But now, on to other topics.
I recently had a conversation with a friend about a guy we both know, a common friend of ours. Let's call this third person (the subject of the conversation) Frederic. Frederic is a musician, and has achieved a certain level of success, having released several albums and played live shows and tours all over the world. However, as revealed in this recent conversation, Frederic is frustrated that his success seems to be peaking, or topping out, and he has not yet achieved 'recognizable household name status'; he's not a superstar.
But this is where the conversation got interesting. Frederic is what I would call an 'artist with integrity.' He is trying to do something which is personally meaningful to him, and which also has a politically engaged dimension, and is in fact succeeding quite well at this, at least in my opinion. But this effort, guided as it is by a strong and highly personal internal compass, puts him almost by definition into a bit of a niche.
I think that artistic work which manages to 'hit the jackpot' of widespread cultural acceptance gets there for a variety of interconnected reasons (such as timing, artistic skill, promotional visibility, etc.), and I think that luck (or chance) also plays a role in the process, but the point of this sentence is that I think it's frequently true that work needs to have an element of non-specificity, of universality in order to 'make it big.' (Just think of those vague and generic lyrics in your favorite tune by U2 or Justin Bieber!) This, then, is the corollary question: "Is widespread cultural acceptance (hitting it big) fundamentally incompatible with a strongly held, highly personal vision, especially when there are elements of that vision that are 'challenging' in some way?"
I think the answer to that question is probably "No these things are not fundamentally incompatible, but they are not frequently seen together and when they are, chance has played a role." One way that chance can influence this process is that something in the artistic work might happen to coincide with something current in the zeitgeist, which is always evolving. Artists can of course intentionally try to 'ride' something they see in the zeitgeist, which can be seen actually as an attempt to engineer a sort of universality; after all anything floating through the zeitgeist is by definition universal, at least for the moment.
In a sense this idea of 'hitting it big' hinges on the fantasy of the 'one big thing'; the hit album or hit song or hit sculpture or painting... the one thing that everyone notices and makes you suddenly famous.
But... there is another way.
And that other way is....
Just keep working. Stay true to yourself. Continue to evolve. And just keep making the work.
And then, slowly, over the years, you gain a different kind of fame... a kind of esteem among your peers. And this sort of renown can often be achieved even when the work is challenging.
The world is full of great examples of people who embody this approach, but the one who came to mind as I was having this conversation was JG Thirlwell, better known as Foetus. He came to mind not only because he is one of my favorite musicians but also simply because he IS a musician, and we were talking about musicians, and he provides a potent embodiment of the the 'just keep working' model, a potent counterpoint to the 'one-hit-wonder'.
JG Thirlwell is not exactly a household name in the world today; in fact he's somehow managed to stay comparatively obscure. But the guy is really a musical genius, and his prolificness (I checked... it's a real word) leaves most of the rest of us in the dust; just glance at his impressive discography. And here's the thing: his work has always been challenging, and therefore niche. A quote from his Wikipedia page: "Recurring lyrical themes include destruction, persecution, anxiety, abuse, incest, masochism, angst, self-destruction, self-abuse, lust, prejudice, murder, failure and machismo, often expressed using American colloquialism and black humour." Yet, somehow, he has transcended the self-ghettoizing consequences of this sort of lyrical output to become, over a career of 40 years, highly respected and sought-after by other professionals not only from the music industry but from other parts of the entertainment industry as well. And how did he manage this? Well my theory is that it's because he is fiercely original, hard-working, and therefore prolific.
It's really about persistence, and staying true to your self and your vision. If you just keep doing your thing, the world will eventually catch up to you.
OK, not everyone can be the next Taylor Swift, but would you really want to be? Sure, the piles of cash sound fun, but I can only imagine that one sacrifices a lot of freedom for a life like that.
Just keep working.
(For a taste of two different, not overly 'challenging' sides of Foetus, click here and here. And believe me, if those tickle your fancy, there is SO MUCH more to discover.)
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OK, change of topic. I've been painting for days, maybe even weeks. I finally got into the swing of it. It's slow work. Painting crumpled fabric is especially slow.
I keep discovering new painters I like.
I'm currently rather enthralled by Mati Klarwein.
I've even developed a real respect for Alex Grey.
With both of these guys the subject matter is a little hit-and-miss for me, but I love the precision and the highly personal vision that they both espouse.
I continue to be fascinated by Ingres and Caravaggio.
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Last week Kodiak and I checked out the Jim Henson exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum.
It was a great show. What an inspiring guy. The Jim Henson Creature Shop was the first place to hire me when I moved to LA to get into Animatronics, and although Jim was dead by that time I did meet his son Brian.
One thought that I had when seeing the work on display was... "I know how to do all this stuff, to build these sophisticated puppets, and it's an unusual and versatile skill, and it's a bit of a shame that I don't do more with it.... I should build some puppets, and... Have a puppet show!"
Head mechanism I built for some puppet or another, incorporating eye mechanisms and multi-axis ears.
Doctor Octopus's upper two claws from Spiderman 2, which I built and puppeteered on set.
Build puppets and have a puppet show? Hmm... we'll see about that.
Anyway the Henson's exhibit was a good show.
(And how's this for a tie-in... click here for Foetus doing a cover version of Elton John's 'Rocket Man' with lyrics re-worked as 'Puppet Dude,' a tribute to Jim Henson!)
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And lastly, a few people picked up on my brief discussion of the Datsun 240Z from several posts ago, and asked if I would in fact write a whole post about that car. Well I really don't think I will do that; there is so much already on the internet about that car and I would mostly just be regurgitating info that's already out there. Suffice to say that I have owned two of them and I love them. They're very fun to drive.
Check out this recent auction of a totally original 1971 240Z that sold for.... $310,000!
Holy guacamole!
I'll leave you with this, the 240Z from Mad Max: Fury Road... You had to have a sharp eye to catch this car in the film... it's barely in there, but I saw it immediately.
Sometime around 2016 I decided to be more Thirwell than Taylor Swift and work in a different way. This was a deliberate change of approach, and I've put four albums out in under two years, some of them ignored, others praised in the press especially the oddest of them. Precisely none of them 'popular'. Like you, I recommend it to all. Do the work. And if the carrot helps: there are prolific artists who sometimes cross over when their slowly building reputation and their latest work and the zeitgeist all align. I would put both Metallica and Bernie Sanders in that category.
ReplyDeleteAnother point: I think specificity in art can go populist, if that specificity happens touch something universal (unfocused anger being a good example - see gangsta rap in the 90s and how it caught suburban white youth). Even Billie Eilish, who won 5 grammys a few days ago, is very specific in her work. Luckily for her, there are a lot of people who relate to the details of being a smart angsty teenage girl in 2019. And there are more angsty teenagers with more time to stream music (or adults who want to connect with youth by streaming that same music) than there are sensitive adults who have the time to stream music all day long that resonates for them in their busy adult lives.
It's also a reality of human populations, especially with our less and less well educated ones, that certain subtle emotions or perspectives simply are less widely felt clearly enough to be resonators for artists' work. I suspect all those perspectives are felt in everyone, but they're usually too unfocused in the uneducated psyche. As opposed to pandering which finds already-obvious resonances and exploits them, there is a special kind of art-genius can take those unfocused resonances and crystallize it into something meaningful. That's when art really moves the culture.