A reference to a recent New Yorker Critic at Large (March 30th) review suggests that a work of art is good if it rises out of necessity and if the artist is capable of carrying out the idea to its appropriate end. As a letter writer paraphrases:
“This matters; this has purpose” and “I can do this, I am able, I can carry out this task to its appropriate end” (correspondence from Joachim B. Lyon, Stanford, California, New Yorker, May 4, 2009).
I found these notions both bemusing and contra-indicated. What do you think?
(Oh, and here’s an image from Rhyolite Nevada ghost town. I don’t know if it has either purpose or, if I paint it, as I intend to do, if I am adequate to the chore.)
June, I like the photograph very much. The atmosphere gives it a dreamlike quality. It almost feels as though the building is being dissolved by the mist.
Regarding the New Yorker quote, it seems that the same criteria could be applied to pretty much anything. Tonight I washed the dishes. The activity arose out of necessity, and I finished. (However I didn’t dry them; I left that to my collaboration with nature.)
I gave up a long time ago trying to figure out if a work of art is good. The longer I’m involved in creating and looking at art, the less relevant the issue seems to me. What I’m really interested in paying attention to is my response to the work, what (if anything) there is to discover from it, and what questions it opens up for me.
As David says, most actions arise out of some sense of purpose. The writer’s need to even consider that as a precondition for creating a work of art suggests that, in fact, the purpose is not very clear and the artist has to talk herself into it, so to speak. And even if there is a more or less clear purpose, the criteria of success are often hazy at best. The artist may suspect she can carry it out to the “appropriate end,” but it’s hardly a given. For my part, the motivation is likely to just be finding out where that end might lie, and I’m pretty sure I won’t reach it. Again echoing David, it’s more about the exploration.
The photo does look misty, but I I’m guessing that’s a pretty rare condition in that dry place. Dust or dim light would seem more likely.
David,
I think you’ve touched on some of what I thought (I also thought the discussion fairly extraordinary, coming from the New Yorker which should have more sense).
I think there’s a confusion between what the viewer/audience/reader (in the case the NYer is discussing) asks: is this worth doing? was she capable of carrying it out? And what we as artists do/ask ourselves/ fall into. If I asked myself “is this worth doing?” I’d have to get into “as compared to what?” and then that would lead into such ‘orrors of introspection that I’d never get anything done. I am tempted to say it’s worth doing because, as me dear ol’ Ma used to say, “I said so.”
The issue of judgment, which seems attached here (capability, etc) is also remarkable. These are questions which seem to arise out of some other century, perhaps the 19th, when great questions of moral history were supposed to play themselves out in art. Dickens did important work and was up to the task, but I doubt that he asked himself about it.
Steve,
The confusion of writer(s) is compounded by my triple distance from the original. I was recounting what the correspondent, from California, says about an article by critic Anthony Lane who is discussing the publication of some of the letters of Samuel Beckett. (“The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929-1940” (Cambridge; $50), edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck,)
Here are the quotes that I think must have triggered the Californian’s responses:
Beckett in one of his letters says: “The only plane on which I feel my defeat not proven is the literary,” Lane continues “… what renders this collection, for all its tics and indulgences, far more of a spur than a letdown is the slowly welling sense of a writer mustering his powers. The letters that stir me most are not those in which Beckett grapples with family tensions, or rues the indifference of publishers, but those which find him at recitals, in front of paintings, or drowned in a book. That is no mean affair; the only thing that separates the writer from ordinary folk—and, far from making him or her a better or wiser person, let alone a more amenable one, it can redouble the force of solitude, “one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness”—is that the reading of a poem, or the pondering of a Crucifixion, becomes an event. Not a diversion, a flight, or a release from chores but an experience no less transformative than a day in bed with a lover—especially if, as in Beckett’s case, lovers were scarce.
Lane says of Beckett’s need for a “purpose for writing”: “In a magnificent letter of 1932, to McGreevy, Beckett had chastised one of his own poems for being facultatif, or optional. It did not, he said, “represent a necessity.” These letters [in the volume that Lane is reviewing] are a quest for necessity—for what must be written about, at whatever cost. As the long book closes, the necessities loom; in that respect, Samuel Beckett, for once, had nothing to fear.” The “necessities of which Lane speaks are those of World War II.
The photo I included is one I’m going to paint as soon as my brain can get its fingers around a paint brush. It seems appropriate to the notion of the void as well as Giorgio Morandi. And it was a day when Rhyolite Nevada was indeed enveloped in wet mist — the day we arrived. Never happened again.
…the writer, from California, who is referring to an article by critic Anthony Lane who is discussing the letters of Samuel Beckett
That’s very Postmodern.
David —
too, too, too true — and you forgot to add the blogger (D.) who was commenting on the writer of post (Me) who was discussing the writer from California, who is referring to an article by critic Anthony Lane who is discussing the letters of Samuel Beckett
It must be my current brain wave activity that has generated this nest of nonsense.
I’m trying to remember why I included the photo. Because I like it, I think. It has no middle ground. But it ain’t Pomo, nither.
June:
Yep.
I’m either diving in over my head, or cannon balling into an unknown depth, but I think I may agree with your point – if only I felt I understood it more completely.
Your point would be that it depends upon where one stands. Necessity itself might not be necessary if one conceives of art as arbitrary. I can imagine a spouse exclaiming: “Is this necessary?” as he or she is dragged to an opening. But upon arrival, that individual might enjoy the offerings for their formal attributes, while an adjacent viewer might be sizing up a piece for how well it might work with the wallpaper back home – a kind of necessity.
I now have an eager grandson standing at my elbow and I’ll get baqck to this.