Sirens of Art

Bardelys was charmed when he heard the following comment from an animator:

“Whenever I see one of the old Popeye cartoons, at least the black-and-white ones, it makes me want to draw something.”
— from the commentary track on Popeye Vol. I disk 3

This, to Bardelys, formed the heart of the artistic impulse. It lay behind every urge to create that he himself had ever felt, and he suspected it lay behind the urges of all artists the world over, since the dawn of art.

All good art, Bardelys deemed, involved a level of abstraction. It was not the perfection of recreation that made art good, it was the very opposite: the imperfection of recreation, when it served a consistent and striking aim, was what made art good, and great. And it was the consistent, purposeful imperfection that added up to ‘style.’ This style was a sort of lens, a way of seeing events or objects in the world, of hearing them, touching them, seeing them, imagining them in a new way. That was the gift of great art, and it could inspire, in those of us so inclined, to want to re-create this recreation, after the manner of the art we experienced at first, and then later in our own manner, which we must discover and lay bare, one fold at a time.

‘Ah, that’s good — I must do some of that myself!’ sums it up.

But then, Bardelys wondered, why did he (and others drawn to art like the animator on the commentary track) feel the urge to ‘do some of that’ themselves? And why did others (most men, he suspected) find themselves quite content to remain in the audience, and never have to create those experiences themselves?

Maybe it was all ego. Artists after all are famous for their swelled sense of self-importance. Maybe they reject being forced to swallow others’ creations, no matter how great, but must at last vomit out their own copies and reworkings, in order to say, ‘There! I made this, and it comes from me!’ Maybe the artistic impulse comes from a side of a man not unlike the side that rebels against omnipotent God, whose creation and intimate knowledge of all that is robs a man of his individuality, his free will, his potency.

Or maybe it lay in some small sense of dissatisfaction. Maybe there are some in every audience who feel the wonder and thrill of great and potent art so powerfully, so intimately, so thoroughly, that they become at length aware that their wonder and thrill are in some way lacking … that there might be, somewhere beyond, something more that would satisfy them 100% … probably this was an illusion, but it was worth striving for, trying to work one’s way closer, and a little closer still, to that perfect and complete satisfaction.

Or maybe it lay instead in a different kind of dissatisfaction — a dissatisfaction not in the art, but in life itself. Maybe we find in art so much joy that life begins to pale. Then we ‘need’ more art in a way almost physically addictive — psychically addictive, anyway. But there is only so much great art we can find. And there are only so many times we can re-enjoy the same old classics, before their thrill wears thin. Then we need more, more of the same only better, more like that only more-suited to our own desires and state, what we like and feel and believe right now.

For some artists and would-be artists, Bardelys was sure the goal was applause and approval by the audiences of the world. They wanted that piece of the spotlight that talesmen, painters, and actors claimed; they wanted the applause to be aimed at them; they wanted the love, the fortune, the fame that lives on. Bardelys suspected that this motive would be found most in the performing arts. In those arts of dance, acting, song and music, the audience could imagine themselves up there on the stage, the cynosure of all eyes. And it would be this fantasy, rather than anything to do with the creation of the art itself, that drew them.

But an animator works far from the crowd, and his principal role involves the drawing in the cell on his table; he forms his relationship not to the audience but rather it grows between his hand and his eye and the line he has drawn. A well-drawn line becomes its own joy, in a way that few can grasp. That line, there — how perfectly it represents, and goes beyond, the thing he wants to show!

In talesmanship, Bardelys feared, this lure was a fatal one, that was so strong and pure in graphic art. In talesmanship the love of the line, in and of itself, lay at the basis of the degradation and near-collapse of the tale in the modern world; it was the reason why so few critics even understood stories, and could only judge novels on the basis of a handful of sentences they found in them, with no idea of what made the story good or bad, or even a story at all.

But for himself, he did his best to see and hold in his mind the tale that lay beyond the lines. And he had begun to wonder, in the context of the animator’s remarks, whether the best tales were the purest, devoid of all ‘well-turned-out sentences’ and even the love of them.

Was Dashiell Hammett right after all, he wondered?

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, August 2, 2008)