Rank—Art and Artist (iib)—The Inessentiality of Biography (b)

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

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[379] One of the radical mistakes made by most ordinary biographies and by psychography is the notion of a parallelism between experience and creation.

This certainly exists, if not causally, at least phenomenally connected. [sic] Quite as important, however, or even more so, is the opposition of life and creation, which has been emphasized, but not understood, since this is impossible without taking account of the creative feeling of guilt.

It is significant that many of the greatest artists (though by no means all) have a strong bourgeois tinge, and Kretschmer, in his study of men of genius, declared that genius needs a strong touch of conventionality.

Many whose work is of the highest value and who live wholly in their art lead a very simple, ordinary life, and this purely human side often comes to the surface in their work, in contrast to the divine quality of genius.

The Muse, too, whose idealization by the poet himself and whose apotheosis in the mother-principle by the psychographer look so fine, often comes off badly enough in real life. Not only that she

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has to endure, even enjoy, the moods of the divinely inspired master, but she very often becomes for the artist a symbol of an ideology that is no longer adequate, which she may have helped him to create, but which he has now to overcome and throw overboard.

In that case... the artist is both unable to create without her and prevented by her presence from any further creation. His inclination may be to let her go, along with the earlier ideology, but his guilt-feeling will not allow it. ...

Not only will the artist who finds a creative issue from this conflict show its traces in his work, but his work will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself, whose solution has to be justified as much as the failure to reach a solution would have to be.

This is unsatisfying given everything that has preceded it.

his work will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself

If biography is "inessential" here, then what exactly is meant by expression ?

As the artist, during this process of liberation from the ideology, has to include in what he surrenders the person or persons who were connected with it, he has to justify this action, which is usually done by magnification.

That is, he will either really create something greater, in order to justify his action, or in the effort to create this greater he will be impeded by a still more enhanced feeling of guilt. In the first case he will use the guilt-feeling directly for creation; in the second even his previous creative power will be impeded.

But if the artist takes the step forward in a purely ideological sense, without the need of concrete figures for the resolution of his creative conflict, his tendency will be to lessen his work, even if in fact it has become greater.

This minimizing tendency also is due to the feeling of guilt, but, on the other hand, this has already worked itself out creatively in the artist, and it is only humbler second thoughts that are obliged to lessen the splendour of creation.

A splendid instance of this is Rodin's life-work; no outsider, regarding it uncritically, would imagine that in masterpieces like the "Thinker" or even

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the mythological groups he sees only fragments of a never-completed work,... Even though the artist was convinced and permeated by the greatness of his work,... the aim which he set up and never attained of a vast and ideal achievement (on a par with the whole creation) represents a minimizing of the actually achieved, only intelligible by the creative feeling of guilt.

This type—of which Goethe also is an instance, with his Faust trailing ever in his hands as his magnum opus by the side of which everything else was meant but as "fragments" of one great confession—has its opposite in another type of artist, who not only gives and fulfils himself in every work, but whose whole production is one vast justification of his impulse to create.

Of this type Shakspere seems to me to be the best instance—and precisely because we know so little of his actual life and even doubt his authorship. Shakspere's work and the biographical material which has been gathered about the Stratford butcher's son have just as much psychological connexion as have the Homeric poems and our scanty information about the blind Ionian singer.

Even if we did discover that Shakspere and Homer¹ were neither of them responsible for the work assigned to them, yet the psychological types thus designated are just as much masterpieces of a people's creation as are the poems and dramas which bear their name.

¹ It is worth mentioning that a life of Shakspere by Nicholas Rowe (1709) is the first modern poet biography, and also characteristic that a life of Homer (probably the pseudo-Hesiodic life) provided the pattern. Thus fictitious biography, which essentially constructs the life from the work, is the real ancestor of all biographical literature.

I mean that Shakspere's work requires an author who because of his creative impulse would give up home and family and all the life of an ordinary citizen in order to justify a foolish and irrational migration to the metropolis by brilliant achievement there. His success is the measure of his greatness. But
even if an English noble or gentleman were the author of the dramas, I am sure that folk-fantasy would have been compelled to invent such

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antecedents for him—which means, would have invented a Shakspere who happened to exist in Stratford or was transplanted there.

The same has happened with greater world-historical ideas, such as Christianity, which certainly needed a Jesus from Nazareth, and it can hardly be chance that the greatest creations of the human spirit, such as the New Testament, the Homeric poems, and Shakspere's plays, should, on the one hand, have been centres of academic disputes as to authorship and, on the other, should have inspired the imagination of whole centuries in favour of one author.

Even Goethe, who could hardly dispute his own authorship, felt himself compelled to describe his whole creation as a collective work which only happened to bear his name. This feeling of the poet that he is the mouthpiece of his age or, for that matter, of all humanity, explains not only why he has to ascribe his work to a Muse and thus connect it with his personal life and give it concrete form; it also throws a light on the fact that, and the degree to which, the art-ideology affects the poet's life.

There is thus an influence of personal experience on creation and a reciprocal influence of creation on experience, which not only drives the artist externally to a Bohemian existence, but makes his inner life characterologically a picture of his art-ideology and thus once more calls forth the individual self in protest against this domination by that ideology.

Between a night-watchman who has to adapt his external life very differently from that of his fellows and the poet whose personal life is an ideological expression of his artistic production, there is a difference only of degree, not of quality.

When modern biography and psychography attempt to explain a man's work and production from his personal experience, the

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effort must remain not only incomplete, but also superficial, as long as the influence of the art-ideology on life and experience is not included.

But this is not as simple as it is with the night-watchman and will not fit the same stereotyped formula, as most even analytical psychographers try to make it do.

For
the impulse to create puts itself into life and into work alike, and the great artist will in himself experience his own creation at the same time as in his work he will shape what he has experienced: for here too form and content are once more one, as they were in primitive art.

This brings us to the real problem of biography. Biography is as little an objective science as history is, even when it endeavours to be so, and would never fulfil its purpose if it were. The formative process of the biography begins long before the actual attempt to picture the life of the artist; after all, the main purpose is the picture of the creative personality and not merely of the man of actuality, and the two portraits can naturally never be wholly identical. The effort to make them so is, however, the avowed or unavowed tendency not only of the biographer, but of the artist himself and of his public, present and future.

If there is plenty of biographical material, as in the case of Goethe, we do look in his life for the experience which would explain his work. But we never find it; though masses of material are accumulated in a futile attempt to find an experience which can explain the creative work, it cannot as a matter of principle be intelligible on that basis alone. In other cases, of which we have cited Shakspere as the type, creative biography has an easier task in constructing a life to fit the work.

But always the starting-point in the formation of a biography is the individual's ideologizing of himself to be an artist, because thenceforward he must live that ideology, so far as reality allows him to do so; and so far as it does not, the artist makes for himself the experiences that he needs, searches for them and gives them forms in the sense of his ideology. Nowadays we quite naturally give the lives of certain

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types of poet a definite dramatic and novelistic form, since this is the only form adapted to the shaping of a biographical legend. That in every age the poet's life should be revalued and re-edited to suit the ideology of that age is only natural, though this does not exactly lessen the complexity of the problem.

With the partial experience of his own artistic ideology the artist is in conflict a priori, fighting for his life, and in the event (as we have shown) he achieves the compromise in his ideological experience which allows him to enjoy both his life and his productivity, instead of having to attain the one at the cost of the other.

On the other hand, we must never forget that creation is itself an experience of the artist's, perhaps the most intense possible for him or for mankind in general. Nor is this true only of the unique instant and act of creation; for during the creation itself the work becomes experience and as such has to be surmounted by new actuality of extension and formation.

This cumulative dynamic character of creativity, which marks it as an experience, can as a rule be reconstructed only genetically, since it is rarely the object of direct observation. Hence it is more easily observed in the arts of time and rhythm like poetry and music, which in their temporal succession and extension often show the development of this vehement dynamism during the process of creation, while we cannot see it in the fine arts except in sketches and studies.

Well then, it is quite inconvenient that the ultimate art of time and rhythm should, as Dad puts it, have a syntax but not a semantics.

What seems more plausible is that this genetic reconstruction could apply to an oeuvre rather than to a life. Too bad the public just cares about lives.

But it is almost typical for great artists that at the beginning of a work they are not quite clear about its formation, working-out, and completion; even in spite of a clear original concep-

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ion, the work turns during production into something other than the artist had originally planned.

Greatness aside, the Conceptual turn is a direct repudiation of this. The aesthetic, philosophical, and commercial aspects of this have been discussed to death. Less discussed, perhaps, is Rank's idea here that

during the creation itself the work becomes experience.

What kind of experience, then, does the creation of a Conceptual artwork become? As opposed to that of the experimental (with a lower-case "e") artwork which

turns during production into something other than the artist had originally planned?

What if

I am my own muse. The subject I know best.
?

In that scenario, what kind of experience is creation itself   becoming?

Rank is already onto this development, which is rather remarkable in and of itself. But his analysis of it is unsatisfying.

This process also is only intelligible through a realization of the specific dynamism of creativity, which must operate on the potential life plane if it is to liberate his energy and not consume it, as we have explained in the case of play.

We have said above that the artist-type, with his tendency to totality of experience, has an instinct to flee from life into creation, since there to a certain extent he can be sure of matters remaining under his own control; but this totality tendency itself, which is characteristic of the really productive type, in the end takes hold of his creation also, and this totality of creaton then threatens to master the creative artist as effectually as the totality of experience.

In short, the "totality function" of the artist-type in the end makes all productivity, whether in itself or in a particular work, as much a danger for the creative ego as was the totality of experience from which he took refuge in his art. Here the conflict of the artist versus art becomes a struggle of the artist against his own creation, against the vehement dynamism of this totality-tendency which forces him to complete self-surrender in his work.

How the artist escapes this new danger, after he had previously avoided that of the total experience, is one of the obscurest and most interesting problems of the psychology of creative artists. There will of course be special modes of escape for each artist or artist-type, which are decided for him by his personality and circumstances. But I think that certain ways are universally accessible, of which I will mention a few that are typical.

One means of salvation from this total absorption in creation is, as in ordinary life, the division of attention among two or more simultaneous activities; and it is interesting in this connexion to note that work on the second activity is begun during work on the first just at the moment when the latter threatens to become all-absorbing.

The second work is then often an antithesis in style and character to the first, though it may be a continuation at another level. This can, of course, only happen with

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artists who have various interests and capacities; thus Goethe indulged his scientific, and Schiller his philosophical, studies at periods apparently of weakness in poetic creativity, but really, according to our view, of danger to the poet when he had to find respite from that creativity.

If a second sphere of interest of this sort—which is frequently a second form of artistic achievement—is lacking, periods of disappointment, depression, and even illness are likely to occur, which are then not so much a consequence of exhaustion as a flight from it.

This brings us to a second means of escape for the artist from his own creation, which in this case is not put on to another level, but simply set aside for the time being. The creative process, with its object of totality, always contains in any case a time conflict, which expresses itself in the difficulty the artist finds both in beginning and in finishing his work. Just as he can escape from threatened domination in the midst of his creation, so he can hold back instinctively as long as possible from the beginning of it; but this so overstrains the inner dynamism that delays of various sorts must be intercalated later, so that he may not be carried off by the violence of the productive experience.

The inhibitions, then, of which most artists complain, both during creation and in its intervals, are the ego's necessary protections against being swallowed by creativity, as is the case, for that matter, with the inhibitions of normal or neurotic types. This form of protection may naturally in some cases have a disturbing (pathogenic) effect. But the retardation of, or refusal to complete, some work may have another, deeper reason.

The restraint which holds the totality-tendency in check is basically fear, fear of life and of death, for it is precisely this that determines the urge to eternalize oneself in one's work. Not only, however, has the completed work the value of an eternity symbol, but the particular creative process, if it involves an exhaustive output, is by the same token a symbol of death, so that the artist is both driven on by the impulse to eternalization and checked by the fear of death.

I have elsewhere shown that this restriction between the two poles of fear

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—fear of life and fear of death—is one of the fundamental processes of life; the artist seems to experience it in a similar intensified fashion to the neurotic, but with the difference that in the neurotic the fear of life predominates and so checks all expression in life, while the artist-type can overcome this fear in his creation and is driven by the fear of death to immortalize himself.

This conflict of the artist, first against his art and then against the dynamism of his own work and finally against its actual accomplishment, finds a peculiar expression in modern artists—clearest perhaps in the poets, but unmistakable also in plastic and pictorial artists. This is the diversion of creation into knowledge, of shaping of art into science and, above all, psychology.

Naturally, spiritual self-representation in the work is always one essential element in artistic creativity and in art, but it is only in modern artists that it becomes a conscious, introspective, psychological self-analysis . But we are not concerned with those artists of the day whose work claims to represent a psychological confession as such and no more—though in point of fact it is something more. Here we are discussing the far more interesting half-way type, which, whether in the course of an ensemble of creation or even within the compass of a single work, passes suddenly from the formative artist into the scientist, who wishes—really he cannot help himself—to establish, or, rather, cannot help trying to establish, psychological laws of creation or æsthetic effect.

This diversion of artistic creation from a formative into a cognitive process seems to me to be another of the artist's protections against his complete exhaustion in the creative process. We have here the ideological conflict of beauty and truth, which we have already studied from the general cultural point of view, reappearing as a personal conflict in the creative artist. But we also better understand how far the artistic form is in itself a necessary protection of the artist against the dynamism of a conflict which would destroy him if he failed to put it into form. In this sense, in the need, that is forced on him by that

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dynamism, for putting order, meaning, and control into the psychic chaos into which his totality-urge drives him, the artist, even if he is never conscious of the fact, is always a bit of a scientist.

My note says:
Well, okay! But there are "scientists" and then there are scientists...

Conscious reflection about creativity and its conditions and about all the asthetic laws of artistic effect is only a continuation of the process at a fully conscious level which ensues whenever the artistic formative power is inadequate to control the chaos—that is, when, instead of being a protection, it becomes a danger to the survival of the ego.

Seen thus, the development of modern art and the modern artist is a manifestation of the same general development of Western art-ideology, as this resulted from the Greek conflict between the notions of beauty and truth. There is a rescue of the immortal soul by the æsthetic idea of beauty, and a controlling of the psychic chaos by the artistic form, with its eternal material. This was followed by the disruption of the form by individuality in the modern genius-art, the overflow of the ego beyond the form in a romantic "Sturm und Drang," and finally the flight from that loss of the ego which would be involved in a total creation or a total experience, into psychology.

This cultural development-struggle between art and the ideologies of art has to be gone through by modern artists—burdened as they are with the whole weight of Western culture, both in their personal development and in their individual growth as artists—in themselves and with themselves. And if one of the leading art-historians of the day, Worringer, some ten years ago delivered before the Munich Goethe Society a funeral oration over modern Expressionism, contrasting our generation's will-to-art with its formative capacity, we must balance this view with some understanding of the artists' struggle if we are to avoid passing prematurely from the establishment of a fact to its valuation.

Worringer is certainly right in his warning to modern artists to be satisfied with the last flicker and echo on the fringes of our culture and to avoid the great mistake of promising us, because we possess an in-

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creased insight into the essence of what art was at creative periods, an equal increase in the decaying vigour of our own uncreative epoch. That is easier said than done; not because real resignation is always harder than a struggle, but because the problem that is touched is the deepest problem of artistic creation, and it can never be solved by conscious deliberation and decision, however correct and sincere .

As long as there is in man an impulse to create, he seeks and finds artistic expression in the most varied ideologies, and yet these have always been in some way traditional and collective. Nietzsche was therefore quite right when, long ago, in Human All-too-human he warned us against "revolution" in art and saw in its break with tradition its end. For unless it has some collective or social basis —for instance, in religion or, later, the "genius-religion"—artistic creation is impossible, and the last hopeless effort to base it on a psychological ideology not only leads away from art into science, but, even so, fails on points of principle.

Well, if that's actually how Fred thus spake, then he misspake thusly: granted that tradition per se is inherently collective , nevertheless the collective and (especially) the social are far broader than "tradition;" broader, and also dynamic. It would be tough to argue that artists who address new "social" developments have ever lacked a "collective" basis for doing so.

It's easy enough (and usually necessary) to be skeptical of self-proclaimed revolutionaries. Usually that's what statements such as the above are really about. But this makes "revolution" a too-convenient strawman for reactionaries to mount and pummel.

Education or art can no more be supported on psychological ideologies than religion can be replaced by psychology. For psychology is the individual ideology par excellence and cannot become collective, even if it is generally accepted or recognized .

But modern humanity , through its increasing individuation , has fallen ever deeper into psychology and the ideologies thereof, precisely because they justify its individuality and its conciousness of it . But this individual ideology—as I declared in my first book in 1905 and have since sought to prove from the examination of world-outlooks—is an impossibility for art and has brought us to our present pass, which we may regret, but cannot alter by comparative studies of culture. So that Worringer's "funeral oration" really applies to art as a whole and not its present form of expressionism.

If, however, we regard the whole culture of a people or of an age as being not merely a means for the production of art, but as the expression of a particular form of life, within which a particular art-form plays a part, great or small, we may reach a

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less pessimistic position.

As I have already hinted in my Künstler, we shall perhaps have to be content with cutting down the claims made for art and , further, shall have to sacrifice the artist-type as it has hitherto existed.

Modern art, as Worringer complained, does suffer from the claims of modern artists to be put on a level with creative artists of other ages, and the artist-type suffers also, since he has to put this modern ideology of art for art's sake in the place of every other. The modern artist attempted to maintain the vanished art-ideologies of earlier ages at least in his personal ideologies, even if he could not transform them into productivity. But this draping of the modern individual in the ideologies of earlier ages was bound to lead, in such individuals, to a conflict between their real selves and the self adopted as an ideal—like the fundamental struggle of the neurotic.

The conflict between the idealistic and realistic aspects of all art, which we have described as the struggle of the notion of beauty against that of truth, is duplicated in the modern artist as a conflict between his true self and an ideal self, in which he tries to conserve the art-ideologies of past ages. But it is not only modern art that (as opposed to Classical) is realistic, but the modern artist also, which means that he is oriented towards truth and not beauty, and this not only in his pseudo-naturalistic art-ideology, but in his whole psychological attitude towards himself and his art.

His aim is not to express himself in his work, but to get to know himself by it ; in fact, by reason of his purely individualistic ideology, he cannot express himself without confessing, and therefore knowing, himself, because he simply lacks the collective or social ideology which might make the expression of his personality artistic in the sense of earlier epochs.

A brilliant and novel argument here, but it doesn't seem quite right, or not anymore.

Not everyone is a sports fan these days, but would we say that pro sports have ceased to be a "collective" preoccupation? They never were truly collective if we adopt the above usage. Even at their peak they have never been total social phenomena, save perhaps the most exceptionally tragic or topical moments. Even the Super Bowl is watched only by 60-70% of people in the US.

Yet for sports fans, even now, there is a "collective" aspect which is abstract and impersonal, bigger than any one person yet fully available and amenable to personalization in much the way Rank says artists "use" those "art-ideologies" they find closest at hand. That there exists in parallel a very large segment of society who find sports fandom incomprehensibly stupid and pointless, this does not mean that sports fandom can no longer be construed as "collective," though it may mean that "collective" is not quite the right word for this and/or for what Rank is trying to get at above.

It is fair and necessary to distinguish pluralistic epochs from monolithic, "collective" ones. At the same time, it is hard to believe that societies were truly monolithic for all of history prior to the late-nineteenth century. Rank's study of ancient cultures and his emphasis on art seems to have led him to a false and absolute dichotomy between total collective conformity and total pluralistic disintegration. This is the bird's-eye-view. But by the time we get around to theorizing something as severe as that "art" itself becomes psychologically untenable under pluralism, this level of analysis won't suffice.

(The position developed here ever since our encounter with Lasch clarified the matter is: "culture" is both the proper departure point and the proper landing zone of pluralism; the more so the further beyond brute necessity. Note that Rank's ideas here, however, begin to extricate art from its purgatorial stay in the "culture" bin; he begins to restore art to a place among the necessities of life, but in a very different way from the now-customary bourgeois arriviste way of doing so, whose shibboleths of "biography" and "psychological aesthetic" he quite deliberately sets out to demolish in the first few chapters. (Actually, he has already gotten started in the foreword!) The pluralistic way, admittedly, would seem to land art back in the more decadent and contingent arenas of "culture." It may be that this is where it belongs, even if that conclusion is unsettling (and perhaps suboptimal in most practical respects) for artists ourselves. Nonetheless, we are prepared (eager, actually) to get on with cutting down the claims made for art because those claims, even where they are valid (and this is not often), nonetheless strike us as self-defeating. On which point we must beg off until a future post permits the space to address this in more detail.)

The point of the sports example is merely to say that cultural institutions can remain "communal" and "shared" even if not everyone shares in them. Myriad social ideologies thus remain available to the artist under a pluralistic regime. The possibility of choice here, while of course opening a Pandora's Box of psychosocial maladies for many people, at least has the virtue of ensuring there is something for everybody. The lack of a total "ideology" with a "collective" basis, this did not actually preclude the continuation of art, not even in the above terms; if anything it has allowed more (different) (kinds of) people to (more or less legitimately) make the contributions to art that only they could have made; this because there is an ideology (dare we confess, a designer ideology) available to them, somewhere, if they are lucky enough to stumble upon it or dogged enough to search it out.

Whether all of this "pluralism" has been worth the trouble; whether it can be sustained; whether this freedom is ultimately terrifying and destructive, necessitating an Escape From Freedom; this is another question. For now, it is at least possible to say that Rank's argument above has not survived the pluralistic regimes of the intevening century. I do expect the drawbacks to be borne out in the end; and yet for those "elites" among us who can handle the weight of such choice, I suggest that this freedom has been a godsend. As so often, the superficial appearance of a progressive, democratizing process is misleading. Freedom is crushing for normies, and it is the only true liberation for adepts; which is to say that actually pluralism has intensified stratification rather than moderating it. Pluralism leads away from equality, not towards it. But if you can just hold yourself together, if you can join the elites rather than trying to beat them, and if you can manage not to feel too guilty about it, then at least you yourself will thrive.

This individual realism, however, which reveals itself as a search for truth in art and life, only intensifies the conflict in the person of the artist. The more successful his discovery of truth about himself, the less can he create or even live, since illusions are necessary for both. The clearest representative of the modern artist-type seems to me to be Ibsen, who was still just capable of

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an artistic elaboration of this destructive problem—and he too sometimes came suspiciously near didactic, doctrinaire psychologism.

Thenceforward nothing was possible but a frank breach of all artistic forms and restraints, and the door was opened to a purely personal psychology of self-confessing and self-knowing in art,

especially in poetry. Poets at first seemed to find some support in psycho-analysis, which they hoped to be able to transform into a new artistic ideology. But, for the reasons mentioned, this proved impossible, and, further, psycho-analysis has rather used the modern artist as an object of study than helped him to a psychological ideology of art.

Thus from both alike , from the side of art and that of science, the way seems to be prepared for the decisive crisis , in the midst of which we stand— but also for its solution , which I foresee in a new structure of personality. This will be able to use in a constructive form the psychological insight which is so destructive when it exists as introspection , and the individual impulse to creation will turn positively towards the formation of its own personality, as indeed it did, and actively, in the earliest phases of primitive art.

This is the goal which has hitherto been vainly sought by the so-called neurotic; in earlier ages he was occasionally able to achieve creatively, thanks to some collective art-ideology, but today all collective means fail and the artist is thrown back on to an individual psycho-therapy. But this can only be successful if it sees its individual problem as one conditioned both by time and by culture, whereas the modern artist is driven by the unattainability of his ideology into that neurosis out of which the neurotic vainly seeks a creative escape—vainly, because the social ideologies are lacking which could fulfil and justify his personal conflict.

Both will be achieved in a new formation of personality, which can, however, be neither a therapy of neuroses nor a new psychological art-ideology, but must be a constructive process of acceptance and development of one's individual personality as a new type, of humanity, and in order to create the new it will have to give

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up much that has been received from tradition and become dear to it. This new must first of all be a new personality-type, which may thereafter perhaps find a new art-form suited to it, but in any case will not feel any compulsion to justify its personal impulse to create by starting from the ideology of long-surmounted art-forms.

[end of ch. 12]