Art Shit

One afternoon in 2010, I went to an art show at a cafe in Williamsburg featuring paintings by a new coworker. I didn’t know much about him, besides the fact that he was a bit spacey… he had reportedly been spotted watering the plants out in front of our shop while it was raining. But his work turned out to be really, really good - precise geometric shapes filled with swirling voids of color. And while the paintings were great, what struck me most was his artist’s statement:

“My art doesn’t mean anything. It’s like shit, it just comes out of me.”

If I hadn’t known him at all, it’s possible I might have dismissed the sentiment as too self-consciously punk. But he didn’t seem prone to irony or subterfuge; It was an honest statement, and as I got to know him over the next few years I’d reflect on how true it was. I came to regard him as among the most “pure” artists I’d known - that is, someone who had centered his life on making art (and was really good) but who was motivated entirely by the creative spirit with almost no constitutional ability to pursue commercial prospects or art world success. A visit to his studio - aka his apartment - left one with the feeling that he was on the verge of drowning in his own creations. Every inch of free wall space was covered with paintings: photorealistic images of the moon, a family scene from his childhood, a seemingly haphazard image of a raccoon caught by a trail cam, stark modernist canvasses of solid red and blue, Richter-esque gossamers of color, sprawling webs of biomorphic tendrils stretching into space. Countless other unseen canvasses sat stacked in the corners, while from under his bed, he’d remove piles of hundreds of pencil drawings, seemingly detailing a saga of sexual frustration as played out through a cast of demonic teddy bears. He had no trace of the self-censorship that leads most artists to filter their work into some sort of consistent style. For him, making images was a compulsory act. Every day, wild new art shit came pouring out, filling up his tiny Bushwick apartment.

I haven’t stayed in great touch with him, but I do know he lives in Las Vegas now - a home that would be a surprising choice for anyone but the most inscrutable guy I’ve ever known. It’s probably nice for him to be around a lot of space, and I’d imagine he likes the neon lights.

It seems obvious that if one wants to explore the intricacies of our attitudes toward shit, one should start with Freud. To quote from a New Republic article on the topic:

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Freud drew a connection between adults' covetousness of gold and babies obsession with poop. “Freud had an idea that in the unconscious mind, that money and perhaps gold in particular, was equivalent to some kind of shit. Excremental substance,” New York City psychoanalyst Steven Poser told me.

According to Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, a turning point in a child’s so-called “anal phase” is the moment at which he is taught to use the bathroom, wherein he is forced to relinquish his droppings to his parents—or worse, to the sewer. “A baby has a predisposition to hold on to things,” Long Island University professor of psychology Geoff Goodman tells me. “That includes feces. When you give that up—you lose part of yourself.”

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I don’t compose compulsively, but through the more creative periods of my life I have obsessed over my own music. I listen to my songs over and over again after I record them (I don’t believe, or trust, any musician who claims not to do this). I think that they’re works of genius, that it’s only a matter of time before the world recognizes their unique contribution to the song form. Then I listen to them again a day, or week, or month later, and they horrify me. My music becomes like shit to me too, in the way a child relates to their own shit - a fascinating, disgusting thing that I was compelled to produce by forces beyond my conscious control, and that I’m then perversely compelled to show to others. Look what I did!

It would seem blatantly self-flagellating to compare one’s art to shit, but I think the similarities are self-evident; that said, I’ll wager that not every artist sees a particular relationship between their own work and excrement. I do, however, think most artists understand that shame plays a role in the act of creation. Personally, as someone who treasures art that takes chances and exhibits vulnerability, I’ve come to believe that if I’m not at least a little bit embarrassed by a new song of mine it probably wasn’t worth writing. I’ve never seen the peculiar relationship between art and shame expressed more perfectly than by this passage by Ian Svenonius, from his book “Super-Natural Strategies for making a Rock ’n Roll Group,” which I will quote at length:

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Human artistic endeavors are typically borne from a deep sense of shame. Only disgrace will entice a human to leave their place of security and risk his or her social standing. The first step, therefore, to getting started with one’s group is to perform in an unready state or to release an awful recording with a hideous cover. Anything at all, just to create a humiliating object or event, which must be transcended so as to obliterate if from the public consciousness.

Human vanity images that our irrelevant endeavors loom enormously in the collective imagination. Therefore, once the hated happening occurs or despised artifact is released, self-loathing will consume the maker, who will long to demolish every copy of it and tear out the eyes of every viewer. However, unfortunately for the aggrieved, it will be impossible to destroy every copy or eradicate every person who’s seen or heard whatever performance or piece of music the maker abhors.

The only way for them to effect their awful legacy is to create something which alters it somehow, either by confusing the public perception of the previous failure, or by overshadowing it with success. Otherwise the loathsome phenomenon floats alone in a void, conspicuous by its singularity.

Since no one’s imagined ideal can ever be achieved, each recording or performance is another kind of failure, a response to the last sordid humiliation. After a while of doing this, one will have created a “body of work.”

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While Svenonius is obviously being funny, I’ve also never read this passage to an artist or musician who didn’t deeply connect with the idea that the desire to keep creating is partially rooted in an attempt to erase the memory of their perceived failures in the minds of an imagined audience. But there are actually two different types of shame being described here. The first is the one we’ve been talking about, the shame of an ego that’s imagined itself worthy of releasing its creations into the public only to be crushed by the tragic combination of time and self-analysis. The second kind of shame is more archetypal and eternal, identified by the statement “Since no one’s imagined ideal can ever be achieved, each recording or performance is another kind of failure.” This is the Big Shame, the one that even the greatest painters, composers, and writers have felt throughout history: the impossibility of ultimately transcending the limitations of form.

To complete the sort of sprawling thought here, I’ll quote liberally from another work, the great essay-length booklet “The Hatred of Poetry” by Ben Lerner:

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Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your works can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented (e.g. the creation of representation itself), but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.

Thus the poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure… Poetry isn’t hard, it’s impossible.

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Perhaps the compulsive output of that artist friend I wrote about is related to the sense of poetic impossibility Lerner describes, as well as his readiness to render his own art meaningless… you can avoid the inevitable shame of your creative shortcoming if you’ve already moved on to the next attempt. And I see a notable lack of shame in his inverse - public figures or artist friends who have completely accepted the commercial or ego-motivated nature of their work, who have abandoned any hope of transcendence through the creative act. But for those still reaching for some sense of deliverance, I think it’s helpful to come to an understanding that all art is destined to be a beautiful failure. Is there some sort of perfection or transcendence in that inevitability itself? Maybe, if you want there to be. Either way, sooner or later, you’re going to have to take a shit.