite scope of our imaginations until we’re left with one refined piece of it (never fear, there is always more marble). And when we reach that refined place, the work of art is complete, or to borrow from the old maxim, “abandoned.”
It occurred to me that in so many ways, this is also the nature of life, a gradual narrowing of choices, but of course in the context of life, the ultimate realization of those choices is...death. That’s the end of the work, the end of the story.
Bear with me, because I think that this is a wonderful lesson rather than a grim fate [I must acknowledge here that I’m 3 for 3 on substacks mentioning death, but I am GOOD].
Perhaps our duty in life is to continue to keep as many choices as possible available to ourselves and those around us as we develop through this “work” of living — to follow the adage owed to Bob Dylan, one that teenagers like myself used to love making our AIM status: to remain in a constant state of becoming, never arriving.
We should always remain open to learning, editing, growing, reframing, attuning, intuiting, collaborating, all the things it takes to get to a complete and satisfying work of art.
And to turn our attention back to that art, when we reach the finished piece, we are lucky to discover that at the end of the journey the work is not dead (like we will be) (I am sorry), though our journey with it may be over. It gains a new life from the moment it’s given over to an audience, where begins their work of reacting, interpreting, judging, imitating and so on.
Hopefully at the end of a life of interesting and dynamic choices, geared toward what may seem like even minor improvements, there will be a work there worth reacting to, interpreting, imitating.
And it seems to me that making art over and over again makes for good practice.
My band name is Some Asshole Having Made a Choice