by Gus Mitchell
This article is from a presentation made for the Rosemary Bechler Inaugural Memorial Lecture, an event organised by DIEM25, of which Rosemary was a founder member. It took place at the Marylebone Theatre in London on January 21st 2024.
That music you just heard is a recording of the Aka People, recorded in the forests of the Central African Republic. The musicologist who collected it gave it the simple title: “Women Gathering Mushrooms.” I like that title because I think its literalness reveals something important. I don’t know if the Aka conceive of it as “art” in the same way that now, sitting in a theatre in London in 2024, we conceive of it. Undoubtedly though it is art in the truest sense.
Of course, it is very difficult––it is impossible––to avoid speaking in generalities when you’re using a word as general, as vast, as art. There are as many arts as there are artists. Avoiding abstraction is impossible. But that’s also part of what I’m going to try to say here. That is––that most of the ways we tend to think about art today are abstract. Too much so, I think. I think that art might in fact mean more than we currently allow it to. It might be more than we currently allow it to be.
But, going back a little bit first––to singing. But this is also a song for gathering mushrooms––art with a purpose. In fact, many purposes. To use Jean-Michel Basquiat’s description, painting “decorates space, and music decorates time.” The music locates one singer’s time to the other’s, literally, but also figuratively, the lone individuals off foraging in different parts of the forest to thread themselves together. And then of course there is the forest itself. Every voice acts alone, finds its own line, plays its own phrase, but then everyone also goes together, mysteriously; goes, moreover, with the forest: the voices and chirps and chirrups of the animals all around them. If there is music in this recording, the forest deserves much credit. If this is art, it is also an unfolding act.
James Baldwin said: “Art would not be important if life were not more important”. All art is political, goes another saying. Art is about being a human being, not about politics, argues another line of thought. Yet Aristotle tells us that “Man is the political animal.” Walter Benjamin diagnosed fascism as the aestheticization of politics, but elsewhere observed that indeed, in the modern age, “the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice––politics.” The singing of the Aka people we might call art but not as we understand it––not as a product, not as a commodity, and not as any kind of post-facto verdict either. It’s part of a ritual of gathering, part of a life-making. What we now call and confine under the word “art” in the west of course also has its roots in ritual; what we now think of as Culture is increasingly inseparable from politics, and vice-versa. The question then arises: why art? Why this inescapable need for it––and yet also this need to justify, or to shield it?
Singing perhaps was the original artistic act. And when someone begins to raise their voice, bravely, shakily, sitting round the fire, say, that voice is dependent on another. Someone else, at least one other person. And when there comes another voice, there also comes recognition, and so, even just if between two people, meaning.
Calling out into the world Dylan Thomas is calling for knowledge and being known. It is the call of love. Baldwin again, tells us that: “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.”
But it’s difficult for some of us to sing. A big part of this is embarrassment, of course Embarrassment, because we are no longer really raised or encouraged to sing as part of life. Here too, art has become specialised. In art as in politics, most of us are conditioned to be passive consumers, observers and not participants, and this isolates us from an understanding of not just what we are capable of, but of what we are. In 1906, the composer and folk song collector John Philip Sousa told the US Congress: “when I was a boy in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left.” Communication, connection, creation, and recreation are what make culture, and a culture suffocates from lack of voices.
The communal song, chanting in the street, is a process, the collective vibration in which everyone can contribute their part. It is a true, instant intervention in the emotional tenor of any action, in the feelings of everyone. In a space of communion like this, a forest of voices, which can freely hold many individuals, many voices, many imaginations––a structure somehow emerges. One might call this structure, this emergence, a social technology, remembering that the ancient Greek source of that word of ours, techne, means an art, a skill, a craft, something practiced, something, which implies a doing, and a making, which ultimately can produce something, something that which wasn’t there before. In this sense, art, that first singing voice, takes its place alongside stone tools as one of our first technologies.
Aristotle defined techne as “a state involving true reason concerned with production.” An ancient Greek trireme, for instance. Or a delicious mushroom stew. Or an urn. It is a deliberate intervention––in the world and in ourselves. I like the words “state” and “true reason” in this translation because both suggest a subtle upending of what we tend to think of as art––a finished product, a verdict, a value––and true reason, which to me suggests a reasoning, a rationality, closer to John Keats’s “truth and beauty” from his “Ode on a Graecian Urn”––closer to that, than to the enclosed and separated concept of rationality, and indeed technology, that we assume today.
I believe that origins matter, as etymologies do. That might seem a naïve or unscientific opinion but let’s indulge it for another moment. What I’m really trying to get at it is this. Art comes out of act. The act of making patterns, making images, making sounds, making symbols, making words. The act of repeating that act. Again and again. So that these “acts” are really accretions. Many individual “actions”, acts in a continuous process of acting, acts which don’t often seem like “acts” at all when we’re doing them. The acts of doodling, of scribbling, sketching, humming, reading, looking, listening, playing, feeling, thinking, sitting, talking, walking.
Another Ancient Greek word artizein means “to prepare.” A work of art is something that has been fitted together by “skill” or “craft”. The work of art, any art, is a constant state preparation. “To prepare”, though, carries the sense of a forethought and foreseen nature to the act which is very often not part of the artistic process. We don’t know what we’re doing, a great deal or the time; at others, we don’t even know what we want to do. And if we do happen to have an idea before us, or a definite plan to be carried out, as often we have no sense whatsoever of how we’ll get there. None. To make something happen. That is the decision, the “act”, that lies before us. After that––who can say?
But there must always come the moment, before we begin (which is to say, when we begin) when you sit down in a chair or enter a studio and spend some time laying out materials, resources, tools, our ideas, thoughts, wishes for the work––this is the crucial hinge at which one point of our imagination must give way to another point. This point, when you start to act out your art, can be accompanied in my experience by a squirm of anxious feelings: imposture, awareness of some falsity in yourself, pretending another self: more insightful, more brave, more wise, more talented, more artistic––and the question then arises, could it possibly be that this self-unselfing, this act––is just that, “an act”? So, am I then only ever really “acting” being an artist? (Am I a fake?)
What this complex, which I believe most artists have experienced––and they ought to experience it––is that the work of art is partially to believe itself, at the risk of embarrassment, into being. Words like “embarrassing” and “cringe” are a big part of popular and internet discourse today, from both the left and the right.
On the other hand, those who might agree with the activist in principle find themselves, somewhere, inwardly saying “that’s not me”. But of course that is the point. The entire initial point of protests and actions is to make others uncomfortable. And while some may cringe, apparently embarrassed on behalf of the actor in question, they are also engaging in a strange version of empathy and, at the same time, a lack of imagination, imagining how very embarrassing it would be if they were the ones doing that, projecting themselves even reluctantly into the action and finding themselves, in the end, incapable of crossing the divide. The feeling of cringe is one of physical discomfort in disbelief: how could anyone, possibly, take themselves so seriously? How could they not see what they look like? It’s the same reaction that any of us might get inwardly when we see a piece of terrible art, performed terribly, and so sincerely, live, right in front of us. Who do they think they are? Who do they think they’re fooling? What are they playing at?
I’d suggest that often the ones taking themselves too seriously might be the ones that cringe, the ones that are embarrassed––perhaps they are the ones who are a little too sure who they are, too ready to bend to that first bodily, stomach-twisting cringe, rather than consider the counterpart that they are playing in the spectacle. Perhaps this is why so many people instinctively stand apart, or when they happen to witness an action in person, perform an amused or bemused spectatorship. The roles that we are used to as individuals––having been told all our lives that that’s all we are, all we can be, all we should aspire to––hamper the would-be activist in the same way that they hamper the artist. The embarrassment even the shame felt by both, who both aspire to escape themselves, to become a different self. Under it all is that question: who do you think you are? Perhaps the most vulnerable answer: those who labour under the embarrassing assumption that the future––that we––might be better than this. The body itself rejects it. Embarrassment, cringing are what else if not a refusal to accept just what is happening, what is being expressed.
Didn’t the audience of 1972 in fact find something else––this feeling, when Bowie was playing, that in their own way they were now invited to play, in a way they hadn’t imagine before? “I immediately put on some of my older sister’s make-up”, said Robert Smith; “I loved how odd it made me look, and the fact that it upset people. You put on eyeliner and people started screaming at you. How strange, and how marvellous.” Isn’t Bowie challenging this very embarrassment?
An artist is always trying to play, a paradoxical effort. Always making a play to escape themselves. Transformation is the ever-shifting object. What might I make, and who can I be, are really the same question. Balzac posited that: “The genius resembles everyone, and no one resembles him.” T.S. Eliot: “Poetry is not expression of personality––it is an escape from personality.” Or as Bob Dylan: “I’m glad I’m not me.”
Modernity’s narrative has enshrined the myth of the artistic individual, the lone genius, and by extension of professionalism, academisation, class and other elements, of art’s exemption, or transcendence from everyday life, at the same time denigrating the collective and the crowd, and, finally, proclaiming that there is no such thing as society. But we are stuck in that posthumous society still. So much time alone, online, as public spaces and spheres and funds shrink and sicken, has made for so many people, the illusory and morbid constant reification of the ego, a Narcissus reflected by the screen, more totalising a power than at any time in history. The implications for cultural and political imagination are playing out all around us.
Art, like religion, and yes, like politics, is the alternative arena of being, an arena for being, which is fundamentally social, in which the ego can find pause from forever building and rebuilding, suffering and its ever-present fear. Within today’s egoistic feedback loops, however, it becomes increasingly impossible to imagining moving at all, to imagine doing anything at all, because anything new or other or unknown can be perceived as a risk, as a precarious unbalancing to threaten the brief fortresses of pleasure and safety that we have built around ourselves.
To return to this briefly––sans soup. I, for one, felt that that first action, and this one ––
–– are themselves good pieces of art. They were intended to shock, and if they do, it’s because it tells us something deeply uncomfortable about the way many now value art––over-value it and, consequently, under-estimate it.
When Van Gogh painted these sunflowers in 1888, what was he doing, what was he feeling, that we can still feel, that makes us feel, perhaps, some of the same things that he did when he painted it, and perhaps other things too? I think that he was doing what all painters, all visual artists do, which was experiencing perception as the gift that it essentially is. As the French theorist Gaston Bachelard puts it: “The world seeks to be admired by you.” In painting, in photography, in music, you can somehow perceive or re-perceive just what is and what was happening, as a gift. It comes to and somehow through the artist as a gift, and it comes out of the artist, across space and time to us as a gift. And, as David Graeber points out in his book Debt––in many traditional societies, a gift and a debt are really two sides of the same coin. It is an insult to repay somebody’s debt in full––it implies a resolution and so a severance of obligation between of you, and of relationship. Perhaps part of why artists and writers can stand to be so alone, as Van Gogh was, that they know, somewhere, that are communicating.
Perhaps this is what it means to define freedom as vulnerability: an absolute openness to the annihilation of the self. Keats wrote about this feeling, this negative capability, and in whether creation or perception, when we feel it however briefly we remind ourselves how capable we are of what Rilke referred to as “living my life in ever-widening circles”, a circle of pleasure, of joy, in the depths of a loss that is also a gift.
Under global capitalist dictaporship, our relationships are redefined to Art with a capital ‘A’ and politics with a capital ‘P’. Art now reflects a wider politics, one of hierarchies and dependencies. But the arts are purely about this practicing of giving, sharing, simultaneous perception. It is a part of that invisible, erased, anti-monetary economy, the economy of care which has always been what sustained the world. The process that art and other forms of care and attention partake of is everything for which there is no money.
The more practice we have at giving, the less it hurts. Art and politics are both about the ability to speak in public, to act in public, to “create” as we like to say now, “a dialogue”. But the giving, and the sharing that is inherent in the arts, can create a radically shared space. Why is that our fellow audience members are as vital to a concert or a performance as the piece itself? At a theatre piece, or at least a good one, it was recently found, after a few minutes, the audience’s hearts start to beat in time together. It creates participatory shared occasion, which functions safely through metaphor, that keeps lets everybody maybe take the next step themselves, in their own way. Or the content of the music at a concert, somehow acts to join all the minds and feelings in one room, so that, briefly everyone is hearing and therefore feeling, more or less, the same thing.
In moments like these, everyone gets the chance to start again. But what is this new, bright and brief space called, and what is its currency, the common wages, as Dylan Thomas says? What is the medium of exchange between us when this utterly mysterious process happens? The wages, I would say, are two: love and grief. Love gives us the need to give; grief, the need to listen, and vice-versa.
To be able to feel that what is in you, might be in others around you. It escapes what we all have felt to be the tragedy of individuality, of being trapped, alone, inside a body, in this one moment. Music can do this. Or literature, which allows us to continue speaking with the dead.
“The beginnings of Dada,” said Tristan Tzara, “were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust.” The artist learns to see things from the outside, to escape the centre and the compromise. And they look to the fringes, to the despised, to the forgotten, the abandoned, the outskirts, the detritus, the refuse, the trash, the buried, to the deep springs of our shame. Because it is always there that the voice of the un-alien “other” announces itself and reminds us where we have buried ourselves. This is what’s happening in Palestine, where evil, unmasked, proves now no longer able to conceal itself even from those who had no particular interest in uncovering it.
The situation there took me back to Robert Bolano’s apocalyptic novel 2666, where we are transported to a version of the real-life city of Juarez on the Mexican border. Under labour and trade laws instituted by NAFTA in the early 90s, American companies were allowed to build factories in Mexico, exploit Mexican labour laws and cheap wages while extracting the profits as though the factories had been built on American soil. The labourers, mostly Indigenous, ignored by the government, millions of workers paid so little by American companies that they can’t afford an apartment. Bolano places as the focal point of this book, the unsolved, and un-investigated killings of hundreds and hundreds of women in Juarez, between the 1990s and early 2000s. Of this extraneous place, this conceptual outpost of the world’s necessitated outskirts, Bolano tells us: “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”
I think that no-longer bearable secret is what pushes us to feel that we cannot simply stay silent. That, if we do, we are collaborating in a crime which we cannot and will not, simply adapt to as “the situation.” We cannot keep living if this is happening in life. We feel lifted into a different reality, one more intense…and our hunger and intense need is, at its core, the same intensity that drives us to art. Just as the depths of intense grief, the wounds of our world are where we first recognise something sacred anew.
And just as an artist, or an activist must make friends with grief, they must make friends with limitation, with failure. There is a plain and inescapable limitation in artmaking and in any honest attempt at politics: we create our conditions out of alien tools; out of what we did not choose, out of what we are powerless over. The conditions for love arise from scarcity. But the obstacles, too, are part of the struggle, just as artists have always struggled, sometimes with themselves, sometimes with very material disadvantages. Beethoven becoming deaf, through the whole strange network of the universe’s intelligence, was what made him Beethoven. No one understands these things––but perhaps secret of the world is hidden in them too.
If “art” as an act only arises out of and ultimately consists of preparations, it is also true, that the “work of art” (a product and evidence of learning, skill, craft, and tradition) is the child of iteration. Doing again. And again, and again and again. The beginning, the middle, and the end of art, then, is a process. A poem is never finished (only abandoned). And the outcome, like all our outcomes, singular and collective, is always unknown. Success cannot be summoned or willed into being. But as Leonard Cohen said: “All I know is that if you stay with a song long enough it will yield.”
So, we iterate. We try something, or we fail in one idea, it doesn’t work. We write something bad, and we miss the mark, we fail in our ideal. We try something else. We try again, and again in another way, and something else again, and something else. Every time and every try is different, and something new comes of it, and nothing is wasted. Once the decision to act has been made, things do get easier. It may require constantly remembering that we are engaged not in a grand, rational endeavour with a final victory or vindication at the end of it, which is secure, or even nameable––but in many acts. If we lie down in a road full of angry drivers, or smash the windows of a bank, or do march, or put a rare, uncorrupted candidate up for an election, organise or support a strike, fight violence with non-violence––we can’t tell what will happen. We may win and lose something. After we try, we try again. Step by step. Differently, maybe better. Stay together. Learn. Iterate. As William Blake wrote: “If the sun and moon should doubt/They’d immediately go out.”
So, we allow process to move us forward, aware that the process is the same as the goal, and the temptation of building immobile bottled ships of self-policed ideology and all-or-nothing expectations, of boxed-in labyrinths of abstraction, may ease. Instead, we may look around us at something that can be done. Neither art nor politics fare very well on abstractions. Today, most of us live and mentally interact, with a world of hyper-super-abstraction. And this is the death of any real power.
Human art and human politics, with a small ‘A’ and a small ‘P’, do not exist in the same world, but they do come from it. Don’t confuse this with moralism. “Belief in progress,” said Baudelaire, “is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians.” Perhaps––but I find myself agreeing with the American writer Donald Barthelme, who said in his own lecture, titled “Not Knowing”, the following: “It’s our good fortune to be able to imagine alternative realities, a talent not given to rabbits or ferns. We can quarrel with the world. And if I have anything unorthodox to offer, it’s that I think art’s project is fundamentally meliorative. The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world.” And we could reverse Barthelme’s equation: the final aim of acting upon the world, would be to allow every human being in it the time, and the freedom, should they wish it, and in whatever way, to meditate.
John Coltrane, once talked about his relationship to music:
I think that music, being an expression of the human heart or the human being itself, does express just what is happening. The whole of the human experience at that particular time is being expressed. In any situation that we find in our lives, when there’s something that we feel should be better, we must exert effort to try and make it better, and it’s the same socially, it’s the same musically, it’s the same politically. I think music is an instrument––it can create the initial thought pattern that can create change in the thinking of the people. I want to be a force for good. I want to be a real force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world. But I want to be the opposite force, I want to be the force which is truly for good.
Coltrane’s bandmate and mentee, the late saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, said:
Playing this music, it did a whole lot for me. And I love playing, but maybe one day I’ll just give it up and do something else. I think I could, but I don’t know how strong I am. I would like to become the things that I play about, to be a good example, to live a good life, and to know how to live this life. All beautiful music that’s it––just trying to be yourself.
In our highly literal-minded and personality-obsessed age, we have forgotten that the “Great Artist”, “the star”, whoever they are, is not the star. They never were. The only real John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, the only real Nina Simone or Beethoven that exists, is in their music. And music, like all art, exists and has its value, only through the imagination. There’s no way to quantify that, or value it, sell it or buy it. And so, the only thing we really can put on a pedestal is not some personality, which we can never know, and whose brief existence is finished––it is the imagination itself.
We hear a great deal these days, both in cultural and political terms, about the need for a new kind of imagination. But just as I don’t believe that ‘Art’ with a capital ‘A’ means anything whatsoever, I don’t believe that the imagination is some airy-fairy abstract notion, or an ideal, or a metaphor, or a neuro-scientific detail we can figure out or exploit. Imagination is not a fanciful escape from reality. It is the real thing. It is just what is happening. It is a recognition (a re-cognition) of reality. And it is all of ours, perhaps the last, and yes, endangered, commons.
We should renounce at the border any dream of a promised land. If the would-be artist and activist are committed to nothing but living––a daily life, being with and for the people in it, deciding each day to be as aware, as prepared, in other words, for the process which is the art of living, to begin by living, with the process of living, to treat living as the ongoing and always-interrupted progress that it can be if we take the soul as seriously as an artist does––that may steer us a truer seeing of what needs to be done, and to act in whatever best direction we can. To listen and allow ourselves to be drawn toward things as they really are; to avoid the traps of a politics of culture and its braying outlets and dead artefacts and the time and the energy and the money and people that they waste.
We have been told that politics is the art of the possible. What of the goals of politics? The kind of politics we’re talking about and gathering to celebrate here, the kind of politics to which Rosemary devoted her life, understands that nothing less than an imaginative transformation can allow for a world in which we can really live. These are the necessary politics of revolt. Of love. If we take art to be the lie that tells the truth, the goal of our action is also, in some sense, to remain continuously unrealistic. What unites artist and activist is patient impatience for the impossibility of the possible.
Just as I was starting my second year at University, I spent a wonderful evening talking with Rosemary about some ideas for my dissertation that year, which would focus on 18th cenutry English. She sent me a follow-up email later that evening, and among plenty of other suggestions she excerpted a poem…
John Clare’s wonderful, grammarless, The Mores which is all about cows free to stray before the enclosures – and his agonised comment to his benighted publisher: “grammar in learning is like tyranny in government – confound the bitch I’ll never be her slave… “
Before the excerpt of the poem, she signed off:
Very good luck –– you know more than enough of this wonderful wonderful literature – just give yourself time to play ––
The Mores
Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed spring’s blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds…