the courage to create
fake vulnerability and what real art requires
I have been trying to make art again. Writing is, I guess, my attempt to innoculate myself to the sort of vulnerability that art requires, which feels impossible in this era where “authenticity” is a brand and my friends won’t even read my writing, let alone actual books. Still, the compulsion never leaves, so here we go again.
I have this problem as an artist, which is that artmaking is extremely stressful to me. Lately I am trying again to keep a sketchbook, and let me tell you, it is excruciating. I think it’s been about three years since I made a painting that wasn’t for a freelance job, and I tend to try and optimize for doing the minimum number of paintings/drawings required to cover my half of rent and keep myself in bacon and cigarettes.
At the same time, art is a compulsion. My fingers itch for the feeling of putting ink or paint on paper. I crave the luxurious experience of putting together beautiful shapes and colors. A few years ago I considered giving up entirely on trying to make art— would it be a relief to just… do something else?— and the thought of it filled me with incredible despair. I don’t really know who I am if I am not making things, but more than that, the urge just never goes away.
So, I’m fucked both ways from Sunday. Artmaking is, to me, a self-harming compulsion, but if I stop trying, I think I will just sort of wither away into dust. (I know a couple of people who have “quit art,” and I am ambivalently sad for them and hugely envious at the same time.)
I have spent about the last decade trying to understand this problem, or at least figure out how to work around it. I have asked a lot of my artist friends what they think is wrong with me and what I should do about it. The general advice is an artistic version of “be yourself”— loosen up! Lower the pressure, let go of your expectations! Make some random marks on a paper, make something stupid and pointless, stop taking it so seriously, quit being so precious.
I’m sure this is perfectly good advice for some people, but it does not work for me. On the rare occasion that I can force myself to follow it, the agony of the process is no different, and the end result is especially repulsive to me. Instead, I have been trying to argue with my amygdala by thinking about what art is and what it is for. If I cannot banish the agony, maybe I can find a good enough reason to endure it anyway.
AMERICANS THINK IN SHOPPING LISTS
Lately I have been reading Rollo May’s The Courage To Create, which a friend was kind enough to give me after I saw it on her bookshelf. May, a psychoanalyst writing to us from 1975, says that every artist commits an act of great courage to make anything at all, because the work of artmaking is so high-stakes.
Creative courage is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built. [...] When we engage a painting, we are experiencing some new moment of sensibility. Some new vision is triggered in us by our contact with the painting; something unique is born in us. [...] The artists thus express the spiritual meaning of their culture.
As far as I can grok it, the general consensus among art historians and theorists of yesteryear is that the purpose of art is to pursue some kind of truth. Every art movement named in history books represents a shift in local attitudes about what exactly that means and looks like, usually in response to whatever preceded it. Romantics were very into the sublime and the ideal; Realists looked for truth in the mundane and unadorned. Modernists tried to imagine what new truths might be possible, Surrealists thought the purest truth— the realest of the real— might be found in the unconscious, postmodernists wondered if truth was even a real thing to be found at all, etc etc. Something like that.
But I don’t come from the world of “fine art,” but from the online world of webcomics, fanart, and online illustration, and my peers there seem interested only in pursuing a kind of personal truth. If the purpose of art is “self-expression,” then the only possible critique is in whether you have successfully told the world “who you are,” although “who you are” often amounts to little more than a list of your likes and dislikes. Here is my favorite character from my favorite TV show. Here is my favorite animal. Here is the kind of person I find sexy. Here is the kind of person I wish I could be. Here is what makes me sad. A list of attributes and aesthetics, not unlike a shopping list. You don’t have to offer any kind of substance or perspective— you only need to tell us about your tastes.
I say this with all the love in my heart, but it’s the artistic equivalent of a Funko Pop cave— please, step into my Collection of Preferences. It strikes me as a consumerist-flavored vision of self-expression, one which requires little-to-no moral or intellectual risk, which doesn’t even really tell me much about the person making it. Though this method is predicated on “authenticity,” it strikes me as false, detached, and insincere, like the artist is asking for intimacy without the risk of vulnerability that comes with really trying to pose an original thought or to expose something only you possess. Of course, taste is so subjective, how can it ever be wrong? It invites no conversation; any criticism must be from the haters, who hate to see me winning, etc.
Rollo May talks about this, too. He references psychoanalyst Otto Rank to explain that we are caught between the “life fear” and “death fear”— in order to be truly vulnerable to one another, we must live in the tension between autonomy (which comes with the risk of abandonment) and dependency (which comes with the risk of losing oneself to the other).
Intimacy that begins and remains on the [superficial] level tends to become inauthentic, and we later find ourselves fleeing from the emptiness. Authentic social courage requires intimacy on the many levels of the personality simultaneously. Only by doing this can one overcome personal alienation. […] All our lives we oscillate between these two fears. They are, indeed, the forms of anxiety that lie in wait for anyone who cares for another. But the confronting of these two fears, and the awareness that one grows not only by being one’s self but also by participating in other selves, is necessary if we are to move toward self-realization.
ART AS IDENTITY
Rollo May says that the artist must operate inside a contradiction: you must assert your truth as though you are totally confident in it, but also hold in mind that you could be wrong. This is a terrifying place to be, compelled to commit to something without the certainty that you are doing the right thing, and it requires the creative courage that May is talking about.
I think part of my problem here is that my peers tend to conflate art with identity, in a way that does a disservice to both by making this sort of courage a moot point. The general attitude seems to be that expressing oneself can never be “wrong,” because it asserts only an unfalsifiable truth: this is me.
We talk about art and the self that makes it as if they are things to be discovered, understood, and unleashed; difficult, maybe, but ultimately self-indulgent, where any outside judgement is easily cast as morally dubious and devoid of real substance. The difficulty, for the artist, is found in removing obstacles— judgement, hatred, and fear, from within or without— to one’s purest self-expression, rather than trying to forge oneself or one’s art into something interesting, original, or profound.
As an audience, evaluating a work of art becomes wrapped up in judgement of the person who made it. Criticism becomes [seen as] an indictment of the artist’s identity— their ethnicity, gender, etc— rather than what they offer in terms of intellectual depth or moral character. As an artist, interrogation of what exactly you are expressing (if anything) is a sign that you have failed to accept yourself.
When I sit down to work in my sketchbook, or start a new painting, I often wind up dismissing my ideas as “boring” before they even hit the page. I have spent a long time trying to understand what I mean by “boring,” this judgement that seems to spring from my subconscious with no particular definition or compass for how to improve. After a good ten years of thinking about it (and a few more-recent years of trying to read about it), I think what I actually mean is “shallow.” My conscience reacts violently to the prospect of cranking out a painting that has little more to say than “this is me” or “this is what I like” or “hello, i am technically still alive, see?” The process of creating— putting many hours into something while holding my breath that it will eventually at least look good, let alone speak to anyone— is so exhausting that “self-expression” alone is not a good enough reason for me to endure it.
None of this works for me, because I simply do not believe this shit, and I don’t think the people who say it really believe it either.
At this point I realize that I am talking about, I guess, “women’s culture.” I have always hung around in art scenes where the vast majority of my peers are women— they dominate the demographics of webcomics, the creative side of fandoms, and online illustration overall. And this is part of why all of this strikes me as extremely hollow, and why their advice does not work for me— because, even when said directly to my face, this advice is not for me. I am not really the target audience.
The ladies love to put out PSAs about how artistic self-indulgence is good, its meaningful, its important. But of course we know how they feel about men’s art, tastes, and self-indulgence. Suddenly, the part of the brain that is capable of questioning the value of art that is vapid or masturbatory or self-aggrandizing wakes up from its apparent slumber. Suddenly, we are supposed to care about the content of a work— what sort of truth it puts forth, what moral or ideological challenges it presents or lacks— and not simply applaud everyone who dares to speak their truth. Some standards do exist after all, thank god.
All this advice is by women for women, who think of themselves as eternally put-upon and ever in need of greater social support and self-confidence— not for men, who they think of as having support and confidence in excess. When women and nonbinary people tell me that I should simply relax and think less about what I am making, it flies in the face of literally everything else I have ever been told about my moral responsibilities as a man. I have to think about what I am making and what it says, because if I don’t, I may end up making something that everyone regrets.
So of course the girlies look at me like I’m crazy or stupid when I talk about my struggle to make anything, my terror at the vulnerability of asserting a truth that might actually challenge the people I care about, the actual stakes involved in my own uncertainty. They just don’t share my anxiety, the sense that, without some standard that comes from outside of myself— some consideration of my work as an offering to others, not only a risk but an obligation— I may make something that destroys more than it creates.
I am no different from anyone else here, in the conflation of art and identity— this blog is exactly what it says on the tin!!— but I just don’t think that either of these things come into being unbidden, unconsidered, without any intention or elbow grease. I cannot accept that whatever art I make (be it with my paintings or my writing or my personal identity/philosophy/etc) is necessarily valuable or interesting or insightful just because I dared to make it at all. I am not a five-year-old, some immature person who needs to hear that my scribbles are very important and profound because any recognition of my failures will see me give up on art entirely. I need to understand and acknowledge and evaluate whatever “truth” my work puts forth, decide that it is meaningful enough to try and express, before I can muster the courage to actually turn an idea into an image.
I suppose, from the perspective of both the artist and audience, the worst part of this conflation between art and identity is that it seems to have obfuscated anyone’s capacity to tell whether a work is lauded/rejected because the work is actually good/bad, or if it is because the creator is the right/wrong sort of person, or if the thing they made is just sort of temporarily trendy/profitable (or not). I know that all of the “you’re valid, speak your truth!” sloganeers will do a quick face-heel turn the instant anyone challenges them with a truth that they do not want to think about.1 But still, just because a work of art is “challenging” to someone, somewhere, doesn’t mean that it is good or interesting or worth anyone’s attention.
All this mostly seems to serve the ends of grifters— people with little going on inside their skulls who still want to operate as if the only reason anyone would ever criticize them is because of identitarian #hate.2 Trans people in particular are asserting a truth when we take ownership of our gender identity; trans or not, to assert one’s gender is always akin to making an argument about how that gender ought to be conceptualized, what multitudes or contradictions it should be understood to contain. That is in many ways a moral claim, one which invites engagement; we cannot pre-empt others’ questions and reactions by claiming that what we make— in art or gender— is fundamentally invulnerable to critique.
I put labor into my craft for the same reasons I try to make my home a welcoming place for guests; I demonstrate respect to the other by giving them something beautiful and interesting. I do not invite people into a mess of dirty clothes and dishes and then demand they shut their mouths and make themselves comfortable with whatever meager offerings I present to them. When we claim that our expressions are already so pure, so true, that there can be no craft— that the primary labor is in revealing, not refining, ourselves— then we effectively demand that respect flows one way, towards ourselves. We forego the real vulnerability in communicating and relating with others: that we not only ask them to change for us, but open ourselves to be changed by them in return.
So, okay. What are you supposed to do if you don’t want to be a grifter or a coward? Where do you learn how to think about art if you actually want to take seriously the work of the artist? What if the pain and the wrestling are not a psychological block to be overcome, but a necessary part of the process of making something meaningful? How does one actually develop the sort of courage that May is talking about without becoming a foolish narcissist?
I mean, I don’t know. I suppose, for me, I’ll have to figure out my own motive for making, and my own standard for whether the things I make are any good. Reading recommendations welcome, and I’ll let you know if I learn anything interesting.
I mean, look, I watched the online backlash to Isabel Fall’s Helicopter Story in realtime, so it is seared in my brain forever. Being a trans woman did not do her any favors, nor was it the reason her story was taken down. Her crime was in challenging the audience’s paradigms about What Ideas Tgirls Should Have, which led to an identity referendum among the trans commentariat— not transphobes— on whether she was really a woman at all. “To the people who say a woman would’ve refused to do what I do, I say— Isn’t that the point?”
Shoutout to my beloathed Devon Price, newly detransed/retransed/whatever, who recently went off about how the only reason to be a man is to exert power over other people (boo/snore), in the same breath as making the ironically masculine claim that they are the smartest and most interesting person to ever [checks notes] transcend the human concepts of gender, species, and age. Okay.