Art is Dead. Long Live Art.
I had a drink last night with an actress friend who has just landed a commercial after years of getting to the final call and not getting parts. She puts this down to her new found Zen calm, a direct result of no longer needing to get the part and thereby enjoying the process more. She has retrained over three years to become a teacher and now has the reward of her students, the sense of a social purpose, the financial reward at the end of the month. She no longer needs those things from acting. So her motivation has changed and so has the outcome.
I realised talking to her that what we want is one quantum leap away from us. Often we imagine it is miles and miles of hard graft but in fact, it’s simply a breath away. Could she have found the Zen calmness in auditions without spending three years training to be a teacher? In theory, yes. But at the time when she wasn’t getting parts, our conversation often focused on the parts of her life where she had regrets: the past successes she had taken for granted, the opportunities she had passed up. Now finally her ‘luck’ has changed. Not because she had a ‘breakthrough’ but because she walked away and dealt with the angst of money by getting another job. She no longer ‘needs’ success and so it has become easy again.
This paradox strikes a chord with me as I have had such a complex attitude to success.
Firstly, I felt under pressure as a child to compete, not only with my sister but all other children of my age. School was set up that way and although academic achievement came easily to me, I resented the way it set me apart from and created a barrier between me and my friends and classmates. I remember once the momentary joy of a prize was quickly clouded by listening to dear Emily (not her real name), the beautiful but tragically skinny girl in my class (who, by the age of 15, we all knew was sleeping in a park) admiring my successes and bemoaning her lack of brains. If only she could tell her parents she came top of the class. I looked at the bruises on her arms and legs and felt wretched.
When, at 13 I decided I wanted to act, it got worse. At first it was wonderful; the accolades, the flowers, the fact that my dad suddenly woke up and paid me attention after years of being lost in his own internal reverie. I loved the atmosphere of the theatre, the excitement and risk of it.
But again I was plagued by the issue of competition: 400 girls auditioned for my part. In the end it was down to six of us. One girl had everything — the looks, the singing voice. But she was too tall. Many of that last six were cast in the chorus and I had to share a dressing room with them for the whole run. It was excruciating. All my friends, all my schoolmates, most of the schools in the city came to see the show. For one brief month in Coventry, in April, 1987 I was a celebrity. Famous people came to show and hugged me, told me how brilliant I was. Some of the adult cast started to resent me, others started to admire me in a way I found uncomfortable. I was never aware of having been noticed by grown men in that way before. I started to feel outside of myself, like there was me; talking and doing and acting and going to school. But here was me, actually me, over here, lost inside myself.
After my parents ruled out further acting before my GCSEs, I plunged into a dark grey grief. I had spent a year in the theatre, under its spell, and now I was cast back out into the cold, dreary world. I clung on: I wasn’t allowed to take parts so I started taking odd jobs around the theatre. I became a house cleaner for the assistant Director, and quickly found myself in the demeaning position of picking up lists of tasks to complete each day. I started to babysit for the Director. Night after night, as his wife was on stage, he would sit and talk to me once his daughter went to bed.
Gradually I began to realise that his interest in me was unhealthy, that he was planning something. Eventually it came: the night when he decided to make his move. It was pretty lame if I’m honest. We’ve read so many accounts of this sort of thing now that I think you can imagine it — he got too drunk on whiskey, suggested we have sex. I was not shocked as I had seen it building over the nights. But I was frightened of him, afraid of what I had unwittingly gotten into. I knew I couldn’t tell my parents. I was terrified of getting pregnant. I desperately wanted to get home.
He was blind drunk when he finally got the message and we drove home with me certain I would either die in a car crash or be dumped in a ditch by him. When I did finally get home I was angry: how had this happened? Because I hadn’t been able to let go, I had allowed myself to become a lackey, a scullery maid. How could these people who had professed their love for my talents treat me so appallingly?
Once I had experienced how corrupt the human heart could be, I saw it everywhere: how successful people were lauded and then later chastised in the media, how childhood stars would be applauded then people would almost cheer when later they struggled with drugs or depression. Success and failure I imagined as a water wheel. When you are rising up it is altogether too easy to forget that the wheel will keep turning and you will be poured out on the other side. As one person is picked out and selected, everyone else is left to feel less. Then the wheel turns and that person is now hung out to dry. I saw this cycle of envy and destruction in the whole process and I thought back to Emily: how my success had made her so sad about her self.
This is surely a metaphor for all commercial activity: when one person triumphs, another feels more acutely their own failure. And surely the danger of success is this loss of a sense of self. This sense of breaking apart from myself has happened again to me since: often at times of great ‘success’ I have experienced this loss of wholeness.
With a new cynicism I returned to my life. Spending more time with my family and friends, I remembered my love of cooking and painting. I joined the local Youth Theatre, began writing and got the opportunity to direct my first play. With that cast, I discovered something radically cool: Cooperation. Cooperation was the opposite to Competition, a way of making that was based on shared goals, winning together. Finally I was freed from the urge to be on the Big Stage. I had stumbled upon the pleasure of doing things because you love them rather than because other people are impressed by them. I discovered what I would now describe as creative autonomy and authenticity.
At 18 I surprised everyone by choosing Art School over Drama. I wanted to experience the autonomy of artistic creation. I avoided all the competitive opportunities that Goldsmiths had to offer. After graduation for three years I volunteered: focusing on therapy, yoga, cooking and my health. My parents were dismayed — what was happening?? I painted, made collages and photographs. I learnt digital imaging. I watched some friends take off on stratospheric careers — trajectories that lead them so far away they never returned. Many people I knew became ‘successful’. And later, when I had the opportunity to work in New York, even more people I knew became ‘successful’. But so often, what was deemed as ‘success’ looked to me like a kind of abject unhappiness. So in New York, despite all the possibilities in what is arguably the most competitive place in the world, I continued to shew commercial competition, ambition and opportunism.
In these situations I encountered people ‘on the way up’ so many times. I also met many that had not survived the down-cycle. I wanted to learn what it was that could help a person survive the ups and downs. I was full of admiration for those who seemed to manage it better than I had done. They were kind to everyone, they were generous. They took nothing for granted. They were also, (sorry) the exception.
Because we are told/our society constantly reinforces the idea that once you have commercial success you will no longer need those around you, it is just too easy to act like this is true. In fact, my observation is that once you are in the ‘up’ cycle, you need those around you more than you ever needed them before. Because you are being shaped, sculpted to the demands of the commercial system and this grows deeply painful before long.
This idea is explored beautifully in Richard Curtis’s new film Yesterday. I love his films because all of them in some way explore our relationship with the everyday, with ‘normality’ and our received ideas about ‘success’. In New York I found myself repeatedly faced with the challenge of exploring my own attitude towards money and fame. My natural disregard for any kind of hierarchy was constantly challenged by the aura that fame and money casts. I was earnest in my desire to be free from this spell but its power was often overwhelming.
But I was lucky enough in my early twenties to have had those years of self-exploration. This gave me the opportunity to really examine my own motivations and the deeper hidden angst behind them. The ability to manage power, I concluded, is entirely based on need. As a child, parental approval granted me a peaceful life, one free from harm. As we become adults, society takes on this role of parent. The messages we receive equate ‘success’ with approval. This approval, though, is never guaranteed. Success one day might not count the next day. So we are all constantly striving to prove ourselves, day after day.
The need for commercial success (money and power) is a symptom of other, deeper unmet needs, or what the French Psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan would call ‘Lack’. In 1958 he described desire as the metonymy of the lack of being (manque à être). To me, ‘Lack’ is the sorrowful pain of existence, born from early experiences: the moment you understood that no matter how hard you cried, your mother wasn’t going to come. It is a hunger that gets ever bigger the more we try to fill it. It is trauma that can only be be healed with understanding, compassion, forgiveness and love. Dr Sears, the Californian Pediatrician, famous for his promotion of Attachment Style Parenting says, ‘needs that are unmet in babyhood, can never be met’.
But so many of our motivations are bred from this place of Lack. As a teenager I thought I wanted to sing, dance and act. This in itself was not problematic. But I had not yet realised that the ‘success’ I craved in getting bigger and better roles would not fill me up for anything more than a moment. Afterwards I would feel more empty. We now know that addictive thrill seeking activities such as shopping, gambling, gaming that boost our dopamine — the pleasure seeking chemical produced in our brains when we feel reward — also deplete our serotonin — the chemical we need to feel happy on an everyday basis.
I was lucky to have so many hard lessons taught to me very early in life: to have had the opportunity to tackle my own ‘neediness’ before I really could externalise it. Commercial ‘success’ can be a wonderful gift. But only if it comes from a place of creative autonomy and authenticity. If worldly ‘success’ (i.e. competitive advantage) is the aim of a creative process, then the autonomy and authenticity will surely suffer.
It is one of the central struggles in an artists life: to re-calibrate, to challenge, to cross examine our motivations and inner workings. This one reason why artists, writers, musicians, all creatives have so many unfinished projects. Sometimes we have to let go, simply because it is not wise to hold on. Many artists walk away completely. And holding on to creative autonomy and authenticity is not an easy ask either. We may start out with one intention and end up with another. Often times we don’t really understand our motivations until afterwards, when we see the results. Art is a process of self-realisation. Of actualisation. Of self-recognition.
As for me, eventually at around 35 I started to recognise that the benefit of having exhibitions, selling work, out weighed the risks of losing my sense of ‘wholeness’. it was time again to try to find a way to walk the line.
With the sales of The Instant Garden I was drawn again into a commercial environment, one where issues of loyalty and betrayal/competition and failure come into play and I haven’t found it particularly easy. I experience all the same guilt and shame over my successes that I felt in the classroom with Emily. I find the exchange of money excruciating, negotiation impossible. I would love to give all my work away for free! In many ways funding from the Arts Council has helped me find a way to offer some of my work to the world without a commercial exchange.
But I have also learnt to trust the motives of others around me and have faith in their unfailing support. I have learnt to build long lasting relationships, founded on cooperation, collaboration, shared goals. Above all I have tried to capitalise on any opportunity for kindness and generosity (in spirit, in time, in judgement of others), seeing these as talismans that will protect me from the burden of my own greed and need. I fail constantly at this task but I also see better now why it is so difficult to achieve balance in a world so skewed towards one prescribed set of outcomes.
With Holding Time I have tried to create a model of working where art is a social intervention, a tool for opening conversations and including as many voices as possible. It has been exacting and exhausting and the work remains permanently unfinished but the process of cooperating with hospitals, academics and mothers has been rewarding and illuminating. I am free of the burden of doubt that has plagued me and I feel hopeful this work can do good without doing harm.
But most importantly I have learnt to always shed the fear that it will end. Having taught myself to survive for so long without a dependence on ‘success’, I know that I can live without it and be happy. I make sure that a high proportion of my time is spent with my loved ones, with friends, in doing things that I find deeply rooted, like foraging, cooking and yoga. These aren’t ‘hobbies’ : they are as important to me as work. When they start to falter I force myself to look again at my motivations.
Anytime I feel I’m getting too tangled up in worries about my ‘career’ (ha ha) and position, I think of my dear friend Greg Daville who, after a thirty year career as a brilliant artist, was diagnosed with cancer and died four short months later. In that short time I had only one face to face conversation with him and these words have been a beacon to me ever since:
“Lisa, I think about all the years I worried about my career…..- it was such a waste of time! Now that I am really dying, all I long to do is to sit in Red Roaster (cafe) with a cup of coffee and the Guardian crossword and gaze up at the dust catching the sunlight in the window…… Art is great and everything, Lisa. But it’s LIFE that matters!’
So here’s to the ordinary, to everyday life in all its glory. Here’s to success when it comes naturally and feels easy. Here’s to work that is for the common good, for outcomes and goals that can be enjoyed and shared. Here’s to a life of Art, without the gravity of ‘success’ or ‘failure’.
Art is Dead. Long Live Art.
