Me / Reactions to Art / Me, Again

Me

My composure at work could be described as "frigid bitch." Controlled, and never playing fast and loose. The words that come out of my mouth in the corporate sphere are affectionally modest, reserved, and curious. They're so sweet and well-articulated. I could kiss most of them, except for the filler words: "like," "um," "essentially", etc. Those words penetrate my corporate facade, parting the beaded curtains to slip inside the "bad room," i.e., my self-hatred, as soon as I hear myself fill a sentence with them.

My body, the physical presentation of another me, is not compatible with anything corporate. It is meant to be fucked, seen, it moves between color and light, grabs eyesight, and takes air. My body looks and feels like the morning time, when everything is quiet and about to be devoured. It is pink and soft and needs to be tasted by your tongue but it is prepared to be brutalized in the center of a mosh pit.

The rest is up for determination. Not by you, but by me. I know what it is but it's hard to bring it all to the surface. I don't present as, "I-don't-give-a-fuck." But I want to get there. I'm desperate to regress and unlearn so many things that fill my mind. I want to be a fucking degenerate.

Reactions to Art in Three Stages Reactions to art occur in three distinct stages. First, there's your emotional reaction. In his essay What is Art?, Tolstoy articulates this initial reaction type as follows:

The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving, through his sense of hearing or sight, another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion that moved the man who expressed it. . . . Art begins when some one, with the object of making others share his feeling, expresses his feeling by certain external indications.

This initial reaction to art arises instinctively, and produces a gut-level, simple response: "I like it," or, "I don't like it." For instance, like many who've seen Picasso's Guernica, when I first saw it, I felt overwhelmed by the size of its sadness. I liked it, but it's tragic work of art.

The second stage of reaction involves engaging with the art on an intellectual level. This is a Kantian notion, but it's also rooted in Susanne Langer's arguments in Feeling and Form. Admittedly, I haven't read her text, but I'm sick of only referencing fuck-ass men. In her book, she states: "[w]hat is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding." She further observes that, "the wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling—a specialized, intensive intuition about feelings."

I love this conception of intellectualizing art because Langer doesn't separate it from the initial, emotional response; the two are intertwined. The idea that the intellectualization of art—or any subject—is merely an intensified form of intuition also helps to explain why so many things fail to make sense, particularly in areas of the corporate world where things are presented as purely intellectual and devoid of intuition.

The third stage of reacting to art is through comparison and analogy. When you engage with highly intelligent individuals, this is their mark: presenting new ideas and concepts within a comparative framework. Comparison helps to contextualize new art and ideas primarily because so much of "new" art is based upon reference rather than being entirely unprecedented or wholly original. This concept aligns closely with Hegel's notion of the Zeitgeist—the spirit of the age—and his thesis that art is intelligible because it reflects the historical, cultural state of the collective and human self-knowledge.

Me, Again

See, the first two reactionary stages outlined above are so obvious to me. They are within me and my art, and they're not going anywhere. The emotion and the intuitive intellect are engrained in everything and there is no reason to strive for escape. There is no reaction, and perhaps no art, without the involvement of these two initial stages.

But it's the third reactionary stage that presents a challenge for me.

My art and my being are intelligible within a broad, comparative framework of all that currently exists and has existed, but concomitantly, I want to break free from being beholden to reference. I want to digress, degenerate, exist without a "bad room," and be contemplated without the need to understand something that's come before me. Has it been done before? Can it be done? Has everything that has ever existed been built brick-by-brick?

It's a version of, "I'm not like other girls," but multiply it by 1,000,000,000, set it on fire, burn it down, and see what rises from the ashes—it won't be a phoenix, because that's what you're expecting.