A Funny Time for Art (Part Two)
by a rogue bureaucrat pretending to be human
Dramatis Personae
the hesitant speaker
the wraith
A Play
Enter the hesitant speaker…
Ahem,
In the essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” written in 1979, Audre Lorde asks, “ If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us [us here being, I think, poor women, women of color, and queer women, not me, the quoter], and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses [your being here well-off academics, also not the quoter] and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color?”
The question resonates. We could pose a similar one to the contemporary arts organization. We want our art to have value, to perform a civic good, to liberate us.1 To promote social justice, nonprofits and civic organizations seek art from historically marginalized voices. Many of these organizations expect that art to have social value. Those inclined towards the arts sometimes expect it to liberate. Does the white progressive now ask artists of color to clean our collective psychic house, clear out the capitalist pollutants?2 (Meanwhile, well-off white progressives might continue to expect certain peoples to clean their physical houses, etc.) I ask them (and you, and myself): Could you not support art regardless of whether it liberated you? Why don’t you go liberate yourself?
When we ask artists to confront the ills of society, when we ask them to mirror our culture in all its writhing agony, when we ask them to both have and grant purpose, to elucidate, to change and inspire, who precisely are we asking? When we ask poor artists, artists of color, queer artists, neurodivergent artists, and other artist-types historically marginalized, what are we doing but asking them to clean our collective dirty house? Should we not all take part in this house cleaning and caring? Are these rhetorical questions? Do I have answers?
We don’t need to talk about the artist here. The artist is unimportant and we are all the artist, unimportant. Who is not being asked to confront the ills of society and do something about it, when most of those ills were born from the sins of our elders? There are a handful of Masters. They are very outnumbered, yet many are very loyal to them, sometimes because the Masters treat them well, perhaps even grant them a degree of autonomy that helps them believe they are free; perhaps they dangle before them the allure of Masterdom, suggesting that they too can achieve this Mastery. We’re hypnotized, but they’re not exceptionally skilled hypnotists. It’s easy to break the spell.3 They are the Master’s Tools, but they are in our hands.
I say all of this as a white man, I think. I’d rather not bring myself into this. Maybe that desire is naive. As a white man, am I afforded the luxury of being the everyman, sorta invisible, not prefacing my words with my identity so that you can suss out my biases? Maybe. But maybe that’s changing. Maybe the white male too now must put our white maleness out in front, perform it for the audience so that they can know what we’re trying to teach them, what our goals are, where we come from. I’d rather not ask anyone to preface their work in any manner but that which they choose, regardless of who they are. What does the artist owe their audience? Might we need to settle ourselves into a certain cultural context before we view the art or read the words? What due diligence is expected from the reader, the viewer, the listener? What if we allowed the artist (or whoever) to present their work exactly as they would like to present it, within certain parameters that assure our safety?4 Could we allow the artist to leave some things a mystery? To nurture imagination, shall we nurture mystery? I fear we’ve built a culture of halfhearted listeners. There is a part of me that is very cynical. Hypnosis seems to hold with remarkable resilience a great many people. I believe many artists are in the business of propping up this hypnotic projection. I don’t necessarily have proof.
It’s fun to watch the artist degrade the Self (it’s a contemptible ideology), but I know that some people would rather not perform their identity for complete strangers all of the time. Art is not always a psychological striptease (though it can be), not always a manifesto (thought it can be). Identity oscillates. What if I, as rogue bureaucrat (for example), find the gender binary uncomfortable. Am I always a man? Maybe, I suppose, yes, because I wear a tie and cut my hair short and carry a briefcase in a certain manner. But also, no, not really, of course not. I contain multitudes.5 I transform. See me in the wild and I resemble an omni-gendered gremlin. But I was born here with a penis raised by white suburban American humanoids fairly humdrum in their thinking. They were told they had a boy and agreed with that decision. That boy went along with it, more or less. He acted a little oddly, and perhaps some people “worried,” but he remained a boy. They may continue to worry to this day, but the rogue bureaucrat ran away from this life. This is only one origin story. I have others. People transform.6
Allow me a reference from pop culture: a person may self identify as (for example) an attack helicopter. They can do so as cruel parody of transgender people, in which case this “identification” is a lie, not a pretending, but a mockery.7 Or, they can do so as parody of parody, as reclamation. Or, they can do so as a child does, transforming into an attack helicopter to play games of make-believe war.8 Make-believe war is the only kind of war I personally want to have anything to do with, though it’s still not even in my top ten favorite types of make-believe. I prefer haunted house. This is only a matter of personal preference and not a moral proclamation. I played games of war as a child.9 In them, I play both sides. I pretend to be many things, including things distinctly different from me, even opposed to. I become the wraith, a demonic double, a doppelganger.
Obviously, there is a difference in pretending to be something while playing make-believe, and being something. But the malleability with which we can pretend to be almost anything suggests to me that we can be almost anything.10 With language malleable, categories malleable, definitions malleable (and fabricated by us after the fact, it should be noted11), transformations from one Being to another not only seem possible but necessary and common.
Being requires arguably less effort than pretending, and it is only a doubting and oppressive society that forces us to jump through all sorts of hoops to prove who we are, even when that being-hood is relatively evident to us.12 And so thus I think it’s possible that I (for example) am of no gender at all, and have no biology. We are caught in a synaptic web spun by the spider master. The spider’s are not really the enemy; they are hypnotized. This language is ours. We use it. We can rebel against definitions. I’m a man but not a man because there’s no such thing as mans. I’m a ghost. I’m still white, but sometimes a pale fog-like white. I drag with me a history. It comes with my blood. Some things are inescapable. Family curses are real, and the racist patriarchal conception of whiteness is a family curse gone genocidal. I am possessed. I’m not pretending to be possessed, not pretending to be a ghost. I may be tweaking definitions and transforming. Or, maybe, I’m just creating examples for an essay, to make a point. This version of me, given to you, is performance. That doesn’t mean it is pretend, and even if it is pretend, that doesn’t mean pretend things don’t matter.
Pretend things matter. Imaginary things matter. Who will take care of them?
As a rogue bureaucrat, it’s my duty to care for imaginary things. I think it’s important. I live in a world bursting with imaginary things. I don’t hallucinate. My brain chemistry is more or less the same as yours (it might be a little different, but we don’t need to get into that). These imaginary things are not not there. They just aren’t there in the same way. They are liminal, oscillating, vagrant, rogue in space and funny in time.
Do you think the rogue bureaucrat is an artist of bureaucracy? What is the artist doing but traveling through boundaries, oscillating between here and there, existing in a liminal space, becoming?13
Audre Lorde addresses one aspect of our current situation in the arts, noting the rationale of usually white Gatekeepers who might say, “We don’t know who to ask,” when it comes to finding non-white artists (or speakers for a panel on feminism, etc.). These Gatekeepers have taken the time to educate themselves on (fill in the blank) but have not taken the time to educate themselves as to the answer to that very question: who do we ask.14 To take this further, we might add: do we need Gatekeepers at all? I don’t think the answer is an easy anarchic no, though it’s closer to that than to an authoritarian yes. The question becomes: What is it that they are keeping gated, and why are they keeping it gated?
Nature forms barriers. There are things I can access that you cannot, and things you can access that I cannot.15 There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a gate. But these natural barriers or gates or thresholds do not trap what is within them. The barriers to a biome (a canyon, a large body of water, changes in elevation) become the very conditions for that biome to exist. Healthy boundaries create and protect. The boundary of the self is not immutable or untranscendable, though transcendence may or may not be death.16
The arts are full of Gatekeepers. Are they protectors, or prison guards? What happens to this mystical undefinable thing called art if we allow only the same few people access?17 It withers and becomes defined so narrowly that only those people can access it, as a rule, because the thing that others are trying to access doesn’t even exist anymore, having been defined into oblivion. If you tell us what art should do and be, you tell us who can make it.
Does this mean we should not showcase art that has some sort of social message? No, that’s preposterous!18 To protect this biome, it may be that we must bring in those who have been excluded, and they may have a message to send to society, or a part of it. They may have what the ecosystem has been deprived of. And, they may belong there; they may have been forced to leave. This is just effective land management, the rebuilding of a damaged artistic ecosystem.
But that’s a problem too, thinking land can be managed. The phrase land management reeks of Masterly euphemism. Rather than Management, I suggest we seek understanding, and caretaking. We seek to understand, and protect, not according to our terms, but according to the ecosystem’s own agency (an ecosystem that we are a part of, but not wholly synonymous with). We don’t manage this psychic terrain, unless we nudge around the definition of manage.19 The better gatekeeper is of multiple terrains, master of nothing. They are liminal creatures too, guardians of a threshold: the sphinx, not the bureaucrat. They ask riddles on behalf of the biome itself.
Can the bureaucrat become the sphinx? What is the bureaucrat but another musical instrument, warped into a tool of oppression? Once, liminal creatures guarded our borderlands, and we listened to them. Now?
A liminal thing occupies transitional space. The cryptozoologically inclined may see liminality as a peak beyond the veil, a space where the material world and the spiritual (ie: occupied by spirits, ghouls, demons, ghosts, fairies, etc.) blur together. In some sense, everything is liminal, or can be understood liminally. We are all always in the midst of a transition, metamorphosis. All things are in flux. Our understanding of time becomes key to our understanding of transitions and thresholds.20 Liminality creates and is created by Funny Time.21 We may not see a stone (for example) as in any kind of transitional phase; we pass it every day and it is the same. Our temporal understanding of the stone is limited; expand temporality and see that stone deteriorate, move around, change, become something else. See everything transform. See the supposedly stationary earth roll like ocean waves. We can see evidence of this motion if we look, see the rolling of hills in a landscape as a frozen moment belonging to a slow motion swelling, breathing, the motion of the earth itself. And so forth.
Maybe we forget that if art is anything at all important (and maybe it isn’t), it is likely because it is a liminal thing. Art makes liminality apparent, allowing us (usually only briefly and barely) to peak beyond one kind of veil or threshold or another. For art to do this, people need to be able to do it, and for people to do it, they need a great deal of room to also not do it. They need to get it wrong. We cannot highlight these liminalities or exist within these Funny Times while rigidly chained to rules and regulations designed to erase or subjugate whatever is beyond that frightening veil. Language (and institutions) designed to subjugate and compartmentalize, parcelize and dominate, utilize and exploit, can harm these liminal pursuits, can colonize time and space in such a way that liminal thinking becomes near impossible.
Here, things become difficult to talk about in a straightforward manner. I falter. The above paragraph barely held together, and my thinking disintegrates as I try to move both ways through a strange gate. This disintegration is needed but it’s messy and usually results in something that can’t be easily summarized or explained, does not easily fall into knowable categories, resists definitions, and disappears, dies completely when forced to perform according to the rules of the Master, or SQT/ACT.22
When language becomes jargon, cryptids wither. Threatened, they lash out. We become infested, our interior a turmoil of unhappy demons. As a writer (ie bureaucrat) of artistic inclination, I suppose I’m meant to exist on both sides of a threshold, but too often, the categories of everyday life, including the category of art, force away from the liminal, because the liminal threatens the very validity of these categories, categories that seek to exert control in a necessarily authoritarian manner, by denying the liminality of all things, their malleability, their funniness. Our status-quo conception of time solidifies our reality into something that makes these silly ‘artistic’ or ‘mystical’ pursuits either a trivial hobby or something that must be justified, justified perhaps by saying, well yes, this is helpful to society, whatever that means. But art is not here to help society, or to liberate you. Art is demonic and wild. It is a glimpse beyond the veil pointing towards something that seems quite at odds with society and conceptual you-ness and me-ness.
This gives art too much credit. To think art is special, ie a specialty, is to compartmentalize it away from other aspects of life. The reason we have a hard time defining art is because art resists categorization.23 It resists it so thoroughly, that even not-art is art.
Maybe artistic thinking, liminal thinking, can liberate, but in order for that to work, we need to see that the artist is a liminal explorer traveling into the unknown. (We all are, it’s not a big deal.) They do not know what they are going to find there, and to ask them to specifically seek something for our collective use is another form of colonization (the colonization of rogue space, demonic space, spiritual space24). The liminal traveler is lost. The path is ragged, uneven, nonsensical, inelegant, and incompl—
Exit the wraith.
We don’t always come right out and say this, and so it may be that we (ie art organizations and society in general) do not, in fact, ask the arts to do any of these things, and I’ve misunderstood intentions to create an elaborate straw-person whom I control like a puppet. It’s possible I perceive an illusory world. I spare the reader of the primary text a few quotes from arts nonprofit mission statements, but grant the footnote reader that luxury: (a) “We believe that arts and culture are a tool for social change,” says ArtsFund; (b) “We bring art into people’s lives and help them understand its unique power to inspire creative thinking, which is crucial to understanding and solving our world’s complex problems,” says the Seattle Art Museum. (c) These mission statements are often dull and adopt a language that seems to say as little as possible, lest they box the speaker into a corner; they are difficult, then, to sift through, and that’s all I can muster, for now. Maybe I’m cherry picking data and maybe it’s just me: only I want art to liberate, even though I know that it won’t, can’t, and shouldn’t have to. (d) I also might note an ad for Gage Academy of Art that claims, “Art is the answer,” though doesn’t clarify what it’s an answer to. Presumably, then, art is Thee Answer, which is a lot of pressure to put on artists, who, to this writer, seem better at posing or inspiring questions than providing Big–A Answers.
Briefly we note how white progressives also look to the spirituality of indigenous peoples and peoples of color to “enlighten” themselves. I sense a strive for spiritual authenticity (or just hipness) that drives gentrification of places, forms, psychic spaces. So, is the white progressive fetishizing the art from non-white or non-middle class sources, using it as a sort of virtue signal, or exploiting it for their own so-called spiritual gain? I do sometimes believe this happens, but I think in most cases, intentions are good and sincere. (I’m at odds with myself here; part of me believes very few of their intentions are good and sincere. I believe mine are, but of course I do.) Ultimately, there is a small group of people who have enormous amounts of wealth, and they do not arrive at such a position by being good and sincere, I fear. The bureaucrats work for them, in most cases. They do not work for the artist, and here, artist means only a person who wants to give something to the world that is good. A good thing is hard to define.
Actually, they’re pretty skilled, re: hypnosis. What they lack is imagination. For more on brainwashing, please see: “The Incomprehensible Factory Apogee: Or, Quiet Quitting the Internet,” which is somewhere hidden on the Internet (ironically).
There are degrees of safety. We need to cross a frightening liminal boundary, but before we do so, it’s best that we’re otherwise in good health and good spirits. Right? Theater of Cruelty is theater before it’s transgressive, “cruel”, or ecstatic.
So says someone quoting Walt Whitman.
I am not a rogue bureaucrat. I am only a writer. I am vanilla white and no sort of gender rebel. My deviations, transgression, and atypical transformations are mostly cognitive. Here, I am the rogue bureaucrat, and it is not simply a pretending, a make-believe. It’s a make-real, even if only briefly, and only with your consent. It is ultimately up to you, whether you want any of this to be real for you. I aim to be easily dismissed. This is not due to a lack of confidence (the writer as human suffers from this, as many humans do, but the rogue bureaucrat does not); the rogue bureaucrat aims to be easily dismissed as a gesture of submissive humility. I honestly can’t follow what’s going on here anymore. I don’t know who I am and therefore refuse to let you feel like you know. Is that a problem for you?
Reminders: (a) Pretending and mockery are at odds and cultural context sometimes makes it difficult for one person’s attempts at pretending to not be something of a mockery, so play nice; (b) the child playing make-believe is sincere in their transformation, even if they know it is temporary. Please see also footnote 10, below. I don’t want the reader to misunderstand: a transgender person is not pretending to be a different gender just as a person of color is not pretending to be a person of color. They are being (and depending on how we think about these things, becoming, in maybe a Deleuzean sense, as far as this writer understands, which is not that far). Read onward for inadequate elaboration.
I refer here to the controversy surrounding Isabel Fall’s short story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” which I have not read yet, and so cannot comment on whether the story is transphobic, as some have thought, though the author is trans. I can imagine a scenario wherein a trans person uses a hurtful meme meant that disparages trans people (a meme which lends the story its title and context) and transforms it into something else, something better. The controversy around the story seems to stem more from the nature of social media, which thrives on mis-understanding. But now is not the time to discuss that.
My games of war veered toward the fantastic and could more accurately be considered forms of monster hunting. Sometimes (pretty often) the discovered monster is only misunderstood, and allies with the (so-called) hunter to face the real villain (usually a man trying to steal a treasure, or a man using evil magic to control people). This is more-or-less the plot to my third book and its sequel, The Lost Treasure and The Way Home, written between the ages of seven and eight (if memory serves). They’re not very good, mostly Indiana Jones knock-offs, but they have some nice twists. A subplot in my second book, Bryan Edenfield: Friends, Enemies, and More had a vaguely similar trajectory, and my unfinished pre-pubescent magnum opus, Death Cave, built itself knowingly and explicitly around such a conceit, with the monster arguably the real hero and the dumb human more of a clownish sidekick.
Almost. Games of make-believe have rules. We are never playing alone, even when we are. See footnote 7. The make-believe I speak of involves gleefully radical empathy. Games of roleplaying might (or might not) involve less radically inclusive empathy and take a mocking-tone; I’m not much of a roleplayer. In the sessions of make-believe I reference, the make-believer becomes all characters. In roleplaying, an individual may become only one, and so may imagine various imaginary opponents as thoroughly other, and transform in an escapist trajectory, transform (rather artificially at times) into an idealized thing. Certainly, there are, still, sometimes, nameless casualties and escapist idolizing even in radically empathetic make-believe, but the better one gets at it, the less this is so, and I, being something of a loner, was pretty good at it. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but the stories I played out in the back yard (or indoors with toys as avatars) were baroque and morally complex, until I became too old to not feel very embarrassed about playing such games. Perhaps not coincidentally, my writing became a lot better around this same time. I’ll also admit, while it’s just you and I, down here in the intimate private space of a footnote, that I played these games long after I was deemed by others to be “too old” for such things. I’m sure this worried people, and it sometimes resulted in mockery that left maybe a few psychic scars. But this isn’t a self-aggrandizing autobiographical pity party. Let’s move on.
In other words, we don’t have definitions waiting for words to be assigned to them. We begin using language with words vaguely defined, if defined at all. Only after the word has entered common usage do we dare define it. As my philosophy professor (Dr. William Nietmann) once told me, the dictionary is only a list of averages. Words are defined only after they are used, and their definitions are aggregates, collages, approximations. I’ve written about this elsewhere, so end digression.
This is complicated. Who we are is not always evident. Sometimes it takes a person their entire life to figure out who they are. There are degrees of knowing. Further, societal structures and certain civilized constraints strangely stand in the way of something that should be straightforward: being. This has gotten so out of hand, entire organized religions form to counteract it, an entire wellness industry tries to sell us something that need not cost anything: self awareness, being. I oversimplify drastically, lest we be here all day. It could be that being is itself sorta illusory; we might think more in terms of becoming, of transformation and change (maybe that’s what some religions are about). Close observation of the universe (including the thing called Self) suggests that this is a fruitful path of inquiry, but again, we’ll be here all day...
Does this festoon too much preciousness and specialness upon the artist? Is this not ultimately very self serving? To dive into this question, please see the works of Basel Sunday. Also, read onward.
Also: how do we ask? I admit, these questions vex me too. Education is not a goal with a discreetly attained end. Education is ongoing. Answers unfurl as new questions.
The interior landscape of our own minds, for example, cannot be entered by others without our explicit guidance, but for in circumstances of extreme violation that usually result in severe trauma (ie ecological catastrophe within our psychological biomes).
The boundary of the self makes evolutionary sense, with nature favoring things that desire to continue and find purposeful joy in this ongoing process of transformation, but to become over-full with Self blinds us to mutant oscillations and porous boundaries, and thus threatens all life on earth, not to get too heavy on you, over and over again.
Another question that has been on my mind this whole time but which I will not quite arrive at within the confines of this essay: is art itself a Tool of the Master? The colonial history of art museums suggests maybe, but the inclinations of most artists that I’ve met suggests maybe not. I guess it’s complicated? The word art transforms what perhaps might be simple acts of ritual and care-taking that all of us partake in, in one way or another, transforms this into something rarefied, a specialty that can then be sold, or grant the holder of this specialty some elevated status. But perhaps this is the cynical part of me thinking such thoughts. What do we talk about when we talk about art? Mostly, I think we try (and sometimes fail) to talk about something beautiful. And what do we talk about when we talk about the beautiful? Potentially, everything.
Well, but: While I’m certainly not suggesting we forgo displaying art that is overtly a protest or enactment of social justice, I do think we need to stop making it any sort of requirement. I believe that, often, the most subversive works will appear, to most who experience them, to have nothing to do with this cause or another, but will, instead, subvert status quo thinking more subtly. These works will thus get ignored by Gatekeepers desiring “socially relevant” art, etc. When certain Gatekeepers ask for art that subverts the status quo, they get art that reflects their status-quo-desire to subvert the status quo. This is how capitalism makes rebellion a marketable trend, a saleable commodity. This is punk music used to sell cars or hip hop used to sell fast food. This is mass media platforms showcasing black arts while turning the art-making process into a commodified assembly-line process, and using algorithms that compartmentalize our identities in order to commodify our attention-spans. This is big box retailers displaying pride t-shirts while failing to pay livable wages, t-shirts displayed mostly to tap into new or emerging markets (or whatever language they use), t-shirts likely created by oppressed hands, belonging likely to people of color. I try to temper the cynical part of me that believes that the local art museum’s social justice rhetoric is of the same type as the above described scenarios. I try to temper that cynical part, that sees this in civic causes attempting to promote progressive messages via art while, meanwhile, giving tax breaks to tech companies and failing to give housing to people in need. The cynical part of me is very cynical and not always right, but I think he’s worth listening to. There are people with legitimately good intentions, who are acting wisely, in all of these institutions, but some of these institutions are so entrenched in Masterdom that the only good thing for them to do is to cease to exist.
Some words are so etymologically tainted that they’re maybe best retired, depending on context. Some words have become weapons and remain weapons in most hands, even if those hands are well intentioned. Put down the weapon, I think. But, a weapon in my hands may not be a weapon in yours. We are not, as individuals, totally in charge of the manner in which language transforms, but we’re not totally at its whim either. Our ancestors have graced us with lineages of use, and misuse. It is probably wise to know, but it is also admittedly pretty difficult sometimes.
To take things back to Jasmine Pulido’s essay. See Part One.
Patent Pending.
See, Part One.
Here again I reference the works of Basel Sunday, who is an imaginary person.
Demonic space resists, and our suite of reasons produce monsters. We suffer. We are suffering. To be continued.