Art and the Fear of Failure
Falling and Getting Back Up
Art and the Fear of Failure
The arts have a long tradition of artists using their work to reflect on the value of existence. Born under Saturn, as the annals of art history would have them, the doubts that fill their lives are reflected in their art. Is this about them or is it about all of us?Was it weariness, doubt, or fear of failure? Was it a general world-weariness or just personal anguish, or even physical pain, after his automobile accident? In 1965, late in his life, Alberto Giacometti had himself photographed in the classic saturnine pose, his chin resting on his hand. The viewer does not know exactly how serious things were for him. He died a year later. A failure was something Giacometti certainly was not. In the years after World War II, the sculptor had become a widely celebrated artist. Personally, however, he was never easily satisfied. Recalling an incident in 1961, Silvio Berthoud wrote, ‘As soon as his mother spoke admiringly of a painting that was not yet finished, we heard him repeat for an hour or more that he had accomplished nothing, that he had lost everything and was doomed to suffer, like Sisyphus or Prometheus, and that he always had to start all over again, from scratch. But a few days later, as soon as his mother, clever as she was, remarked that the painting was indeed no good and that it was impossible to paint the way he did, he was suddenly well aware of his worth and would hear nothing of this kind of commentary. He then declared that he was very close to achieving what he was trying to accomplish and the other artists – not he – were the ones who were on the wrong path.’1 Failure in art can, firstly, be personally rooted in a temporary or a structural frame of mind on the part of the artist, as in the case of the life of Vincent van Gogh, who cut off his ear and later committed suicide, self-destruction that can be identified within the historical social and psychological aspects of art theory. Secondly, it can serve artists as a strategy, giving a space to breathe, reflect on doubts, despair and sadness about future prospects or a downturn in the creative process, or the potential shortcomings of the envisioned work. In the history of art, this can be understood in terms of artistic strategies. Thirdly, failure can itself be a subject of art and can be expressed in an artist’s work, without the artist himself literally failing at all – on the contrary. In all three cases (biographical, strategic and thematic failure), the history of mental attitudes plays a distinctive role. The mind-set of the artist, his artistic abilities and his philosophy and convictions about art are what form the basis of his mentality. Mentality is not the same as character, because you can change a mental tendency, but not character. In this context, I concur with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who in his short essay Two Regimes of Madness distinguishes between paranoid and passionate madness.2 This differentiation indeed goes back to Plato, who saw clinical illness as separate from creative illness.3This text looks not so much at failure through paranoia, but failure through passion. This is not failure because one cannot do anything about something, but failure that is consciously generated and made part of the art.
Saturn
In classical antiquity, Orpheus was the original ancestor of the melancholy artist. In his sadness over his lost wife, Eurydice, who because of him was forever doomed to Hades, the realm of the dead, Orpheus proved capable of producing a brilliant song. Nonetheless, he believed himself to have failed for all eternity. The absent Eurydice was a muse for his art: as an artist, Orpheus had not failed. Two chapters from the book Born under Saturn (1963) by Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, about the personal and socio-cultural origins of failure, can be seen as a sequel to the Giorgio Vasari’s (1511-1574) general and biographically inclined Renaissance descriptions of the lives of artists. The authors accentuate reflection and doubt, the miscarriage of success and resorting to suicide. Michelangelo is discussed at length, even though he did not commit suicide. There is no dénouement or failure visible in his work, but Michelangelo was apparently frequently plagued by doubts. Perhaps this was one reason why, in the famous fresco in the Stanze of the Vatican, The School of Athens (1510-1511), Rafael painted him sitting with his hand supporting his head.This pose is referred to as saturnine because the planet Saturn, which in alchemy symbolized hell, reeking of sulphur, is associated with the despondent mood of the artist. Saturn is the fiery, violent, temperamental member of the solar system. As a melancholic, the god Saturn goes through his paces in a never-ending succession of rising and falling.4 Hippocrates, the physician, defined the saturnine temperament as a mixture of four fluids: blood, slime, and yellow and black bile. His theory of the Four Humours was adopted in mediaeval medicine and would henceforth be referred to as a melancholy temperament, generally summarized by sensitivity, bitterness, gloominess and eccentricity. In his 1585 text, Treatise of Melancholy, Timothy Blight added more identifiers, including good memory, outspoken opinions, doubts, brooding, bad dreams, irreconcilability, impulsiveness, low spirits, shyness, despondency and frequent refusal to take part.5 The alchemist and physician Paracelsus associated the melancholy personality with everything that was sour, cold and dry. In modernism, this tradition is interpreted in a structuralist fashion, amongst others by the writer Susan Sontag: ‘The mark of the Saturnine temperament is the self-conscious and unforgiving relation to the self, which never can be taken for granted. The self is a text – it has to be deciphered.’6 Albrecht Dürer had already found a now-famous allegory for this ‘self’. In the copper engraving Melencolia I (1514), in addition to his representation of the angel of alchemy, with her characteristic saturnine gesture, he included fire, also alluding to Saturn. We see it flaring up from a small cauldron. In the opinions of art critics Panofsky and Saxl, as an allegory, this angel is all about the artist in doubt.7 The melancholy or saturnine gesture – as even Andy Warhol adopted in a self-portrait painted in 1967, after a photograph of himself in that pose back in 1964 – is also the symbol of failure.
Psychic Expressions
‘I am too sad to tell you’, claimed the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader in 1970, in the title of his own photographic self-portrait. His head is leaning on his hand.8 Does this photograph serve as an indication of Ader’s own temperament? In this case, it is doubtful. Ader was a pioneer of body art, which was making its appearance at the time and was suffused with the psychic expressions of such artists as Vito Acconci. The photograph allows the psychic state of the artist to be seen, as if it were a kind of calling card, and it offers two possibilities: either Ader had been crying, or he was pretending to be crying. As far as the result was concerned – for this photograph was intended to be a work of art – the artist need have no regrets. It has not been a failure. We could in this case speak of staged photography, a movement that began gaining ground in 1969. That was also the year in which viewers’ attention was called to behaviour as a subject in art, in the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle in Bern. This ‘attitude’ served as a new criterion for mentalité, which had been introduced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his research on human development.9In this context, it may be fruitful to take a brief look at the history of literature in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century, when the bildungsroman, or character formation novel, especially ‘artist novels’, became popular. Pursuant to the romantic lauding of the genius of the artist, the difficult path of artistic success became a favourite subject. The psychology of the literary figure, vacillating between self-preservation and downfall, was quickly seen as particularly important. With the use of fictional artistic characters, authors made poetic note of their inability to cope with adaptations, impediments, doubts and poor decisions. Novels of this kind frequently ended badly, with suicidal protagonists. In this context, the biographical demise of Vincent van Gogh in 1890, the year he died, which was openly commented on at the European travelling exhibition of his work in 1906, served to confirm the cliché. In 1947, Thomas Mann went a step further in Dr Faustus, with the artistic failure of his protagonist, composer Adrian Leverkühn, as an allegory for the failure of German society in the 1930s. As confirmed in a Dutch encyclopaedia of fictitious artists from 1605 to the present (2000),10 artists in novels are seldom undone by their art, but are instead brought down by their psychic or social circumstances, as in Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich, 1854-55), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), or Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1930) – with one famous exception: Honoré de Balzac’s novella Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu, published in 1831. This masterpiece tells the story of a once highly regarded German painter, Frenhofer, who is friends with Poussin and a certain Porbus. For a long time, the apparently so gifted Frenhofer works away on his masterpiece, without showing it to his friends. When Poussin finally succeeds in getting a glimpse of the work, he is bewildered by Frenhofer’s lack of ability. Frenhofer is in turn devastated by this harsh judgment. But the reader is less saddened by that than about the fact that Frenhofer has failed to achieve his artistic goal of representing inner beauty, rather than superficial beauty. Were his high expectations the reason for his failure, as he allowed his work to be reduced to chaotic patches of paint with few motifs and general formlessness?Perhaps Frenhofer ‘lived’ too soon. In the late nineteenth, or in the twentieth century, people might have judged his discoveries differently. Paul Cézanne also admitted conflicts of his own: ‘Frenhofer, that’s me.’11 Sigmund Freud might have been able to offer some help. In 1912, he proclaimed the ability of self-therapy to resolve potential conflicts.12 According to Freud, help lies only in the capacity to activate one’s own power of self-preservation. In contrast, fear of failure can emerge on the heels of success that we feel we actually do not deserve, generating a sense of guilt, despite the fact that a passionate desire has been fulfilled. The result is profound melancholy. But how does one capture fear of failure in the art itself? Even Freud did not have an answer to that.Two artists have tried. One of them, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), did it in his life and his work, whereby he somewhat resembled Isidore Ducasse, alias Comte de Lautreamont, many years before him.13 The other is Bruce Nauman, who has tried to capture failure exclusively in his art. Artaud sought a union of art and life, in the way that André Breton demanded of the cubists in the 1920s. Artaud agreed with him. ‘The countenance of the world’s madness is incarnated in a tortured soul’, he claimed.14 Artaud was in fact the only one who had no fear of his objective of merging art and life – so consistently, in fact, that he turned away from what he critically perceived as the inconsistent Surrealists. He did not see his spirit as independent of his body. Because he suffered from delusions, he also felt that his body had to express those delusions, and vice versa. He perceived his art as an outpouring of his body and his spirit. For this reason, he harboured a preference for fragmented sentences as an expression of the suffering soul and the presentation of all the bodily fluids: sweat, blood, tears, spit and urine. Artaud was committed to a madhouse, where he died suffering unbearable pain, but according to witnesses, he was not crazy. Can one therefore conclude that he did not succeed in his plan to unite art and life? Artistically, he was extremely productive. He simply failed to completely master his spirit at all times. Perhaps his neurotic tendencies were actually his strength, a ‘voluntary failing’ with which he could keep his crises under artistic control.
Learned Helplessness
Bruce Nauman’s artistic response to Freud’s proposed self-therapy is equally complex, but in another way. It is known that Nauman lives quietly and happily on a ranch in New Mexico, but in his art, he certainly presents the suffering man, often with the tongue cut out, with heads dangling on a carousel, sometimes wrapped in barbed wire. His heads frequently bear his own face, probably as a pars pro toto for all the sufferings of this world – consistent with the existentialist example of the work of Samuel Beckett. Nauman acknowledges his gratitude to Beckett for much of his inspiration. ‘It has also to do with the confusion about being an artist and being a person, and whether there is a difference between the two…. I struggle a lot with this issue. It seems as though more of my life is concerned with things I care about that I can’t get into my work…. I don’t want the art to be too narrow.’15 He often doubts whether he has succeeded in doing this. ‘It is also not entirely clear to me what I am doing here,’ as he explained on another occasion. ‘Fury and disappointment are feelings that have a strong driving force for me. They carry me to the studio.’ And further, ‘Getting away from the doubt, that is my most important motivation. It leads to the question of who I am and why I want to do something.’16Nauman’s series Learned Helplessness in Rats (1988), about the science of psychoanalysis, is illuminating in this context. Martin E.P. Seligman, a brain specialist, decided to apply the results of a famous test by psychologist B.F. Skinner to different situations. Skinner had demonstrated that rats were perfectly able to survive a labyrinth (the Skinner box), because they have the capacity to learn. Seligman also demonstrated how rats that had been subjected to electrical shocks were reduced to apathy and depression. These rats learned nothing more at all and seemed incapable of getting themselves out of the labyrinth.17 Seligman spoke of ‘learned helplessness’, of depression at the point when you can no longer provide yourself with your own reward and can no longer bring light to an unpleasant life.After acquainting himself with the results of Skinner’s and Seligman’s experiments, Nauman built his own installation (a Skinner box made of yellow Plexiglas) and beamed strong light onto it. He then focused four cameras on the box. At the same time, on the wall, he projected a video of a rat in a trap, with the sound of drums in the background. He called the installation Rats and Bats (Learned Helplessness in Rats). Nauman also presented an etching that sketched the entire situation, without depicting any rats. What appears to have mattered to him was that the viewer would identify with the invisible, caged rats. The rhythm of the drums expresses the hopelessness. For those who recognize the word ‘arts‘ in the word ‘rats’, his intention becomes even clearer: learned helplessness by way of art can motivate us to self-therapy.
Motives for Failure
That a simple task can be one that an artist cannot achieve is something that Marcel Broodthaers also demonstrates in his work. Initially, he was a poet, before he began to call himself an artist. He found an adequate metaphor for both artistic disciplines. His 16mm film La pluie (1969) shows him spending fully two minutes repeatedly attempting to write his own initials, M.B., in ink on a piece of paper, alongside and over and under one another. He is intensely preoccupied with finding his touch of genius, but without success. It is raining heavily, and whatever he writes down keeps getting washed away, no matter how hard he tries. Has Broodthaers failed? The film is about vain efforts in an amusing allegory on ‘the death of the author’, but the work of art is about quite the opposite: it was planned, staged, and simply completed. Once again, the theme does not depict actual failure. Appearance and reality are fused together in this imaginary failure.Falling is an important motif in failure. Falling bodies or crumpled postures are frequent subjects in staged photography, in body art and especially in examples of melancholia photographica, with figures in attitudes of extreme hopelessness. Valie Export appears to have been left for dead, lying between a wall and the street in a big city (Entität, 1972), and Sigurdur Gudmundsson is lying in the street with his head under a paving stone (Untitled (Event), 1975). For Bas Jan Ader, falling was even a major theme in several short films. He fell from the roof of a house. He fell with his bicycle into a canal, and he fell from a tree into a ditch (Fall I, II and III, 1970). Unlike Yves Klein, who ten years earlier had ‘lept into the void’ (1960) from a window, in order to reach a zone of nothingness and pure sensitivity, within the framework of the then emergent body art, Ader was attempting to show how gravity had taken such a hold on him. It was not romanticism that interested him, but the fall itself, as a motif.Sombreness and melancholy here find a material translation. In the late 1970s, body art was already a ‘mentality art’. One could say that by way of body art, psychic gestures in art were liberated from the simple treatment noted in 1969 by Harald Szeemann in When Attitudes Become Form. Feelings and pathos gained entry to art, without sacrificing any of the artists themselves. One might say that for art, ‘The self is the Other.’18 The work of art as a reflection of the self consequently allows a form of non-existence, into which people are able to shift their suffering.There is nonetheless also the deeply earnest subject of real death or suicide as a theme in art. Antonin Artaud did not see it as an alternative. ‘No,’ he wrote, ‘suicide is always a hypothesis. I claim the right to have my doubts about suicide, just like everything else in reality.’19 He did not believe in something that anyone was able to achieve, such as eradicating pain by means of killing oneself. He believed in his deepest feelings, which he was only able to experience while he was alive. Death would have no value to him. Torment made up a part of Artaud’s life and provided a source for his creative endeavours. Although, in a brief text, he put the blame for Vincent van Gogh’s suicide on the society in which Van Gogh lived, for himself, he made no use of such political arguments. For this reason alone, suicide was not an option.In extreme scenarios, other artists have attempted to combine the reality of life with the reality of art, which is to say they allow the time of their lives to coincide with the time of a performance, thereby finding real, physical boundaries for their art.20 Perhaps this was also true of Bas Jan Ader. In 1975, when he used an art event to say goodbye to his gallery audience prior to a trans-Atlantic sailing trip from the North American coast to Europe, it was intended to be ‘in search of the miraculous’, as he promised them. Intentionally or otherwise, it became a permanent farewell. Ultimately, a thesis is possible: self-reflection, which in the negative case takes the form of Weltschmerz, extreme pondering and deep melancholy, so that one no longer wants to go on and believes that one’s creative potential has forever abandoned one, proves its function as an artistic strategy, which primarily is necessary in order to regain strength by way of taking a breather (and a great deal of sighing), secondly can serve as a ordeal in an initiation ritual, perhaps in the form of seeking self-therapy, and thirdly for reworking what is experienced in art and expressing it as a part of the creative process. In this case, art does not serve as a documentation of biographical attitudes or moods, but as a field for another side of art, at the edge of non-art – a paradox that is eminently artistic in nature. Here, the artist shows himself to be a medium, not a victim of his incapacity. In this way, art allows itself to be recognized as a phenomenology of suffering from the demands that we impose on it. Because this art concerns the so-called impotence of the artist, which he paradoxically does not demonstrate in a passive way, there is no question of it being a simple documentation of a romantic palette of sensibilities. These are active forms of expression of the existential foundations of art. Failure is in this instance a source, a medium and a departure point for a translation in the guise of fiction. Antje von Graevenitz is an art historian, Amsterdam
Antje von Graevenitz
