On Persistence and Beauty

One of the challenges of artistic practice is deciding how much of your workings to show, particularly during periods where most of your work is happening behind the scenes.

Most practitioners hope to make work that reveals something, whether that’s a particular truth about themselves (possibly hidden behind an anonymising artistic veneer), to put forward a viewpoint that others can respond to, maybe contribute to an ongoing discourse or, even better, provide an entirely novel perspective.

During the course of the last couple of years, as a pandemic and the relentless pace of profound events left us grasping for only the most important things, and where stability has at times felt impossible to achieve or maintain, it’s been hard to know where to look for insight and inspiration, and I’ve certainly found it really difficult to get into a creative headspace.

There’s something about the way we adapt to changing circumstances though isn’t there, that means eventually we’ll often find ways to survive and even thrive during the most turbulent periods, in the same way you’re able to tune out that piercingly loud alarm that initially shocked you out of your sleep. That capacity to adapt and become reconciled to changed circumstances continues to allow us all to live in this current time.

Reminds me of a song:

Things are changing, life is hard, blah blah like whatever! People get by…so what Justin?

Well, the crux of the challenge of artistic practice seems to me to be the ability to simply persist, despite the prevailing circumstances. To continue getting by. To remain committed to the act of creating, producing, thinking, re-examining, recombining, revising and revisiting. This imperative is paramount and independent of a desire for financial compensation or dreams of notoriety, and of course it’s almost impossible to achieve any of the latter without the former.

The most successful artists aren’t those who shine most brightly for a season of possibly majestic brilliance, but those who remain doggedly consistent amidst the turmoil that characterises the world in which we all live. Many (the majority?) of these artists will never be widely known, but they persist anyway. This singular passion sustains the artist even if alone it often, unfortunately, cannot put food on the table and belies the idea that artists are somehow less diligent than people in other disciplines. I’m arguing that persistence is an achievement in itself, especially now…and if you’ve been able to simply keep going in whatever way that means for you, then you deserve all the credit in the world. Much of that behind the scenes work may simply have been about survival, and that’s fine too. 

If you’re an artistic practitioner and you’ve made it this far, well done! Take a moment to acknowledge your own success. Then keep going.

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At the moment I’m working on a project that considers the benefits that can arise out of the most painful experiences. One of the questions I’ve been thinking about a lot during the research phase revolves around the artistic ethics of depicting terrible circumstances or events in a way that might be called ‘beautiful’ visually. Beauty is of course highly subjective, but should an artist seek to make work that tends towards their own conception of beauty, if the subject of the work is grim?

This question was prominent for me while watching ‘The Underground Railroad’ recently, the Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book. This series deals with the most horrific acts but looks truly breathtaking the entire time. At times the visual beauty of this work felt really jarring to me, but also forced me to think more deeply about the wider impact of what was being depicted. In this case I concluded that the photogenic visual canvas on which the events of this work were drawn actually served to further highlight the dark atrocity of the acts committed, by sheer contrast. I would however accept the counter argument that to construct such a visual feast somehow diminishes or glosses over the heinous nature of the crimes portrayed. 

This video gives something of a taste of the look of the series:

Does the visual tone of this video feel congruent with a series about the horrific traumas of slavery? I’d be really interested to hear the reader’s reflections on this. 

Certainly something to consider, but ultimately I guess the choice lies with each practitioner to strike that balance where they feel most comfortable, accepting that the viewer will be the ultimate judge of the success of your choices. It’s a tricky balance to strike for sure. 

Another reflection is that sometimes striving for ‘beauty’ when depicting difficult or traumatic events might help to prevent the work sliding into a lazy or stereotypical portrayal. This is no bad thing either and possibly another justification for taking this approach. The history of visual art is littered with examples of practitioners who resorted to the most trite imagery to hammer home their point, often removing any sense of subtlety or nuance in the presentation of their (often) disadvantaged and disenfranchised subjects in the process. So maybe, producing something ‘beautiful’ offers a more layered presentation of your subject and offers the viewer the opportunity to consider that things might not be as straightforward as they first assumed. I don’t have the answers here…it’s just a thought. 

Hopefully I’ll have more to share from the project I’m currently working on in the very near future. In the meantime, please accept my offering of this photo of some footprints. An indicator that we’re almost at the end of this particular journey.

And to close, another song to really hammer home today’s theme:

Till next time, keep persisting.

Research/Life

One of the reasons I decided to write about my work in progress in this way was to affirm (and remind myself of) the fact that the reality of the creative process is rarely of a brilliant artist working singlemindedly towards the production of a widely-acclaimed masterpiece, but rather a quite normal person, who cares about something, battling various practical and financial obstacles in order to bring into being a piece of work that, in the majority of cases, nobody else cares about at all, with the progress towards this objective being anything other than a straight line. 

Thinking about this brings to mind the wise words of Wendy McMurdo, an actually brilliant artist, who I was fortunate to be tutored by in the final phase of my MA. During one of my many existential crises she calmly informed me that the numerous issues and problems preventing me from making work that I was describing to her were in fact simply part and parcel of being an artist, and that the associated self-doubt and uncertainty were all part of the creative process. Her advice being that I should basically suck it up and make work anyway because that was the only way anything ever got done, the only way any progress was ever made. Coming from her, these words meant a great deal and have stuck with me ever since. 

So, I write to remind myself of this and also to keep myself accountable and it is in this spirit that I make this latest entry in the WIP log. The last few months have of course being challenging for everyone, what with the rona, and life as we knew it seems to be gone for good. I’ve been overwhelmed with work stuff and also had to survive my own bout of the virus, so it’s been a challenging time for sure. Amongst all this though, I’ve tried to stay committed to the idea of continuing on regardless, as best as I could under the circumstances. One of the lessons I think, is that instead of being hard on yourself for not being as productive or creative as maybe you’d hoped to be in certain circumstances, it’s preferable to stick to your guns and just do what you can. Every little helps and with each small step you’re that bit little closer to the end goal. It’s important for me to remember that there never is a ‘perfect’ time to make work, with absolutely no obstacles or distractions to contend with, there’s always just now.

As I’ve continued planning and researching for a project focusing on mental health, there’s been an inexorable convergence with the themes of Reaching Out. 

I recently had the opportunity to talk a bit more about the making of ROITD over on the Shutter Hub blog

Loneliness and solitude certainly offer psychological challenges, but it’s been really interesting that I’ve found myself circling back round and being forced to consider loneliness from new angles. Another lesson perhaps, that research is never wasted even if it seems to be not directly related to the topic at hand at first, and a reminder that my MA work lives on, and remains unfinished business. 

I’ve been reading A Biography of Loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti. Looking at how loneliness has been conceptualised, written about and experienced through history, it’s an ambitious work indeed. Interestingly, Alberti starts from the position that loneliness is not intrinsically bad, and that there are positives to be gained from experiencing this state. Describing loneliness as a ‘cluster of emotions’ rather than a single feeling, the author argues that it hits differently at different life stages such as divorce or old age. Alberti also argues that loneliness is not an inevitable or universal aspect of the human experience, and when encountered can also confer benefits such as increased self-knowledge or creativity. 

It’s fascinating to consider that loneliness has not always been with us, simply because the vocabulary associated with this experience did not exist before about 200 years ago. Prior to that, being alone was not at all bound up with typically negative ideas of loneliness that we take for granted today, but rather considered a much more neutral state of being. This idea is really interesting to me, that how we describe or think about things, materially affects the way we experience them and it’s an interesting idea to explore visually in the future.

Another book I’ve covered recently is Advice for Strays by Justine Kilkerr. This is an interesting story, about a woman going through a difficult time who’s revisited by an imaginary friend from her childhood, returned to accompany her through her troubles. This friend, a lion named Jericho, appears when things seem to be slowly falling apart in her life, and while their relationship is never fully explained, there quickly develops a seemingly mutually beneficial co-dependence. The key theme that resonated with me here was the idea of perception, of being able to ascertain what is real and what is not, and whether sometimes it’s actually easier, even safer, to surrender to the constructions of our minds rather than address difficult things in the ‘real’ world. The idea of spending so long immersed in your own perceptions that you struggle to differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined is also interesting. How does one categorise experiences that can seem very real to us, and from which we may derive some positives, if they are not perceptible to others…are they any less valuable, less real? This boundary between our tangible material world, and that of our very personal, internal world is a fascinating place to explore.