The Model Wife by Arthur Ollman, and derivatives.
The book was a Valentines day gift from my wife – with whom my own work has become entirely entangled and inextricably enmeshed. So much so that it is not my work any more (this is discussed early on in Ollman’s book).
Thus far (now reading the chapter on Friedlander) Mr. Ollman has engaged each couple via a few central themes:
- the theory portraiture (of the self and otherwise)
- the dynamics of power between the partners
- the emancipation of the woman (or not)
- and the perceived emotional quality each husband approached/approaches his wife with
The images he’s chosen, while neither sparing nor a surfeit, bolster his point of view effectively.
Much more can be said about the book, after all the above is hardly enough to wet the appetite, but I’d rather divest myself of what it has helped me understand.
It has been a year since I last stepped foot in any sort of formal art educational program, so I was a bit surprised today to hear myself thinking, “all that time in art school, years, and I’ve only just now begun to really make art.”
Prying into why I’d feel that way lead me to this sentiment (one I would have applauded, supported, upheld, espoused, and even claimed for myself at any time in the near past, but only now know what it means de veritas): Art is Devotion.
I’ve made art for years, and even liked some of what I made, but never before have I been so entirely vested in what I’m doing as when making images with Roxanne. Speaking in terms of universals, it is the gravitas of devotion that makes it possible for the artist to wade in and remain with the specifics of the chosen subject. It is exactly that extended encounter that allows the individual to see / touch / hear / appraise / experience and finally-commune-with, that which ultimately is transformed/transferred into the work of art.
In re-reading the above statement I notice I may have skimped on one, maybe the primary, facet of how devotion shapes the negotiations between artist/subject: it demolishes the internal barriers in the devotee that would keep them from their practice. It abolishes half heartedness and demands total partisanship, to be devoted means to identify oneself with something else.
I am tempted to speak of love, and how only in giving yourself totally to it can it be fully consummated, but immediately I think of other states of being that may also fuel an artist’s forge: lust, fear, anger, the sublime, the perfect hegemony of the mundane . . . and on. It matters not what the particulars of the sentiment or ideation is, so long as it is immersive, consumptive, and that the artist be comfortable in that state. This is exactly what devotion allows, demands even, of the devotee: that they attend with the utmost of their capacities to the thing at hand, giving of themselves to it as much as is needed to attain communion, correlation, identification. *
The success of the artist’s gaining depth and breadth in knowing the subject of their work is dependent on their capacity to devote themselves to it. Without that fulcrum, that identification, even the most brilliant virtuoso will have little of substance to deliver and merely produce commodities.
Art is Devotion.
* The generic version of the above is:
To make good work the artist must be comfortable coming into prolonged contact with something that makes them deeply aware that they are alive and succeed in infusing something of that into their finished work.