A few years ago, I was in a cinema, enjoying a film – I don't really remember what it was about, other than that it had a rather artistic and steamy love scene in it, which a couple of accomplished actors handled rather well. When the lights went up and we all got up to leave, I heard one well-dressed Southern lady say to another, "My! That was downright embarrassing." (She chuckled when she said it.)

Real art is always just a little bit embarrassing.

So much of what we enjoy is mere entertainment, and so much of the talking business is about...well, talking, that we get used to listening to overblown analysis of what, after all, is just another well-executed piece of fluff. I used to work in an office where I was accustomed to overhearing conversations that started like this:

"Did you see X? Man, you've got to see it. The cinematographic realisation of the concept is truly over-the-top. The director is a genuine auteur. He references Rashomon and the Dadists, and his use of point of view is so novel...

"In short, that was the definitive zombie movie."

I'd usually head for the john and run cold water over my head after that.

All right, you say, I'll postpone wanting to beat you over the head for dissing my favourite movie genre, but what in Sam Hill do you mean about art being embarrassing? Aren't zombie movies embarrassing enough for you? Well, my friend, here's my take on it.

The other night, I was watching 1776, which is definitive, in its own way. 1776 was a ground-breaking musical back in the Sixties, in that it turned a fond but irreverent eye on those people who used to be called (without irony) the Founding Fathers of the United States. With wit, humour, and the occasional burst of Broadway-style song, 1776 got us through that hot Philadelphia summer to the signing of the Declaration of Independence without ever once becoming sententious. The proof of the pudding was that the live show version even pleased the cast of Hair. Ah, bliss.

1776 is a must-see for anybody who yearns for a painless way to pass History 101 – take note, lazy students. It was written and composed by a history teacher. I was watching it for two reasons:

• I'd just finished rewriting the Revolution for a history course, and Elektra thought it would be funny to be mean, so she ordered it on Netflix, and
• I surprised her by wanting to listen to the director's commentary and find out what problems they'd had making the film in 1972.

My efforts were rewarded. It turns out the new DVD not only has better colour and sound than before, but has the scenes restored that Richard Nixon made them take out. Yep. Producer Jack Warner kowtowed to the paranoid President and removed what Tricky Dick considered an offensive song about conservatives. (There was no Republican Party back then, but we assume John Dickinson of colonial Pennsylvania was too close for comfort.) It turns out they had to go down into a vault in a salt mine to find the missing scenes...which Warner had ordered shredded, but which had been preserved...how cool is that?

1776 is great history – the libretto is the only one I've ever read that has footnotes – and it's great entertainment – I defy you not to laugh at Ben Franklin – but it's not art, in my book.

Except in one place.

That place is a song by a character named John Rutledge, delegate to the Second Continental Congress from South Carolina. The setup is that Rutledge makes it clear to the Congress – and the audience – why it is the Declaration won't pass until they remove Thomas Jefferson's antislavery clause. Heady stuff.

Now, South Carolina=slavery=hypocrisy is nothing new. The Triangle Trade is nothing new. But when the actor on screen/stage, in a wig and knee britches, gets through jumping on the tables in Independence Hall and singing Molasses to Rum¹ while cracking an imaginary whip on an imaginary slave ship, you are through being entertained and educated. You are limp, ragged, and wrung out. You are moved. You begin to suspect that something may not be complete about the way you see reality. You begin to suspect that this may not be about something that happened 234 years ago, but about what's in the newspaper...you begin to suspect your conscience has been taking notes.

Art does that. And it does that by being embarrassing, by lifting the barrier against self-incrimination of the emotions and senses. There's no Fifth Amendment in art.

Yes, yes, I know what Kipling said:

...The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mold.

They scratch with their pens in the mold of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start

When the Devil mutters behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it art?"

I know this, and I care not a whit. I'm not talking about the difference between highbrow and lowbrow – I've seen art happen in a community centre, and everybody was singing the Hallelujah Chorus together, and I suspect some of us were off-pitch – I'm talking about where you are in your mind when it happens, this art. And whether the safeties are off on your personal holodeck.

Art is forgetting to breathe unless the wind blows your way. Art is getting lost in the theme, and lost in the moment, and letting it happen. Art is forgetting that anybody else is watching (which is why I've never seen art happen at the Olympics, but maybe you have). Art is singing The Impossible Dream and meaning every single word. Art is like that country song:

'You gotta sing like you don't need the money...you gotta dance like nobody's watching... (Susannah Clark)

Yeah, like that. Why don't we know that? Because as soon as somebody's done it, we step in and strut our stuff, criticise (when I was looking up that last quote, I found slighting comments about the song on snopes.com), pretend to know better, talk airily about how "it's all been done before" (and yeah, I know that song lyric, too). We talk all our joys to death, and nothing is left but cheap pleasures.

I don't mean that sincerity=art. I mean that art has abandonment. Without that abandonment, performance is recital. There are no emergent properties. Nothing is ventured, and nothing gained.

It ain't art until it takes us away from here. It ain't art unless it's a little bit embarrassing. Nothing wrong with entertainment, but hey – if a little art comes my way, I'm grateful. I suspect the birds in the trees of perpetrating art, because the birds don't have critics to worry about – just cats. I don't mind feedback on what I write. It helps me write better. But every once in a while, I like to go off somewhere and just bask in the glory of it all – the form itself, the life, the love, telling, singing, dancing something in a way that gets us all in the moment.

In the meantime, there's always the definitive zombie movie.

Fact and Fiction by Dmitri Gheorgheni Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

29.03.10 Front Page

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