3/24/2004 09:44:00 PM|||Andrew|||I've been thinking a lot lately about the nature of Art. In particular, I've been thinking about Art as performance. I wonder whether art (hence lowercase because let's face it, I'm lazy) ultimately boils down to performance of one kind or another. A good number of artists of various flavors have denied this, but the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced of the truth of that proposition. And it's bothersome to me.

An example from my own past will suffice to explain some of what I mean. When I was a freshman in high school, I was wounded grievously by a girl. That's nothing out of the ordinary...I think that probably happens to everyone in high school at least once. But it only happened that once for me (at least in high school). What made things interesting, and where art comes into this story is that instead of moping about in my own mind, I set down not too long after the wounding and starting writing. It was the first time I'd written seriously in a journal, but certainly not the last. In fact, I can trace a whole string of notebook keeping (as I call it, since I do more than merely "journal") stemming from that first moment, culminating in the present incarnation, this very thing you're reading, a notebook of sorts, really. But that's all another story entirely.

The point is, when I began to write I had no motivations other than a need to dump out all the emotions swirling inside of me on to paper, for lack of a better place to dump them. It was as if things were so chaotic that I thought I might burst. And so I started writing, starting briefly with the present, then quickly jumping back to the beginning of events as such, tracing the chain of things forward to the present day. And then I kept up with it, adding entries from time to time, chronicling my emotional state and thoughts as time went on. It's to me a precious thing, and now that I think about it, I really ought to drag that out from wherever it is and read through it.

But the point (really now) is that as I wrote this chronicle of my life, I wrote, unwittingly, not just for writing itself. The art I produced (for writing is truly art) extended beyond itself. Looking back, I realize that I actually wrote to an audience, even not knowing who that audience was. Perhaps at the time I wrote to myself as audience and author simulataneously. I'm not sure. I think perhaps there is more to it than that. But certainly I wrote with the unconscious expectation that I what I was writing was meant to be read. It was meant to be seen, to be experienced. And is this not performance? Of all the arts, acting seems the most clearly performance-oriented, but I think that in all forms of art, performance is inherently there. Art as art is meant to be experienced by another...it is a performance by one individual in some medium, whether that individual's own body (as in acting), some other physical medium (as in painting or sculpture), in ideas and lanaguage (as in writing), or even in raw emotion and lyricism (as in music). And this performance does not exist in a void; no, it is directed towards someone, towards an audience, even if in fact it never reaches that audience. Art as such is the performance of one for another.

This is troubling to me. Something in me, for whatever reason, reacts against the idea that my art, my writing, is performance. That same strand that has move other writers to cry out against this idea rises up within me. I think there are elements of this in Oscar Wilde's famous preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, referenced by me here before, and probably referenced again in the future. Perhaps there is somewhere within the idea that "true" art is done for its own sake, critics and viewers be damned. That to create art as perfomance is in some way to betray one's self, to "sell out" in the vernacular.

It's a struggle that I don't think I'll ever resolve. Even now I wonder, I ponder, I grasp at my own self and wonder of what it means. Thrust upon me is this itself as I write, however. Unavoidably, the blog is performance through and through. And because of that, I struggle with this writing (and even these very words) as authentic. I think in the end the realization strikes that indeed art is performance at its very heart, that the blog is no less an art than the sculpture. Yet thoughts continue to swirl around me as I grasp at wisps of thought.

Until next time...|||108019349576927654|||