Containers and Convergences

I have written many times about the concept of the container, a notion I keep coming back to. The most familiar version is the human body, holding all that living matter and consciousness inside a remarkably fragile but durable satchel of skin.

The variants are many. I have come to view containers as the “safety zones” that are created to fend off a whole lot of the dissolution, disintermediation and disintegration going down right now.

Containers are essential, but convergences still happen, gratefully. And they seem to have an immunity to obstacles. I will often be halfway through an article when I realize how closely aligned these ideas are with ones I have been percolating. Concepts come in on different trajectories, but they often land on a common spot.

Last week I read three novels, went to a performance of dance and saw a satirical “meta-musical.” As different as these activities are, they all l surfaced a variation of that elemental question: what is it art can do, right now, during this period of accelerating breakdown?

These three novels stand out because they all possess a quality that is very rare: they were written by authors who actually have firsthand experience with what it means to be a visual artist.

Most portrayals of visual artists in fiction are painfully inauthentic, and most visual artists roll their eyes when they encounter these characterizations. (Note to novelists: we are not just a variant of the writing profession. The nature of our practice is very different.) These three writers get that, and what a difference it makes.

Xóchitl González’s Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a ghost story, a murder mystery, a furious indictment of who gets to be remembered and who gets erased. It is a fictional version of the Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta story: major minimalist marries visionary performance artist. Ana’s mysterious death in 1985 at the age of 36 remains one of the art world’s most unresolved and haunting chapters. Did she fall or was she pushed from her high rise apartment window? Andre was acquitted of the crime, but not in the eyes of the art world.

González’s book is full of rage and revenge. The art world she describes is full of gatekeeping, erasures, and white male protections dressed in the language of “merit.” It is all so recognizable and real, and in many ways indistinguishable from the broader culture of entitled selfishness that currently holds so many of our institutions hostage.

Susan Conley‘s Elsey Come Home follows an American painter living in China. She has married and now has two young daughters, but she is struggling to balance the many part of herself–artist, mother, wife. It is a quiet, interior novel but the devastation in Elsey’s life is profound.  Conley understands what it costs when you stop doing your work. What Elsey can’t get back to is not the loss of a career; it is the loss of her self. The capacity of an artist to live “paintably” can depart, but it can also return. It is its absence however that is its own profound kind of grief.

Larissa Pham is an art critic and former painter, and her debut novel Discipline follows Christine, a writer and former painter, haunted by an early affair with her art professor that brought an end to her painting career. Pham’s book is rich with associations and feelings that are nonverbal, fertile territory for exploring what resists language. Christine’s central wound is not simply the abuse of power; it is what it did to her relationship with making. She gave someone else authority over her creative life, and it morphed into a permanent contamination. Pham writes about this with a precision that is clinical. And devastating.

What these three novels share beyond their intimate knowledge of art making and the art world is a belief that making things matters. Not as commodity, not as career, but as a mode of being in the world that, once lost, leaves an absence nothing else can fill.

These books were on my mind when I saw Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, performing in Boston, brilliantly, thanks to Vivo Performing Arts. (I have also written about Alvin Ailey here, Art That Makes a Forever Mark.) The company is in a new era under artistic director Alicia Graf Mack, and the programming reflects a confident expansiveness.

Two pieces in particular astounded me. A Case of You–an excerpt from Judith Jamison‘s 2005 Reminiscin’–is danced to Diana Krall‘s slow and sultry rendition of the classic Joni Mitchell song. And Difference Between, choreographed by the gifted Matthew Neenan, juxtaposes his fresh and playful movement style with the raw and powerful music of  Heather Christian. (New to me but clearly on her path, Christian was just awarded a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.)

This company, bravely founded in 1958 to celebrate and explore African American expression, is now embracing iconic Joni Mitchell and the strange and potent energies of Heather Christian. Ailey is not abandoning their identity as a paragon of African American dance and culture. Rather they are demonstrating through the prowess of their dancers that art is a universal solvent. The body does not ask permission before it feels. Dancing to white women singing is not a contradiction but a proof that art travels across the lines we use to contain each other, operating at a frequency higher than identity politics and demographic taxonomy. This is not crossing over. This is what crossing over is for.

Which brings me, unexpectedly, to Something Rotten. I am not, by nature, someone who seeks out musical theater farce for cultural sustenance. But I was delighted by a show in which two brothers, stuck in the shadow of Renaissance rock star William Shakespeare, set out to write the world’s very first musical. The show is a love letter to the very form it’s sending up. Underneath all the tap-dancing and clever lyrics loaded with Shakespearean and musical comedy references, there is something quite real: the terror and necessity of making something new when a dominant figure has already claimed all the oxygen.

And that’s not a Renaissance problem.

What I keep returning to, across all of these experiences, is this: in a culture of bankrupt values–and let us not mince words about what we are living through–art is not a retreat, a luxury, a hobby, a distraction from the serious business of the world. It IS serious business. It is what will keep the essential life-affirming frequencies vibrating. These novelists understand this, the dancers understand this. Even the Brothers Bottom, bumbling through the Renaissance with their soothsayer’s bad predictions (the greatest play in the world will be called…Omelette? Did I hear that right?) understood this: that making something — getting it wrong, trying again, risking it all— is the only answer to the question of what to do when everything rotten surrounds you.

The Pell Lucy artist collective motto comes to mind: form has an intelligence of its own. So yes, the body knows before the mind does. And art, when it works, is a transmission of something that cannot be shouted down, no matter what.

Alvin Ailey will be performing in multiple cities. Check your local listings.

Something Rotten is at the Lyric Stage in Boston through June 7.