For me, making art is a personal exploration. It helps me clarify my thinking and answer questions that bubble up in my brain – Queen Celine began with the question: what if free trade suddenly stopped? Rosie and Eric the Postie helped me explore the different approaches to finding one’s identity in a world that said you couldn’t.
I could explore these ideas intellectually – stare into the sky and let the idea roll around in my head – but that tends to lead to circular thinking and I end up with no greater clarity on what I think or why I think it. So, art provides a physical medium to explore the ideas and ensures that I have some forward momentum and an endpoint to the question I’m pondering. And note, I use the word ‘endpoint’ and not ‘ answer’ intentionally.
The problem with attempting to display one’s thinking in public (as art is so wonderful at doing), is that a vulnerability that exists. After all, what we’re really doing is saying, “I had this question, I explored it for a bit, and here’s where I landed. What do you think?” We’re exposing our workings (just a scientist or mathematician does), and inviting critique. Inviting critique is incredibly confronting.
Sometimes, it turns out that people also had similar questions to the ones we were trying to answer. They can see the work we’ve put in to try to answer it for ourselves and they can have a few reactions:
- Appreciate the attempt for what it is – an answer – but realise it’s not their answer. Our work may influence their thinking somewhat, perhaps provide another perspective, but it’s not going to transform them in some meaningful way.
- They disagree. Whatever endpoint we reach is not something they can understand or want to engage with. They have their own point of view and that’s fine. We go separate ways with things all the time.
- They love it. Our endpoint resonates with them really strongly, it’s as if we’ve answered their own question that they never thought to explore in art but may have pondered from time to time.
It’s with this first audience that we can often get some thoughtful, perhaps useful, commentary – “I see what they were trying to do here”, “It’s a noble attempt at…”. There will always be the second audience, which may be most difficult to overcome. And it’s with the third audience, the ones who may have had similar questions, that we tend to get the warm and fuzzies over the work we’ve achieved with responses like, “I really love this, I want to buy it!”
The fourth audience
But, there’s another audience – the ones that prevent us from making the work in the first place for fear that this audience will be in the overwhelming majority. Sometimes, we find ourselves in a situation where no one else has asked the question that we’ve asked ourselves. No one could care less about free-trade, or whether the world may inhibit our ability to be our true selves. It’s with these audiences where we hear the most confronting commentary, “This is pointless. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it. Why would anyone waste their time with this?” This, to many of us, is a ‘disaster’.
When this sort of commentary is brought to our attention it’s easy to connect our work directly to our identity – if people think this is a waste of time, then maybe I’m a waste of time. If this is pointless, then maybe *I’m* pointless. If no one gets me then why would I bother to try to answer any more questions for myself? And so we stop making or sharing anything.
But, here’s the thing. Our work is not our identity, even though it comes from a personal place. Our work is simply and literally an endpoint for a question that no one but ourselves asked. Chances are, that question has an infinite number of endpoints and there are thousands of artists, essayists, scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers seeking to arrive at their own endpoints. Just because someone can’t imagine why anyone would bother, or that one particular endpoint doesn’t resonate with them, doesn’t mean we’ve failed or that we’re a failure.
If anything, our work is an act of generosity. We’ve spent a small portion of our finite time on the Earth attempting to provide a perspective on something – something that we’re interested in or something that’s been bugging us. Some people will value that and others won’t. But art, just like science, maths, philosophy etc, often deals with questions no one thought to answer. Without that innate curiosity paired with the courage to show our workings to the world, we wouldn’t have the rich, vibrant culture and knowledge we have today.
Today’s culture and knowledge have been built upon over 1000s of years – each of us attempting to answer the questions that plague us in our own way. To avoid contributing to that makes us all less well off, whether the small group of detractors know it yet or not. And so if our work is simply an endpoint and not an answer, the only thing we can do is keep contributing, learning, and watching for those who are interested in answering the same questions as us. Their contribution may help us refine our own thinking and improve the next attempt we make at arriving at a new endpoint. We might also do the same for them. That’s the way it’s always been.