Naked Civil Servants
My old friend Al Giordano at The Field has written a provokative and moving piece about Penny Arcade, the performance artist. The review of her career is fascinating, but more to the point for me are his thoughts on art and audience, on media and market, on being a working class artist and autodidact and what that means.
All of these issues are sources of pride and torment. To function outside of the system, whether one functions in opposition to it or not, is to live in an apparent vacuum. I say apparent because in reality it is not a total vacuum. The problem is maintaining your energy and sense of direction when all of the messages from the official world, if there are any, are negative and insulting.
To be an autodidact in this world is to be subject to scorn and condescension. There is an entire academic establishment out there and it doesn’t exist to recognize that anyone can achieve the same level of learning on their own. It is true that academics are subject to peer review and must pass through a gauntlet of training before they can publish or teach. Even the most radical academic functions within this system of discipline and it serves the purpose of guaranteeing a certain level of quality in the product, or at least consistency. But writers and artists aren’t really academics, even when they have PhDs and MFAs, though they behave as if they were. Art School must teach something, so it teaches craft and taste and dresses both up as standards. And despite the fact that going to school to be a writer is a recent phenomenon, it has existed in the other arts for a long time. The term ‘Avant-Garde’ really means ‘Art created OUTSIDE of the academy’. Alfred Jarry did not look for academic approval of Ubu Roi after all, nor did Joyce get an MFA followed by a PhD in comparative literature to write Finnegans Wake. The embarrassing thing about Finnegans Wake, the unavoidable truth about Finnegans Wake, is that it is a book immersed in popular, vulgar occultism, and that Joyce’s imagination was as exercised by his wife’s underwear and farts as it was by Menippean Satire, Celto-Hybernian Rites, anticlerical ridicule, mystical paranomasia, polymorphous perversity or brontologism. Shakespeare also was an autodidact, and though he is an official god he has suffered over the centuries for it, including the greatest insult of all, the conviction that he could not possibly have written his plays. The main reason for the Authorship Controversy? No commoner could have been so smart. Surely he was an aristocrat, for only an Aristocrat would have the education and knowledge of court the plays reveal. And he must have been a lawyer, and courtier, and a soldier, and crypto-catholic, and a puritan. Anything but a WRITER acutely sensitive to rhetoric, professional jargon, the rhythms of speech, the ways of people, a man whose ear sucked up all around him, and an actor who knew how to put on a show. Shakespeare was a sponge for language, as all writers are, and a wicked mimic.
The accusation of autodidactism always relates to class and the personal psychology of the artist. The implication is that by remaining outside of the system, by training oneself, the autodidactic artist is placing theirself outside of the realm of criticism, beyond the market of aesthetics and values which represents what is judged to be best, never far from sales. The result is inferior, immature, unsophisticated art that depends upon a coterie for success. Precisely. It depends upon a coterie for success. Another way to put it, is the way Al and Penny do. The relationship is directly between artist and audience. Both artist and audience have decided they don’t need the critic, the foundation director, the editor, the agent, the studio head, the gallery owner, the reviewer, the academic, to mediate, to tell them what to think. Penny Arcade has enjoyed large audiences for decades, despite sneering reviews in ‘alternative’ papers like The Village Voice.
But the price is high. Economically it means that likely you will have to work a full time job or forego having a family. It means voluntary poverty or work in a mind-deadening job. It then becomes necessary to somehow find the mental freedom to make art, to perform, on the side, or, if the job is sufficiently mindless and the surveillance spotty, while at work. Again, this would be true for any artist with a day job, which in writing is typical today even of relatively successful authors. But what you take away from a day job as lawyer or college professor and what you take away from a day job as cashier, or kaprongetator assembler, or bookshelver, or dishwasher, or house painter is very different. Most working class jobs involve minimal decision making, little respect, and no sense of power or direction. Artists function without the respect, but they must have self-respect just wake up in the morning. What Penny evinces in her every syllable is a sense of personal power and purpose and of self-respect. In his post Al quotes (via Penny) Jack Smith, who says that great artists have to be willing to make bad art for decades and even then not be sure. She also quotes her old pal Quentin Crisp, who said that time is kind to non-comformists. I’m sure Jack Smith is a ludicrous figure to Jerry Bruckheimer or even Woody Allen. And I imagine there are few successful authors who would be satisfied with Quentin Crisp’s life work. But for these men, however you regard their output, life and work were and are inseparable, and being Jerry Bruckheimer or Truman Capote was not an option. They would have failed miserably at both and on top of that, failed at life.
It is not that you wish to be beyond criticism, it is that you wish not to be crushed by criticism based on a measure you have never accepted. This makes the going murky because without outside validation you have to trust your own ability to create and enforce your own measure, one you may not be able to convince others is valid. And doing this for decades on end, in near total silence, has turned me into a mad man.
