WHAT'S THE POINT?
EPISODE 022.5: WHAT'S THE POINT?
In the wake of the pandemic I recently heard an artist express words I suspect many of us are thinking about making and sharing our art: what’s the point? These thoughts have been haunting me. What’s the point? We are. You are. Life itself is the point and we (and you!) need your art-making more than ever. Let’s talk about it, please.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when it was clear it was all so much more than just a flu and we started locking ourselves indoors and seeing the rising death toll in the media, an artist I love and respect posted an image on Instagram saying he wasn’t sure why he was even bothering; given the severity of world events it just seemed so unimportant. In between the words, and between the lines, what I read was “What’s the point?” and as I typed out a brief and inarticulate reply, I began to wonder how many others were feeling the same thing. I’m David duChemin and this is a special episode of A Beautiful Anarchy, What’s the Point? Let’s talk about it.
Music /Intro
I wrote this episode to become Episode 29, which would publish in May, 2 months from now, but in reading it to Cynthia today she said, people can’t wait 2 months for this, and I had that feeling in my gut that she was right. So, as I work on this, isolated in my office in the attic of our home on Vancouver Island, it’s March 24th 2020, and the Covid-19 crisis is really only just beginning here in North America. Like you I have no idea what will happen in the coming months and it will probably all get so much worse and so much more uncertain before it gets better. I’m sure my artist friend isn’t the only one looking at the world at large and what he makes, or peering into the darker corners and the pain of others, or ourselves, and asking: what’s the point? What’s the point of the drawings? The cartoons? The painting, the sculpture, the songs, or whatever thing you make? When it’s big stuff, it’s easy to answer the question. When lives depend on you, I suspect the point is much clearer. But when it’s just art? When it’s some version of what Paul McCartney called “silly little love songs”? Don’t we need something in these darker times with a little more gravitas? Are those of us who concern ourselves with art that seem less weighty, are we now consigned to the sidelines while the serious artists take over?
What’s the point? I’ve allowed this question to rattle around a little bit for the last few days, and it haunts me. Because if there’s no point to what we do now, in these times when we’re all just a little more awake to the precariousness and therefore the value of life itself, then why do we do it at other times? If it’s not worth the breath we expend on it today, I can’t imagine why we’d ever spend that same breath on it. But I think it is worth it. On the largest possible scale, art and our efforts to make it, might just BE the point.
Art, even when it’s not remotely on the level of Picasso’s mural-sized painting Guernica, even when it’s only a pretty picture, art matters. Because beauty matters. I read a quote last year that suggested serious artists have long ago given up on beauty. I don’t subscribe to that. Beauty is not the only thing about which art can be about. But it can still be about beauty. We can still make something just to transport ourselves or others to a place of transcendence, awe, wonder, or reverence for life and something bigger than our momentary worries. There are many ways to be alive and not all of them require us at every moment to dwell on weightier things. Levity and humour are more important in darker times because we need the break from our tensions that laughter creates. We need the distraction. Not to be pacified, but just to catch our breath. To hope for a moment that things will go back to normal, and that when that new normal arrives there will still be laughter and wonder and yes, pretty love songs.
Making things that now seem trivial, like a piece of pottery or a poem, can be a way of expressing empathy for others, of giving courage and hope. It can be a means by which we express solidarity. When Italy was so hard hit by Covid-19 in early March, people took to balconies and from their places of isolation they sang arias and played guitars and connected to others while around the world people on social media took to writing notes and poems and telling anyone that would listen, “We’re in this together. You are not forgotten.” It was an artful response to the darkness and a way to put a candle in the window. To give courage and hope, and when even those were slow in coming, to say, “I’m here.”
And beyond that, as if that were not point enough for the making of artful things, both great and small, art-making is not only for everyone else. A candle placed in a window does more than helps others. It helps us. Art-making brings focus to our days. It provides a welcome distraction from the fear and the fretting. It gives us a place to put the nervous energy and the dark thoughts. It slows us down and helps us breathe. And when we can’t do that, and make our art without those things, art-making gives us a way to express them, to make that art through the fear or even because of it. Not every painting, poem or song, need be positive. There is room in our art for expressing sorrow, doubt, anger and the side of our emotions often seen as negative but which are, in fact, just messier and harder to look at, but no less human. Sometimes art-making isn’t pretty at all, but it is cathartic, a word that find its root in the greek work that means to cleanse or purge. Sometimes it’s only purpose is just to get it out and it’s going to be ugly and, if we’re lucky, no one will see it. At least not for now.
Art-making is a very human response to a very wide gamut of emotions and experiences. It’s a way to process those emotions, to let others feel the courage to experience those emotions themselves, to find respite from them, to in turn make something from them and pay that freedom and courage forward to others. To make art, however you do that, is a very human activity, and it is not only not trivial, it is vital and needed more in times like these. Not more than other things. Not as a panacea. Art has no anti-viral properties. But we are not only physical and care for ourselves and for others must be done in the ways in which we’re equipped to do so. I am not a doctor or a first responder. I can’t operate a respirator. But there are those for whom I can make breathing a little easier. There are people to whom you can give hope and calm and a reminder that they are not alone.
I think that’s what art and artists do best. We and the things we make remind others they aren’t alone. That there are others feeling the same hard feelings and thinking the same difficult thoughts. We can remind them of wonder, and when it’s all dark and gloomy and it feels like it’ll rain forever, we can be a witness to the inevitability and beauty of the rising sun. Art doesn’t matter despite the hard times, it matters in and because of the hard times. Art and art-making, is its own point. It requires no justification because courage and hope and pleasure and wonder, as well as the means to express and explore our fears and sorrows, require no justification.
What’s the point? You are. I am. We are the point because art is one way that we live our lives and remain awake and breathe deep. Art serves us. It heals us. And long after the dust settles on Covid-19, life will go on for those for whom life goes on. As it always has. And the question then will be what are we living for. And the answer will be art and all the things about which and for which we make it. You’re not alone. This was never going to be easy. But we’ll get through it. And on the other side, once through it all, there will be art, laughter, wonder and joy. There will be sunrises and silly love songs, and the best of what it means to be fully alive. And that, I think, is the point.
Thanks so much for joining me, friends. I hope you and yours are safe and well, staying put and washing your hands. I hope you’re finding the courage to make your art, whatever it is, and to share it with the world if that’s something you do. But don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. We need your art more than ever, and so do you. Until next time, take good care of you.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0