A portrait of the artist as a portrait of the artist

by David Benjamin 

“Before I start a book, I’ve usually got four hundred pages of notes. Most of them are almost incoherent. But there’s always a moment when you think you’ve got a novel started. You can more or less see how it’s going to work out. After that, it’s just a question of detail.”

—P.G. Wodehouse

 

MADISON, Wis.—One of the timeless conundra that bedevil the community of intellectuals—although blissfully irrelevant to normal people—is whether someone deemed an “artist” ought to produce some actual art. This is a proposition not as simple as it seems.

For instance, there’s a guy named Pyotr Pavlensky who, to the applause of many of his colleagues, has settled the issue with a resounding, “No way, José!” 

Who he, right? 

I know about Pavlensky only because he just showed up in the news from France. Right now, he’s on his way to jail for disseminating—without consent—pornographic images of a philandering politician. Now, technically, Pavlensky might seem a traditional artist because his video clips are palpable works of “art.” But he insists that they were not his point. His “life,” as a self-declared artist performing grotesque acts that no sensible person could imagine, and then refusing to explain the point of each weird (and often creepy) stunt, is Pavlensky’s point.

Before fleeing Russia and landing in France, Pavlensky “protested the government” by sewing his mouth shut in sympathy with the rock group, Pussy Riot, wrapping himself in barbed wire, and by nailing his genitals to the pavement in front of Lenin’s tomb. Obviously, the guy can put on a hell of a show.

But is it art?

I understand that the guy is practicing a form known as “performance art.” Therein lies an aesthetic deviation that tends to bother anyone who clings to the notion that to make art, you have to leave behind something visible, tangible, readable, watchable, listenable, recordable, repeatable and adaptable.

As preposterous as are both Pavlensky’s outrages and his stated motives, I hesitate to simply snort that performance art is bullshit. The art world, to which I’ve never been invited, has been chewing on this dilemma for decades. There are “experts” who can, with impressive conviction, provide a definition of “art,” despite other “experts” whose definition stands in contemptuous and deeply abstruse opposition. You can find these clashes published in art magazines. 

I’ve tried reading art magazines. I’ve failed. A cold reading of Einstein’s theory of relativity (“… the Fresnelian convection-coefficient implicitly assumes the existence of a fixed ether…”) would be easier. 

Partly because of the word’s vagueness, but due more to its overbearing pretentiousness, I’ve avoided characterizing my own work as “art.” P.G. Wodehouse, one of my literary heroes, regarded writing as a sort of craft, its practitioners similar to potters, stonemasons, glassblowers, seamstresses—or, to stretch the analogy logically—painters, sculptors, dancers, actors, singers. I’ve always thought that the judgment of any object as “art” is determined not by its maker but first by critics—who can’t be trusted—and, in the long run, by posterity. 

(By this measure, Pavlensky’s nailing his nuts to the Kremlin, can’t be called  art because he pried out the nails—ouch!—and walked away, probably a little bowlegged. He left bupkes behind for posterity to peruse and appreciate.)

When I was an aspiring writer in high school, I read, with a measure of ambivalence, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Even then, I had a sense that Joyce, calling himself “artist,” was being immodest. I recalled that impression a while ago, when A Portrait of the Artist came up in conversation with poet Richard Swanson. After many years, he had re-read the book and realized that it’s a mess—plotless, humorless, whiny and self-flagellating. When Richard was my teacher, every bright high-school kid felt obligated to read A Portrait of the Artist. Today, few kids read it unless forced to. And why bother? With instant access to a surfeit of bad writing in hip-hop lyrics, teenagers have little use for the pretentious self-pity of a dead Dubliner.  

Besides, Joyce went on to write Ulysses, one of the sacred texts in the twentieth-century literary canon. While he was doing so, of course—and for the duration of his literary career—he sponged off friends, dodged his rent, neglected his children, bankrupted Sylvia Beach, his most generous benefactor, and then dumped her for Random House.

But therein lies the issue posed by Pyotr Pavlensky, who declared after his conviction in France that “the artist’s life” is the artist’s art. By living “artfully,”—and conspicuously—stirring controversy and defying norms, one uncocoons into an artist of life itself. At that stage, he sheds the plebeian obligation to make something. He has transcended mere craftsmanship. 

By this measure, of course, Al Capone, Hugh Hefner, Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, Donald Trump and dozens of Kardashians are among our greatest artists, “famous,” in Daniel Boorstin’s formulation, “for being famous.” 

Another author considered required reading among smart teenagers when I was one of them was Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road I read in tenth grade, after which I was puzzled. Although it had passages of enviable lyricism, the book seemed to go nowhere, except out to the coast and back. What I didn’t understand was that Kerouac was a bold protagonist of the conviction that one’s life, in its spontaneity, its collecting of outrageous, dangerous, exotic and artistic companions—fictional characters come to life—were the “art” of the writer, author, philosopher. Later, I read virtually everything that Kerouac wrote, not from admiration but opposition. Jack’s metier—living a consciously unconventional life for the sake of telling other people about it, thereby demonstrating superiority over all those drones and housewives you’ve left in the dust—turns out, in the reading of it, to be a recipe for narrative tedium and premature burnout. 

Today, Kerouac, as he apparently wished, is remembered for his life, which ended at age 47 in an alcoholic haze, than for the books, stories and poems—all about him—that hardly anyone reads anymore. However, Kerouac was no performance artist. He believed his life was his art but wrote it all up, voluminously—defying, in a sense, his own faith. He didn’t trust his portrait of the artist to survive unless he drew it himself, over and over.

Picasso had it easier. Like Kerouac, he lived a largely profligate and reprehensible life, arrogant, sybaritic, sensual, undependable and misogynist. But we overlook the details of his mischief, narcissism, infidelity and sexism because he was an incomparable craftsman who left behind museums bursting with brilliant, experimental, vastly eclectic and startling work. Pablo might have been a cad, but we can forgive, for almost any sin, the creator of Guernica.

Likewise, we’ve forgotten that Alexandre Dumas cheated on his wife with forty mistresses, squandered a fortune and had to flee France to escape his creditors. What does it matter if a life is misspent and disreputable if it leaves behind The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo?

Long before Pyotr Pavlensky’s arrest, another young Russian went to prison for taunting the government. But he lacked the imagination (and showmanship) to sew his lips together or wrap himself in barbed wire. His life was more chaotic than artistic. But he life behind The Brother Karamazov, Notes from the Underground, The Insulted and Injured, Crime and Punishment …