More Pretentionism: On A Critique

This was the prep drawing for a print, and when I ran across it the other day I thought it was worth showing. I adore drawing imaginary animals just for that moment when you look down at the paper and get a faint whiff of life. This wasn't done with a brush, by the way. I used the graphics program Expressions. I get the feeling that the new Illustrator pretty much makes Expressions pointless...

The print was strongly influenced by Japanese brocade prints, and it would have been good if the sleeping Allosaurus hadn't looked dead, and I'd given half a fucking second's effort into drawing some ground cover, a few fucking ferns for chrissakes, how much work is that.

So I got a little het up during my writer's group meeting on Monday, and it provoked some thoughts. I really should get to bed and try and get a couple of hours of drone time in, but I'm thinking too hard for that.

The Monday night group has recently undergone a sea-change. One of our members, Deborah, has had a cough for a while that's kept her away. The result of this has been fascinating, if not to my tastes.

Because all of a sudden the group is a triangle. And triangles are awkward shapes for social groups because it is so easy for it to turn into a two-against-one dynamic. And some of us get a little defensive under such circumstances, and by some of us, I mean me.

Now, before I go into this, I need to state this up-front. I work with these writers for good reasons, and I get good and useful criticisms from them every single week, and have done so for years. But they both have particular biases, they are both quite literally-minded, and neither is artsy-fartsy or responsive to the kinds of fantastic and visionary elements that are at the roots of my creative process.

Deborah gets me in a way the other two don't, so when she's in the room we can kinda acknowledge what's going on when art gets trampled by craft.

They were critiquing the first act 0f the current draft of the novel. It is considerably changed from the last draft, and vastly improved. And I need to get this done. I need to get it out and get on to the next one. So at this stage of the game, I am just asking to have my hand held. I am being honest about this -- right now I am wanting to hear, 'yes, write the next act and send the fucker to an agent.'

You can see where this is going. Honestly, I can't recommend being in a room with me when I'm a little defensive. Ordinary person gets a little defensive, that's maybe three, four pounds of defensive. I dish out ten pounds, twelve pounds easy and that's nothing compared to when I'm really defensive. I've had to do a lot of defense in my life, so I'm good at it.

The first critique came from someone who has only with this draft become aware that the lead character is mentally ill. This is not something I can blame entirely on her. One thing I'm becoming more and more aware of is that my greatest weakness as a writer is that I do not...

Oh, Jesus. This is the kind of thing you're not supposed to talk about. But they brought it up. They used the term, 'too smart.' Repeatedly. In the discussion of more than one issue. But fuck it. I'm dealing with a subject restricted by the bounds placed on ordinary mortals, I speak of the Mighty Oaf. I am too big, too strong, and too smart. My shoulders are wider than an airline seat, I can't use garlic presses because they break in my hands, and the target audience for my fiction is Sherlock fucking Holmes because nine-tenths of what I write is implied. Make that thirty-nine fortieths.

And the result has been that the last draft of the novel was an entirely different experience for everyone who read it. And everyone except for maybe two or three folks I can think of only got a fraction of what was going on.

If they all got the same fraction it would have told me something. They all got a different fraction. Everything I put in, somebody got except for some of the obscure scientific stuff. And Linda got some of that, like the way time shifts affected the frequency of light so the lead character was seeing into the infrared and ultraviolet at times. But until now, she never noticed that Matt was nuts. And she doesn't like it. She thought this was a funny book, and now it's got this whole edgy, disturbing quality to it that gets on her nerves.

See, she had already decided she liked the book. So when this comes up, she's reacting as though I took her book away. So she actually told me that she thinks the book would be more popular if I took that element out.

I think some kind of stinking froth actually shot out of my ears at that point. The origin of the novel came when I wrote what was intended to be a classic ghost story very much in the M.R. James mold about a haunted garage band. I arbitrarily set it in the Santa Cruz around 'eighty-three, 'eighty-four, and used myself as the chatty M.R. James-style narrator.

When I was told the supernatural elements worked, and the realistic elements worked, but they didn't work together, I set about fixing things and the work grew in size. When I realized that my narrator was based on myself during a time when I slept two or three hours a night because my flying saucer experience left me with terrible nightmares, I realized I might have a protagonist rather than a narrator.

My mental illness is the core of the book, one of the primary structural poles. The fantastic elements of the book exist because if I wrote what happened literally, it would be a weak skeptic's version of Communion, and it would suck. But one of the root virtues of this work is that it attempts to deal honestly with mental illness. So that crit was easily deflected.

Then when they asked me what the mechanics of the fantasy element were, what the rules were, that's when they said I needed to dumb it down. The words 'dumb it down' were spoken.

I also disagreed with this criticism. I do understand that people are beguiled by images of a comprehensible world, and that by presenting an only-partially comprehensible story, one that feels as if it makes sense even if you can't figure out how, I'm automatically dismissing a certain portion of my potential audience. But -- here I betray that heralded intellectual snobbery -- I think I like my potential audience better without them.

Then came the criticism that the book just seemed to wander at first. That the protagonist doesn't seem purposeful. Now, this one got to me. Because while I was hearing phrases like, 'he needs to be the hero in every scene,' that immediately set off my hack alert, I also knew that there was something wrong in the work that I hadn't noticed.

That phrase 'hack alert' probably needs comment. I believe that all novels are literary, and that literary fiction is a particular genre rather than a description of what is best in fiction. I also believe that much of the fiction published as literary fiction actually is superior to much other fiction in many ways, and that the critical standards to which it adheres may be effectively applied to most, if not all, other fiction.

I also believe that genre fiction is not only too accepting of lower literary standards, but that its tropes and traditions allow people to 'construct' works (D&D, I blame you for a lot of suck), and that such construction is inferior to genuine acts of creation.

So while I'm not ever going to dismiss fiction on the basis of genre, I'm also conscious of the element of commercialism in most fiction. But that includes what is labeled as noncommercialism.

Here is a key Pretentionist concept.

Truly noncommercial art is made public despite the will of the artist, and the vast majority of it will never be seen. And in most cases, it will be more interesting from the perspective of pathology than aesthetics, and there will be a distasteful exploitative taint to its display.

'Noncommercial' work created with the idea of display in mind is created in the context of a commercial environment that allows support of the artist. And these environments inevitably specify the nature of the 'noncommercial' work they are willing to support.

Even art that manages to avoid interacting with commercial interests still takes place in the marketplace. We live in the marketplace.

That said, there is a very interesting dance that I find myself doing. As I've written before, part of the reason for this blog is that I don't want to be a noncommercial writer. My big aesthetic realization is that what I truly value is the experience that someone has in response to my work.

So there are obvious things I have to do in order to make my work readable. And there are obvious things I have to do in order to make my work worthwhile for me. For instance, while I love a good plot? I read tons of stuff that's basically plotless. If people didn't want plot, I'd write the occasional plot-0riented short story just to prove I could, but a whole novel's worth of plot? No way I'd bother if I didn't have to. Writing insane visionary passages? Sorry, folks. That's why I read, so that's why I write. You'll have to live with them.

But there is a weird zone where things are not clear-cut. I have made specific visual descriptions in the novel because I knew they would be easy to film. Those scenes are easy for the reader to visualize, because they use a familiar visual vocabulary. This is both a commercial and an aesthetic decision, and as an artist I stand by it.

Now. Back to the novel. The issue that came up that really hit a nerve was the idea that the lead character needed to have more of a sense of fate or destiny or purpose to him.

Now, this is something that has been the big problem all along. This has been my big focus on this rewrite. So when I heard this, I felt like I'd gotten a crack from a bat right across the back of my head. Of course, the dude saying it prefaced it with, "This seems ninety-eight per cent there and I would have read through all this just for the writing," but that wasn't important to me. I already had the good news.

The way the criticism was stated made things difficult for me. Al works from a basis in principles, while I'm a 'disagree with principles because they're too much like rules, take them apart with the intention of destroying them, find much virtue and reluctantly incorporate them,' kind of guy. So hearing statements like, "Matt has to be The Hero all the way through," and, "Matt has to be The Fixer in every scene," set me off.

But I knew there was something to what he was saying, and I couldn't see how to deal with it. And if I dealt with it through the application of principles rather than through an organic process of creation, it would damage the work. So I wouldn't do that. But his statements made it clear to me that there was a flaw in the work that I wasn't seeing.

When I learned art, there was no one I could find who taught perspective in a rigorous fashion. So I took a couple of courses in the architecture department. When I wanted to study plot, the only person who was able to actually teach me anything is a writer who's become marooned in SF/Fantasy. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, he's a strong and worthy writer in and out of the field, and it is likely I will succumb to the same fate.) Most of what I know about composition I learned from art I hated and landscape gardening. Here's another Pretentionist nugget.

Current training in the arts ignores many practical aspects of craft. A dedicated artist would do well to design their own course of education, and be willing to go outside the realm of the so-called fine arts to complete it.

And in this case, the solutions Al was presenting me were from the world of writing instruction. Most writing instruction books are intended to enable people to construct potboilers. But they were revealing something wrong with what I've written, and my intuition was that this was important. If Al was right and I had ninety-eight per cent of the novel, well. I was missing the important two per cent.

I could fix the visible problem by applying the rules. But the visible problem, Matt's seeming lack of purposeful movement, was the result of something deeper.

Now, the structure of Matt's story is one of someone who feels completely at a loss in life, who winds up at the end being strong and purposeful. This initial sense of drift is important. It's part of the story. But this is something that has been done before, and I've used other techniques to compensate for it, and goddamn it.

If it was right, it wouldn't feel wrong.

So I've been going nuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuts.

And then it finally hit me. I was reading the first few pages, and I realized that Matt had a tremendously emotional experience that drives the entire fucking plot happen in the second paragraph, and I never say or show how he feels about it. I have him perform extreme acts motivated by that moment, and I never tell the reader how that moment influenced him.

And I realized that while there were passages where I intentionally let the reader in on his thoughts, my technique has been to hide as much as possible. This is partially because of the first issue I mentioned -- one of the symptoms of the mental illness I've shackled my poor protagonist with is self-pity and compulsive internal verbal abuse. I've tried to indicate that stuff without showing it to a degree that becomes unpleasant for the reader. (Which is why Linda's complaints about Matt's mental illness are driving me nuts -- I had literally seventy or so pages of that kind of stuff that she read without issue in the last draft.)

But -- I haven't systematically considered the issue of what the reader knows of the protagonists emotional state. It's purely been a case-by-case issue.

And that's the thing with principles. When Al and Linda were strongly encouraging me to go through the work and make sure that Matt was the hero in each scene he appeared in, I felt as if Satan himself had appeared in my studio and said, "Come to the hack side. We've got all the readers!"

I knew that if I did that, it would throw off the balance of the scenes where Matt's role as the hero of the story simply is not the issue. It would make the work more readable, more appealing, and less worthy. But if I hadn't been made to consider the issue, I would not have recognized a serious flaw in my work, and one that applies to much more than this one instance.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I've never had a critique that didn't teach me something, and sometimes the real pissers are the ones that do the work.

Mektoub.

Toward Pretensionism 4

Now, something has to be said about my appreciation for the Lichtenstein piece. I was able to enjoy it because despite the origins of my artistic impulses, in my pursuit of craft I have developed an understanding of and appreciation for more formal values in the arts.

Composition, color, technique -- these all have meaning for me. Before I studied art, they influenced my reactions to particular works, but that influence was on a subconscious level. Initially, my interest was in image and narrative content.

And these elements are still central to my appreciation of the visual arts. But now I'm able to enjoy art on another level. Which brings me back to one of my difficulties with fine art -- it the problem with me, or is it with the piece? Is it possible to reach the point where you can in good conscience reject a work on any other basis than, "It didn't do much for me?"

Here's the rub. In works in any media where content is important, I feel a lot more comfortable passing that kind of judgment. 'Was the content effectively conveyed?' is a question I can usually answer with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

But in an arena where formal values are paramount? I can have an opinion -- but I can't pass judgment. And this leaves me feeling uncomfortable.

So. On to the artworks that brought me to the gallery.

The two exhibits of Asian photography caught my interest, involved me -- but now that a few days have gone by, the only pieces that have stayed with me were a number of works dealing with landscapes as abstract images. I can still call them to mind, still recall the emotional state they evoked. In particular there was a series of photographs of the sun on the ocean that evoked a distinctly nocturnal atmosphere. They were beautiful dreams, and I won't forget them.

But the Richard Avedon show... that was something different. As I said, I was in an emotionally distraught state, and I found many of his works to be shattering. There was a wall of small, fairly conventional portraits that did little for me, and many familiar images, such as Nureyev's foot, seemed clever but trivial after the works that most affected me.

These were the large-scale portraits. In photograph after photograph, one was left with the sense of direct contact with the subject of the portraits. Every physical detail of the people portrayed was mercilessly, almost surgically, laid bare. I was reminded of scientific illustration where the absolute specificity of the subject was the only goal of the image. This was heightened by the consistent use of spotless white backgrounds. Every wrinkle, every blemish, every line generated by habitual facial expressions and every bit of physical damage endured by the subjects was there to be seen, inspected, measured. Everything that could be seen was seen in microscopic detail, in black-and-white, with a clarity impossible in live observation.

These were images of the human animal, wounded, wary, vicious, and unconquered.

The subjects returned the gaze of the viewer -- or the photographer -- with no more mercy than had been shown to them. These were images of successful people, people who had achieved, and they seemed haunted. I have no way of knowing how much of this came from the subjects, how much from Avedon, how much from me, but my emotional response was that these were people who had been shattered by trauma and yet refused to die, survivors of a prison camp or a battlefield. I read the names, the professions -- and it grew on me that the horrific environment that had stripped these people of joy and left them hardened against its unrelenting power was the world of privilege of which I am fearful and jealous. Or, more simply, the world.

Then in a smaller area off of the main exhibit, I found two portraits that nearly brought me to tears in a public space.

Not to go into it too deeply, but some of the most important influences on my writing came out of the social group known as the Algonquin Round Table. When I used the word 'shattering' to describe the emotional state this exhibit induced, I was referring specifically to the portraits of Dorothy Parker and Oscar Levant.

Humor has always been my first line of defense. And both Parker and Levant are best known for their humorous remarks, their one-liners, and in both cases their humor is known for its cutting qualities. These portraits showed their subjects without that armor. The results were heartbreaking, horrifying, appalling.

Dorothy Parker has always struck me as a failed talent. She produced some excellent light verse, a few first-class short stories, and a large body of entertaining critical writing. None of these have struck me as a true fruition of her potential abilities. Like many of my other favorite writers (I use the term 'favorite' as contrasted with 'most respected.'), her story is one of great gifts compromised by lack of discipline, self-indulgence and self-pity, bad habits, and most distressingly, lack of vision.

Ms. Parker's portrait broke my heart. Her self-imposed isolation had left its mark on her features. The set of her mouth, her eyes -- a lifetime of unrelieved bitterness and the kind of misanthropy generated by disappointment in oneself had branded her. It was an unfair portrait. To deny her the consolation of wit was genuinely cruel. This was not a portrait of Dorothy Parker; it was a portrait of her shadow, of a woman stripped of her saving graces.

This cruelty was nothing next to that shown to Oscar Levant. Unlike the other portraits in the exhibit, this one was blurred by motion. Blown up to twice life-size, mouth open, lunging forward with his remaining teeth on display, I was -- and this is my cruelty -- irresistibly reminded of an elephant in agony, bellowing in pain and rage. The image was monstrous, almost inhuman. It was a dying thing, the human animal in defeat, the other side of the first photographs in the exhibit. To associate that image with the gentleman whose witty comments I'd been reading my whole life was a reminder of the inevitability of death and decay, that there is nothing we can ever do to distance ourselves from the traumatic corruption of the body.

After this, I'd had enough Avedon. I was not in a state to re-inspect the works I'd seen once. It was time to move on.

Toward Pretensionism 3

Or How I Learned To Start Worrying When I Stopped Hating Roy Lichtenstein

On Tuesday I had an experience that will have long-term effects on the way I feel about the fine arts. My digital photography class had a field trip to a showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I was in, shall we say, an emotionally vulnerable state. I was feeling weak and helpless, and the idea of entering into a temple of privilege was not something that held a lot of appeal for me at that moment. I wandered around the city for half an hour before meeting the rest of the group, and came very close to just going home.

As someone who began to study art with the intention of learning how to illustrate comic books, I've always had conflicted feelings about the world of fine art and just about all of those feelings have been negative. I've felt threatened, overwhelmed, judged, intimidated, mistrustful, and scornful of much fine art, or rather, of the social and academic structures surrounding the actual works.

These feelings are best understood in a context of class. I am a member of the working class, what Tom Wolfe would refer to as a stone prole. While many participants in the fine arts have similar backgrounds, the context of the fine arts is relentlessly upper class.

I've already used the term 'temple of privilege.' What I mean by this is... well, think about what a museum or a high-end gallery looks like, what it feels like to be in that space. Vast, airy, quiet, well-lit, impeccably painted and maintained, guarded -- these spaces are temples. One has a sense of reverence generated and enforced by architecture. And this context is specifically the product of wealth. I don't feel comfortable in these spaces. I feel excluded, unwanted, and inadequate. I also feel angry, envious, and resentful.Smaller galleries and public art spaces attempt to mimic this effect with less and less effectiveness as the budget in question shrinks.

When thinking in terms of the allocation of public funds, it's difficult to imagine an aware member of the working classes choosing to support these spaces over education, public transportation, and all of the other obvious inadequately supported elements of our lives. Frankly, it would do more good for the arts to have larger numbers of smaller institutions similar to the art labs of dole-era Britain, where people would be given the opportunity to create rather than observe. One of the great harms mass culture has inflicted on the human species is the transformation of creativity from activity to product, and art spaces such as the MOMA reinforce the distinction between artist and audience.

Art for the working class consists of reproductions. This predates our current notions of fine and academic art by hundreds of years. The nobility and clergy looked at paintings; the peasants looked at woodcuts. This is still the common experience. My introduction to the arts came through comic books, magazines, and illustrated fiction, and these are my primary models. The fact that so much of my work is digital stems from this -- digital art is inherently reproduced art.

Art for commercial purposes, art for reproduction -- these are, like it or not, regarded as more trivial than what we call the fine arts. And much of the time, these works are trivial. The serious work done in these forms is typically first recognized outside of the culture that generates them -- look at the French appreciation of American comics, or European appreciation of Japanese brocade prints. Inside their home culture, those who produce these works are not given the respect afforded to fine artists. And when they are? The sign that they have arrived is that they have a show in a major gallery or museum. Art intended for reproduction is thought of as second-rate. And my intention to work in the arena which is most natural to me has always left me feeling as though I am a second-rater, regardless of how well, how seriously I work.

When my involvement in art led me to study the works of what are referred to as the great artists, I did not have the opportunity to study their works. I studied reproductions of their works. The words of my teachers and my few experiences of museums and galleries made it plain to me that there is very little in common between the experiences of seeing a work reproduced in miniature and seeing it in person. So much of the information in a hand-crafted work of art is eliminated or changed in the process of reproduction that it's difficult to see more than a rough resemblance between the two modes. While it is possible to learn much from a reproduction, the true emotional impact of a work derives from its physical presence.

What this visit to the MOMA really taught me was how much of that experience is dependent on the physical attributes of an art space as well as the work itself. How the grammar of the space informs the dialog between the work and its audience.

As someone with both janitorial and building experience, it's impossible for me to enter a museum without an awareness of the effort and finances involved in its construction and maintenance. The two thoughts this provoked in me were first, that the physical skills involved in keeping the marble, the glass, the chrome and brushed aluminum shining and free of fingerprints, the installation of the drywall, the mudding and taping and painting of the walls and ceilings -- these skills are actually very similar and in some cases identical to the physical skills involved in the execution of a work of art.

The second thought was that the mood, the tone inherent in a museum is found in two other types of public space -- banks and churches. In all these cases, it is a sense of reverence that is inculcated in the individual, and part of this reverence is unavoidably directed toward the privilege that allows these spaces to be constructed.

The feeling that one is undergoing a spiritual experience is not-very-subtly heightened in the MOMA by the use of black marble in the entrance. It's a large room with a high ceiling, but the reflective black walls and floor combine with the dim lighting to make a space that I found both oppressive and visually confusing. I felt a sense of relief when I climbed the stairs and emerged into a space defined by comfortable light and unobtrusively warm colors. An open, pleasant space. This application of discomfort followed by ease is a classic element of an initiation process, and it worked on me.

The first work I noticed was a huge canvas, maybe seven or eight feet tall and nearly twice as wide. It was executed in bright, heavily saturated colors and made use of line and large dots used to mimic the Benday dots of reproduction. I liked it. I stared at it for a while. I looked at the impeccable precision with which the paint had been applied to the canvas -- this showed at least as much skill as had been applied to polishing the marble downstairs. More, in fact. The composition was pleasing. The emotional tone of it was practically non-existent and that was fine. The bland confidence of the piece pleased me.

And when I finally went to look at the plaque and see who had done it, I was muttering (mentally -- I was in a bad mood, not a psychotic one) "Don't be Roy Lichtenstein, don't be Roy Lichtenstein."

It was Roy Lichtenstein.

I've always had a nemesis relationship with Lichtenstein's work. His appropriation of compositions from comic books seemed to be shallow, contemptuous, and artsy in the worst sense of the word. I've even done a large scale print that satirized those paintings, and in researching his oeuvre in preparation for that piece, I found myself actually growing angry at his treatment of commercial and popular culture.

But when I was face to face with one of his works, my reaction was one I had feared for years. I liked it. I respected it. And I no longer felt comfortable with my scorn.

Of course this disturbed me. One of my most important emotional defenses against the oppression I felt from the world of the fine arts has been the feeling, vague at first, that a lot of that stuff was fraudulent.

At first I felt as though that feeling was reflective of ignorance, of an inferior capacity to appreciate art. But when I read an article in Art World magazine about a company that repaired conceptual art, I felt confirmed in my belief.

There were two pieces in particular that left me feeling comfortable with dismissing them without seeing them. One was a pile of Sweet & Low packets that the artist had dumped from a carton onto the floor. A visitor to the gallery had kicked it. The Sweet & Low packets were gathered and meticulously rearranged to duplicate photographs that had been taken of the original installation. And there were doubts expressed about the validity of the piece post-repair. After all, they hadn't been able to duplicate its internal structure!

Hoo-boy.

The other piece was an eighty-pound wad of butter that a sculptor in the Netherlands had jammed into the corner of his studio, up at the ceiling. (Shall we discuss willful eccentricity? Not knowing the artist in question, we shall refrain.) A Spanish collector walks comes to visit, sees the butter wad, and says, "I must have it." Said wad is transferred to a room in Barcelona. Where -- believe it or not, art fans -- it melts.

In the course of reproducing this work, the company in question found that different countries produced butter that melted at different temperatures. In order to properly duplicate the original, they needed to use Dutch butter. And the room it was displayed in had to be refrigerated.

You can understand how the word fraud seemed applicable.

But the sight of the Lichtenstein drove home a thought that had been lurking in in the back of my mind throughout my involvement with the arts.

What if I'd seen the pile of Sweet & Low packets or the butter wad in their intended context? What if I'd liked them?

Was I going to have to abandon the concept of fraud in the fine arts?

(To Be Continued!)

Toward Pretensionism 2

A color scheme for Halloween...

Okay, let's start off with something easy. This will draw from the following questions.

How is an artist to find his feet in a culture that is becoming all cultures, where it seems as if everything has been done before and done better?

How is one to process the tsunami of possible influences, goals, and directions now available?

Are traditional modes of art still valid?

Are Modernism, Post-Modernism, and other such movements still valid?

I've run across the statement in more than one place that traditional art forms are over. They're done. They're played out. Because they've been around for so long that everything that can possibly be said in them, has been said.

In my opinion -- and you shouldn't take my opinion too seriously -- it that this statement is hogwash. Balderdash. It's the monkey's bathwater. Bullshit. Utter nonsense. Without any value whatsoever. You with me so far?

Here's why.

First off, here's a hypothesis of mine. When a particular form of behavior shows up repeatedly throughout human cultures, throughout the span of time, throughout the world, it might not be a bad idea to see if there's something about it which essential to human nature. A view common in Post-Modernist thought is that everything is essentially cultural. To ignore our fundamentally biological nature, to assume that the human mind is not a function of the human body, is reflective of a retrograde mindset, a profound ignorance which is difficult to respect.

The picture, the story, the song -- these all answer human needs which are physically built into us. It is possible to consciously reject these forms, but to do so is to isolate oneself from the mainstream of humanity in a way which can be unhealthy. And I've noticed that frequently creators or critics who are relentlessly avant-garde in one arena will be surprisingly retrograde in another -- or will have personal tastes that are strongly at odds with their own work.

The song, the picture, and the story satisfy us -- and for most people, they prefer to have art that is reflective of their times and their experiences. I like to expose myself to a wide variety of cultural influences, but as a creator I am dedicated to working with the material provided to me by my life, my times, my experience of the world.

The story, the song, and the picture are vital, living means of communication that spring from deep roots -- they are intimate reflections of the physical nature of our minds. To disavow them is to render oneself unable to speak truth.

We are living in a period strikingly different from any other in human history. We are experiencing things no one has experienced before. The amount of information and the rapidity of change we live with are increasing on a daily basis.

No one has created works about the current human experience until now. And the old forms are old because they work for us. To constantly seek radically new methods is a dead end -- and one that is specific to our culture.

To seek the new is an essential artistic impulse, but it's one that has been short-circuited. To flee commercialism, to flee tradition, to flee the predictable, the comprehensible -- try as you may, your attempts to do these things will be co-opted before you can blink your fucking eye. We've developed an art culture capable of commodifying quite literally anything you can create. How much is Picabia's canned shit worth these days? Transgression for its own sake is over.

But just because something is a creative dead end, that doesn't mean it lacks value. All experiments teach us something -- and an open-minded creator can gain much from the study of flawed or limited works.

I may speak poorly of Post-Modernism. There really is no clear and functional definition of the term, and there is a lot of nonsense associated with it -- but I have learned a few things from it. There are times when a work of art may be more enriching when regarded as a social construct as well as an entity in itself, for instance. It's now a truism that works outside of the traditional Euro-centric canon of older academia are worthy of examination. Let's not throw the monkey out with the bathwater.

(That said, there are a lot of dead white male Europeans who fucking rocked, and who have legitimately earned their position in world culture.)

Most importantly, Post-Modernism recognizes that the world is changing, that our attitudes and beliefs shape our perceptions of reality in ways that we can only escape through radical experience or dedicated self-criticism.

As creators, most of us are adrift. Our cultures are shifting, untrustworthy things. As an American, I come from a nation that's younger than the bars in which many people drink -- and the popular culture of my country has infiltrated virtually every other nation on Earth.

The current interpenetration of cultural influences can act against the sense of personal identity which enables an artist to work with confidence and power -- it goes hand in hand with the feeling that everything's already been said and done.

But to say that one should or should not make use of the techniques and approaches of previous artists is foolish. All artists exist in a continuity of influences. They may act in reaction to those influences or they may embrace them, but no artist has ever sprung fully blown out of a cultural vacuum.

Right now we have more different kinds of art readily available to us than at any other time. To reject any of them on the basis of being tired or worn-out is absurd. "Can I use this? Does this speak to me? Does this tell me the truth and can it help me tell the truth?" These are the questions we need to ask, not, "Is this overdone? What's the next thing?"

Rather than feeling overwhelmed by what has gone before, we need to embrace it, examine it, and find our individual ancestors. Speaking for myself? The musicians of Mali are my ancestors. The printmakers of Japan are my ancestors. The pulp writers of early Twentieth-century America are my ancestors.

I have many ancestors, and the more I look at the history of the arts, the more ancestors I find. The history of art is not a burden to me; it reaches out to give me the tools I need to speak my truths.

We are unique. We are in a new world, and when we wake up tomorrow morning we will be in another new world.

We have lost tradition, or retain it as a pose. Transgression has become a tool of commodification. The search for novelty has become shallow and reflexive.

What do we have left?

Truth. The human constants. Our lives as we live them.

These are enough, because they have to be enough.

Rather than feel overwhelmed by the works of the past, by the vast history of human creativity, we should take pride in them. And we should be willing to go to the effort of creating works that will be part of that history, so that those who follow us can benefit from our lives long after they've ended.

Should the species live long enough, our time will be studied.

Do you want the art of our time to be regarded as the trivial creations of a confused and troubled people?

Or do you want to have our time and ourselves reflected in works worthy of their place in the history of the arts?

I want the latter. And I work hard with the desire to participate in the arts as an equal to those who have gone before me and who will go after me.

That is what makes me a Pretensionist.

Toward Pretensionism 1

Observation. Creation. Pretension.

So I'm going to break one of my rules today. Since I got back from Viable Paradise, I've worked on the novel first thing every morning. But yesterday I finished my current batch of line edits, and right now the missus is in bed sick. She finally fell asleep after a night spent wrestling with some respiratory illness -- lots of hacking, snorting, and snottery of diverse sorts. I've got a manuscript downstairs I want to get off to the Windblown Coalition today, but I don't want to turn on the light and risk disturbing her.

And I've been up since three, thinking about pretensionism. (Also trying to drive the songs Oh, Mickey and Twilight Zone from my mind. Hatin' the eighties right now...)

Long-time readers know that I've been wrestling for some time with my sense of identity as an artist. The events of the last year, year and a half have changed my attitudes toward myself and my work radically. My communications with Glendon Mellow and more recently Catherine Schaff-Stump have crystallized my thoughts, and now I feel as if I have a basis for explaining things to myself.

I always say that I don't know what something looks like until I draw it, and that I don't know what I think about something until I write about it. I've been fixating on this issue recently, and I've realized that it's time to write an artistic manifesto. I may well repudiate it at a later date, but I am on the verge of being able to explain my intent -- and let's face it, us insecure loudmouths love our manifestos. And I've always wanted to be part of an artistic movement. Now that I'm engaged in a number of artistic communities, I'm thinking the time has come. And if no-one else is gonna make a big-ass pretentious gesture, it may as well be me.

So for the next while I'll be blogging as a means of exploring my thoughts, making them more concrete. Afterward I'll organize my ideas into a real manifesto, but for now I'm engaged in a process of exploration.

Why Pretensionism?

Let's face it, labels are fun. They're also useful. To name something is to claim it -- and literally, that's what pretension is. It's the act of claiming something. Pretensionism is, in one sense, my personal claim to the status of artist. It's my hope that it may allow others to feel more comfortable in making that same claim.

It's also a reactionary statement. For the last while, I've referred to myself as pretentious. That's because I've thought of myself as a fine artist, as a literary writer, and I've become willing to make that statement in public. And I've had a few people tell me, "Man, you've got balls to say that about yourself." Others have acknowledged some pretension on their part.

That's because in my culture -- which is a big component of the burgeoning monoculture -- to call someone pretentious is to insult them. It's interpreted as a claim to a station which you haven't really achieved. From below, you look like a snob. From above, you're gauche.

But pretension isn't about making a false claim. It is (hit the dictionary) about making a claim, true or false. You can be pretentious and right at the same time. Or, as Dizzy Dean said, "It ain't braggin' if you can back it up." Yeah, the name Pretensionism is a reactionary statement -- but if the culture pushes you, if you're marginalized, fucking push back.

If you want to claim you're a Pretensionist? Then you're in the club.

So Where the Hell is this Going?

The Pretensionist Manifesto is going to concern itself with the issues relating to a sense of artistic identity, including but not limited to:

What makes a person an artist?

How do we cope with the schism between high and low art?

What is the role of the marketplace?

How is an artist to find his feet in a culture that is becoming all cultures, where it seems as if everything has been done before and done better?

How is one to process the tsunami of possible influences, goals, and directions now available?

Are traditional modes of art still valid?

Are Modernism, Post-Modernism, and other such movements still valid?

What is the role of appropriation in the arts?

Of what real value is art, both personal and public?

Can the act of artistic creation be regarded as a legitimate form of labor?

How can one function in a system that is clearly unstable, a world that is unmistakeably on the path to disaster?

How does one reconcile personal and public art?

What are worthy artistic aspirations? Worthy artistic values?

These questions are inherently subjective. They will not produce answers. They will provoke opinion. And my opinions will be oriented toward providing me with a basis to work well.

Yeah, I'm talking about producing a philosophy of art, when my knowledge of art history and theory is far from complete. But this is not really art theory. It's the product of a working artist, intended to support and encourage both myself and other artists.

It comes from inside an experience growing out of a post-post modernist world, a digital world, a world where the boundaries separating times and cultures are being shattered, rebuilt, stirred, and confused on a moment by moment basis. We are living through a phase change, a singularity. The monoculture is emerging and the apocalypse is threatening. This is my attempt to engage them both forthrightly, without blind optimism or reflexive pessimism. To find a way to work productively and effectively in a world whose future is unimaginable.

Of course that's pretentious. I am, after all, a Pretensionist.