A few weeks ago, I joined an art collective run by a friend pursuing her PhD in art history. The collective began as a response to the unyielding isolation of lockdown—the ravenous hunger for connection after months of only being able to see one another through the miserable window of a zoom screen. It’s grown from those 2021-era meetings in New York apartments, both laterally (stretching now across the globe, with one founder in our humble Scottish sea town and another in gorgeous Singapore) and in scope (inviting not only visual artists, but hopeless poets such as myself into its ranks). But the seed from which it grew remains the same: a need to create in a room of creators, a hope that the pressure of watching other people make something will force us to make something, too.
There’s a part of me that resists integration into this lovely, artistic, candle-lit space. Admittedly, it’s a part that feels like joining an art collective is too pretentious. Another part of me isn’t sure that I qualify as an “artist,” at least in the sense that the collective means. All poetry includes some sense of the visual—what is a poem without white space to bracket it? —but my only experience with sketching is a charcoal portrait of Dan Howell I made in middle school art class. I suppose I’m being unfair—I love collage poetry, and incorporating visual art into my written work—but I would never consider myself an “artist.” I guess this begs the question, what is art? What is an artist? And does it matter?
I’ve been reading Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics, albeit very slowly, and understanding that in reading it, I’ve effectively undermined any claim to unpretentiousness. But I bring it up here because of the opening lines of its opening chapter, entitled “State of the Art”:
There is of course no state of American poetry, but states, moods, agitations, dissipations, renunciations, depressions, acquiescences, elations, angers, ecstasies; no music to our verse but vastly incompatible musics; no single sentiment but clashes of sentience: the magnificent cacophony of bodies making different sounds…11
I’d like to broaden this out to art more generally. There is no state of art, but there are states, moods, agitations, dissipations, renunciations, depressions, acquiescences, elations, angers, and ecstasies; if that’s the case, I must be an artist, and art must be something that incites feeling in the viewer/reader/listener. Bernstein is of the mind that good art, or good poetry, at least, should be averse to conformity in all its forms—that the best poems are the ones that speak to “the pressures and the conflicts of the moment with the means just then at hand”.2 If art speaks to the pressures and conflicts of the moment, then it doesn’t just matter—it’s a vital part of our intellectual diet. Art dissents from the mainstream, from the conformist, from the everyday, and creates something that challenges.
The drawing sessions have a big question to wander around as we sketch or doodle or write. Last week’s was “what is art?”, which is why it’s been on the forefront of my mind. My opinion diverges from Bernstein’s in the sense that I don’t think all art necessarily must break from the mainstream—but I do feel like it needs to surprise us, to sneak up on us a little. Emily Dickinson wrote that “if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry”.3 I feel the same about visual art—I love Parasite (dir. Bong Joon Ho) because every shot takes the top of my head clean off. I still remember the experience of sitting in the theater in January of 2020, watching Geun-sae’s eyes peek over the top of the staircase as he emerges from the basement. That moment did more than sneak up on me—like the character himself, the scene took up residence in the house of my mind. I like images that linger, poems that surprise, songs that might have been ripped from my own diary. I like art that worms its way in, makes a home of my body. Maybe art is like a parasite in that way—a strange symbiosis, where we are both its creator and its sustenance, its food and its flesh. I don’t know if I have the authority to say what art is, exactly—I don’t know if any of us do. But I think we can all say what it does: art surprises, incites, resists, invites, contradicts, doubts, believes, shocks, explores, deepens, creates.
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