AUTHENTICITY AND ART MAKING

Guest Viewpoint
By Trish Szymanski
Photo: Andre Watts

I am an artist, and my life is my greatest piece. I am also, for lack of a better description, a spiritual atheist. Art is the closest thing I have to religion, but with fewer rules (whew!). It makes such a difference to give something a name.

To clarify, by atheist, I mean I think the god/God concept is a human construction. Absolutely no offense to anyone for their beliefs, but telling stories is what we humans do. Language is a biological directive in homo sapiens sapiens – that’s us – and our cerebral cortex allows us to experience things in only that certain human kind of way. It drives us to description, by which we survive and thrive, as did our ancestors. Now, ironically, I think that beautiful human brain can do a lot more than we usually let it do, and a lot less than we usually think it does, meaning that I think we tend to underestimate and overestimate ourselves at the same time. Following me so far?

That said, I totally understand how the god concept came about and why it persists. But it seems like so much hubris, to say nothing of tragically limiting, to replace what is essentially unknowable with a story about the extraordinary unknown of which we are all a part. But the concept does refer to something.

It is the thing with no name. Now, you can call it a million things and you can go pretty far that way. But what if I resist the urge to use my fancy shmancy human language skills and don’t call it anything. What if I leave it unnamed, don’t let it sound like something I’ve known or something I need, and just leave it as something that starts and ends with me and everything else. Without the name, the possibilities become endless.

To choose the identity of artist is to take ownership of those endless possibilities within ourselves. It’s a big job, one for which we are pitied, reviled, envied and revered. There’s your first clue to how important artists are. And yet, if everyone chose to identify as an artist, it would become a mundane moniker. I would love to see that world.

We are fully flawed in our humanness. It’s not easy to dance on floating glass. How to hover above what looks like nothing, with no visible means of support? But we are not above it, we are it. And it is not nothing, it is everything. As for support, we are completely connected to absolutely everything, which is perhaps the most frightening idea of all.

Which is it – are we autonomous or interdependent? The answer is, of course, “Yes.” We can and do make decisions at an individual level. And yet, we make few decisions in an egoistic vacuum. And when we resist the truth and do so, boy, do we make a mess – the more important the decision, the bigger the mess.

How does all this square with making art? I see no conflict, which is a good thing, because art requires confidence in our vision. We are each simultaneously autonomous, with responsibility for our own deeds, as well as utterly interdependent, and we do best when we act that way, when we take and give and are authentic with ourselves and each other. That space has no room for cynicism. It is liminal, exquisite, and indescribable.

                                  

I am an artist, and my life is my greatest piece. I am also, for lack of a better description, a spiritual atheist. Art is the closest thing I have to religion, but with fewer rules (whew!). It makes such a difference to give something a name.

To clarify, by atheist, I mean I think the god/God concept is a human construction. Absolutely no offense to anyone for their beliefs, but telling stories is what we humans do. Language is a biological directive in homo sapiens sapiens – that’s us – and our cerebral cortex allows us to experience things in only that certain human kind of way. It drives us to description, by which we survive and thrive, as did our ancestors. Now, ironically, I think that beautiful human brain can do a lot more than we usually let it do, and a lot less than we usually think it does, meaning that I think we tend to underestimate and overestimate ourselves at the same time. Following me so far?

That said, I totally understand how the god concept came about and why it persists. But it seems like so much hubris, to say nothing of tragically limiting, to replace what is essentially unknowable with a story about the extraordinary unknown of which we are all a part. But the concept does refer to something.

It is the thing with no name. Now, you can call it a million things and you can go pretty far that way. But what if I resist the urge to use my fancy shmancy human language skills and don’t call it anything. What if I leave it unnamed, don’t let it sound like something I’ve known or something I need, and just leave it as something that starts and ends with me and everything else. Without the name, the possibilities become endless.

To choose the identity of artist is to take ownership of those endless possibilities within ourselves. It’s a big job, one for which we are pitied, reviled, envied and revered. There’s your first clue to how important artists are. And yet, if everyone chose to identify as an artist, it would become a mundane moniker. I would love to see that world.

We are fully flawed in our humanness. It’s not easy to dance on floating glass. How to hover above what looks like nothing, with no visible means of support? But we are not above it, we are it. And it is not nothing, it is everything. As for support, we are completely connected to absolutely everything, which is perhaps the most frightening idea of all.

Which is it – are we autonomous or interdependent? The answer is, of course, “Yes.” We can and do make decisions at an individual level. And yet, we make few decisions in an egoistic vacuum. And when we resist the truth and do so, boy, do we make a mess – the more important the decision, the bigger the mess.

How does all this square with making art? I see no conflict, which is a good thing, because art requires confidence in our vision. We are each simultaneously autonomous, with responsibility for our own deeds, as well as utterly interdependent, and we do best when we act that way, when we take and give and are authentic with ourselves and each other. That space has no room for cynicism. It is liminal, exquisite, and indescribable.