Rank—Art and Artist (iia)—The Inessentiality of Biography (a)

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

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[xxii] during all the years when I was constantly absorbed by problems, particularly those connected with poetry, I did not attempt a single biography (or pathography) of a famous artist.

...anything in the nature of psychographic material and view-points that I myself had to contribute invariably presented itself to me at once as something fitting into a larger frame,...

...I propose to follow the line of reaching out beyond what is individual in the artist-personality and to show, or at least suggest, the collective aspect...

...my feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally, originate solely in the constructive harmonising of this fundamental dualism of all life. I arrived at this conception by a concentrated psychological study of the two human types which most clearly reveal success and failure in this struggle to overcome: the so-called neurotic type, and the creative.

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[22] it is just these ultimate psychological problems of art that will trip us up if we have neglected or inadequately understood the creative personality, an understanding that is an inherent necessity in all æsthetic, however far it may advance into the domain of psychology.

For
æsthetic, by its nature, can only deal with the effect of a work of art, and it takes account of its creation by an artist only by arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator.

But this conclusion, apart from its indirect nature, is a fallacy; for as we (or at least as I, myself) have been convinced by a study of the productive personality, there is between that and the unproductive type not only a quantitative but a qualitative difference.

...it seems to me clear that the idea of intuition (Einfühlung) as fashioned by psychological æsthetic has been attained as from a view-point of reception, while the notion of abstraction which Worringer contrasts with it refers rather to the spiritual attitude of the creative artist. ...

Ever since Aristotle's day this seems to me to have begun with the tacit assumption that the artist intended to present the effect he aimed at in its phenomenal form, and that therefore there were involved in the creation, at least potentially, the same psychological experiences and psychical

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processes as are to be observed in the contemplator of the work and especially in the æsthetic critic.

... [of course] in some cases the artist does aim at a definite idea effect in his work,... Nor need we doubt that the artist occasionally does find pleasure and satisfaction in his creation, though the confessions of great artists themselves generally tell rather of the struggle and suffering of creating it.

But the fundamental difference in essence between the creative and the receptive types, which are psychologically complementary, is not affected by such evidences. While æsthetic pleasure, whether in the creator or in the contemplator, is ultimately a renunciation of self, the essence of the creative impulse is the exactly opposite tendency towards assertion of self.

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[25] the latest statements in this field [psychology] show with astonishing frankness and unanimity that the psychology of personality has helped little or not at all to the understanding of genius or (as it is termed scientifically) the productive personality;

moreover, that it probably never will contribute anything, since ultimately we are dealing with dynamic factors which remain incomprehensible in their specific expression in the individual personality.

This implies that they can be neither predetermined nor wholly explained even ex post facto; as, indeed, we cannot understand, in my view, personality at all, even man as such, by a purely individual psychology.

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[38] the fundamental problem of the relation between living and creating in an artist...the reciprocal influence of these two spheres.

All the psychography and pathography
(with its primary concern to explain the one through the other)
must remain unsatisfactory
as long as
the creative impulse,
which finds expression equally in experience and in productiveness,
is not recognized as the basis of both.

...creativity lies equally at the root
of artistic production and of life experience.
That is to say,
lived experience can only be understood as the expression of volitional creative impulse,
and in this the two spheres of artistic production and actual experience meet and overlap.
Then, too,
the creative impulse itself is manifested first and chiefly in the personality,
which,
being thus perpetually made over, produces art-work and experience in the same way.

...one might put it that the artist does not create
from his own experience...,

but
almost
in spite of it.

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[55] It was not mere imitation of Classical Greece, but the expression of a similar ideology of personality that led the artists of the Renaissance to try to re-experience the Greek ideal of boy-love.

We see, for instance, two of the really great artists, of entirely different social environment, expressing the identical spiritual ideology, with such far-reaching similarity that the notion that the mere accident of a personal experience produced both cases must be dismissed.

They both, Michelangelo and Shakspere, found almost identical words in their famous sonnets for the noble love which each of them felt for a beautiful youth who was his friend. ...

[56]

whatever the decision reached by zealous scholars
concerning the identity of the person addressed...
this "biographical" fact
seems to me
unimportant

as compared with
the psychological evidence
that
this glorification of a friend is,
fundamentally,
self-glorification
just as was the Greek boy-love.

I plead ignorance and agonsticism in equal measure on the boy-love question. Unfortunately Rank's larger thrust is accessible only through a profusion of case studies, among which this is (to me, at least) the easiest to follow in methodological and epistemological outline despite being weighed down by limitations of standpoint.

i.e. The point is to consider

two of the really great artists,
of entirely different social environment,

expressing the identical spiritual ideology,
with such far-reaching similarity

that

the notion that the mere accident of a personal experience
produced both cases
must be dismissed

[56] In this sense,

then,

not only are the sonnets in fact self-dedicated—
as is creative work of every description—

but they reveal that peculiar attitude
of the creative instinct
towards the creative ego
which seeks to glorify it by artistic idealization
and at the same time
to overcome its mortality by eternalizing it in art.

The fact that an idealized self-glorification in the person of another can take on physical forms...has actually nothing to do with the sex of the beloved, but is concerned only with the struggle to develop a personality and the impulse to create which arises from it.

This impulse is at bottom directed to the creator's own rebirth in the closest possible likeness...

[57]

... Just as we know, from the psychology of the creative genius, that his impulse to create arises from precisely this tendency to immortalize himself in his work, so we can be in no doubt as to whose transitoriness it is that the poet deplores with almost monotonous reiteration.

In these sonnets there is so complete a revelation of the meaning and content of the whole output of their authors, and indeed of the nature of the artist's creative instinct in general, that their high valuation and, no less, their intriguing ambiguity become comprehensible. ...

From this point of view, then,

the biographical presentation,

even when it can be done with certainty,

seems to us inessential.

We are by no means cast down when this method fails,
for we can understand that
beyond a certain point
failure is unavoidable,
since the creation of a work of art
cannot be explained
even by the reconstruction of an inspirer.

Thus
the factual and concrete biography of Michelangelo or Shakspere
does not enable us to understand their work the better;

rather we are left more amazed than before at their coincidence. ...

That is, their coincidence of ideological content, in light of certain disparities in biography .

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... Not only is it evident from this self-immortalization in the work that the matter is at bottom one of the self-immortalization expressed in another (in the ideal), but both the artists have expressed with great clearness, and to the point of monotony, the idea of oneness with the friend. ...

This psychological solution of the much-disputed sonnet-problem shows how experience, and still more the whole attitude towards life, grows out of the struggle to create and so reduces the problem of experience to the problem of creativity.

For the extent to which the artist succeeds in actualizing his love-ideal, in the service of his own self-immortalization, is of minor importance compared with the basic attitude that his work discloses—

As always, there is a trap here:
perhaps many more people harbor this

basic attitude

than can be reasonably be called

great

artists.

Great success

is the only thing that can widely reveal this

basic attitude.

We can only assume it is operable elsewhere,
yet is therein concealed
by
less-than-greatness.

namely, one originating in dissatisfaction with artistic creation and so urging the creator in some form or other towards life—that is, towards the actual experiencing of his fundamental self.

In any case his impulse to form man in his own image or in the image of his ideal inevitably brings him into conflict with real life and its conditions.

These conditions are not artistic, but social, conditions, in which one individual has to respect another and is not permitted to remake him.

So,
imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,
but "imitative" art is not actually/always about that.

Rather, it evinces

[xlviii]
the tendency to reproduce something absent,
which in certain cases happens to be a natural object,
while in others it pictures an idea.

The obvious purpose in this tendency is domination,
whether this takes the form of
a naturalistic representation of an animal as a hunting spell
or of the symbolic representation of a human abstraction.

If so, then we might think longer and harder about any and all symbolic representations of human abstractions which happen to depict actual people who exist. There may be more to this than meets the eye; perhaps exactly the opposite.

Now,
a certain measure of conflict is,
of course,
necessary to creative work,

and this conflict is,
in fact,
one of the fields in which an artist displays his greatness,
or,
psychologically speaking,
the strength of his creative will-power.

A curious equation which deserves close scrutiny.

By means of it he is able to work off a certain measure of his inner con-

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flict in his art without entirely sacrificing the realities of life or coming into factual conflict with them.

This avoidance of conflict is precisely what gives "symbolic representation" of other people who exist its therapeutic value. But this alone says nothing at all about public presentation. Once an image of someone is presented publicly, everything changes; and it all changes again once this depiction is attributed to another person who very much exists.

In any case, the destructive results of this ensemble of realities upon the neurotic, as we are able to observe them in his neurosis, show that what distinguishes him from the artist is that the latter constructively applies his will-power in the service of ideological creation.

A certain type of artist, for whom Goethe may stand as the model, will learn to deal with his experiences and conflicts economically and in the end wisely, while another type exhausts his strength in chasing after stimulating experiences so that his conflict does not come out in production.

For the artist himself the fact that he creates is more immediately important than what he produces, although we are inclined to make his classification as a particular type depend upon the result, his art-work.

Here again we find ourselves at a point where art as the result of production must be sharply differentiated from the artist as a creative individual. There is, in fact, no norm for the artist as a type, although we are constantly tempted to set up more or less precisely formulated norms both for art and for the individual work of art.

Production is a vital process which happens within the individual and is independent at the outset from the ideology manifested in the created work.

On the other hand, the work can show an equal independence towards the artist who has created it, and can in favourable instances be compared with other works within the categories of art; but it can never be compared with its author or with the artist as a psychological type.

Between the two—artist and art—there stands Life, now dividing, now uniting, now checking, now promoting.

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[81] the relation between experience and creativity. No single causal relation appears to exist between the two phenomena—certainly not the one favoured by psychography, which purports to explain creativity by experience in general or by special experiences.

It seems likely that the reverse is more possible, since the creative will which underlies them both manifests itself more clearly in the created work than in

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experience.

This in part because experience is not (entirely) under our control, whereas creation at least seems to be, or can seem to be.

On the other hand, creativity itself is, of course, a special form of experience and one peculiar to the artist, and all depends in the last resort upon whether the individual is capable of restoring harmony, or at least a temporary balance, between the two forms of experience—artistic and vital—and to what extent he succeeds.

This does not by any means signify that the person who better adapts himself to, or succeeds in, life must needs be the better artist. In this respect Goethe forms signal exception in the whole long line of really great men whose lives have been swallowed whole by their work. ...

[83]

the Romantic stands...as the pioneer and earliest specimen of the individual artist-type, whose art-ideology is the cult of personality with its idea of liberty.

...he is dramatic or lyrical, he acts the piece instead of objectifying it,...

His art is as chaotic as his life, whereas the pure art-ideology is based on order, law, and form—in fact, on traditional and therefore collective ideologies.

...Goethe wished to reestablish this pure art epistemologically,...

First, however, he had to curb the individual Romantic in himself, and this he succeeded in doing, though only at the expense of his productive power,...

If Goethe's importance lies rather in his representing the purely Classical ideal, as against the personal artist-ideology of Romanticism, than in his actual creative work, he is perhaps the first example—and at the same time the highest possible type—of the poet who becomes a universal genius.

...our modern author has become conscious of the personal art-ideology that is within him; but the first result of the process has been to project this intuitively recognized artist-ideology on to the history of art and to misinterpret the whole of its development in the light of its latest phase. ...

[84]

...the will is a human phenomenon, and we cannot assume offhand that Nature and all her creatures possess it, even in the form of "unconscious willing." Certainly, in our view, the individual will is a derivative of the biological life-impulse, but it is a purely human derivative, though, again, it is in a prime mover of Nature that we find the biological premiss;

this differentiation between life-impulse and expression of will, which psycho-analysis has ignored, seems to me to be the basic human problem par excellence since it comprises both the dualism of ego and species, of mortality and immortality, that is inherent in the individual, and all those creative tendencies which go beyond the mere function of propagation.

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[95] the central question of all æsthetic is: how does the artist achieve this effect, that enables so many others to identify themselves with the work? But the explanation is so unsatisfactory and presumes so many psychological improbabilities that it could not survive the critical analysis of modern æsthetics, and already it is considered as definitely refuted. ...

[96]

If belief in the soul may be taken as religion, or at any rate as the preliminary stage of it, we must admit that art was at first, and for a long time to come, the handmaid of religion.

Its "aim" was to prove the existence of the soul by concretizing it, and it achieved this by presenting the abstract in abstract form—that is, by imitating as faithfully as possible, not reality, but unreality.

The imitation...concerns the unreal,...while the aimlessness concerns reality—a fact which æsthetics has, strangely enough, inverted by looking for imitativeness, vis-à-vis reality, in which domain it has no purpose —and so being led to deny that art has any aim except that of æsthetic gratification.

...

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***play***

The newer art-theories, with their anthropological orientation, assign...a special rôle to the variously interpreted play instinct...[yet without it] becoming much more intelligible from the æsthetic standpoint.

Spencer himself regards play as the outlet for superfluous energy; Lazarus, as recuperation after the fatigue of real life; Groos, as exercise preparatory to these... If we applied this to art, therefore, we should find ourselves back at the theory of aimless imitation, whereas the unsoundness of that theory...was the very starting point of our discussion.

It only shows, once more, that all our anthropology, sociology, biology—yes, and psychology—do not at bottom get beyond reality as the ultimate explanatory principle and can only understand even a make believe action (Spencer), such as play represents, as an imitation of a real activity.