What is meaning-full-ness? (1)
Have you ever been audience to an art work that was well intentioned, well executed and interesting but for some reason you found yourself looking at the rest of the audience more than the piece itself, guiltily waiting for the chance to get away?
Maybe you’ve also met people that seem to be talking about something really interesting and important but you find it hard to listen to them?
Sometimes it can be hard to put your finger on, but some art just doesn’t ring true. All the ingredients are there for a great work, but there’s a strange hollowness, a sense of irrelevance or perhaps tedium at the work’s core.
Most artists want to make work that is meaningful. Most people want to live meaningful lives and contribute to other people’s lives in meaningful ways. We know meaning when we see/hear/feel it, but not always how to generate it.
The paradox of meaningfulness is that, a bit like really good, funny comedy, you can’t really set out to be meaningful.
“Hmm, what’s a really meaningful topic I could make a meaningful art work about? How about the plight of a homeless, schizophrenic homosexual suffering from AIDs in the midst of a never-ending civil war somewhere in the third world? …”
There are two basic things wrong with this sort of well-intentioned, earnest plan to create something meaningful:
1. No matter how much research you do, the work, unless it is a documentary and uses the words, images and experiences of the people involved, will never ring true. You are not homeless, oppressed, sick, or whatever it is you think is interesting.
2. The work will most likely suffer from a dreary kind of seriousness and carefulness that comes from a strong respect for the subject matter and the people involved but isn’t at all interesting to an audience. When a black homosexual man suffering oppression because of mental illness makes a film about his own life, you can be sure there will be a lot of irreverent humour, political incorrectness and sweet humanity in the story that is very hard to fake up if you are an outsider trying your darndest to respect someone different from yourself. Even if you are just dealing broadly with a theme, if it isn’t YOUR theme, you’re likely to get a bit lost in seriousness.
Just like your originality, your meaningfulness can only come out of your own experiences, your life, your soul.
We are here to dance to our own music.
Sounds easy enough …
Still, there are some common difficulties in executing this dance: To begin with, as we grow up we learn not to reveal our deepest selves to too many people. We learn not to tell embarrassing stories about our failures. The gift of art is that it gives us metaphor and aesethetics. These two things act as a kind of bridge to support the revelation of ourselves, not entirely naked; clothed in imagination and colour.
Another difficulty we often encounter is that we think we (especially the white, western, urban we) have nothing interesting to talk about. We no longer live in a culture that wants to hear its own stories. We have become accustomed to films that deal with extreme situations – world wars, the holocaust, crime and triumph over extreme adversity. Why would anyone want to hear about the way my mother used to make jam when I was 7 years old?
On top of this, how do I even know what my song is so that I can dance to it?? All the schooling, training and learning we do teaches us to do things a certain way, and to be interested in certain themes, material and stories. To be a true artist, you have to be prepared, time and time again, to embark on a journey into unknown territory, pretty much alone. You have to be on a constant search for self-knowledge and to take the risk of expressing what you find to others.
The key to all this is trust. John Daido Loori, in “The Zen of Creativity” says
If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it’s trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.
One of my teachers, Margaret Cameron, said it like this “Your work is what is right in your face.”
One thing is for sure: what you find and share on your journey through your self, your life and your art is going to be damn interesting and meaningful to those around you, harbouring secrets in their own souls and struggling to hear and dance to their own music!
