When the green-visored demon inside me starts crunching the numbers and shoving them under my nose, I can never resist for long. Sooner or later, the demon wins out, and I look. There I am, awake and alone at 2 am, reckoning with how much of my time and energy is spent creating content rather than creating art. I won’t relay the grisly data here—it’s simply too much.
Working at the commercial factory has paid my bills for years now, but I’ve always found ways to stay engaged with the real thing1, managing to still feel like a participant in the culture, sometimes as a writer, but even if only as a reader, a watcher, a listener, a witness. But my day job has been very busy—digital birdcage liner can create itself, but for now it’s better when people do it—and my mental health not so good, and so, lately, it feels like that culture is happening without me. I’m no longer a front-row ticket-holder at the moviehouse, but a slavering stray fogging up the window of a steak joint. I want what they have, I think, scrolling through feeds clogged with book reviews, movies and TV shows, stage productions, features, primers, art installations. My tabs, numerous as spores, await me, untended (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) The ARCs Jenga on my nightstand2. I rewatch the shows I watched last year, or twenty years ago. I subscribe to sites, newsletters, Patreons, and then let my subscriptions rot like fruit under a lonely tree.
A combination of overwhelm (like I said, work and brain and, oh yeah, everything else) and creative listlessness have left me thirsty for art, even if it’s everywhere, even if I live in New York City. Behind this thirst trails bitterness like a hangover, because capitalism, et. al., has made it so that I have to be operating at full cylinders under a very specific set of more or less ideal circumstances to live my life the way I would like to: reading and writing, every day, about things I want to read and write about. There’s this book about Casanova I’m trying to get off the ground, an essay about Michael Mann that’s been collecting dust, merch for GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY to be designed and promoted, so many books and projects—many of them by friends and colleagues—that I would like to review and maybe even write around.
I would prefer to always live within the wonderful focus that envelops you when you’re working on a project, that rare, miraculous, satiating certainty of artistic vision in which your conviction is so strong it becomes predestination. But if I can’t, as I suppose we all must, for me there is at least a silver lining: When I do not feel as if I have a creative purpose, I am more likely to consider the mechanism itself. What is art, and why do I do it? Does it matter, and if so, why? Most importantly of all, what can art do3?
These questions occur to me anyway, of course. They are inextricable from the kind of artistic practice I want to have, and the side effects, I think, of artistic maturation if you came to art as individualistic escapism before recognizing its potential for something more, as I did. Does my art marry my politics, furthering a vision for, or even contributing to, a world in which there is more and better for the people? Or is it distinct from those politics (and if so, am I wasting time that could be spent on more and better, for the people)? Or does it, like visual artist Paul Chan has said of his anti/non-idpol work, disperse power, “…and so, in a way, the political project and the art project are sometimes in opposition?”
But in the absence of creative all-consumption, these questions feature more prominently in my day-to-day. Perhaps this is nature’s way of forcing me to be principled—by denying my pleasures. The god of the Old Testament strikes again.
How to bring about the meeting of pleasure, craft, and the political? How to find, create, or imbue meaning in the work that we do (so as to, perhaps, convince ourselves that it can be done in tandem with The Work—could even be considered The Work as such)? This is my preoccupation, anyway, and one that is shared by the artists I most admire. “All works of art within their immediate context are bound directly or indirectly to be weapons,” wrote Marxist artist and critic John Berger4, the project of whose life was illuminating the ways in which art does, and can do, for liberation, “…only after a considerable passage of time, when the context has changed, can they be viewed objectively as objects d’art…Valid art, in fact, because it derives from passionate, fairly simple convictions about life, is bound, in one sense, to be intolerant.”
Of course, not everyone feels that way, which is interesting in and of itself. Studying these diversions to inform, if not construct, one’s own art practice is a pleasure in and of itself, and one of the fun parts about being an artist, I think. So, in the spirit of fun—god knows I need it—this DAVID series will be about art and why some of us do it. A project so insurmountable that I can take comfort in my insignificance, like a cliche under a night bright with stars. If you’re in a similar pit as I am, let’s relight our fires, remind ourselves why we’re here, keep that demon at bay. It’s not like we have anything else going on.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read the earthquake room. Keep reading DAVID to find out when their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), is available for preorder.
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Not that real culture isn’t riddled with content as well as art, but at least there you have a fighting chance of coming across something interesting.
Though I did manage to read and review one last week.
Slowly working my way through Joshua Sperling’s delightful biography, A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger.
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