Is Outsider Art Just a Big Fraud?
Have you ever looked at Outsider Art and felt a bit queasy and asked yourself what all the fuss is about? Have you felt suspicious about the term ‘outsider’ in the first place? Is there merit in this work? Your suspicions may be correct. The fact is that even if it isn’t all bad and we must be careful not to over-generalise, outsider art is in many ways built on false premises and is in many respects a fraud.
Irren-Anstalt Band-Hain. 1910. Adolf Wölfli's Via Wikipedia
Outsider art as an idea or discourse comes in waves: it is not much talked about, then you later see it rear its ugly head. There are even academics, credited and discredited (and I can think of one), who believe they are experts in Outsider Art, which indicates the many contradiction and disingenuous beliefs around it.
The rogue art form, unacademic, immune from high theory, is thought by its defenders to be a creditable object of study. It's one of the many cake-and-eat-it stories that surround it. And I've noticed that some of its academic defenders use it to show their limitless concern for the underprivileged, the disabled, and dispossessed, as they write their homilies, in all their liturgical earnestness, from within their air-conditioned walls.
If you think it is all a fraud. You're right. If you think it's ugly, you're right.
The Origin Story of Outsider Art
The term 'Outsider Art' was coined in 1972 by the English art critic Roger Cardinal as an umbrella term to describe the art produced by those not associated with, admitted, or educated by the art scene, usually the insane, but also the parochial ingenu. ‘Outsider Art’ also incorporates the ‘Art Brut’ of French postwar artist Jean Dubuffet, and folk art as part of its lineage.
But Dubuffet was part of the art establishment, and very much within the annals of art history, where many discuss him without recourse to mentioning ‘Outsider Art’. (I continue to use scare quotes to emphasise that I can barely dignify the term.)
By and large, this kind of art is characterised by rawness in both conception and design. It is a directness of approach (read: lack of forethought) that assumes a deeper plenitude of psychic penetration. It basks under the myth of a childlike honesty made possible only from the lack of inhibitions of either the censoring superego or the arbitrary rules of mainstream culture.
It is the perception that art from so-called outsiders comes to us uncivilised and unalloyed that gives it its allure, a negative cachet that is caught up, I would argue, with diagnostic voyeurism. In other words, you are curious to see what sort of art a madman might cook up. (There is always a market for the drawings of prisoners on death row.)
The pornographic attraction to the lurid and the bizarre is far from the only thing that makes Outsider Art suspect. Taken at face value, it is an innocent descriptor that masks a serious problem: its insulation from the discourse of 'high' art. It presumes a set of alternative (‘outside’) criteria proper to it, which, by implication, ‘normal’ art discourse is ill-equipped to accommodate.
Outsider Art as an Accepted Term
Now that Outsider Art is an accepted (by some) genre of art (and of the art market), rather than an innocent epithet made in passing, its premise of inside vs. outside, its claim to rules beyond the ken of those possessed of reason, accountable knowledge and history, is cause for considerable alarm.
For it is a way of thinking that drinks from the seemingly bottomless cup of exclusive mysticism that is profoundly conservative. It is conservative because of its exclusionism, its suspect clubbiness, and for how it spurns a normative level of accountability to which 'insider' art is generally answerable.
It would be good to begin with the presumptions and implications of Cardinal's term. Much like Lawrence Alloway's coinage of Pop, Cardinal may have begun with a throwaway name. And while the coinage may belong to such people, they are less responsible for the acceptance, continuing theorisation, and relative hardening of the term. Its scattered acceptance is problematic.
To begin with, it is a notion based on principles that are philosophically lazy. If there is an outside to art, there must be an inside.
Inside-out and Outside-in
The rejoinder is easy to anticipate: the inside represents the art schools and academies, the galleries and museums, the critics and the connoisseurs, the educated amateurs and the enthusiasts that fête, recognise and patronise the artists themselves. But this is just all gloss and rhetoric. Fluff. The 'art world' is too much of a disordered, discordant mass to have an inside, let alone an outside.
Since at least the Middle Ages, art has always had its share or outsides. From the Renaissance at least, art’s life and development are firmly based on a dialectic between what it wants to be and what it doesn't; what ought and ought not.
If we look at the different movements burgeoning in the early twentieth century, we would have to say that this institution was multiple, a heterogeneous pool. The possibility of defining an inside to an outside is an errant absurdity.
It is with Modernism that an inside-outside dynamic, constructed as it may have been, becomes most visible, for the avant-gardes were highly critical of institutions. Despite the institutions they made of themselves or made of them in the dialectical passage from radicality to acceptance, the avant-garde at its youthful peak was ipso facto of the institution, namely the academy, which they saw as the guardianship of habitual, stereotypical modes of artistic production.
Broadly speaking, the dissatisfaction with art schools and their accompanying salons was two-fold. The first was the repetitiveness that they perpetuated, and second, they were inadequate microcosms of the kinds of freedoms to which the radical artists wished to aspire. While avant-garde artists defined themselves as against the establishment, they needed that institution against which to fight their battles. The spontaneity and energy perceptible within avant-garde works still derive from the energy of being unorthodox and willing to rebel.
Therefore, for the notion of Outsider Art to be tenable, it must ignore the very binary on which Modernism, and to some extent, Postmodernism, is built, that of talented and courageous types fighting their battles of truth against the stodgy lethargy of the art establishment.
Over and above the debate of what constituted admissible art or inadmissible art – whether that be what satisfied public etiquette or what was appropriate for the salon or equivalent academic showing – the presiding debate was what was good and bad art.
This still sits within the claims made by the institution of art: what enshrines the institutions, the beliefs, and the knowledge systems that allow for the consensus of the value of objects as symbolically invested, that is, imbued with the quality of ‘artness’. A large portion of artists' activity and those comprising their 'world' is to separate the good from the bad.
Reference TBA. http://bit.ly/38j9Kjo
Good Art, Bad Art, and the World of Art
What constitutes good art and bad art is a relative and vexed question and highly variable. At one extreme, it can be read ideologically (e.g., Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), or on the other, in the way I prefer to see it here, as understood in the Kantian sense of the distilling process that occurs all the time with moral beings for whom almost every moment of the waking day is spent in making choices. Hence the right and good passage as opposed to the less favourable.
If the difference between good and bad is seen in terms of inside and outside, then so be it, but this is not what the apologists of Outsider Art mean, as we well know.
So, one way of looking at the so-called art world is as a system of fluid and constantly redefining demarcations. This is especially present and appropriate to the age of 'contemporaneity', the wobbly term that has snuck in past Postmodernism as the prevailing label for the times. Its looseness can be attributed to the sheer abundance of different styles and attitudes caused by digitisation and globalisation.
There is also a subtle implication within the term that not all art produced now is necessarily contemporary. Rather, contemporary art is defined according to what most sums up the spirit of the times: its discontents, its contradictions. What makes the idea of the contemporary so challenging is that it follows a dialectical model whose terms of reference are shifting.
The profusion of Biennales throughout the world, what many would agree as endemic of the globalised and diffuse nature of the contemporary within art, are critical to how the contemporary is trying to instate and constantly redefine itself.
We might do well to remember the famous discourse of marginality that is still a driver and an inhibiter for postcolonial nations such as Australia, whose remoteness from the more febrile and lucrative art markets make some forms of ambitious art-making and art marketing unjustifiable.
And within the so-called centres themselves – be they London or New York – hundreds of galleries complain of not being satisfactorily accepted within so-called mainstream and cutting-edge markets and opportunities. The art market is always winnowing out its own.
In short, there have always been outsides to art, and these outsides are multiple and exist according to many categories; so, to stake a claim for a principle outside is either simplistic or carries the ignorance of arrogance.
If Outsider Art is part of what has been rejected, then maybe for good reason. Yet there is a substantial amount of art which is called Outsider by some – and which shares the traits typical to tâchisme (‘tâche’ is French for ‘spot’ or ‘stain’) or other more ‘insider’ terms – which is well worth looking at and which garners as much attention as other ‘mainstream’ art. The brutiste (related to ‘Art brut’, art that is obviously crude and inelegant) tendency is very much part of that composite, which many recognise as contemporary art.
Suppose we were to use the simplistic dialectic of Outsider Art against itself. In that case, we might well say that the simplistic binary is merely a posturing that is always already subsumed by the difference inherent within ‘the contemporary’ within art. But this is not what the apologists of Outsider Art would want us to believe—as we well know.
The Myths and Philosophies of Outsiderness in History
Today, we accept that Modernist art has a substantial debt to the kinds of tendencies that Outsider Art wishes to own for itself. We can go further than that and look at concepts of freedom and liberalism inherited from the eighteenth-century, and in particular, the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Extraordinarily, Rousseau – particularly in the works Émile and The New Héloïse – is credited with overhauling how children were treated and represented. The way he shaped our idea of childish innocence and the extent to which his thought was so keenly adopted is well known.
More extraordinary still is the degree to which his ideas still have purchase today, extending to those who neither know nor care about the Enlightenment philosophe. Rousseauian notions of untutored energies allowed free reign. The voice of childish innocence was to be preserved at all costs, as it bespoke a quality uninhibited by the false consciousness of cultured society.
Rousseau's concept of society is a tissue of laws that have lost their moral substance for having severed themselves from the constituents that gave birth to them. Sadly, the culture-nature opposition was endemic since it suggested that humanity had lost its fundamental bond to what was natural, hence true and free. For Rousseau, humans could never be free so long as they invested too little in social standards at the expense of those taught by nature.
In effect, Rousseau constructed an idea of nature that had never existed before. Philosophy had always spoken of natural laws, but these were still seen as extensions of God, irrespective of whether Cartesian or Spinozist. But Rousseau's importance lay in the way he crystallised the Enlightenment and pre-Romantic notions of independent agency through absorbing them into a concept of Nature.
As opposed to viewing Nature as an extension of God's will and his abounding substance, Nature now belonged to Man. It became the object of human striving. Whereas nature was part of God, man, and his relationship to nature, had effectively replaced God.
With this came a series of potent myths of non-mediation whose ramifications Rousseau could barely have imagined. A wild fruit, a fruit that has not been tampered with, is immeasurably better than one that has come from a farm. So too, a gesture that comes to us without premeditation or forethought is truer than one that shows the characteristics of culture and tutelage. In short, it gives us a more accurate snapshot of Nature and is closer to who we really are.
Together with the increasing notice given to children at the end of the eighteenth century came a fascination with the insane. The Romantic identity is tightly woven within the growing valorisation of untutored, non-rulebound forms of expression.
Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking studies in the 1960s and '70s in this regard are well known: the growth of the discourse of reason after the Renaissance witnessed a parallel growth of unreason. The implication of this was that reason could not subsist without a culture of diagnosis and sequestration.
This division of society into two parts also created a countermovement amongst artists in particular. Thus, the interest in children, the insane, and the primitive from poets to doctors comes from an increasing consensus in certain circles, pre-eminently artistic and philosophical, that their expressions yielded a more poignant truth what could be could be gained from due tutelage and reflection.
Théodore Géricault’s portraits of the insane are part of this trend, as are Francisco de Goya’s etchings and paintings of lunatic asylums and black masses. Arthur Rimbaud’s dérèglement des sens (a disorder of the senses) becomes a catchcry for successive generations of artists and climaxes in Abstract Expressionism.
With Jackson Pollock, in particular, art met its inevitable dead-end; that is, according to the narrative of unfettered expression. (As theorists like Rosalind Krauss have shown, when taken into the realm of performance art, Pollock's work is far more fluid, continuous, and less oppressively mythological.)
Drip Painting. 1951. By Jackson Pollock. Woodshed Art Auctions.
A Roll Call of Artists Who Would Have Shuddered at Being Called Outsider Artists
When we look back on figures like Rimbaud or Pollock, and others like Vincent van Gogh, Antonin Artaud or even Paul Klee, or the German Expressionist artists of ‘Die Brücke’ (The Bridge), it is hard to gauge the limits of outsider-ness, let alone what characterises its style. All of these artists are definitely ‘in’ the art world. They are key members of the history and language of art.
Numerous others fit the bill as well, such as Gauguin but for the sake of concision, allow me to concentrate on those few I have mentioned. Pollock always played the outsider, and his marketing was reliant on that. By no wish of his own, van Gogh is the same. Pollock was a student of Hans Hoffman, and van Gogh was largely self-taught, but constantly sought out the advice of his peers, who were some of the most brilliant artists of his time. He had worked at the art dealers Goupil and Cie, had attended classes in Paris of the famous academician Cormon, and was in contact all his life with his brother Theo who was manager of Goupil's in Paris.
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. Vincent van Gogh. Circa 1853 – 1890. The Courtauld Gallery, London
To call van Gogh naïve is a manipulative mistruth and of benefit only the commercial market. The truth be told is that he struggled all his life to be an insider, but the tragedy of his life was that things didn't go his way. If van Gogh knew that he would have a museum dedicated to himself, he might not have done himself so much self-harm.
Klee can be singled out not only because of his famous dictum of 'taking a line for a walk', obeying chance over conscious design but because of the uncanny regularity with which so-called Outsider art looks like bad imitations of him.
All the artists who formed the ‘Die Brücke’ group in 1905 were architecture students with no art school training. They attempted to crystallise the still developing interest by the avant-garde in African sculpture, with the Fauvist revolution of Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice Vlaminck, together with vitalist narratives of complete freedom.
Rimbaud deserves special mention as he is the archetype of the artist-outsider and visionary. Beginning writing seriously at thirteen and abandoning it when he was 20, he epitomises the youthful, impatient flourishing of raw emotion and explosive intelligence that youths and die-hard romantics think art should be.
His prose poem Saison en Enfer (Season in Hell), which he composed aged nineteen, is not only astonishing for being written in the still-nascent genre of the prose poem, but ranks with any visionary tract from St Augustine or Hildegard von Bingen. Its third line reads, ‘Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. —Et je l’ai trouvée amère.—Et je l’ai injuriée’. (‘One evening, I sat Beauty on my knee. And I found her bitter. And I insulted her’.)
These are lines that endear themselves to anyone who is attracted to an alternative, unorthodox vision. The veiled violence of Rimbaud draws youths to him for generation after generation. Rimbaud is held up as the success that can be achieved when an artist is left to his or her own devices, freed from the (false?) expectations of parenthood and education.
Artaud is another priestly figure within art whose madness had often led to gross misinterpretation. For like van Gogh, he had his bouts of sanity, and much of his art represents an effort to negotiate the two poles of mental activity.
While his fellow Surrealists were busy holding up Artaud as the token madman, Artaud was desperate for recognition within their coterie, not as an outsider who was – similar to complaints made by feminist and racial minorities—both idolised and vilified.
And like van Gogh, Artaud’s work is an intricate odyssey into self-analysis, since he found the diagnosis and forced empathy of doctors and artists around him to be lacking. Artaud wrote a dizzying text on van Gogh in which he declared that he had been victimised by a society which had failed him and driven to suicide, 'suicided by society'.
Both Artaud and van Gogh were social beings whose efforts at clear and unduped expression are too easily seen as a symptom of madness instead of their attempt to escape it.
In the words of Louis Sass from his book, Madness, and Modernism:
It in no way diminishes the unique and uncanny brilliance of his writings to suggest that the sensual excesses of his ‘theatre of cruelty’ may be better understood not as expressions of a naturally overflowing vitality but as defenses against the devitalisation and derealisation that permeated his being.
Sass goes on to articulate that the primary source of Artaud's agony lay in the constant loss of self, precipitated by his collapse into psychotic states, and the powerlessness that it brought. The ‘magic’ that he sought in life and art was both bereft in the bourgeois mind and in danger of being unreachable due to his mental failure.
The Critical Safehouse of Madness
It is essential to emphasise at this point that I have no real problem with the equations of art and madness, except when it is simplistic. When madness, just as childishness or the noble savage for that matter, are made into a fetish that ultimately ruins other narratives of art production.
I am suspicious that madness and other narratives of irrationality are used as safehouses from criticism. What artists use madness as a crutch and a pitch they have both ways: they want to be taken seriously as artists while also seeking empathy for their condition.
I am critical of art that is too ready to grasp at narratives that too easily lapse into regions of pure abstraction, pre-articulacy, and which by implication are immune from ‘conventional’, ‘reasonable’ discourses and their constrictive power relationships.
By contrast, there are contemporary artists such as Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois. They are remarkable for the way irrationality is a talismanic standard that threatens to explode the work of art. The individual, at any moment, but is also kept in check with ironic reflection.
One category that has been omitted is that of the other kind of child artist, the artist in a state of mental decline. There is a narrative of development that persists since the Renaissance that artists begin as tempestuous revolutionaries and end as heroes at peace with the world, finally after a long life of apprenticeship to art, plumbing the secrets of childish immediacy.
An artist like Matisse is a model in this regard. Apart from how this myth came to eclipse other forms of development and became a kind of mandate for artistic success in old age, like all myths, there is a sizeable grain of truth. A serenity can creep into the art of old and experienced artists that strikes us with its untarnished honesty. But this obsession with honesty can be taken too far.
The madness of mental decrepitude is as seductive to some of art's audiences as the cognitive weaknesses that give vent to outsiders' mucky, questionable truths. To quote the architecture critic Martin Filler, ‘one man’s serenity is another’s senility’. Titian's late works, venerated as a watershed in his career for their freedom, were executed while the artist was not in full possession of his faculties and physically ill.
Willem de Kooning's last paintings are celebrated as feats of freedom. Yet, they were made while the artist was in an advanced state of Alzheimer's disease such that his assistants had to hand the paint to him, effectively choosing the colours themselves.
Before he died in 1973 at the age of ninety-one, the last paintings of Picasso have also been subject to steady criticism, even as early as on the occasion of the exhibitions in Avignon's Palais des Papes in 1971,1972 and 1973. Critical responses were lukewarm. Many commented on the mad jumble of paintings whose evident haste was either the product of a man who had taken leave of his senses or had become governed by the idea of his inviolable genius, or both. These are instances of what the literary critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith has called the 'senile sublime' or, better, 'the dross of dementia'.
Self Portrait. Pablo Picasso. (June 2, 1972). Via Pallimed Arts & Humanities.
What is to be noticed is how these examples are still stridently defended. The eagerness with which some people respond to artists' work manifests a loss of agency, as if that lack of intent, will, and knowledge provides easier access to primal truth, whatever that is, or whether not knowing what you are doing can make it challenging art. It is stupidity and badness dressed up as a religious insight.
Outsider Art as a Shady Cult
Equally, the defenders of Outsider Art have lobbied together as a kind of cult. Like a cult, it uses ineffability to dodge objections and to gain more devotees.
What this shortlist of artists aims to underscore is that the history of art is so populated with artists with mental disorders (salient, repressed, hidden, manifest or diagnosed; we are now led to believe that most artists show symptoms of the latest mutation of Asperger's syndrome, itself a diagnostic invention of a Viennese doctor) that it is impossible to make any disassociation.
Nor is there sufficient evidence that any similar line can be drawn between artists with formal training and those without. Before the avant-garde, art has always had an agonistic, and indeed parasitic relationship to the outsider – the heathen, the heteroclite, the healer.
The narrative of the avant-garde exposes a cycle within art that is recurrent within many other endeavours as well, from science to politics: discourses refresh themselves with others from the outside; assimilate and develop, then fall into stagnation and disrepute (take Thomas Kuhn’s theory of the scientific revolutions for example).
In short, there is always already an outside within art. And as the example of Artaud has shown, these outsides multiple, and are often inadvertent, still less desirable to those who inhabit them. Even were ‘Outsider Art’ to call itself a rhetorical title – like Vauxcelles’s phrase that gave way to Fauvism – this would necessitate a rhetorical twin of 'Inside'.
The hypothetical consequences are ludicrous. In short, the semantics of ‘Outsider Art’ are based on a binary, yet once this binary is scrutinised, the logic is found wanting. To lay a term like Outsider Art at art’s door is about as redundant and as presumptuous as sending an outdated manual on motor mechanics to Daimler-Benz.
Outsider Art vs. Aboriginal Art
Before I conclude with the family traits of 'Outsider Art', it would be unfortunate not to mention Aboriginal art in this discussion since it can be viewed as being Outsider on several counts. It belongs to a marginal community whose political, spiritual, and intellectual needs have been inadequately met. Most of its artists – and certainly all of those who come under the indeterminate banner of 'traditional' – have not had formal art training in the sense of what is offered by Federal and State institutions.
At the risk of tipping into the distasteful, regarding the appeal that the socially dysfunctional has to the 'Outsider Art' aficionado, Australian Aborigines have a chronic incidence of alcoholism ethanol-related addictions that lead to rapid mental and physical deterioration.
And yet, while it is very hard to generalise in this area, Aboriginal Art has always campaigned for parity with the other arts and has always been distrustful of efforts to put it on a pedestal.
Equally, it has come up for its fair share of criticism for the desire to be equal to non-indigenous arts (and at the same time being commercially and internationally more successful), while yet protesting that non-indigenous eyes have limited access and comprehension of the sacred, secret nature of their art. (The counterargument, voiced less often, is just as valid: indigenous people are not necessarily adequately initiated into Western ways of thinking; mutual responsiveness, tolerance, and patience are of course key here.)
The issue of a right of admission to a particular discourse is prevalent to colonised peoples, however, since it maintains the ownership of difference.
Problematically, but without the specific cultural harness, 'Outsider Art' craves the same indulgence. By definition, it asks to be judged by criteria 'outside' that of art while being positioned as art. 'Outsider Art' places itself within its own special quarantine, insulated from 'mainstream' criticism.
This alternative discourse that it claims for itself is permanently hidden since it belongs to the regions of what is hard or impossible to articulate—as we have seen, either childlike, psychotic, or 'primitive'. Yet it wishes to claim for itself something more nuanced than a symptomatology, which was what Freud came dangerously close to, or to some, fell into, in his essays on art.
‘Outsider Art’ is also a-historical; the phenomena of ‘outsiderness' can be located in time, but it does not follow the same kind of development as the history of style within conventional art, be it Western or Eastern (especially Chinese, Japanese, and Korean).
There is no sense of a progression of style, no rise, no fall. There is no evaluative sense to it for history and the historical circumstances from where the work springs, except when it comes to the artist's biography, which is usually a maudlin tale that, if you choose to discount it, you run the risk of appearing heartless.
By and large, the more you unpack the intellectual apparatus around ‘Outsider Art’, which includes the conspicuous lack of them, the call for different criteria from those of ‘conventional’ art discourse is more like the desire to escape criticism. And this kind of marginalising leads to indifference. In the end, the quick first pang of curiosity leads to an ocean of boredom.
What makes matters worse is that the apologists of 'Outsider Art' are mostly well-versed art historians or critics who have offered alternative discourse and hopefully have heard of the political consequences of groups that deludedly set up an independent framework for themselves. 'Outsider Art' is an Animal Farm but with one major difference: its lack of members. How many 'Outsider Artists' so-named really would have wished to have been called as such?
The example of Artaud is well taken. Would Adolf Wöllfli have wanted such encouragement? Colin McCahon’s work is a series of sallies into the dark in the desire to be heard, accepted, embraced, and belong. The well-credentialed apologists of ‘Outsider Art’ preside over their flock like psychiatrists in an asylum whose cells are filled with holograms.
The principal problem with Outsider art—if this is possible to state after all the problems I have enumerated, but I have been saving this until last—is the most obvious: it is so often so execrably bad. Yet unlike 'mainstream' art, 'Outsider Art' indulges itself with the special liberties of the inchoate and astray. The good artists claimed within 'Outsider Art's' pantheon are few: Wöllfli, Wols and Jean Dubuffet number among them.
The latter’s membership is always provisional since his brutisme is a developed style and strategy, not to mention that he is a darling of the French establishment who is treasured for having managed to divert attention, ever so briefly, away from the art world of the United States with an approach that was less derivative of Abstract Expressionism than tâchisme.
For all its faux-alternative self-styling, the newness delivered to us from the eyes untrammelled by 'reasonable' culture are mind-deadeningly monotonous: an inadequate mastery of figure-ground relationships; spirals; elongated heads (sometimes with spirals for eyes – Mad magazine was on to something); big bug-like eyes; lots of images of people shouting à la Munch; obsessive hatching or dotting or scribbling; excremental forms; more scribble; concentric circles (sorry, no offense Indigenous artists of the Western Desert in Australia); vivid psychedelia (sorry no offense you designers of T-shirts and album covers of the 1960s and '70s); stick figures; vomit-like form; more scribbling. Outsider sculpture looks like the wood forms that children assemble while waiting for their father to cook their sausages on the barbecue; later, it goes into the fire – wisely.
It is a saving grace that there is no such thing as 'Outsider Music'. Otherwise, we would be overhearing ensembles of 'players' sawing away on instruments they do not know how to lose.
The analogy is more intended than flip. One of the most stirring and stimulating aspects of art is that we are brought into the bosom of a struggle. But the most compelling of these is when more than one dimension of human endeavour is enmeshed when the struggle with form encompasses a struggle with psychology, politics, and belief.
Intensity commonly arises after repeated attempts at this struggle—an attempt, as the poet Stéphane Mallarmé saw it, of distillation. Art is all about the abyss, but it is most liberating and, therefore, most interesting when its expression is somehow a product of resolution, not regurgitation.
