Archive for April, 2010

The Illicit Use of Hammers: Graffiti and DRM

Friday, April 9th, 2010

04.09

I have always wanted to be a graffiti writer. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. I never as a young child said that when I grew up I wanted to be a graffiti writer. For one, we didn’t have graffiti in my suburban hometown, and if I’d ever seen a graffito it was probably as the background of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon and I didn’t know people could actually do that. I didn’t want to be a graffiti writer in high school, I was too busy being a poet and a jock. I didn’t want to write graffiti in college, I just wanted to write. I don’t think I even really thought about graffiti as a thing in an of itself (as opposed to thinking of it as a plague of city dwelling people and the pointless defacement of public property, especially in a place where the majority if the graffiti leaned toward racist slurs and proclamations) until after college in the Bay Area when I met actual graf writers at a barbeque I went to in El Cerrito. They were all but retired then, old men in their early 30′s talking about the way that San Francisco used to be, the places you could tag, ghost cities that no longer existed or were so hard to find they weren’t worth looking for anymore. I even wrote about it.

But now that I’ve thought about it, now that graffiti has entered my vocabulary and my consciousness not merely as an illegal and often-times dubious urban building décor, but as a subculture containing its own language, its own history and its own heroes, it is hard to dislodge. It is something that a part of me longs to do, longs to be a part of, longs to contribute to and longs to measure myself against. I don’t think I would be immediately good at graffiti and I’m not sure I would ever be good at graffiti, but in some ways that is not the point. The point is to break out of seeing the world through lawful eyes and break in to (no pun intended) seeing the ways in which I can change the world, the ways in which I can have an effect on the world. While graffiti may not be the most positive change I can effect in the world, the process of revisualising the space around me into something I can act on is something I find appealing.

This is one of the unintended changes brought about by the technological innovation of the spray can. My theme in exploring these unintended effects of technology is always William Gibson’s quote from his story ‘Rocket Radio’: The Street finds its own uses for things. Graffiti is an unintended consequence of the aerosol spray can, and with it comes a shift, albeit a small one, in the power and the voice of people who are dominated by large buildings and the people who own them and have little or no say over where they’re built and what the consequences of their building are. I realize that this is nothing more than a romanticized version of what graffiti is. I realize that most graf writers aren’t revolutionaries, nor even close to as witty, playful or talented as Banksy, but I’m not sure how important that is. The very existence of graffiti, especially artistic graffiti, is in itself proof of a culture of dissent that is alive and well, which I find incredibly satisfying.

Reflecting back on my analysis of the effect the technology of skateboarding had on the community, graffiti has rarely been embraced by the community in the same way that skateboarding was, and this is likely because it’s more difficult to make a profit from graffiti. Skateboarding requires a lot of equipment, and encourages a lot more that isn’t required, it promotes a lifestyle that comes with a lot of clothing and shoes. It’s also highly watchable, as the X-Games have proved time and time again. Thus, the providers of this equipment, real and imagined gear for acting or appearing to be a skater, have a vested interest in lobbying their cities and counties to promote and encourage skateboarding since it funnels money into the city through skateshops via taxes. Graffiti has no real vehicle for an influx of cash except for spray cans and spray caps. Stocking up on graf supplies is as romantic as visiting Home Depot and the art store. The mythos, you might have noticed, is lacking.

The only place you can watch people graffiti is on CCTV. That’s not true anymore, and probably never was, but the reality is that networks can’t program and promote graffiti shows or competitions in the way that they can with “extreme” sports, and without a visual narrative to suck kids in it’s difficult to create a mythos around the leading figures of the art, and therefore nearly impossible to sell those same kids cheaply made products to pursue said pastime. I firmly believe that if networks can find a way to promote something, to eke an ounce of drama out of something and then sell us a product based on that drama they will. The same thing happened with poker 5 years ago when ESPN2 began in depth coverage of the World Series of Poker, exploiting a previously untapped market with the simple innovation of the rail camera that allowed viewers to see the players’ cards.

So the fact that Big Content can’t profit from publicizing and promoting graffiti and the fact that grafitti is blatantly illegal (where skateboarding inhabited much more of a gray area) has made a huge in the way that the two pastimes have been dealt with by society. Graf writing still has cultural cache. Its stories are still small, they are still local, it’s very existence is part of being local, using graffiti to define the limits of territory in urban areas. And I like that. The spirit of graffiti is anti-corporate, anti-business and anti-establishment, and its one of the few places left that hasn’t been co-opted by the success of its practitioners into an unseemly orgy of merchandising and promotion.

And at the heart of graffiti is something that lies close to my own heart. The unintended consequences of the spray can, the uses that these artists have created of their own accord without help from a focus group or a team of engineers is what digital rights management (DRM) seeks to prevent and criminalize; DRM and all its threatening legal language, seeks to put an end to the heart of play that I see in graf writing, seeks to put an end to innovation and invention. If we only ever do what we’re told with what we’re sold the world will be a much sadder place. Imagine if everything we were sold came with DRM, or rather RM, since hammers and spray cans aren’t virtual. Imagine having to sign a 26 page legal document to buy a hammer promising that you’ll only use it as the manufacturer intended and that you wouldn’t lend it to anyone else for uses proper or improper since you are the sole recipient of the product. One day your neighbor spies you using your hammer to pry open your rusty shed door and BAM your sued for violation of your hammer rights management. It’s absurd on so many levels that its laughable, but we’ve been led to believe that the hammer we buy from iTunes is a different kind of hammer because it’s art. Except it’s not a different kind of hammer, it’s the same kind of hammer with a more rhetoric and a better legal team.

And look what beautiful things people have made through their illicit use of hammers! I know that all graffiti isn’t beautiful, and even the beautiful stuff isn’t some people’s taste, but what’s at the heart of graffiti is truly creativity. People are (mis)using the tools they have at hand, cheap paint and available urban and copious suburban wallspace to practice and express their creativity. This is art. This is life. This is beautiful. And yes, highly illegal, and it’s likely that it’s all the more tantalizing for its outlaw stature.

This is why I admire graf writers, because I see in them the ability to rebel, to reinvent and repurpose in playful and creative ways that feel vibrant and alive. It does not seem mature to me to like this, it feels infantile and immature, that graf writing is a petty form of self-expression that, writ large, neither improves the communal landscape and hurts small and large businesses alike (and likely hurts small businesses more), and I agree with all of that. But at its heart, in the theoretical space where I keep the spirits of the ideas and realities that excite me graffiti is a form of dissent, of civil disobedience that I was never brave enough to try nor enlightened enough to engage in. In the black and white world that I grew up in, graffiti is a colorful reminder that it’s important to break the rules, and the beauty that can develop if we do.

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Skateboarding, Technology and Urban Planning

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

I was watching “Shackle Me Not” a skate video from 1988 last night. I made it through two-thirds of it before I had to turn it off due in large part to nausea and small part to exhaustion. I am not, the video reminded, as young as I used to be, and yet, even if I’d watched this video at 15 I would still have been just as nauseated, though probably not as exhausted.

What I took away from the video, other than an upset stomach, was a new appreciation for the skateboard and, in a smaller sense, the essence of skateboarding. I realize that this is an oversimplification coming from a man who, though he was provided with his skateboard at the age of 7 (as a prerequisite for the Midwesterner entering into costal culture) never learned to ollie, and whose closest brush with skateboarding in the last decade or so was provided by Playstation and Tony Hawk. I also realize there is a great chasm between those for whom skateboarding is a consuming passion and those for whom skating is a culture or a lifestyle. I want to cut away the chaff, the culture, the media and the hype and just think about the technology of skateboarding.

Skateboarding is, essentially, a technological adaption of urban inhabitants to more easily and enjoyable traverse the concrete and asphalt of large metropolises and swathes of suburbia. Just as the surfboard, to whom the skateboard owes much, was a technological innovation to utilize the natural and free power of the waves, the skateboard is a technological innovation that builds on and enhances a combination of technologies to take advantage of the urban and suburban abundance of “free” space.

The first question that springs to my mind is “Why not a bike?” The real answer is to this false dichotomy is that many of the kids who bought skateboards also had bicycles. But the separation of the bike from the skateboard reveals a couple of things. One, a skateboard is for the most part cheaper than a bike is. Two, being smaller, it’s much easier to store. Three, being small enough to keep on your person, it’s much harder to steal. These three things specifically, I think, lend the skateboard to being a more popular urban mode of transportation and entertainment than a bicycle would be.

What’s really interesting to me is the way that urban and suburban skateboarding are a tool for a reimagining of communal space and urban planning, and the way that this technological innovation forced large urban and suburban areas to rethink the way that they planned space for children and teenagers. The skateboard is a tool for people, mostly adolescents, to reinvent the urban space. The curb is no longer a space delineating the sidewalk from the street, a warning track used solely as a code for parking permissions, but a thing in and of itself to be used in the practice and demonstration of the skill of grinding. Handrails and stairs are no longer just passageways between walkways of different altitudes, but long railways on which we can precariously transport ourselves and obstacles to be overcome by long jumps on a skateboard. Concrete benches are the perfect platform for an ollie to manual to kickflip. This is a very exciting thing, if you’re not a city official. It opens up new possibilities in every crevice of concrete, asphalt and brick. It regenerates old and otherwise useless areas and edifices and extends the entertainment and exercise options for children and young people in what would otherwise be an environment hostile to play. The skateboard is in many ways a kind of cybernetic enhancement of the human body to take advantage of its urban surroundings.

But this adaptation by urban and suburban youth was directly at odds with local authorities. The skateboard as a mode of transportation represents a basic disregard for the accepted use of public space, since they belong neither on the sidewalk (pedestrians) nor on the road (cars and bikes (which, though begrudgingly accepted as cohabitants of the road, also inhabit a similar limnal space as the skateboard). In a very fundamental way to choose a skateboard is to step outside of the realm of accepted behavior and to be at odds with urban and suburban authority.

This is less true today than it was in 1988 when “Shackle Me Not” was released. Cities and communities have had decades to respond to the ‘plague’ of skateboarding and the stigma that comes with it. The first and most predictable reaction was rejection. Cities immediately posted passed anti-skating legislation and “No skateboarding” signs all over the themselves in an attempt to crack down on what they saw as a dangerous and destructive pastime with little or no redeeming value. This led to the famous slogan “Skateboarding is not a crime” as well as the totally clichéd moment in every skating video where they skater is shown skating in areas where it is strictly forbidden, only increasing the status quo of skaters as rebellious, anti-authoritarian figures, much to the glee of 13 year olds across America and the irritation of city officials.

The uselessness of the laws and signs as well as the continued destruction of public spaces by the skaters led in two directions: the stick and the carrot. The first was to fundamentally alter the public space to make it uninhabitable by skaters. The most clear example of this is in anti-skate devices appearing in public places. This has to be one of the worst ideas in the use of public space history, since these beefed-up L-brackets not only ruin the space for skaters, they also ruin the space for the public, while purporting to reclaim the space for the public at the same time. In time city planners came to integrate these anti-skate devices more elegantly as seen in San Francisco’s Embarcadero, but they’re still very clearly recognizable for what they are: a sad bureaucratic compromise of a city unable to come to terms with the needs and desires of its citizens.

The carrot offered by many communities was the skatepark. My own suburban hometown opened its own skatepark in 1998, and many communities all over the US did the same thing, some much earlier than others. I’m impressed by the behavior on both sides of the disagreement in this compromise, since skaters had to step up and make the case that skating had beneficial results for the kids who skated (in contrast to its bad boy, anti-authoritarian image) and communities had to get over their stereotypes of skating as an anti-social even criminal pastime and accommodate those people who want to do it. In a very small way this shift was akin legalizing marijuana; city authorities making official urban and suburban space for people they had long considered and treated as criminals, which doesn’t happen very often.

The move of the skater from the streets to the park as a general theme wasn’t the end of the story, it was in some ways just the beginning, but it did end a lot of the acrimony between skaters and bureaucrats that had developed from the inception and widespread adoption of the skateboard. Part of that is that the kids that started skating grew up into the people with influence in their communities, they had become the people they once rallied against as adolescents. Some of the acrimony will never go away; there are plenty of kids out there looking for trouble, and one of the easy ways to find it is to skate where people don’t want them to do it. But the larger narrative of how a technological innovation, developed by surfers to entertain them when the waves were flat, changed the way that kids play in the cities and the ways that cities view themselves and the pubic and private spaces that they enable for the most part came to a close with the widespread adoption of urban and suburban skateparks.

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The Technology of Memory

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

I often feel bad that I don’t have a better memory. My memory isn’t bad, but it’s not good either. I have never had an easy time of memorization, memorizing Bible verses and acting lines throughout high school was always difficult for me. Though it was something I could accomplish, it took a lot of time and patience, and I never got to the point that I was able to easily commit things to memory. Now my memory in some respects is good, but in others spotty. If I want to remember a birthday or anniversary it has to be in my phone or I have to see it on Facebook to remember it, otherwise everyone but my immediate family is completely forgotten about, and this makes me feel bad, because remembering things in our culture has a high social value.

And yet, I also conversely believe that memory, specifically in the form of memorization of facts, figures and narratives, is no longer a necessary technology, it has been surpassed numerous time in the same way that being able to walk long distances is no longer a necessary technology, since it too has been rendered, for the most part, obsolete. This is not to say that memorization, much like walking long distances, isn’t good for humans and doesn’t serve a purpose, but rather to say that I’d like to examine the idea I have that because my memory is not good I am not succeeding as a person, working hard enough because if I was I would remember things better.

I would like to first posit that memorization is a function of technology. A more apt description might be technique, and I think that the shared root of the two words, ‘techno-’ reveals that memorization on a grand scale is not an inherently human trait, but a skill learned through the application of a method or system devised by humans to artificially increase our capacity for the long-term storage of information. When viewed from this angle, the act of repetition, which I would posit is the most basic form of memorization (rather than the more advanced technique of mnemonics) is strikingly identical to a computer writing information onto its hard disk; the difference being that a computer is a thousand times more efficient.

In this sense memorization is not a signal of high moral character but merely the adoption of technology for use in day to day life. What’s more interesting is that the first use of this memorization technology that comes to my mind is in the use of ancient storytellers, who memorized their respective canons and passed them down to the next generation through a combination of repetition and their own homebrew mnemonic devices. While these stories weren’t just stories in the way that contemporary culture has demeaned the concept (an imaginary or fictional tale bearing little or no relevance to the actual world except through its social value of humor, education or moralization), they were the stories of where the storytellers had come from, what they had survived and what they had accomplished. These stories were the oral history of the people who were telling them, and the technology of memorization was their link to the past, to their heritage and their culture. Thus the technology of memorization is indistinguishable from the art of storytelling and the science of history.

But not all of humanity was content with the technology of memorization of oral histories. Some humans altered the technology of information storage; they upgraded their memory capacity through the use of symbols and ultimately the development of writing. The cave paintings in Lascaux are the some of the first efforts at upgrading memory capacity, and although primitive and short sighted (they ran out of memory very quickly!), opened the door to improving the technology of memory. Eventually the pictures evolved into symbols and the symbols into words, a huge technological advancement. Though writing, and its opposite reading, were neither popular nor ubiquitous until contemporary times, the creation of a new form of memory meant that a record of events or a group of stories (really, what a contemporary distinction I’ve made) could be recorded without memorizing them. This had its advantages and disadvantages. Records could survive even if the people whom they happened to and who first recorded them didn’t, living long lives in libraries or etched into the walls of tombs. The flip side is that all writing is coded to those who don’t understand the lexicon, thus all records are hidden until such time as someone with the patience, skill and desire to unlock the code does so. The records are also much more cumbersome than the human record. To flee a monastery in the midst of Viking raid is fairly easy compared to fleeing a monastery in the midst of a Viking raid carrying the painstakingly recorded multivolume history of the area and its people. Thus the development of writing, though a very useful technological leap, likely didn’t have a great effect on the memory of most of the individuals for a very long time, though it did have a great effect on the survival of the memories of groups of people who would otherwise have long ago been forgotten or overlooked, which is strikingly valuable today.

Until the spread of literacy writing and reading were a very limited technological skill set, but in today’s society that’s no longer the case. In the modern world literacy is ubiquitous (99% of Americans can read) and there is more recorded information than any one person could ever hope to read in 100 lifetimes, much less one. Memory is cheaper than it’s ever been and information is flowing faster than our mechanical memory can record it. I no longer need to memorize statistics, because for instance, I can pause my writing, flip over to Firefox, type ‘American Litera’ into the Google and Google will finish my typing with suggestions. Our technology anticipates our needs, further reducing the need for the memorization of facts, figures and even spelling. This is, however, an interface; the technology needs a user, it cannot determine what we need on its own.

The outsourcing of memory to machines and the ubiquity of literacy has decreased the need for the personal technology of memory and increased the need for something called meta-literacy, media-literacy or simply filtration. The personal technology of the information elite is no longer memorization or literacy, the two technologies that are the foundation of where we’re at, but filtration. This technology, even at its lowest level, is far from ubiquitous. For instance, according to a 1993 study by the US Government ’21% to 23% of Americans were not able to locate information in text”, could not “make low level inferences using printed materials” and were unable to “integrate easily identifiable pieces of information.’ So almost everyone can read what is written down, many of them don’t understand what it means or what its significance is. Memory and literacy are requisite building blocks for this pyramid, but the new peak is filtration. The first requisite is the memory of the millions of computers that store the information we’re accessing conveniently termed the World Wide Web, the second requisite is the ability to decode the symbol system that the information is coded in, i.e. literacy. But these two alone are not enough to get good information for the Web.

To extract useful, relevant data we must not only have access to the information and then know how to read the actual, basic language, but we must also be able to navigate a loosely codified matrix of symbols and signs that have nothing directly to do with the English (or Chinese or Urdu…) language in which the information is encoded, but are directly relevant to the authenticity and authority of the information we’re examining. These codes are likely infinite and constantly evolving, since the code that the Oxford scholar is using to navigate the jungle of information is not the same code that the Oakland crunker is using to do the same thing. In the world where memory is cheap and literacy is ubiquitous to be successful in using the Internet, watching television or even navigating a large metropolitan area, we must be able to discern useful information from useless information, we must actually read less in order to learn more, and to read less we must construct our own personal filters, our own personal structures of authenticity and authority to help us ‘read’ the metacontextual data that is always attached to the information being offered in order guide us to new and relevant information.

This is new. This is not how it has always been. Our generation has access to more (conflicting) information than any generation before has. Thus memorization of the 50 states and 194 (Google isn’t sure about this one) isn’t nearly as important as it used to be. The Internet will take care of that for us. What the Internet will not take care of is teaching us to discern useful and trustworthy information from useless and untrustworthy information. The Internet will not teach us how to do this, in fact, the Internet will encourage us not to do this, as it is comprised of sites that would prefer us not to be meta-literate, not to have filtration systems since the most profit, legal and illegal, scrupulous and unscrupulous, comes by taking advantage of the unaware. Certainly on a basic level it is unlikely that even the most media unsavvy will fall for a phishing scheme or be lured into divulging personal information more than once, since this powerfully and directly effects our ability to survive, but will most people take the next step to determine what information can be trusted and what can’t? Will they, in short, develop their own filter, their own critical thinking skills to examine the information that is being presented? Not likely. This example from the information technology blog ReadWriteWeb.com is incredibly telling about the incredibly low meta-literacy levels of most internet users, and I think another good example is software installation. How many people do we know who are smart, thinking individuals, very successful in other realms of society, who still can’t, no matter how many times they install a program on their computer, unclick the “Install Company X’s toolbar,” button, so their web browsers are riddled with useless, potentially harmful, information-gathering novelty toolbars? In my life, I’ve known a lot of those people. They have been taught to trust the companies that they are purchasing or using products from, and as such have no concept that they are being given something they don’t need. As basic literacy was slow to catch on, so too will meta-literacy.

For me, meta-literacy is what I’m good at, extracting information from the flood of data that threatens, on a daily basis, to overwhelm me (and you). So, no, I don’t have a good memory. I will likely never memorize another sonnet or soliloquy, much less the spelling of soliloquy (thanks MSWord!), but in the world that I inhabit, those skills are a waste of my time and energy. Sure, the one time a decade that I decide to hand write a letter I have to do a couple of drafts, but in the long run, I save a lot of time at the computer by letting the more efficient machines take care of that for me so that I can spend my time and energy sorting through the useless information to find and interpolate the useful.

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The iPad and Comic Books

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

I was looking at the demonstration of the new Marvel Comics app for the iPad posted on BoingBoing.com today and I have to say that my immediate reaction was ambivalence, equal parts, “Oooh, shiny!” and “How can I appreciate a two page spread on this plastic piece of shit!?” I admit that the technology and the layout of the app itself appear top notch, that they’ve done an amazing job of user interface (UI) and that browsing through my eComic collection or their iPad store looks incredibly intuitive and, dare I say, even fun. Then the video demonstrates the way that the comic book reads, and the graphics in the video are very impressive. There are good, high resolution images which can be zoomed in on and examined in detail. The minutiae of the digital comics will likely be better as a whole than on “real” paper comic books, since there’s every chance that a copy I buy at the store may be smudged or a detail tucked away inside the crotch of the book, and there’s no chance that either of those things will happen in the digital version.

But, being very conservative at heart, my reaction was mitigated by the Idea of the Comic Book! This app, my conservative heart declared, is a travesty! It destroys the purity of the two page spread that’s been carefully developed and evolved since the 1930′s by artists who never even heard of a computer. What will this rectangular monstrosity do to the innovation and invention that so many artists have brought to comic books industry over the past 80 years? Long live paper comics!

I think that this voice of mine has some good points. The Marvel app does a lot of things well, but it doesn’t reproduce the effect of reading a comic book, nor can it every hope to do that. And there’s certainly some valid concerns that the experience of reading comics will truly become dreadful and monotonous reading from a plastic screen (not that dreadful, monotonous comics every put fans off of buying them before).

Comics, much more than books, are a design medium. The structure of a novel is a conceptual equation, explicitly appreciated by very few, and visualized by even fewer. The physical way in which the text is laid out, except in the most extreme cases, has absolutely no effect on the structure of the novel. This is what makes eBooks so attractive is the fluidity of their content. Whether I can see the next page of a novel or not makes absolutely no difference. Recto and verso become forgotten structures in the digital ether where every page is a front page, and there is no back.

Comics, on the other hand, are a primarily visual medium and the media through which they are communicated matters greatly to the structure of their composition. Viewing a comic book on a pad of any kind, bit it an iPad a Nook or a game changing device we haven’t met yet, fundamentally alters the way that comics are read, which in time will fundamentally alter the way in which comics are created. The kids growing up on pad comics (and in five years pad readers will be so cheap that there will be kid friendly devices designed specially for comic books, likely devices designed in synergistic efforts between the comic book companies themselves and clever startups with new ideas, like screens so thin and flexible they can be rolled up and bent in whatever direction without significant damage. Both of the majors will have their own with competing gimmicks to draw in tween consumers, with high-end multifunction devices available to more discerning, and wealthy, consumers) will have a fundamentally different understanding of the visual narration than I did growing up on 8.5×11″ paper comics.

What the Marvel iPad app really does is forces us to reevaluate our understanding of visual narration, of which comic books is only one part, albeit an emotionally important part to people like me. One of the things highlighted in the BoingBoing demonstration is the reading panel by panel feature that the app offers, immediately rendering the reading experience much more cinematic, a feature that likely has great appeal for some, but not for me. One of the things I love about the comic style of visual narration is its ability to take me out of the ease of cinema and force me to imagine the exciting things happening outside the borders of what I can see of the world being presented to me. Matt Forsythe’s Ojingogo does this incredibly well, and creates a stunning world without the use of words or colors, simply through the use of visual narration. This is, of course, still very possible in pad form, but is it likely? No. The fact is that gems like Ojingogo aren’t any more common now because of the paper format of comic books. The 8.5×11″ format is the current magnet for replication, and in a decade or so the 8.5×11″ tablet will be the new magnet format.

Which is not to say that innovation is dead. The pad format offers opportunities that the static comic book never dreamed of. What about a visual narrative that scrolls from right to left and is read not in boxes, but more like a Mario Brothers game (or an Egyptian Papyrus, if you want to get historical about it)? And Choose Your Own Adventure comics have never had an opportunity like the pad format presents to them. These are just a few of the possibilities that the new format and technology present to the structure and design of visual narrative. Most of them will not be explored, and even fewer of them will be successful. We humans like our stories in a certain format and that format has been replicated over and over for centuries, and the novelties that are spun off from that main branch of storytelling are fun for those of us who enjoy the meta-contextual narrative of what stories are, how they’re formed and what effect they have, but for most people just having an escape from their daily existence is the most important piece of a story, and the pad format will provide that in many forms, from video games to online dating to chatroulette. Comic books are just one sliver of what the pad format can deliver, and in delivering, fundamentally transform.

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An Artist’s Disguise

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

I am always interested in ideas of the Artist. It is a nearly impossible thing to avoid in Western society, these ideas of artists. The general stereotype of artists is that all inspiration is genius, essentially an act of inspiration, usually spurred on by a mystical sort of self-destruction that. The two things are difficult to separate in contemporary Western culture, in fact, to the point that our collective stereotype of an artist might best be expressed as an introverted, selfish person (usually a man, but sometimes a woman, though none spring to mind off the top of the head) who pursues their Work at the cost of their health and relationships. The one that springs most readily to mind is for me always Amadeus. The movie paints a stark (and historically false) contrast between the title character Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose genius needs no encouragement and is free to chase skirts all day and still write the most heavenly music, and his contemporary and jealous rival Antonio Salieri who though he works hard cannot attain the genius of Mozart’s music (and is ironically doomed to be one of the few people on Earth who can appreciate its purity and beauty). While the movie itself is a work of art (and netted F. Murray Abraham an Oscar), very little of it is historically factual. Mozart and Salieri’s “rivalry” is blown totally out of proportion, and the movie neglects to mention the fact that Mozart had been training as a musician since the age of 4, a fact that Malcom Gladwell sanely reminds us of in his book Outliers, and reminding us how much work Mozart had put it by the age of 20 to be the ‘genius’ that he was.

This is the usual stereotype that I run into about artists, but today on Facebook I ran into a variation on this theme, essentially that the concept of being an artist allows an individual to ignore the good of the community and pursue their own selfish interests, and that the space of the individual, the ego, if you will, is infinitesimal in size when compared to the group. My friend went on to say that the day he had the realization that the needs of others transcended his own was the day he put aside being an artist. I found this statement both insightful and disheartening, and said as much in my comment, which is reproduced nearly verbatim below.

Oh friend, I couldn’t agree/disagree with you more! Certainly in comparison to the needs of community the internal space is insignificant, yet for the majority of us it is that very insignificant internal space that is the engine for most of the mysterious, arbitrary and irrational decisions that we make affecting the community as a whole. Thus its size in comparison to that which it affects is less important than the size of the effect it can have on that greater whole. The impact of a single decision issuing from the internal space can have devastating consequences for the community and communal space.

It seems strange to lay aside the identity of the artist in order to enter into the community, since the community needs artists as badly as it needs scientists. While I believe there is a stereotypical or immature view of the artist as a being beholden to no rules or regulations, free to move in the world without attachment, focused solely on herself and exploration of herself, it is certainly not the only view or even the most productive view of the artist (but it is the one, I believe, that sells the most records, books and movies). My goal is being a human is not to put my own needs ahead of the community (selfishness) nor to put the communal needs ahead of my own (martyrdom), but to find balance between the two. That is my spiritual journey. Finding ways to express the road I walk in maintaining that balance is my artistic one.

The community needs artists as much as scientists, for artists shed light on that mysterious internal space that is at the core of our humanity, ideally helping the rest of us to understand ourselves and our motives better, helping to make sense of ourselves and help us to fit better in the communities of which we are a part, a kind of tiny enlightenment, if you will.

I know this isn’t always how it works out (how does Lady Gaga or Dashiell Hammet help me understand myself better, for instance), nor do I think all art must be committed to the act of enlightenment. The world would be a monotonous and dreary place if this were the case, but art is one of the few places outside the realm of religion where we as conscious beings can explore the concepts and ideas of self-hood and existence, and those concepts and ideas and the artistic expressions they motivate have been as integral a part of community and society for as long as there have been societies to speak of. The arts were just as important to the Greeks of the Golden Age and the Italians of the Renaissance as the sciences were, and for a long time (until the Industrial Revolution, let’s say) the two were inseparable, as embodied perfectly in the genius of Leonardo.

One flip-side to the stereotype of the Selfish Artist is of course the stereotype of the Noble Scientist, in pursuit of the Truth, somewhat ironic since this is the same claim that the stereotypical Selfish Artist is seeking as well. There is nothing more inherently noble or rigorous in the identity of the scientist; rather your expression of what it means to be a scientist is in fact representative of your growth as an individual. And whether we label that collection of ideas and experiences artist or scientist, the importance lies in the growth and your reflection upon it.

What was most important to me in this articulation was the separation between the line I walk as a spiritual being and the line I walk as an artist. Art is an expression of my journey, an articulation of my actions and reactions to the stimuli I experience as I stumble through this life, but I do not think it can be the thing itself, which is something that I hadn’t realized. If I live for art alone then I am merely living for the experience of something so that I may in turn articulate it in space, either as a performance, a written record, a vocal recording etc. I begin to experience the stimulus not for the sake of the stimulus, but for what I might produce from the stimulus. And this is fine if every stimulus produces and artistic response, but what if they don’t? What happens to the songwriter who writes amazing songs about breaking up when they’re happily engaged in relationship with someone? In the simplest terms, what happens to the tortured artist when they get happy? The art must be left behind because their concept of an artist is someone who is tortured, and they no longer qualify, and for someone who has structured their lives around the pursuit of art, this is devastating, and true happiness seems impossible.

I am that person; for a long time I committed my life to writing, the point and purpose of my existence was to write, it was my gift and I used it well, though never well enough to be truly satisfied. But when I met my wife my writing dried up because, in the simplest terms possible, I did not know how to write and be in relationship. This created a situation where I was happy with my woman and unhappy simultaneously, because in a strange way, she was also the reason I wasn’t writing. Thus she was both the source of my happiness and my unhappiness, my freedom and my prison in large part because I had built my life around art instead of around my life. I am not demeaning the place of art in any way shape or form. I need art to live, I need writing to truly be happy, but I don’t need JUST writing to be truly happy. I need writing and relationship and when writing WAS my relationship it was not possible to be happy with myself, my life and my partner simultaneously.

It has taken me five long years and a journey through the darkest parts of myself in order to find the time, space and ability to write again (I touch wood even as I type this, knowing how fickle this gift can be), but more than anything I was clearing out the internal paths of a lot of collected emotional bullshit; shining light on many beliefs that led to dysfunctional and self-destructive behavior, and though they weren’t the traditional bad habits associated with being an Artist, they were still related to my pursuit of art. It has taken me a long time to find a way to sit here again and have the patience and courage (rather than the need and self-abandonment) to write about my life, but it seems, for the moment, to be working.

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