E S S A Y 5: Success in Gravity is Only Falling.
And magically
And magically
Salmon falls
Magically
– Harry Nilsson with Klaus Voorman, from the ‘Duit Mon Dei’ LP.
*
Success! In Art! Is Difficult! What is an appropriate metric for judging it, anyways?
**
Success in Art may mean sales to a celebrity or an institution, though barring sales to a
celebrity or an institution it may mean sales to friends and family. Success in Art may mean
representation by a gallery, though barring representation by a gallery it may mean seasonal
rotation in a stable. Success in Art may mean a solo exhibition in a beautiful space, though
barring a solo exhibition in a beautiful space it may mean a group thing in an interesting
room. Success in Art may mean money, though barring money it may mean a hedge on a
future exchange of some other kind of currency. The myth of exposure in the guise of free
content, say. And so on. Success in Art may be a series of negotiated disappointments, to be
sure. However these measures of success do not really address the fire part of fire. Instead,
they address the area made comfortable by the fire, where folks sit around and talk about the
color of the flames, or remark on their size, or complain about which way the smoke blows,
or remember other fires in other backyards on other evenings which were more successful
than this one. However a truly successful fire is successful because it does exactly what is in
its nature– it burns according to the availability of a selection of resources– and so a
discussion of its success necessarily includes an index of fuels, first and foremost.
***
How then to discuss success in the Art part of Art, which is forever in the act of
devouring its own indices? It goes like this; when Art is pronounced to be about
something, it christens a place for its opposite as well. Left hand, right hand. And so the
components of Art are not worth parsing, nor is there time to do so; they arrives to us and we
know when they do. It is for the same reason that Art cannot be taught any more than hunger
or sweat. It is its own Thing, and it was buried in our psyche before a choice was made to
cultivate it. A discussion of success in this Thing, then, is a better couched as a two-handed
discussion of degrees of pursuit. One hand: success is the ability of the Artist to pursue this
Thing according to its nature, and in doing so to fully realize the Thing’s unique Thing-ness
regardless of the results. The rider allows their back to be broken by the bucking of a wild
horse because the horse is beautiful as it moves, and because the rider chose to approach
it. Other hand: success is the ability of the Artist to recognize the special qualities of the
Thing, to arrange them just so, and to present a semblance of the Thing to folks who are too
busy, or too callous, or too talented in other areas to know about the Thing otherwise. The
rider breaks the horse and rides it back to town so that other people can see it, tamed though
it has been, because a horse at a canter is still quite a thing.
****
As I think of it, though, the image of the horse and rider is not the closed system it
should be — the horse can leave, the rider can take another horse, or walk, or drive. The
agency of the participants lacks the unending movement of the project of Art; the way that it
does not rest, even in sleep. Consider instead the image of a planet in orbit, forever seeking
resolution to the dual forces which drive it. The first force is the unforgivingly attractive pull of
gravity emanating from a central point more massive than the planet itself. The second force
is the planet’s own forward momentum, propelled perhaps by its history with other attractors,
or something in its childhood, shooting along a vector from here to who-can-say-where. Were
the planet’s own momentum to overcome the pull of gravity at the center of its orbit, it would
leave the path of its orbit and become, at least for a time, lost in a vacuum. On the other
hand, were the gravity at the center of the planet’s orbit to overcome its forward momentum,
the gravity would pull the planet closer and closer and closer towards oblivion; unfit for the
larger world; self absorbed beyond use; cloistered; insane.
*****
Ultimately, the business of fires, and the business of horses, and the business of
planets moving, is the business of balances. The introduction of oxygen, just not too much.
Letting the horse run until it is tired, and then taking an Advil. Constantly falling in an orbit,
and not panicking because of it. Regardless of the model we use for discussing it in the
abstract, all of this Art will be something we actually leave behind. Practically speaking, there
will be drawers of it, bags of it, piles of it, apartments and studios and warehouses and
landfills full of it. However all of this Art will only be one facet of what we will each of us leave
behind, and as much as we each intend to live on through the drawings we made hung on
the walls of the rooms we moved through while we were alive, we will live on more
completely in the folks around us. It is short sighted and foolish to put the needs of Art before
the needs of friends and family. Success in Art, then, is success in understanding how to
effectively merge the necessary egotism of a studio practice into the great joy of a connected
life. All else is fetishism, or selfishness, or buying in to a bygone myth about the primacy of
Art above decency, which is surely a reflection of social luxury more than it is an earnest and
patient evaluation of our own ability to–as a species– recognize, index, and truly appreciate
the hilarity of our own self awareness.
The End.