On the Spectrum of Context

Morning Thoughts #258

I can’t write in the middle of a room, can’t write in the middle of the day. Something has to be cushioning me in, a right angle to lean against, looking out. Music too, a kind of cushion against the empty open silence.

To be an artist, it’s not fake to want to be understood in context. Authentic art plays a real role—not self-published through vanity, shouting into the void. Oh, age of identity: the first question from our inclusivity-driven critics is “Who is the artist?”—not “What is the art?” or “What good is it?” (And as another aside: isn’t the main job of a critic the opposite of inclusivity? The critic’s task is to exclude the mediocre, the superficial, the cliché-ridden… but I digress.)

As a result, for many of us who do not tick the right boxes, what was taken from us was not our words, but our good conscience—and with it many times, our reach or our belief in even a right to it. Do I need to make it more personal? Maybe yesterday, maybe tomorrow. Today, my words speak for anonymity.

As an artist, the danger lies in going too far in either direction: existing entirely out of context, or entirely in. You wish to be understood. But you also wish to say something new, a new perspective, or at least an interesting alternative to an old one.

It’s always more difficult to communicate authentically through art. But if no communication is achieved, you’ve failed. If total communication is achieved, you risk being consumed without depth—that is, it all seems so apparent: no gold here, so why waste time digging?

But communication is a two-way street. Sometimes the artist, still seeking real connection, isn’t afraid to bypass the current generation for the next. In this way, the artist is born posthumously, not concurrent with the flesh-and-blood self. This artist lives farther out on the “out of context” side of the spectrum, though not entirely.

That the artist is eventually understood is crucial. What we call the “misunderstood artist” might be better described as the “eventually understood artist.” The artist entirely outside of context, by contrast, has no one but himself to call him artist, and thus exists in the dark matter of the arts. A coined possibility, but in a currency accepted nowhere, and probably never.

So, to some degree, context is inseparable from being an artist, and from the desire to be. When the context spits you out without even giving you a taste, you either decide to speak to the future or just yourself. Still, at the end of the day, the desire to be an artist is really an outgrowth of the need to make art. The need to create. From the realization of this need, the proper label can be retroactively applied.

When the vain apply the label preemptively, they tend to stunt their progress in the very direction their appearance seems to be pointing.