Woody Allen, "Midnight in Paris," 2011.
"Art is the antidote to the meaninglessness of existence."
The central line in Woody Allen's new film, Midnight in Paris, is delivered by Kathy Bates' convincing Gertrude Stein to Owen Wilson's equally persuasive nebbish Hollywood-screenwriter-turning-ex-pat-novelist, her hands strongly gripping his undeveloped shoulders. No, art is not a hack job executed by handsome hucksters jostling to keep up with the status quo. To keep a job. Or, to keep a Malibu home. No, art is the most serious of human endeavors, even when couched in comedy. (Hemingway: Do you hunt? Woody Allen: Only for bargains.)
When Bates' Stein spoke the line, I heard it. I audibly responded, the congregant to Woody Allen's preaching. I agree, Amen. But am I worthy of this calling? The artist must not despair, Stein warned. How can a depressed artist deliver on his cosmic duty? Not only giving shape to the aches and pains of the soul, the artist must provide a cure to life's inherent meaninglessness. I am in the thick of a graduate art program that has taught me a lot about the myriad competencies the professional artist must perform to endure in the semi-autonomous field of art, paying little mind to the cosmic expectations of my craft. How can I avoid being depressed when the scope of work is so programmatic: analyze the world and the history of art, produce some claims on these conditions-- claims which may or may not actually be entirely manifest within the work itself--and all the while ensure that the production of some discreet object (or to translate to the the dance-theater context, a 60-80 minute show) is ready for sale, distribution and consumption. The bread and butter of art-making.
I told my friend and collaborator, Brennan Gerard, a secret, "I want to be the inheritor of culture. I want to occupy a privileged position the way artists do in France. I want to receive culture, not analyze it." Woody Allen shares this tragic longing as much as he knows its improbability. No matter how many lovers or how many cities, he would still be faced with the unavoidable, undeniable emptiness of existence (even with the thinning subsidies of social democratic states). He could escape into nostalgia, pull the heartstrings of melancholia, long for another time or place, a world not his own, but in the end, he would have to go back to work. Making stories out of disappointment.
My friend, the French performer Marlene Saldana, would remind me often of her thesis on theater: it is always about life and death. She might have just said death, but I understood she meant that through the contemplation of death, one also learns how to be alive. To be alive to a city, a color, a sound, a joke, a movement, an idiosyncrasy, a piece of news, a line of words, a body working, a cut of fabric. Am I describing the aesthetic? In part, yes. But not the aesthetic as a case of shallow design or empty decoration. This aesthetic demands the pleasure of looking, listening, reading, touching, and thinking. A radical, wild, disturbing pleasure that disrupts the nightmare of rationalization and makes an otherwise empty life into something ravishing. A full life that rages against the utter meaninglessness of existence.
Simone Forti told me in an "advanced improvisation" class in California that when you write, "go for the jugular." She was quoting her own writing teacher, Natalie Goldberg. This bodily reference, a screen for the life-and-death stakes of every creative endeavor, is a welcome antidote to the anemic artistic practice taught to us by school, by the market, by the critical establishment. "Go for the jugular" is a polite way of saying "kill or die trying." You go for the jugular when you are in a fight to the death, when it's you or your opponent. The funny thing about art-making is that "you" are playing both parts, the fighter and his contestant. What you are up against is nothing other than your own despair, your own fear, your own depression. Go for the jugular, kill the bear, and work your feelings into the most outrageous pattern. Those are the stakes.
-R.K.
