The Meaning of Art

The result of self-abnegation—so-called death and rebirth—as a way of owning and restoring culture

Way back in 2010, I picked up two books on the advice of a thread on the Something Awful web forums. The second of these, Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, lead me to steal Otto Rank’s Art and Artist from the Ottawa library.

Well, not intentionally. I just couldn’t find it for several years, long after it was due and I paid my fine. All the better—since it seems one of those books that would have survived the next culling given the direction the whole system seems to be taking.

Rank was a disciple of Freud who was ignominiously exiled for disagreeing with his master and, subsequently, was pushed to the sidelines of psychoanalysis. In Art and Artist, he answers the question of how it is that an artist can simultaneously express himself (pardon the exclusive language) as an individual while also speaking for his culture.

So when we dig up some old fine, expressive relic, and say that it’s a product of such-and-such culture, how can we fit the individual craftsman into the picture? Where does self and tribe intersect?

The answer for Rank was that of filling a gap, or a hole. The artist has first to learn everything there is to be learned, more or less, from his culture—and still find himself wanting. There is something he needs his culture hasn’t given him. And so now it is upon him to fashion it, and return it.

You may recognize shadows of what’s been abstracted and refined into the Hero’s Journey in that statement—some Osiris myth stuff—fine, but let’s not leap to conclusions. That’s an archetypal abstraction of contemporary literary studies applied to myth—and I’m not talking about any of that stuff. Wrong domain (and wrong for a million more reasons I’d like you to remind me to wade into at some point.)

I’m talking about the motivations of the artist, and his relation to his culture and society.

T.S. Eliot put the same idea into his own words in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. It’s great when two smart people independently converge on the same explanation, corroborating each other. Rank was a German psychoanalyst, Eliot an American English poet. But right in the title you see, tradition and individual. Culture and artist.

I read Eliot much later, and only later after that did I realize that Rank and Eliot were saying the same thing—that one has to master a tradition before one can go beyond it. That one takes it up, and changes it, and by that means even retroactively changes the meaning of prior art for one’s own and subsequent generations. You change the past as you create the present. You can only do this, of course, if you fully understand the past.

When McLuhan chastised Ezra Pound, James Joyce, TS. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis for using “these rituals as a basis for art activity,” his indignation comes from having studied the techniques of the artists for years in blissful ignorance of their origins in pagan religion.

In terms of creating art, McLuhan agreed with Rank and Eliot. The artist, in McLuhan’s terms, practices “self-abnegation.” He deprives his ego of what it wants, for the sake of opening his mind. He self sacrifices. It could be asceticism, it could be the abandonment of what would make him happy. It is, in other words, a death of the individual. It is prepared for, heavily, for years, through the study of all there is. All these artists spent their lives studying and mastering their crafts, staying abreast of developments scientific and artistic, in as many domains as possible. I mean, come on. We’re talking about James Joyce here!

And, for the sake of art, they created things which met the needs of the day. Innovated on tradition. In the specific case of the moderns, they responded to the post-Newtonian world of cause-and-effect breaking-down with electric speed and global travel. They demonstrated the use of analogy and mythic language to leap across discontinuties while positive science was breaking down and mathematicians were being rudely dispossessed of their dream of a perfectly universal system of formal logic.

If you want to kill your ego and come back for art, then great. Have at ‘er. Hope you’re suited up for the trip.

But, of course, death and rebirth as a matter of religion, as spiritualism, as something inflicted by those up a hierarchy for the sake of taking control over those lower on the hierarchy; that’s a problem. Because it’s not divine. It’s basically the imposition of schizophrenia.

It’s not as cut and dry as I lay it out, but that’s the bait-and-switch between the pinnacle of artistic method for a ritual into New Age mysticism as a spiritualism. The artist knows what he is going into. He does it to himself, or gives—in today’s jargon—informed consent. When one is “informed” that what one is entering into is a spiritual practice, one is being lied to. It’s not. It’s just psychology.

The world is in fact in need of artists willing to forego their own comfort and desires and egos, and enter into the chaos of meaning-making in order to forge what is needed. But the more I look into the fruits of anthropology since James Frazer, the more problems I see with how this has all been articulated and framed.

Art is not a hobby. It’s a serious endeavour. It takes the sort of study of tradition and the discipline of honing one’s craft, honing one’s senses, developing one’s skill, which cannot be bought and performed as an early-retirement hobby.

The work of taking on a tradition, or of having broadly surveyed one’s culture first, also buffers the problems of runaway innovation. What one creates must fit. It must be what was lacking, what was needed. What one interpolates to fill the void. One is creating puzzle pieces to fill holes, and one can’t know what goes on the piece if one hasn’t studied what’s been completed of the puzzle.

The nonsense language of construction and deconstruction, or of semiotic signs and signifiers, is totally unsuitable for understanding any of this.

I think my answer to the problems of New Age nonsense mysticism, and it’s incessant preaching of the death of the individual and rebirth into disembodied, cultish, communal consciousness, requires a new elitism about art. An exclusive one. A critical one. But one which is clear and upfront about its motivations, at least for those who have ears to listen.