And would such a withdrawal come as a surprise? For civilization, at least where it is found among those who are affluent in the West, has amounted to little more than a population of men and women who are driven by their impulses, panicked by a vacuum of meaning that they feel rather than understand, distracted by anything loud enough or bright enough to impose itself on their attention, and closed off to anything that might reveal to them how completely they have abandoned themselves to their craving for influence, fame, and affirmation.
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For there is a line between apathy and what I guess I would call religious inaction. The two things might resemble each other, but they are miles apart essentially. And yet it is only the compulsions that arrive out of the latter, out of a sense of charity, mercy and justice, as well as, I suppose, an awareness of the behest for the propagation of the human race, as articulated in scripture (at least in the Abrahamic traditions), that prevent some people from withdrawing so thoroughly from the activity or busyness of civilization that they would seem to have lost interest in it, and to have found no purpose in engaging with it.
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Which isn’t to say that such a person becomes unfeeling as a rock must be unfeeling, but that, by an effort of will, and by dint of an imagination that has been exercised in the broadest disciplines of knowledge, and brought under the jurisdiction of the conscience (which is independent of one’s interests, at least as that concept is popularly defined), they arrive at a perspective that regards human pursuits, when not ennobled by some transcendent purpose, as futile, meaningless, and vain.
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For the burden his characters have assumed belongs to that realm of courage that is moral as much as physical, and that reveals itself by a refusal to deem any action that can be undertaken, during any instance in time, as less violent or frivolous or unnecessary, from the perspective of, say, a rock, than any other action.
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That his particular bent of mind, as manifested by the voices of his characters, can be described as cantankerous and suspicious, as opposed to, say, joyous, sympathetic, or enthused, matters little when measured against the nobility of the journeys taken by such characters, and the premise from which these journeys originate.
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Beckett saw the processes of life with the clarity of a biologist or an anthropologist, but he was equipped with the mental apparatus of a poet and a theologian.
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One waits for Godot, for example, from the moment one becomes conscious until the moment that one’s consciousness expires. All that we do in the interim, in the duration of that waiting — the going to and fro, the getting up and lying down, the speaking and expostulating and vying and consuming and reproducing and prevaricating and negotiating — is a matter of hand waving, more or less. Though that would take a pessimistic view of things. And pessimism is a distortion of the truth.
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The works of Samuel Beckett can be understood, I think, as a disquisition on, or dramatization of, this principle or conviction.
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I should have remained mute if I was really wise, should have endeavored toward some condition of mind that, in the depth of its inaction, could be said to precede infancy, and yet would not object to, nor interfere with, entropy and the process of growing old.
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The beauty of a scene can impart more wisdom than an utterance that would describe it.
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It is late afternoon, summer, and the shadows are longer than the figures to which they belong.
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I see a fountain in a plaza or a courtyard, where the citizens of a city gather to talk and philosophize.
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And if, after I’d suggested this approach, someone were to say to me, ‘To what end?’ or ‘For what good?’ or ‘For what purpose?’ I would first confirm them in their skepticism, and agree that maybe there is nothing to be gotten from art, and the sussing out of our own selves, by way of it (for certainly there is nothing material in it to be gained), before reminding them, as a way of drawing to their notice an alternative, of that saying of which the ancient Greeks were so fond, and which seems relevant here, “Know thyself.”
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In other words, what an audience needs to do, more than anything else (and perhaps to the exclusion of anything else), when they encounter a work of art, is pay attention. Not only to the artwork itself, though that will absorb them at first, but also to what is happening inside of them, to their feelings and their thoughts, as they arise in them in whatever order, and according to whatever rationale, bidden or unbidden, so that they, the audience, might even be able to trace, or to mark, a correspondence between the particularities of the two, the artwork and the mind, the stimulus and that which is stimulated, and in so doing to follow their own hunches and ratiocinations into the recesses of their psyche, which at bottom might be formed not only of the experiences and memories and dreams that have been unique to them, as individual souls, but also of some conglomerate, primordial substance that is common to all humankind.
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It is even possible, I suppose, to describe the work that an audience must do as a passive rather than an active kind of work. Insofar as the audience that is most likely to get something out of a novel, or a painting, or a film, or what have you (if it can be said that there is anything to be ‘gotten’ out of art, which I am not certain there is), is one that is able to gather the more strident energies of their ego into something that resembles a pond whose surface is exceedingly calm, so that the slightest disturbance to it will create ripples.
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I digress. My larger point was that art can be described as the site of a communing between two intelligences — that of the artist and that of the audience. Insofar as the work that is completed by the intelligence of the artist needs yet to be apprehended by the work that belongs to the intelligence of the audience. Even if this latter work is not so much of the intellectual variety as it is of the psychological or spiritual variety.
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As far as I know, for example, there has been only one performance of The Artist Is Present, by Marina Abramović. Which would seem to have been part of the intention of that work, for she served as both its creative and interpretive intelligence. Further, due to the singularity of Abramović’s style, one might even say that a reproduction of it, by somebody else, would not be advisable. And yet certainly one can conceive of another artist, at another point in time, attempting to reproduce that performance. The way one musician will cover another musician’s song, out of admiration or love. So that even a work of performance art, which by its nature is more ephemeral than recorded art, can be lifted out of its temporality, and can endure as long as there is someone who, remembering it, is committed to its reenactment, and its perpetuity.
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Even so, the observing of these two aspects of the artistic intelligence, as they relate to performance art, is perhaps not essential, for it is possible to conceive of a circumstance that reduces their significance.
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When a theater company stages a play, for instance, the creative artist responsible for the existence of the play, which might have been written centuries before, can be said to reach out to, or commune with, the intelligence of the audience, by way of the actors who give dramatic life to the work, and who can be described as the interpretive artists. But when a work of art lives and dies with the performance itself, so that afterward it would seem to have vanished, or been retired by the only intelligence that could properly give it a dramatization, we can say that the creative intelligence and the interpretive intelligence are one, or that they are found in the same person.
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However, here I would differentiate performance art, which is always live, from live ‘productions’ of art, wherein the intelligence of the creative artist can be distinguished from the intelligence of the interpretive artist.