Only You can Define You

“To define is to limit.”

So said Oscar Wilde. Even the word, artist, lives and breathes in the cramped space of definition. It is, however, the word I’ll use in this context.*

I’m not the first artist to throw off the shackles of definition.

I’m in this protest across time and space, across arts. I have seen interviews whereby Dries Van Noten rejected the word, fashion, for its limits. Joni Mitchell, who paints as much as she makes music, for whom alternating between these is a personal methodology, has been quoted as saying, “I am fluid.” She followed her internal map right off of the popular charts to make an album with Charles Mingus before he died. Cecil Beaton’s documentary begins with him being asked which of his many media he most defines himself by. “I don’t know,”  he replies. There are countless examples of artists who refused to be defined. And then there is us, the artists of the present day, shamelessly devoted to our compound practices.

Are you an artist? Well, are you?

Only you can say. Every time anyone says “you,” they are speaking in the second person. I can’t know you unless I ask. Only you know you. The statements that you make about yourself start with “I”. I statements are not just a means of release from conflict. I statements are statements that only you have the authority to make.

Let’s talk about you. Martin Buber sang the praises of “Thou” as opposed to “it,” trumpeting the merits of deep engagement with others, as opposed to transactional relationships, as the only way to be alive. I love that idea so much. I also like to reframe Buber, to bring his definitions of “living,” based on the quality of real and present engagement in relationships, into the relationship that we have with ourselves. If we are transacting with ourself, how rich is that relationship? And I bring this definition of Buber’s into our relationship with our own art. If we are only transacting with our art, how rich is that relationship?

Let’s talk about the implied “you” of the second person voice. If I am having a real and present engagement with you, I can know nothing about you, “thou,” unless I ask. “Thou” is a mystery to me. The wonderful novelist, Jennifer Egan, opens A Visit from the Goon Squad with a Proust quotation, “The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.” So how can anyone, that is not you, define you?

Let’s talk about genre.

Genre itself implies an “it,” you as someone to be transacted with. “What genre is your music?” “What medium is your art?” These are not opportunities to define yourself. These are requests that you sort yourself into a tidy structure in the mind of the other, in the marketplace. Anyone remember childhood, when your mother offered you two choices to make you feel empowered? Would you like to eat your corn or would you like to go to your room?

As an artist, defining one’s work is hard enough, isn’t it? There is no stasis point with art-making. There is maybe that one brief moment when a body of work feels like it’s resolved, that it’s getting shared somewhere, and I can talk about what inspired it, why I made it, or what I made it with. But I have never looked back on anything that I did and found that it stayed in stasis after I showed it, performed it, or published it. Its permanent state is a grave from which it calls, to tell me it is still living and breathing. Even after it is in a frame, a recording, a book, or a performance, it still lives and changes. Did you ever hear the story about Bonnard asking Vuillard to distract the guards in the museum so that he could apply his latest color discovery to the canvases? One’s art is a living being and does not reach a state of completion, necessarily, simply because it has reached a stage of resolution. Martha Graham said, “No artist is pleased…there is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction.”

And this evolution of one’s work is further expanded by the tools and materials and practices that an artist clusters into an aggregate. By reaching for ways to express one’s vision or *ausion, there is an inevitable fusion. And that fusion may be describable, but it is not definable.

As an artist who paints, writes, writes songs, performs music, makes visual work, filmic work, theatrical work, costume sketches, designs systems and methodologies, documents, studies materials, etc. I gotta tell you, I can’t change this about myself. From my perspective, to “choose one thing,” I would have to give up my toolset, my materials, my discoveries, my practices. But these are inextricable. As they were acquired and applied and used in concert, they vanished into the weave. Fortunately, though, I am the only one who can define me.

If I define myself as artist, which I do, I define the concept of artist, for myself only, as well. And this definition, as well as the definition of my art, and of myself, is also evolving.

Currently, I personally define artist as operating from within and define art as emerging, usually surprising me. Personally, I define artist as a channel for forces larger than myself, forces that can only stream in via my own internal locus of operation and, therefore, are never defined by any exterior human. Martha Graham again, “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one you in all time.”

Anyone addressing me as thou knows that they do not know. Because I am thou to myself, and my art is thou to me, external forces have two primary qualifications for engagement. One is description, which is always optional to me, and the other is curiosity.

Experimentation and the state of play.

I also define artist as experimental because I believe, as many have said, but Paula Scher said it this way, “Design only happens in a state of play.” And Einstein said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun." And in that state of fun or play, that state of flow, one is not within the confines of time, but accessing the eternal now. If I am dusting the den and my guitar happens to be hooked up to the sound system across the room, I will pick it up and see what kind of sound the feather duster makes when I use it to strum the strings. I am freed of the reigns of time in this act of playful experimentation. In its most living state, the studio is a laboratory for the new. Seen through this understanding, definition by others becomes, at most, a pesky flea.

The most natural act in this state is to reach. We reach for tools, materials, processes, and discoveries. The impetus to that playful state is a need, sometimes an urgency, to express. My first pre-educational experiments with printmaking were made with house paint and dryer sheets, because I had to print-make and this is what I had lying around. This inspired experimentation drove me to seek formal learning.

Experimentation in a state of play connects me to that force that surprises me. My only regret is forgetting, when I do, getting drawn out of my relationship to art as my “thou” into treating my art like an “it” because I temporarily succumb to the imposition of external definition. And so I define an artist as responsible for protecting against (1) a transactional relationship with my art, (2) a transactional relationship with myself and (3) the policing forces of definition by others. And I have heard them all. But I have doubled down. For example, that “jack of all trades” distinction. That idea belongs to a paradigm that I did not define. To quote a popular reference, I cite the testimony of Tess McGill, Melanie Griffith’s character in Working Girl: “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life working my ass off and getting nowhere just because I followed rules that I had nothing to do with setting up.”

And why would a jack of all trades necessarily be a master of none?

Mastery is over the self, the artist herself. Naturally, working with many tools and processes necessitates management —advanced skills in time management, for example. Some segments of time must be reserved for artistry, for effective craftsmanship. But these standards also must be internally driven, and internally defined. I am choosing between two unrelated paradigms here. (1) It is not to evolve in the marketplace that I seek to make “better” art, but it is (2) to express myself that I happen to make “different” art, which is the only art I can make, and is art that only I can make.

“Different than” is the natural state.

To me, there can be no such thing as “better than”. “Different than” is the only natural state, and the goal is the full realization of that, full engagement with the forces that drive only me. I reject the “better than” paradigm. I am not saying that I am immune to comparison, but it does not enter my mind when I am grounded in my relationship to myself and my art as “thou.” And, when a tendency to compare myself to others does arise, I have trained myself to recognize what it is — a moment of sadness at being distant from my own highest engagement with my own internal locus of operation, what Emerson called that feeling of “alienated majesty.” “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.” And so, when I find myself comparing, it is a sign that I am not making my inner sanctum my domicile, not living in that true and natural paradigm.**

Regarding you as an artist, regarding thou, isn’t everyone that is exterior to you a secondary consideration? This is not to say that others are not informative regarding your work, but I don’t believe that the information comes in the form of definitions, which are nouns. In my case, the exterior world teaches me about my own work by sharing descriptions of their impressions, adjectives, which are looser. These adjectives are not heavy. They get floated and stay airborne while I consider them. In my case, I am usually offered the same set of adjectives, whether someone is commenting on my written work, my visual art, my music or any of the above and beyond. In my case, they say raw, haunting, vulnerable, ethereal, poetic, delicate, gritty…  And then, once in a while, something magical happens with their list of adjectives. Something new will be on the collective list. That new adjective will start getting repeated by multiple witnesses and I will awaken to that in my own work in a deeper way. I consider this to be feedback. I consider it valuable.

And so while I have been warned countless times from another’s paradigm, usually one regarding me as it and my work as it, about “spreading myself too thin,” a larger collective voice has been talking to me in sweet, harmless adjectives, and the adjectives have been the same whether I was working with a paintbrush, a pen, a plosive, or a plasma cutter. And this has affirmed another element of my artist philosophy: that to the artist operant from within, that to the artist protecting against definition by others, anything and everything is a tool for expressing their natural sensibility. What I am positing here is not that it is possible to perfect each tool, process, material, and medium, but that if an artist remains squarely in the thou relationship to her own art, it is inevitable that art will result.

Do we forget our own liberation?

If I want to make bell sounds in my video and all I have are pots and pans, why not? Aren’t I still a musician? When Neil Young was recording Harvest Moon, I don’t know whose idea it was to make the scratchy, swishy sound with a corn broom, but I am sure they weren’t feeling restricted regarding definitions of music when they hauled it out of the janitor’s closet. In drawing classes in college, when we were told to break a stick off of a tree with which to draw, or when we had to draw with our non-dominant hand, were we violating some definition of “media”? No, the slowness of our mark-making in the first case, and the access to the subconscious in the other, these were examples of processes, of experimentation.

Robert Rauschenburg said, “Art is a one to one relationship with materials.” That, to me, is a very expanded definition of art. It is natural for me to adopt that definition. Every material does what it does. We honor that. Materials as thou.

A personal relationship to process.

I like to expand Rauschenburg’s definition. I believe that art is a one to one relationship with process, and with learned practice. And I believe that any process or learned practice that is developed from Martha Graham’s “only one you in all time” is an inevitable path to art.

And so what I want for myself, dear artist, is to stay centered here, in this internal locus from where I choose my own tools and materials, from where I experiment freely, from where I define myself, and from where the external definitions by others, local and global, blend into the backdrop of my artist’s life, a hushed little din among the distant train whistles and birdsong, and I want this for you as well.

I was never one to choose eating my corn over going to my room, but in childhood, I made my room a haven. Now, that haven has to be carried within me wherever I go. Stanley Kunitz said,“Some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray,” and as long as I, alone, am defining myself and you, alone, are defining yourself, I and thou will dwell in that principle of being, and stray we shan’t.

When we begin to consider external definitions too seriously, it is easy to feel like we’ve been “sent to our room.” From this paradigm, we could experience loneliness. If we are fortunate enough to have a room in which to make our work, we can make that room our laboratory, our sanctuary, the place where we commune with ourselves and our work as thou. From this paradigm, we experience aloneness, which is a lovely thing, not like loneliness at all. But we are all looking for our human thous as well. We are all looking to be seen as thou. And we are all hoping that our art will be experienced as thou, as opposed to it. And we want the financial transaction, but when the money is good, we want the transactor to buy our art because they treat it like a thou. It is far less satisfying to be paid by the non-curious. We long for human connection.

And so while the world is reaching for definitions — multi-media artist, interdisciplinary artist, and the like— I try to see this as an effort toward shared understanding while remembering that, ultimately, being defined is the same as being limited. As an artist who works the way I do, I try to remain self-defining, and even then, there are challenges.

Challenges such as overwhelm, perhaps when one has projects across many media that want to be born, or the threat of loneliness to the artist with too few thou relationships, or unnourished relationships to themselves or their work, or the pressure of the web, and the world, and the market, could make us stray into heeding external definitions, and that would derail us from our art-making, or set us back in other ways. Because viewing the world through external definitions of ourselves is dangerous. It could cause us to take rejection personally, for example, when there are far more inspiring ways to see it.

*I actually prefer the word “designer” to the word “artist” but that’s a story reserved for unpacking in another defining moment.