Art and Fear

 "is Language the adequate expression of all realities?"

Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm pretty sure I've written over a dozen incomplete songs, wrote scraps of poetry and abandoned a few novella ideas at the first page. Ideas can often die the second you attempt to materialise them, other times they get started but then slowly descend into a creative plateau. Art is hard. Everything you put together is made with a hint of uncertainty and doubt. Not everyone will like what you create.

In my first lesson of media studies the teacher held up a photograph of a monkey and asked the class: what is this? Almost unanimously everyone answered "a monkey, sir." 

"No. It's not a monkey. It's someone else's representation of a monkey."

Art is made up of symbols. For example a word is an expression of something and not the thing itself. A photograph of a monkey is not a monkey it is millions of pixels in different colours compiled to create a two dimensional image of a monkey. 

Expression is a form of translation, we translate our emotions or thought processes into words or symbols yet we do not recreate the original idea itself we create a simulacrum. The recipient of your art then receives your articulation and must then translate it. No matter what you produce people will translate it in different ways. Symbols do not mean the same thing to everyone many symbols are conditionned. In my recent trip to Albania I was surprised to find that in their culture to shake your head means "yes." Words or gestures are expressions of reality not the reality themselves.

French semiologist, Roland Barthes wrote an essay called "The Author is Dead." In short, he explains that the second the author translates his thoughts or feelings into words they die on the paper. No one experiences language in the same way and therefore the original inspiration dies the second it is written. If I told you about Mr. O’Connor and his wrinkled face, crooked demeanor and eyes that yielded the sense that they had seen too much, well, the image of him in your mind is definitely different to the image in mine. I could go into greater detail about him to help clarify the image but ultimately we’ll always be thinking of different people.

In an interview the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was asked: "How do you feel when critics don't like your movies?" He replied, "I don't care what people think of my movies as long as they are talking about them."

The experience of art is infinite. Regardless of someone loving your art or hating it there is one universal principle beneath both reactions. Your art produced thought, it produces a critique; you created an experience for someone else. Prior to filmmaking Godard was a critic himself. Often he is described as a "critic's film maker" and something that I feel immortalizes him among cinema’s elitist class is that he challenges Cinema. His films break rules and conventions. They force the viewer to question why this and why that? In love or in hate, cinephiles will always be talking about his films. They are intellectually stimulating; they do not feed your id with images of meaningless sex and aesthetic violence.

Express yourself. I'd rather live with fear of rejection than in a world of robotic critique. Welcome to my blog.

-Phil Brown