We think of art as something which we create and then put out in the world, where it affects others and perhaps, in some small way, changes them. What we often ignore or disregard is that in addition to being agents of change we are also change’s clients: Everything we create creates us in turn, and when you gaze long into an empty Word document the empty Word document gazes also into you. It can be difficult to determine who your audience is. Are you writing letters to yourself, or to yet-unknown friends who are similar to who you believe you once were? Are you making art as a byproduct of pursuing ideas and aesthetics you find interesting and edifying, perhaps just publishing research notes on unquantifiable subjects in case anyone else might find them useful?
Something I’ve begun worrying about a lot more over the last few years is what it is, exactly, that we choose to put out into the world with our art. It’s true that you can never really know the impact that something will have until it’s out there having it (and sometimes not even then), but the impact of a work starts where the work itself starts: In the artist.
In you.
We’re all guinea pigs for our own medicines, and though their effects may vary from patient to patient we can still catalog those effects we can observe. Perhaps all this seems like it’s trending gravitationally towards some grand moral injunction against putting ‘harmful’ material into art, against the harms one might do oneself in the name of art, but I resist that gravity. Sometimes medicine is just a small quantity of poison; sometimes poison is just an overdose of medicine.
You are patient zero. Does your art hurt? Does it hurt in a way that brings enlightenment, that helps to decrypt the pain inscribed into the workings of the world? Or is it just a hurt that leaves you wanting to pass that hurt on to others, to chisel pain into stone, codify it into law, make it permanent? Does your art bring comfort? Is it the comfort of seeing that better worlds are possible and that we might yet reach them one day, or is it the comfort of sitting on the throne of skulls that already undergirds this world?
We cannot evaluate the moral trajectory of a piece of art by how it makes us feel, only by how it leads us to interpret those feelings, what it leads us to understand about them, and how that understanding leads us to act. There are certain very important ideas, probably, that can be solely or most effectively expressed through the medium of schlocky horror or saccharine simplistic fables, can only be expressed through ultra-violent action scenes, idiotic comedies, impenetrable art films – and each of these perhaps excels at portraying a specific moral understanding, any one of them may be, by happenstance, the only correct format for the parable that’s taken hold of your heart.
We must, indeed, take care what we put out into the world, what we express into the abyss – but, having taken care, we must express it however we can, whether it be through blood and guts or love and lust or cute and sweet or strange and opaque. Develop the moral clarity to understand where you see the world from and what that means, and then express that in whatever terms are most comfortable to you, no matter how others regard them.
After all, you’re the guinea pig – these experimental results will have no value if you cannot interpret their meaning.
[…] also self-impression, both in the sense of impact and of emulation. We affect and are affected, as I wrote before – and, because we are our characters, we share their fates, suffer with them, die with them, are […]