Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)
[xlviii] a paradoxical phenomenon discloses itself, which will not startle the psychologist and indeed will facilitate our approach to the understanding of the spiritual dynamism in artistic creativity. The autonomous individualism of primitive man, as well as that of the lordly masters appears to be more dependent on Nature in its artistic creativeness than is the sedentary collective type of man, who, though depending to a great extent on nature's moods and his own environment (of commerce), can yet rise to abstractions in art which are quite independent of reality. We shall see presently how this compensatory function of the art-form brings the development of personality and its dynamic need of equalization into unison. Here I would merely point out...that in neither of the two art-forms is it a question of an absolute style-principle, but only of a more or a less, while at the same time both style-forms alike possess 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. Behind both there is the creative will of the personality, which only now and then manifests itself directly, and at other times reacts to the compulsion of collective society and gives expression thereto. Undoubtedly this second art-form...is more capable of development, not only for stylistic and aesthetic, but for psychological reasons as well. For the abstraction at the base of this mechanical art represents even in itself a rising above nature, and it can be still further intensified and varied, whereas in naturalistic or organic art the objects within a cultural environment are limited, so that the artistic effort to deal with them otherwise than in their natural setting does not find them very malleable. In a word, art consists in the latter case of arbitrary
[xlix]
re-creation (not copying) of the given objects; in the other, of the new creation of ever changing ideas. Nevertheless, for both we must assume a creative force in the individual himself, which has to be studied in its various forms before we can arrive at a deeper understanding of the art-forms produced by it.
[end of Introduction]
I
Rank's
feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally, originate solely in the constructive harmonising of this fundamental dualism
of individual and collective. (p. xxii)
By therefore relegating
biography (or pathography)
to the margins, Rank reestablishes a line (perhaps a barrier) between transmission and reception, a line that uncritical, self-projecting observers have tended to blur.
I see no reason why the audience cannot also be creating something through their participation, incommensurable as that something may be with what the artist has presented to them. Yes, reception can be a (self-)generative act, a transformative act, or at the very least an act of consolidation, a renewing of vows to ego and/or to alter. Audiences must also have some dynamic need of equalization even if that need is not as tempestuous as that of the artist-type . But I also see no reason why we should be obligated to assume this of the audience tout court. The old saw about actions speaking louder than words is never too obvious or trite to be relevant. Experience permits us to be dubious when someone tells us offhandedly that a song or a movie or an unrealized concept piece "changed my life." Don't tell me, show me. Don't write your own biography so mechanistically. The fact that you yourself have done it does not make it valid.
There has recently been an awful lot of effort put towards revealing the various "transformations" undergone by nonelite audiences as they consume their nonelite cultural consumables. I suppose I am more interested in revealing transformation's absence from the elite enclaves where it has previously been claimed to exist. This latter seems to me actually the more urgent task. It is certainly the more woke one!
If we go so far as to demand a properly scientific burden of proof on such matters, we will hardly ever be able to declare that art has transformed anyone in any way, and we will have to dispense with almost all of our existing conceits to having either experienced such transformations ourselves or observed them in others. I feel in my gut, just like you do, that the truth cannot possibly be quite so barren, but that is beside the point. The point, rather, is to be wary of convicting people of things that cannot be proven.
II
Cage said, somewhere, that he considered a work incomplete unless and until it was performed. By now most of us striving lumpenkunstler feel this in a very real way; we always feel incomplete because we have no audience at all; we feel this differently, then, even than Cage must have, at least by the time his remarks on such matters were being eagerly recorded and disseminated; it is a practical remark, though, first and foremost, and only secondarily an emotional or spiritual one, and so for us, now, it maintains at least this aspect of its original (practical) valence.
The contemporary arts education juggernaut most often and most explicitly renders this completeness criterion as a commercial imperative, and not (strictly speaking) as a "practical" one. But really it has become a therapeutic imperative.
As Becker says,
A self-reflexive animal...can only get the full meaning of its acts by observing them after they have happened. This is what led William James to remark that we are sad because we cry; in other words we give the full meaning to our crying by dwelling on it after it happens.
Back in the early days of the internet, some hobbyist of the commercial orientation (the kind that only hobbyists can afford) suggested that music major graduation recitals should happen off campus so as to involve getting a gig as the linchpin of the entire project. I assume this person had not been to music school themselves, because otherwise they would know that strictly appointed times-and-spaces for on-campus recitals are for securing an audience, not for securing a "gig." Getting a gig can be unpleasant, but it's not that hard. Finding an audience, meanwhile, has become almost impossible. It can't be taught, that's for sure!
Merely creating the work, then, is insufficient for purposes of equalization . One could be forgiven, actually, based on strictly anecdotal observations, for thinking that the content of works is far less important than the attention they draw to their makers. "If it isn't posted to Facebook, it didn't happen." Facebook is a recent arrival, but the broader truth has been true for as long as there have been "social networks."
On this view, then, "passive" audiences have all the power. Even in mediums where works can be well-preserved and enjoy a noble posterity, it remains the case that a show without an audience never happened. Even the genius need not be neglected for very long before they are functionally leveled with the undistiguished. When equalization is what's at stake, a work is not complete until it is not only presented publicly but indeed until it has a public. Rank doesn't put this quite so directly, but it is made crystal clear in any case.
Ideally the artists and the recipients could land on a symbiotic relationship rather than the parasitic one we currently have with each other. Ideally all would both generate and receive in their own ways; all of this, ideally, as Mumford would have it, in the right amount in the right place at the right time. I would hazard a guess that the strictly numerical balance of the artist and audience macrotypes in the proverbial
Wild
is shockingly close to ideal and probably governed by well-evolved bio-social dynamics. What, then, accounts for the wildly unbalanced reality we actually live in? Quite literally everything else that humans, the social animal, have wrought for themselves. But I don't think that renders this thought exercise pointless; rather, it is an ideal which ought to be considered explicitly in policy-making, an artifact of psychodiversity which is, unlike some other kinds of diversity, scalable rather than zero-sum on account of its central conceit to symbiosis. To this extent, at least, the Cultural Studies hive is right to begin with the task of according the "practice" of reception its due importance.
III
Guy Debord was at times quite prescient, at times no less than eerily clairvoyant, in forseeing the (d)evolution of the contemporary art-ideology. His righteous talk of "alienation" and "compensation" is not hard to reconcile with Rank's less explicitly political account. But Debord committed a grievous (because elementary) error in proposing that alienation could be eradicated, like polio or the dodo bird. In fact, so much has Debord absented from his envisioned utopia that the need to
reproduce something absent
would be felt constantly by everyone. Fixated as he is upon macrostructual sources of alienation, and upon score-settling with his intellectual rivals, he is blind to the possibility that some baseline level of microstructural social friction is inevitable, thus also to the proposition that art's "compensatory" quality might therefore be essential and constructive rather than merely decadent. Thus the artists, guardians of the Coping Strategy in a world that is not fit to be coped with, were for the brilliant but disequilibriated Debord "the worst kind of bureaucrats," with the sociologists, guardians of empirical inquiry against the blustery rhetoric that was his own coping strategy, a close second. The error is more understandable than it is forgivable.
IV
A commonality between Rank's time and our own, and of both times with the so-called "Romantic" period: artists simultaneously enjoy an elevated and a degraded social status. We are both respected and feared, pitied and envied, loved and hated. Further, each such valuation has both an affirmative and a negative avenue: that is, artists may be parsed as what they are or as what they are not. Hence a vicious Punnett Square of misprision.
Faced with the wider collision of formerly isolated cultures (including both "collective" cultures and individualist cultures-of-one), those of the affirmative outlook have banded together out of self-preservation, forming specialized institutions to look after the interests of their affirmative ideology of artisthood. To the world outside of these enclaves, meanwhile (which, it must be emphasized, certainly includes many who self-consciously identify as artists and have a noncontroversial claim to doing so, but perhaps are not of the affirmative outlook), this institutionalized art world can itself only be construed as Other, as an interest group, foreign, and if not malign then at least an Inessential Business in terms of the Everyday economy.
Hence an apparent paradox: institutionalization/formalization may itself be the only surviving art-ideology , and simultaneously it represents the most organized, persistent, and effective threat to art itself. It is for the better that artists are no longer quite the simulacra of National or Religious figures that Rank found them to be; but then as we enter the Twilight of Sovereignty, the age of globalization and the mobility of capital, the Interest Group itself is the only nation many people have left; and this brings all manner of Darwinistic implications and existential threats crashing down on all of us like a California landslide.
Ditto art-as-religion: art institutions famously harbor an unmoored contingent whose mystical beliefs, absolutist tendencies, and necessary hypocrisies all comport perfectly with the contemporary Religious gestalt, as well as a tiny irreducible minority of mundanely devout followers whose very devoutness is, if harmless, also less inherently respectable than it would be if taking the more comprehensive Judeo-Christian moral ideal, instead of the exceedingly narrow ideal of art, as its object.
It's easy to notice "style wars" raging and wonder just how some of the institutional outposts (university music departments, non-profit orgs, etc.) manage to function at all. Perhaps this is just one more indication that all of these style warriors indeed share something beyond style (or perhaps short of it); namely, a commitment to a particular institutional way of doing business which is self-preserving first and everything-else second.
When Worringer explains the incongruence of art-history and æsthetic by the fact that our æsthetic is nothing more than a psychology of the Classical way of feeling art, he is certainly right; but there will probably always be a similar incongruence between every ideology and its concretization, as indeed there actually is between our æsthetic and the corresponding intuitive (einfühlende) art, as also between the religious art of Egypt and mediæval Christianity and the works respectively produced by them.
In addition to this natural divergence between an ideology and its concretization, there is in artistic creation yet another decisive factor which æsthetic would have to neglect entirely if it sought to make its laws absolute, and this is the personality of the artist, with his own system of ideology, which perhaps runs largely parallel with the general, but by no means coincides with it.
(p. 21)
Pseudo-religious conceits will no doubt continue to circulate among artists, but functionally the institution of art is an earthly interest group par excellence, and the interests served are, as my choice of this term seeks to indicate, their own, thus through deeds giving continual lie to so many words as fast as we can speak them. From that drawing of comparison with other such groups, what I ultimately want to argue is that there is a mundane but essential social function that art practices might serve but which art institutions cannot. The religious-style commitment to art, if it is viable at all, must be Protestant or Evangelical (or. . . Puritan!) in outline rather than Catholic. There must be as few human intermediaries as possible (ideally none at all) standing between practitioners (artists and audiences) and their various art-gods.
Law Enforcement presents a fraught but topical illustration of this distinction between the ideal/essential contribution of a "practice" to society and the perversion of this mission by interest-group politicking: as police unions are to good policing, so the institution of art is to artistry, with very different consequences but nonetheless for the same reasons. And so it goes: just as the gutting of public sector union rights targets teachers or police but less often both at once, so orchestras program the weakest works of famous composers over the best works of obscure composers. I am not equating these two arenas, but I am unafraid of accusations from the occasional careless reader (of which I sometimes am one myself) that I am somehow equating them by availing myself of a rather callous analogy. This is the analogy, callous or not. Only having first accepted that reality can artists begin to imagine other ways.
And so, I think that Rank, in his nuanced, anti-mechanistic psychological approach, has a good claim to having identified precisely this "mundane but essential social function" of art which, subsequently, the institution of art, as today's guiding ideology of artistic creation, has completely abandoned simply in order to preserve the already-privileged positions of its most privileged exponents. If all this institution did was to constrain creation by channeling it into the areas it knows how to operate with, this would not be so comprehensively destructive; what it does in parallel to this, however, is to similarly constrain reception, to dictate to Others (more or less explicitly depending on the medium and the moment) exceedingly strict boundaries of self-construction via reception. Reception then is not allowed to blossom into the generative activity it could and should be, because artists, as an Interest Group, seek their own monopoly on this kind of generativity, on meeting this "dynamic need of equalization" in this peculiar way, a monopoly on which they rely in obtaining money, sex and recognition, the trio of resources which sustains them (or perhaps, in strict adherence to the Rank-Becker line, best allows them to deny their own mortality).
Hence artists must cut ourselves down to size before the Other acts on its impulse to cut us into a thousand pieces. We may resolve our crisis of conscience and our crisis of survival via the same avenue; but it is an avenue which under present conditions requires rare courage and, probably, the disappearance-loss of so many vessels sailing into uncharted waters unless and until enough of them survive the journey that lines of communication and a secure beachhead can be established. (Another unfortunate analogy that nonetheless feels unavoidable.)
When art-as-profession becomes about our "mundane social function," it will cease to be fetishized for what it is not, thereby achieving the exaltation of the affirmative over the negative image of art and artist; indeed, this is the same exaltation pursued by our sclerotic art institutions in a scorched-earth fashion, whereas as individuals we are free to pursue it more constructively and (periodically) out of view.
To the extent that the twin pillars of "dynamic need of equalization" and the inessentiality of "biographical presentation" hold explanatory power, to that same extent do the Explanations come fast and furious. Post-ness or after-the-factness, trite as it is to say, then becomes even so the crucial element of the present epoch, and the reasons why, incidentally, explain why art, even "after the fact," has not ceased to be created, transmitted, or received: namely, that the fact after which we find ourselves situated is self-consciousness: of tradition, of other artists, of our membership (whether in our own eyes or others') in art, of all the things art is thought to do, what it actually does, what we only wish it would do, and so on. All of these are decisively collective factors, still, somehow. They are not individual(istic) ones, a point which is lost sight of only when the scale of historical maass-consciousness has withered to months rather than centuries.
the artist not only creates his art, but also uses art in order to create.
(p. 7)
Rank is largely content to demonstrate the inessentiality of biography and move on with his larger argument. Notably little is said about why biography has, in fact, held so much sway, undue or otherwise. In the introductory remarks, the preponderance of "mechanistic science" is given pride of place in this connection; I think there is much more to it, though, as is implied in the later, more detailed discussions.
Post-artists who are not merely aware of the biographical orientation but are in fact post-biographical in their mania for this as an essential element of both creation and reception can, like any other kind of artist, be seen as "reproducing what is absent": that would be first and foremost themselves; they who are not, as would be non-sensical, literally "absent" from the scene (though they cannot tolerate that either), but rather absent from the internal drama of the art-ideology of the time to which they are appealing. This is because really, no one is present in institutional art-ideology, because institutions are nonparticularistic. Some of us do not mind this about institutions, whatever our other misgivings. This nonparticularism may even be seen as art institutions' most salutary trait, comporting as it does so neatly with classical liberalism's ideal of an impersonal public order. Others, conversely, make it their first order of generative business to (re)create themselves on the surface level of their artwork, such that "they" are always in the room, even if that room is administered by a nonparticularistic institution, even if that room is itself the whole extent of such an institution.
Any appeal here to static rationalizations, such as balancing the (mis)representations of Others by creating countervailing (mis)representations of Self, runs aground on Rank's dynamic account of personality formation. The central implication of that account is simply that neither structure nor agency can be held exclusively responsible for personality formation, and, by extension, for artistic production; rather, responsibility for any given artistic production lies in a dynamic interaction between the two, creating an individual which is perhaps quite unique psychologically in some ways but in other ways just like the rest of us. Usually both things are true, and this enables faux-critics to pick and choose their critical framwork self-stylingly. And so biography is, for one thing, in these terms a mere static, one-sided, "mechanistic" account of Structure, devoid of Agency; and for another, it is by direct virtue of this static, literal quality a chilling restraint on reception, which is thus channeled into a far narrower range of acceptable response than is required for-and-by the audience (also comprised of sentient human beings with rights, needs, and aspirations) to be able to make use of the artwork as a vehicle of self-equilibriation.
Thus the "biographical presentation" certainly can become, as so many of its armchair theorists would have it, a Confrontational tack; indeed, a confrontation wherein one side has brought a rocket-launcher to a knife-fight. As an older teenager in my neighborhood who had fallen in with the wrong crowd once put it, "If someone wants to be a p~$$y and shoot me, that's on them." Settling of scores for more than a day at a time requires mutual vulnerability borne of commensurate ammunition; in that specific respect, the Political Artist who seeks to countervail existing power dynamics by reproducing them in negative is merely driving an SUV in the bike lane. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. At one time art may have appeared, like the Long March Through the Institutions, as a supreme end run of soft persuasion around this otherwise immovable obstacle; but after the fact, that is no longer either a radical thought or a workable strategy; it's just an outworn platitude without much empirical backing. There is no longer any hope of soft persuasion here, and the consolidation of hard persuasion (Confrontation) into an art-ideology in its own right has, besides committing the fallacy of staticizing the psychological workings of art, also begun to work against its stated purpose as audiences and artists alike have become attentuated to it, traumatized by it, or perhaps just vaguely sick-and-tired of being lectured, by someone, nearly everywhere they go.
As an individual matter of self-equilibriation through artworks which are made For The Drawer, there need be many fewer constraints on what is acceptable. It is, rather, in what might be called the Distribution and Promotion of artworks (in other words, in who we show our work to, the terms on which we show it to them, and our related utterances about this showing, about the work, and about ourselves) where there is an urgent (because frequenly abused) ethical dimension.
An extreme example: an older friend of mine who acted in a TV series that still has, decades later, a cult following, once showed me a piece of Fan Fiction that a Fan had sent her. This Fan quite clearly and explicitly was disequilibriated in a way that required this specific outlet; and as profoundly disturbing as this "outlet" was to me as a mere outside observer, it can only be that much more disturbing to its object, my friend, who thus finds herself, very much as herself, fictionally woven into the fabric of this severely disequilibriated person's writhing efforts to equilibriate. The content itself would be enough on which to base this evaluation, but the content need never have reached her; and indeed it should not have, not ethically at least, and not materially either given that she protects knowledge of her home address vigorously for precisely this reason. As I say, it's an extreme case in the qualitative sense, but not necessaily a quantitative outlier. I think this simply brings into higher relief elements of the status quo which rely on their seeming mildness in order to pass unquestioned. That is exactly where I would locate, against the backdrop of this extreme, any number of Distributional and Promotional artifacts of the postmodern art-ideology adhered to more or less explicitly by myriad professionals and by quite a few non-professionals too. (A good place to look for these quotidian artifacts of high-functioning psychopathology is in your spam folder, where the most overzealous of my self-promoting friends occasionally tend to land even if they have been in my Yahoo address book for as long as I've had one.) These are patterns of behavior with which this so-called extreme example fits near-perfectly. And I would conjecture that if we could empirically sort these behaviors by personality, we would find Rank's theories of equilibration and "reproducing that which is absent" to be proven with a robustness that refutes almost everything else that artists working under the current art-ideology tend to say about themselves and their work. This too would cut artists down to size, and also elevate them in one fell swoop.
V
[12] Everything produced objectively in any period by the contemporary ideas of the soul was beautiful, and the aesthetic history of the idea of the beautiful is probably no more than a reflection of changes in the idea of the soul under the influence of increasing knowledge.
Perhaps still true today if we are willing to be properly cynical about the soul-less-ness of both LCD mass culture
and
of the elite prevarications known as
scholarship
and
criticism.
To call these practices "soulless" is not to say that they do not also, at the same time, have a very particular
idea of the soul
which guides their courses (negatively, as it were).
[7] The artist, as it were, takes not only his canvas, his colours, or his model in order to paint, but also the art that is given him formally, technically, and ideologically, within his own culture, this probably emerges most clearly in the case of the poet, whose material is drawn from the cultural possessions already circulating and is not dead matter, as is that used by the plastic arts. In any case we can say of all artistic creation that the artist not only creates his art, but also uses art in order to create.
And so the audience not only experiences the artwork but also uses art in order to experience.
The artist's mandate, then, is not to choose the material or the style on behalf of the experiencing audience. Rather, artists as a group do better, perhaps paradoxically, if each one of them follows their own muse and then leaves the audience alone to figure things out for themselves.
The artist's mandate, then, is to
stay tf out the way
once the work has been created.
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