The Artist's High and the Click

The Lost Art of Art

untitled (contrails), coloured pencil on paper, 2023

The Artist’s High and the Click

Some endeavours have good results to the point that they seem superb or amazing. There are elated feelings about this happy surprise that I would call a ‘high’. This happens in sports, writing a poem, and everything else that requires determination and focus. The artist’s high is like the runner’s high, which, in my limited experience, feels like a separation of my awareness from my thoughts and activities. It’s a kind of meditation, and this state of mind, lately referred to as ‘being in the zone’, also occurs when I paint and draw.

There is no thinking then, there’s just doing, and when this doing leads to success, there is deep pleasure with the momentary thought that you just made something perfect. It’s a very good day bathed in narcotic achievement. You just want to do it again, you want that buzz.

But inevitably, I fall for the idea that it wasn’t an unexpected good result at all, not really a surprise, actually more intentional than accidental, and in fact, it was anticipated. So it might be the case that I had cleverly planned the whole thing, but I know I have to examine the contrary possibility. Perhaps pride is taking credit for things that just happened in my vicinity. What is my role in having the idea in the first place? It seems to me, I was just waiting for it to show up.

I try to shake the inflationary thinking before I start another project; otherwise second rate work will be on my horizon. I honestly can’t take the credit for ideas that just drop in; sometimes, when I look at a piece a couple of months later, I notice coherent ideas that I wasn't even aware of when I made it. But I will confess, it is difficult to renounce the gentle soothing of personal achievement even though witnessing the birth of something beautiful is more than enough all on its own.

I recently read “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace” from The Review of Contemporary Fiction Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2, By Larry McCaffery. I have a deep respect for DFW’s writing beginning immediately after my first encounter: his essay, “Ticket to the Fair”, which I thought I had read in McSweeney’s although the internet insists it was Harpers. That feels highly unlikely to me, I rarely read Harpers.

Here’s what Mr. Wallace had to say:

“I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major with a specialization in math and logic. I was, to put it modestly, quite good at the stuff, mostly because I spent all my free time doing it. Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these moments “mathematical experiences.” What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called “the click of a well-made box.” Something like that. The word I always think of it as is “click.””

There are a few things to discuss here. First off, I believe that the artist’s high and the click refer to the same thing. And a second quote from the same interview leads me to believe that DFW and I seem to be in agreement about Postmodernism being unhealthy.

“But you’re talking about the click, which is something that can’t just be bequeathed from our postmodern ancestors to their descendants. No question that some of the early postmodernists and ironists and anarchists and absurdists did magnificent work, but you can’t pass the click from one generation to another like a baton. The click’s idiosyncratic, personal. The only stuff a writer can get from an artistic ancestor is a certain set of aesthetic values and beliefs, and maybe a set of formal techniques that might – just might – help the writer to chase his own click. The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment”.

To clarify my statement that Postmodernism is unhealthy, it is particularly unhealthy for subsequent generations of creators. As Wallace says, the click isn’t a baton that’s passed along. New generations have to find new insights, new aesthetic highs. If you’re interested, below is the Editorial from Wegway, issue one, 1995, back when it was a photocopied, folded and stapled zine.

Wegway 1, 1995, back cover, which at the moment, looks more interesting to me than the front cover. But the curious needn’t worry, the front cover is at the bottom of this post.

Editorial, Wegway inaugural issue, 1995

Did you know that when I was a kid ten or eleven years old, I made a neighbourhood newspaper with an Underwood typewriter and carbon paper? The print run was, I think, around 5 or 6, and a couple of the copies were pretty hard to read. When I was 15, two friends and I took our life savings (I worked part-time in a public library for 90 cents an hour) and we bought a used Gestetner ditto machine. We published an 'underground' magazine called Karma and sold it on the streets in Yorkville (that was Toronto's 'Haight-Ashbury' area in the 1960's). Using the same Underwood typewriter as before, I wrote concrete poetry under the pseudonym of Lenny Ankersfeldt. Now is almost 30 years later, and now is Wegway. As W. S. Burroughs says, "Isn't life peculiar?". But enough of maudlin wool-gathering.

I have been wondering why art has become so puny and irrelevant. It may be because art is about too many things these days. Art is so distended with content, it has de-materialized into an infinite balloon of cultural æther. Oddly, our present situation is also like the old saying, "A very tiny baby can easily get lost in its bathwater". Obviously then, when things get either big enough, or small enough, they become invisible. It is time we learned that trying to force relevance, inevitably leads to kitsch. And it is time to remember, that if you would just stop being a wise-ass for a minute, we would all agree that kitsch is bad.

I have also been wondering why no one since Arthur Cravan has gone on record saying something tactless. Are we all filled with so much self-pity for our irrelevance, that we want to leave our pathetic little careers unthreatened? I realize that our pond is small: That is why we submit to civilization and its discontents. Perhaps that is why nobody will say something like, "David Salle's paintings are the cloying dwarf offspring of that empty man, that thief and charlatan, Picasso". You will notice that I also prevaricate in my saying of such a thing. I believe that this is an era of minced words because outside of our art-confinement, nobody cares. That is how unimportant art has become. Since no one else cares, we need to flatter ourselves, and show feigned support for each other although we know in our innards that we and a few others are good, while the vast majority are "salon painters" or some other fatal thing. This fawning has the additional side benefit of inducing wealthy idiots to divert some of their money to art instead of baseball cards. If we really cared, we would honestly say what we think of our peers, and we would tell the world that its money belongs in hell. If art is real, then it is serious.

The Modern world worries everybody; it is not just a problem for silly artistes. That is why the L'il Abner / Beverly Hillbillies myth is so touching. We want an Eden that has not been bothered by the Modern. That is also why the science-fiction theory of "Post Modernism" is so enticing. Jed Clampett and Post Modernism are both wish fulfilment fantasies. There is no Post Modern perception, nor is there a Post Industrial world. Our present mode of perception (assuming there is such a pretentious thing) began with the camera obscura and was confirmed for all in 1839 with the invention of photography. Dirty industry is merely sliding out of Western sight into the Third World. Beware of Marie Antoinettes of theory who rush to declare the new era of the Post Modern and the Post Industrial.

Things are the same as they ever were, only worse. It will have to get much worse yet, before there is a radical change. We are nowhere near a critical mass, and nowhere near the magical point where an epiphenomenon might pop up. Now the Modern is pervasive enough to be opaque. We cannot see outside the virtual. Everything is subsumed. Here is your challenge: Do not give up on Modernism; it is yours; take it back from the cosmetics manufacturers and the advertisers. Take Modernism back from your television set and your personal computer. Art is becoming irrelevant because artists are losing their vision. I have decided that I am not an artist: It has become a foolish thing to be. There is no dignity left in the word 'artist'. It has become no better than 'shopkeeper' and 'poseur'. I am not an artist because I am not nothing. Wake up. Fight back. Jobs, entertainment and apartments darken our souls. Throw away your television. Cancel your newspaper subscription. Dump theory. Embrace practice. In a couple of months you will begin to realize what you are in. You will begin, once again, to see the difference between double entendre and self-consciousness.

S. E. Armstrong

A final word on highs and clicks: Besides the click there’s also the joy of the chase, imagining the perfection of the click. And since there is really no goal and only the journey, it’s best to take the long road, and enjoy the treasure-hunting and fishing along its way.

Wegway 1, 1995, front cover, the illustration is a pencil drawing I made in the late 1970’s of a photograph of a Louise Nevelson sculpture. It was a meticulous, pointless task I undertook just to see what it would look like. A portrait of the lost art of art I suppose.

You can find the DFW interview here:

https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/2013/08/02/a-conversation-with-david-foster-wallace-by-larry-mccaffery/