Action and Art

This morning I watched a docudrama about the Rwandan genocide. In one scene a Huntu man, loyal to “the party”, is stopped at a roadblock and made to watch his Tutsis wife and their children being slaughtered in front of him; afterwards, the killers let him pass. Another scene has a group of school girls being mowed down in mass because they stood together and refused to give up the Tutsis among them. In both episodes I was brought to tears and driven to contemplate what my own behavior would have been under the same circumstances. In both cases I determined that I would’ve acted heroically. I would’ve given my life (with a fight, of course) to show solidarity with the others and hopefully reveal to my oppressors a little of their inhumanity, thus planting the seeds for change. That said, I don’t think I’m ready, and neither is anyone else, to pin an award for heroism on my chest and congratulate myself for hypothetical bravery and sacrifice. Feeling moved by a movie isn’t the same as being moved by real life—and acting hypothetically isn’t the same as acting in relation to other living things. At the same time, I don’t think life and fiction are completely separate, either. So what does it mean that I felt so moved by this movie, but when the Rwandan genocide was actually taking place I was mostly oblivious to it?

I belong to a theater group which practices elements of what’s called Theater of the Oppressed, a type of interactive theater designed to empower others to see themselves as subjects rather than objects within an imposed political system. Essentially, we try to pose the same kinds of questions I asked myself during the movie—what would you do in this situation and what would that accomplish? More than that, though, we want to show that art isn’t just a packaged reality to be passively accepted but a real “thing” to respond to and accept responsibility for—as the expression of a subject interacting with other subjects. As Samuel Beckett said, “it isn’t about something, it is the thing itself!”

In contrast, you have pornography. I read an interview of Susan Griffin yesterday, in which she condemned pornography as being deterministic. I quote: “The pornographers are very deterministic. They feel, well this is the way people are and we're just giving them what they need. But in fact that's not at all true. The culture is a human creation and we can make choices in what kind of culture we create, and culture has a profound effect on behavior.” I also found an excerpt from the book she was being interviewed about (Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature) in which she says: “And let us remember finally that we cannot choose to have both Eros and pornography; we must choose between beauty and silence. (p. 249)” James Joyce distinguishes between art and pornography by claiming that art arrests the mind while pornography stimulates it. I think this is true. Moreover, I think pornography kills emotion while art heightens and at the same time transcends it. Beauty (in art or in nature) makes me feel more alive and more eager to take action—not action to satisfy a craving but action motivated by a feeling of relationship to and dependence on other living things—a feeling of thankfulness. To paraphrase Joyce, beauty enables me to see a thing as the thing that it is that can be no other thing or to see the other as autonomous and separate from myself, yet necessary to my existence. It makes me want to “act lovingly” as opposed to falling in love or giving love. It places the behavior, as opposed to the principle or concept, as the subjective essence. Pornography, on the other hand, turns experience into an object. It locks the experience down, pigeonholes it, defines it, takes away its freedom and determines it to be something. It suggests that your desires are determined rather than made, and that your desires are a part of you, when in fact they’re by definition separate and other and can never be possessed. In summary, art empowers us and makes us account for our freedom while pornography determines (makes us all the same—at one with the universe) and manipulates us.

But maybe I’m oversimplifying. Is the docudrama I saw on the Rwandan genocide artistic or pornographic? Or neither? On one hand it stimulated and made me want to do something. It prompted this writing for one (if you can call that doing). But I’m not so sure it was the movie that prompted me to write this or the discomfort I felt knowing that I could be so moved by a film when all around me real life tragedies are going on that I’m unaware of and unmoved by. Is art a replacement for experience? By vicariously experiencing these people’s sufferings am I protecting myself from them—denying responsibility for them? In art, aren’t we primarily living in the past or the future—in our imaginations instead of our hearts? Aren’t we eliminating risk from our experiences? I’m wondering if art doesn’t help us maintain our purity in the world by presenting us with clear-cut decisions which don’t require compromise.

While I’m writing this, there’s a movie called Speak playing on TV. I’ve seen it before and, like the docudrama on Rwanda, it moved me to tears several times. Speak is a pretty cheesy movie, though, and hardly what I’d intuitively call art. The bad guys are clear-cut stereotypical villains and the good guys are clear-cut stereotypical heroes and the victims are clear-cut stereotypical victims. And I think the docudrama on Rwanda is probably closer in substance and style to Speak than it is to Hamlet or War and Peace. The villains in both movies are easy to hate, and the choices represented in both movies are the kinds of choices we’d all like to have in real life, but can’t. Right now I’d like to go out and do something. I’d like to go out and give money to a homeless person, fight alongside a freedom fighter in the Third World, make an abused woman feel like she’s a human being—anything besides sitting here in front of my computer and bitching into a word processor. In short, I’d like to act heroically (even if only for appearances sake). But those heroic choices aren’t available. The homeless person I give money to might grow increasingly reliant on the generosity of others and view him or herself with less and less respect. The freedom fighter might use my assistance to replace one repressive regime with another. The abused woman might see my concern as yet another manipulation or come on. So how can I act in a way that really communicates who I am or want to be (and heroic isn’t how I really want to be but an egoistic fantasy, but that’s another subject)? Through art?

Doesn’t real life and real freedom require that we sully ourselves—that we act period instead of for the sake of principle? Doesn’t art preserve principle? Preserve our dignity and our selves as objects? In that sense, isn’t all art pornographic? Or can art avoid objectification by calling attention to itself as art, by maintaining its ambiguity and declaring itself as behavior rather than dogma? There is, naturally, an obvious difference between Deep Throat and Speak—between pornography and cheesy but well intentioned movies, that is. And there’s even a bigger difference between Sade (educated porn but still porn) and Shakespeare or Dante or Emily Bronte or Jane Austen or Rembrandt or Bergman or Bach. I think pornography deadens but art enriches. I think art enhances awareness and immanence. At the same time, it memorializes and kills. It replaces reality with language and ideology. It oversimplifies and delays action. It encourages myth and fantasy. And if we lived in a pure perfect world then there might not be any need for it, but that isn’t the world we live in. And if we want to live in the actual world, we have to tolerate ambiguity and imperfection and compromise. We have to pollute our images and we have to be willing to take risks. So art isn’t perfect, but if it empowers people to take action and to better appreciate natural beauty, as I think it often does, then it matters, even if in turn it risks the abstraction of real life. Art isn’t our salvation but neither is it our ruin. Some art works are more empowering than others and some works of pornography are less degenerate than others. If the world we live in is artificial then maybe it’s necessary to use artifice to get us out of that world, no matter how simplistic or even emotionally manipulative the art form might be. Art that exposes our cultural assumptions—that lifts the veil we cover nature with—that transforms us—is valuable and empowering. A docudrama reminding me of a genocide that took place while I was alive to help prevent it may not be Shakespeare but it is art and it is something that matters—and so is writing about it … I guess … maybe….

*****

There's no such thing as a compassionate person who doesn't act compassionate, as a thoughtful person who can't articulate her thoughts, or a villian who doesn't participate in acts of villiany. We are what we do. Period. Actions beget principles, not the other way around. And the same goes for emotions. If you don't have a heart, act as if you do, and you'll have one. Fail to act, and you'll be left with nothing except your purity.

*****

To know and not to act is not to know.
Ancient Chinese proverb