8 years ago
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The two levels of being in Art
Editorial note: This post is no-holds barred, it's not a sythesized argument, it's just letting my mind go loose, and what streams out is what is being processed, realized, corrected as I type it. The end will likely be sudden, and I may even contradict myself halfway. That's how I roll sometimes...
-D.A.
In the past few years, the strongest theme in my aesthetic of narrative Art has been one of reality. I would strongly make an argument that Art, when properly done, is ontologically true on a very deep level, despite being a "fantastic" story. The choices made by characters need to be real, otherwise we wouldn't go along with them. The themes they address need to be real, otherwise we'd have no reason to watch them. And on the deepest level, our witnessing them has direct implications and consequences on our lives. Therefore, a story is not "just a story." The story is real.
Now, you can quibble with that plenty, that's really a very condensed summary of pages and pages of old essays I've written and wrestled with. I posted them on my old blog, and I still have them archived, though it's been a while since I've dragged them up and revisited them. My main point is that this view of Art as real has two major consequences. One, it elevates its significance to more than just passing entertainment. Two, it requires more ethical responsibility in the telling. If a story is real, then creating evil within it has an intrinsically ethical challenge that needs to be addressed.
Again, this is all prefatory. But I think that gives you enough of a starting point to hear where I want to go next. Recently, I've started considering a second level to this scheme. Art exists on an primary ontological level, yes. But I'm starting to think it also exists on a second-order level as well, one which is more symbolic or representational.
When you see a young boy playing make-believe, he is engaging with forces bigger than himself. He is killing monsters. We laugh at this if we're cynical. But many would argue that the child is doing something very real here. He's living in a world which has evil in it. Where things go wrong. Where there are scary things he knows are bad, but cannot prevent. When we make monsters, we are physicalizing those abstract ideas into a single thing. An entity we can fight and kill. Or, maybe like Jim Henson, we make them comic, and so we no longer fear them, we laugh at them, and gain master that way.
The jump between that child's play and our theatrical works is not a large one, I don't think. The secret, I think, lies in the fictitious element. We create a kind of "unreal" space, wherein we can change the rules to do a kind of otherwise "real" thing. Where the bad guys are completely bad. Where evil has a form. Where the hero can get hurt, but can still stand up. This also lets us do things that mean bigger things. To "kill a monster" is on the primary level an act of violence against a creature, something we would identify as bad and seek to avoid. But on the second-order, it's the act of eliminating the evil which ought to be destroyed.
This leaves a lot of questions regarding where the line is between the first and second order of things. I don't really have the answer to that, this is all something of a new realization to me. This paradigm seems to have something essential in it... but I haven't figured it out.
One of the big caveats which I think definitely needs to be said in this mode of thinking, is an intelligent and self-aware audience. If the audience does not see the second-order, then something has gone wrong. It is in these deplorable cases where we make an ultra-gratuitous film and pass it off as art, using the pretense of an unengaged second order to simply give us the excuse to enjoy the violence and sensual content. But this is a failure in the artist and/or the audience, not a wholesale failure of the work itself.
Another theory I might put forth. (...this one really undeveloped as yet) It seems the biggest thing this symbolic view of Art affords is a certain license to do things on stage which one wouldn't do in real life, only since it is universally understood by the actors and the audience that it is in an "unreal" space... precisely because the actor who gets killed will get up at the end. But the question always comes back to the same bottom line, how far is too far? What is that line?
I'm beginning to suspect that it may have to do with that other trend thrown around a lot lately: realism. In the older comics, the heroes didn't bleed. Not even the badguys. They just got beat up. In Elizabethan drama, if a horrible act of violence happened, it was offstage and referred to... today, we see blood and guts and everything. Now, if the message is to say "violence means people get hurt, and that's bad" okay. But if the message is more second-order, then I think that violence does more to pull the audience out of that higher frame, and more into just seeing violence plain and simple.
Here's an illustration of what I mean. It used to be that cartoons and such were "fake" and we liked action and adventure. We got our virtuous encouragement, but we weren't exposed to all the blood and guts. Then, someday came along that a real fight had to happen. And we saw blood. And we were rightly horrified. Then we made the connection that sometimes fights have to happen, but they have bad consequences and real risks. These days however, it seems that we see so much violence all over the place, we don't mind it so much anymore. "Oh, the other guy gets brutally maimed? That's not too bad, he deserved it anyway..."
So, it's complicated. It seems to me that I do land in circles, since they all come back to "what is actually happening? "What is allowed?" and "Which is good, what is okay, and what is harmful?" To some extent, that always lands on the audience's self-awareness. But I also think the debate just got a lot bigger in scope in my own perceptions...
PS Comments on this one are definitely encouraged. I'm trying to figure this out as much as I'm trying to "share" it. So do you horribly disagree? Show me where. Think I'm on to something but missed it? Fire away...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
So a couple of comments for whatever they're worth...
ReplyDeleteYou may want to re-examine the assumption about graphic violence being new: no doubt our ability to portray such things to a disgusting and overwhelming level is relatively new ("splatter fest" is a relatively recent coinage), but violence in the arts and literature has a long, storied history (and I recall being told at one point that in Elizabethan theater they used pigs guts and bladders for rather graphic effects). No doubt such things cheapen art, but that, in itself, is not a new phenomena (Aristophanes, for example was rather too fond of fart jokes -- among others, in The Clouds, he portrays Socrates as arguing that bees fly by, well, you get the drift). I only say this because I tend to think we moderns are way to self-obsessed ("we've ruined everything") -- no doubt we've ruined things and perhaps even in our own unique ways, but wanton destruction of value is, for better or worse, part and parcel of being human. Generally, I think that what truly cheapens art is not so much excessive violence or a essential loss of moral value but a commodization and commercialization of art as such and the consequent demand for its mass production -- mass production for commercial purposes tend to demand that which garners the greatest profit for the least effort and outlay (as a bit of a subtext to this, I think there is room for even gruesome, -- which, by the way, is an amazing word -- gory violence in art; it is the mode in which our blood and guts are normally presented to us that is cheap and -- here I'll agree -- severely lacking in a moral foundation).
I really didn't mean to go on that long about violence, but I suppose at this point its a fait accompli.
What I really wanted to address -- and what I feel more competent to address -- is the notion of an ontological basis to art. If you'll forgive me for channeling Lacan for a moment, but, in a certain sense, it's the fact that art presents us with a reality that is completely at odds with what is real (i.e., which can never be resolved to a reality) that makes it that much more important -- the story is real, but its reality consists in its not-being our reality. Of course, I suppose that begins to sound as if art is all about escapism or presenting us with a false (and thus acceptable, i.e. livable) reality (yes, I am implying that reality is unlivable), a mechanism for overcoming reality and making it acceptable. Art as escapism seems an insidious view. Rather, I would wish to say that art (as the unreal reality) forces us to confront and attempt to make sense of the "real unreality" in which we live. I realize I haven't explained this "real unreality" (in fact this whole thing being written in medio res, which is to say, unedited, is probably absolutely incoherent); suffice to say, I intend something like this: there is a dual element of reality, a story which we tell ourselves (the reality in which we live, i.e. phenomenological reality) and (to borrow from Lacan) the Real itself. Art, at its best, by confronting us with its unreal realit(y/ies) forces us to confront the unreality of our narrations.
It is from such a basis, I think, that one can derive a moral imperative for art ("moral imperative" as in an imperative to raise our moral awareness, to force us to confront who we are, who the other is, and the relationship between us).
I apologize for using your comments for what is essentially a lengthy, incoherent diatribe, but I did want to show that what you wrote got me thinking... I did have some (as yet not really formulatable) thoughts about what you were saying about evil, but I would just mention (if you can bear to read a Protestant theologian), Barth's formulation of evil as the "impossible possibility" as something that bears consideration regarding the reality of evil as such.
- Ian
Ian:
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments, as a matter of response I agree fully that violence in the Arts is definitely not new, it's not even at its worst, for that you'd have to look to the Gladitorial "games." But you could at least call it cyclical, the rise of graphic violence commonly portrayed on television and film in the past decade is decidedly more prominent, whether you agree with it morally or no.
Jumping off your Elizabethan theater context, I'll bring up one counter-example.
Thomas Middleton's "The Revenger's Tragedy," the play Shakespeare ripped-off to write Hamlet, is about a man who avenges his wife's rape. The initial incident is written into the original production, as was dramatic custom for the era, abstractly. That is because something so horribly graphic and transgressive as that was not to be depicted on stage. I once saw a London production where it was enacted completely on stage. It made me want to throw-up and the images of it still occasionally haunt me years later. This is not good art, this is obscene. (I've gotten into many debates over the "necessity," or at least, utility of such graphicness as a useful "shock factor". I do see their reasoning, but I'm not entirely convinced.)
Now I'll wrap up this whole case with one final note: I'm not arguing that it doesn't happen, but only that it is unnecessary and wrong when it does.
As for your other points, I have not read Lacan, so you're more than welcome to draw from him. I have no problem with the idea of Art being an effective coping mechanism, and therefore "escapist" in a manner of speaking. It sounds more like the same point I'm trying to make, only opting to approach from the exact opposite side of the coin.