I had high hopes for this one. I stumbled across references to it in
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, and believed it to be a psychological treatise on one of my favorite subjects -- the cultural tensions that artists must transcend if they are to create art, and the damage that transcendence does to their cultural identity. It is partly that, but it is mostly something else, a dissection of the creative urge and how and why it arose in ancient cultures.
Artists Must Use Art to Create Art
For my purposes, Chapter One, “Creative Urge and Personality Development,” lays out some of the essential tensions. Here, Rank is talking about the task he has set before himself in writing this book.
Of course, for such an undertaking, which tackles the problem of art primarily from the psychological end, a different starting-point is required from that which is called for in a study of art from the stylistic or cultural-historical angle. Even if by art we understand, not the part played by the creator in the psychological sense, but the product, the work, or even the content of all art -- at least for the particular period -- we can for the time being sum up the relation of the artist to his art as follows: the artist, as a definite creative individual, uses the art-form that he finds ready to his hand in order to express a something personal; the personal must therefore be somehow connected with the prevailing artistic or cultural ideology, since otherwise he could not make use of them, but it must also differ, since otherwise he would not need to use them in order to produce something of his own. While this aspect brings us again to the dualism in the artist, there is, as we know already, a similar dualism at the bottom of the cultural ideology, as one of the manifestations of which the style of the age must be regarded. But the general ideology of the culture, which determines its religion, morals, and society as well as its art, is again only the expression of the human types of the age, and of this the artist and the creative personality generally is the most definite crystallization. The circular argument here is only apparent, for we may not disregard the creative process, which presents itself as an essential factor between the ideology of the art, the style, and the creative personality, the artist. We must admit, however, that we know almost nothing of this process in the artist, since here, more than anywhere, the hopes held out by modern psychology have proved delusive.
This is setting us up from some of the ‘snake eating its own tail’ analysis that awaits us, namely, the artist uses the culturally-defined understanding of art in his society to produce his art which, although an attempt to say something personal, can only be expressed in the common language of his society’s guiding ideology. If true, if artists must use art to create art, then from whence does art come? From the artist? Or from the ideology?
Artists Must Transcend Art to Create Art
We don’t start exploring a possible answer to that question until Chapter Twelve, aptly titled “The Artist’s Fight With Art,” because it argues that the artist must transcend existing ideology in order to attain his true artistic fulfillment and, in doing so, create new ideologies for others.
Thus the great collective ideologies of art, which we call styles, also show us the conflict between a new-born ideology (religious, national, or individual -- that is, of genius) and an old one -- ending in defeat of the latter -- as the principle of development. This struggle of world-views, which is represented microcosmically by the conflict of the artist against art, is undoubtedly powerfully forwarded by the strong artistic individualities and leads to the triumph of a new style. But the beginning of the movement is cultural and not individual, collective and not personal -- only, through his inner conflict, the artist gains the courage, the vigour, and the foresight to grasp the impending change of attitude before others do so, to feel it more intensely, and to shape it formally. But he must do something more than gradually liberate himself from the earlier ideologies that he has hitherto taken as his pattern; in the course of his life (generally at its climax) he must undergo a much harder conflict and achieve a much more fateful emancipation: he must escape as well from the ruling ideology of the present, which he has himself strengthened by his own growth and development, if his individuality is not to be wholly smothered by it.
This may be the appropriate place to remind ourselves that Rank argues that art is the expression of something personal -- of an idea.
Almost all students of the art of primitive peoples get the unanimous impression that, as the first historian of primitive art, Franz Kugler, put it as early as 1842, “the intention of primitive art was far less towards the imitation of nature than towards the representation of particular ideas.” More than fifty years later so great an authority as Leo Frobenius says the same of African art: “We cannot say that there was any direct extrovert effort at the attainment of some perfection of form. All the objects of art come only out of the need to give plastic expression to ideas.”
Art is not the form. Art is the idea that the artist is trying to express through the form. And in trying to emancipate the idea from the ruling ideology, he can only briefly succeed, before the emancipation itself becomes a new ruling ideology.
The first stage in the growth of an artist is that which we have described as his “nomination” and which marks the subordination of the individual to one of the prevailing art-ideologies, this usually showing itself in the choice of some recognized master as the ideal pattern. In doing so, he becomes the representative of an ideology, and at first his individuality vanishes, until, later, at the height of his achievement, he strives once more to liberate his personality, now a mature personality, from the bonds of an ideology which he himself accepted and helped to form.
This emergence of the true artist, of the idea from the ideology, is a painful one. Not only because the artist has helped construct the ideology, but because he is widely recognized as an artist because of that construction. When he tries to transcend it, he will no longer be revered by the followers of the ideology. He will be vilified by them.
Artists Must Create
So why? Why does the artist do this? Why not remain an artisan, producing forms accepted by the ideology?
For we have seen that the basic conflict of the creative personality is that between his desire to live a natural life in an ordinary sense and the need to produce ideologically -- which corresponds socially to that between individuality and collectivity and biologically to that between the ego and the genus. Whereas the average man largely subordinates himself, both socially and biologically, to the collective, and the neurotic shuts himself deliberately off from both, the productive type finds a middle way, which is expressed in ideological experience and personal creativity. But since the artist must live as a human being and yet feels compelled to make this transitory life eternal in an intransient work, a compromise is set up between ideologized life and an individualized creativity -- a balance which is difficult, impermanent, and in all circumstances painful, since creation tends to experience, and experience again cries out for artistic form.
Because he must create. He wants to live, and he does not want to die. And in creating art, he is able to accomplish both -- feeling life at its pulsating, creative best, and leaving behind immortal ideas, either as flashes of misunderstood brilliance, or as permanent additions to the ruling ideology.
But there are trade-offs here, dangerous ones, and artists throughout history have generally managed those trade-offs in one of two ways.
In this sense the general problem of the artist -- not only in its psychological, but in its human aspect -- is contained in the two notions of deprivation and renunciation. The psychological point of view, as it culminates in psycho-analysis, always emphasizes only the deprivation, from which artists seem to suffer most in themselves; the philosophical view, to which a few artists like Goethe or Ibsen attained at the height of their achievement, emphasizes renunciation. But the two aspects are complementary, like outer and inner, society and ego, collectivity and individuality. The great artist and great work are only born from the reconciliation of the two -- the victory of a philosophy of renunciation over an ideology of deprivation.
It is another snake eating its own tail. How will the artist resolve this tension? This tension that he himself has helped create but first mastering and then being constrained by the ideological form of his own art? He must not deprive himself of ordinary life. But he must also renounce it in order to create something both within and beyond the frame of his art.
From this point of view discussions about life and creativity, the conflict of various modes of life and ideas of creativity, seem superficial. An artist who feels that he is driven into creating by an external deprivation and who is then again obstructed by a longing for life can rise above these conflicts to a renunciant view of life which recognizes that it is not only impossible but perilous to live out life to the full and can, willingly and affirmatively, accept the limitations that appear in the form of moral conventions and artistic standards, not merely as such, but as protective measures against a premature and complete exhaustion of the individual. This means the end of all doubt as to whether he is to dedicate his whole life to art or send art to perdition and simply live; also of the question whether he is to live a Bohemian life in accordance with his ideology or live an ordinary life in despite of his art; and in the end his creativity is not only made richer and deeper by this renunciatory attitude, but is freed from the need to justify one of the other mode of life -- in other words, from the need for compensation.
In this analysis, Charles Strickland, the protagonist of Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, who abandons all to pursue his art, is NOT a great artist. That distinction belongs to those who create works that bend the ideology, but remain human while doing it.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
