Thursday, July 28, 2005
Art and Artifice
This post started out as a response to an good comment from lotte on my previous Marilyn Monroe post. Once I started responding I couldn't stop, because she brought up an interesting point which has been spinning in the back of head about MM since seeing The Seven Year Itch.
First to quote her response:
Lotte: I could not agree more about how much work it takes to make something look easy. I know from writing, like you, how much work goes into a sentence. And because everyone was taught the ABC's and can pick up a pen, they think they can write too. Well, sorry, but no, you can't. Spend five hours a days on it- eat it, drink it, smoke it, then- maybe. If I had a nickel for every shmuck who said, "Well, if I had the time to write a novel..." As if that was all it took.
However, I have to pick a bone about your statement: craft = artifice. It's incorrect for the very reasons you use to prove your point. It's the lack of hard work that leads to fakeness, or what you call artifice. Marilyn's hard work shows, and when I said she was genuine, I didn't mean that she didn't have to work. Just the opposite, and, I apologize for not being clearer on that point. It's her hard work that allows her to have a genuine moment. And it is good you asked me about this, because it is really the thing that interested me the most about her. She obviously worked very hard to control her emotions, her humanity, her sense, very physically, of body. To use such things as a carpenter uses tools. Acting, in my limited experience (I've taken three or four acting classes, mostly to help me with my fiction) is a lot about being genuine on stage, and yes, it takes a lot of work to get there. It's working with a script, finding internal reference points, substitution, as Uta Hagen calls it. But all that work leads to a presentation of something that is true, and genuine, and not artificial.
The same is true in writing. For myself: I work and work and work, and then, I start to get things down pat-things I had to concentrate on before, became second nature. Pacing; stronger and more steady diction; refined use of adjectives and adverbs- at points things I might have had to consciously think about, which took up my thought process. Once those skills became instilled in my "writerlyness," so to speak- my mind was freed up to think about other things- dare I say them- themes, narrative devices, rhyming actions or even the dreaded meaning.
But let's talk some more about artifice. I would define artifice, or fakeness, in art, as creating something from an image that already exists in the world. It's the narrative voice that uses cliches and short-handed language. Think, It was a dark and stormy night, or once upon a time. There is no work put in there, it is just regurgitation of something you've heard a million times before. "I love you with all my heart." "Scared to death." The list goes on, and this is not an essay about the use of language, but I will bring up a post I read on Michael Breube online about Victor Schlovsky, a Russian formalist dude, and defamiliarization. One of the major points of his post is the far reaching effects of defamiliarization. Almost everything in twentieth century theory can be reduced to defamiliarization in one way or another. Gender theory is rethinking sex roles, Freud is defamiliarizing the family. It's the one golden rule of all art forms: make it new.
Apropos to this topic as well. Artifice is the familiar language in writing, or the familiar action in acting. Repeating the words or phrases or tones you've seen everywhere else. It's happening a bit now, with this David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs style of snarky 1st person memoirists. Don't get me wrong, Sedaris is great, I think he's hysterical. But more and more I see writing coming off as copies of that style. That's not an attack on Sedaris or Burroughs, but instead a comment on how writing becomes familiarized.
I've gotten way off the point, and I should be working. So I'm done.
First to quote her response:
Funny that you call Marilyn's performance "genuine." She was actually one of the hardest-working actresses in show business. Her scripts were always heavily annotated, she took acting classes, the whole nine. She put a lot of craft -- and, thus, artifice -- into what she did on camera.
This, too, has lots to do with writing. One of my friends just said I'm "the bestest of writers," and he thinks it's because I'm so "in touch" with my emotions. No, goofus, it's because I slave over every sentence. It takes a lot of work to make it look like it comes naturally.
Lotte: I could not agree more about how much work it takes to make something look easy. I know from writing, like you, how much work goes into a sentence. And because everyone was taught the ABC's and can pick up a pen, they think they can write too. Well, sorry, but no, you can't. Spend five hours a days on it- eat it, drink it, smoke it, then- maybe. If I had a nickel for every shmuck who said, "Well, if I had the time to write a novel..." As if that was all it took.
However, I have to pick a bone about your statement: craft = artifice. It's incorrect for the very reasons you use to prove your point. It's the lack of hard work that leads to fakeness, or what you call artifice. Marilyn's hard work shows, and when I said she was genuine, I didn't mean that she didn't have to work. Just the opposite, and, I apologize for not being clearer on that point. It's her hard work that allows her to have a genuine moment. And it is good you asked me about this, because it is really the thing that interested me the most about her. She obviously worked very hard to control her emotions, her humanity, her sense, very physically, of body. To use such things as a carpenter uses tools. Acting, in my limited experience (I've taken three or four acting classes, mostly to help me with my fiction) is a lot about being genuine on stage, and yes, it takes a lot of work to get there. It's working with a script, finding internal reference points, substitution, as Uta Hagen calls it. But all that work leads to a presentation of something that is true, and genuine, and not artificial.
The same is true in writing. For myself: I work and work and work, and then, I start to get things down pat-things I had to concentrate on before, became second nature. Pacing; stronger and more steady diction; refined use of adjectives and adverbs- at points things I might have had to consciously think about, which took up my thought process. Once those skills became instilled in my "writerlyness," so to speak- my mind was freed up to think about other things- dare I say them- themes, narrative devices, rhyming actions or even the dreaded meaning.
But let's talk some more about artifice. I would define artifice, or fakeness, in art, as creating something from an image that already exists in the world. It's the narrative voice that uses cliches and short-handed language. Think, It was a dark and stormy night, or once upon a time. There is no work put in there, it is just regurgitation of something you've heard a million times before. "I love you with all my heart." "Scared to death." The list goes on, and this is not an essay about the use of language, but I will bring up a post I read on Michael Breube online about Victor Schlovsky, a Russian formalist dude, and defamiliarization. One of the major points of his post is the far reaching effects of defamiliarization. Almost everything in twentieth century theory can be reduced to defamiliarization in one way or another. Gender theory is rethinking sex roles, Freud is defamiliarizing the family. It's the one golden rule of all art forms: make it new.
Apropos to this topic as well. Artifice is the familiar language in writing, or the familiar action in acting. Repeating the words or phrases or tones you've seen everywhere else. It's happening a bit now, with this David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs style of snarky 1st person memoirists. Don't get me wrong, Sedaris is great, I think he's hysterical. But more and more I see writing coming off as copies of that style. That's not an attack on Sedaris or Burroughs, but instead a comment on how writing becomes familiarized.
I've gotten way off the point, and I should be working. So I'm done.
