Introduction
The question of the relation between the artist and their work is a difficult one and one that has been the particular focus of attention for some time in Western culture. French philosopher Michel Foucault notes that before the Renaissance in Europe, the artist existed in anonymity and it was the subject of their work or the hero of their tales who was the focus of attention. However, since the Renaissance, the artist has become a hero in his or her own right. Contemporary celebrity culture is perhaps but one facet of this heroisation of the artist. (1) The question raises particular difficulties in relation to those artists, namely actors, who have become perhaps unduly heroised in a culture that is dominantly based on visual texts. Like no other artist, the actor uses his or her own personality and body to produce their art. It is small wonder that there often exists a confusion between the actor and the work they produce. The audience expects the actor, indeed the artist in general, to be the exemplary hero of their own life, just as they exist at the heroic centre of their own work.
This confusion is perhaps what lies at the base of celebrity culture. The actor/artist/celebrity becomes an ethical model whom people strive to emulate in a culture which sets less store on moral codes and institutions of authority, than on private self-fashioning. Eminent actor Christopher Walken notes in response to a question as to whether he uses movies as a platform for his own political views: 'I don't want to sell anything. As an actor, it's tricky. You have this platform and it has to do with your face, your charisma. It's tricky when you endorse something because people are liable to believe you. Be careful.' (2)
The work and the artist's life exist at two different levels - they are not the same thing. The way Walken distinguishes and relates these two different orders, the work and the artist's own person, has always been one of the interesting features of his work as much in interviews as in his films. As he remarks earlier in 1987 employing the widely used idea of an actor and his instrument:
"Actors are unusual in that they are sort of like musicians,"... "but they carry their instrument around with them. You hear the expression, 'You're always acting, you're acting all the time.' I was always taken aback by that because I thought, 'I'm NOT acting all the time. I'm being perfectly like myself.' But on the other hand, if you are an actor, you've got your own violin with you all the time, so that if you're dishonest with people in a social situation, you are apt to be dishonest with them onstage, too. Actors have to practice all the time. In the last few years I've started to think about it that way. You have to remember that every time you talk to somebody, that's the quality you are going to bring to whatever it is you do when you work. Actors have to stay in touch with themselves. It's a cliché but it's true." (3)
What is interesting about this statement is that Walken reverses a more common way of viewing this process. Here, he is suggesting that it is the ethical work that is done on the self that is of essential importance in the production of art. The general view tends to be that, for the artist, the primary work focus should be the art itself (ie the actor's performance). The personal life of the artist merely wraps itself around the production of art in an accidental and subsidiary fashion. Any personal quirks which either pre-exist or emerge in the wake of the work of art are to be tolerated as necessary preconditions or byproducts of its production (the mad or tortured genius etc.). (4) Foucault offers another view of this relation. In his first statement, artistic/intellectual endeavour transforms its creator as a person. In the second, the living of life becomes a work of art in its own right. But as he indicates elsewhere in his work - it is an artistic effort which has ethical force and consequences.
'I never think quite the same thing, because for me my books are experiences, in a sense that I would like to be as full as possible. An experience is something that one comes out of transformed. If I had to write a book to communicate what I was already thinking, I would never have the courage to begin. I only write a book because I don't know exactly what to think about this thing that I so much want to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms what I think. Each book transforms what I was thinking when I finished the previous book. I am an experimenter, not a theorist.' (5)
He also writes:
'What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?' (6)
to be continued
Foucault 'The Father's No'"
Earlier in his career Foucault provides a historical account of the way the West has drawn the relation between the artist and the work. This is what he has to say:
'When Christian Europe first began to name its artists, it gave their existence the anonymous form of the hero, as if the name could only play the pale role of chronological memory within the cycle of perfect rebeginnings. Vasari's Vite sets itself the task of recalling the immemorial past, and it follows a prescribed and ritual order. Genius makes itself known from childhood, not in the psychological form of precocity, but by virtue of its intrinsic right to be ahead of the times and to only come to light fully fledged. Genius is not born, but appears without intermediary or duration in the rupture of history. Like the hero, the artist breaks time apart in order to put it back together with his own hands. This appearance of genius, however, is not without incident: one of the most frequent problems is the episode of misrecognition/recognition. Giotto was a shepherd and was sketching his sheep on a rock when Cimabue saw him and paid homage to his hidden royalty (in medieval tales, the son of kings, living amongst the peasants who have adopted him, is suddenly recognized by the grace of a mysterious mark). An apprenticeship follows, which is more symbolic than real being reduced to the singular and always unequal confrontation between the master and the disciple - the old man thinks he is giving everything to the adolescent who already possesses all. From the first clash the relationship is reversed: the child, marked by the sign, becomes the master of the master, and symbolically kills the latter, because the master's reign was merely a usurpation, and the shepherd without a name has inviolable rights. Verrochio abandoned painting after Leonardo painted the angel of the Baptism of Christ, and the aging Ghirlandaio withdrew in his turn, in favor of Michelangelo. But access to sovereignty imposes yet further detours. The artist must pass through the further test of secrecy ‚ but this time it is a voluntary test. Like the hero who fights in black armor, his visor lowered, the artist hides his work and reveals it only upon completion. This was what Michelangelo did with his David and Uccello with the fresco above the gates of San Tommaso. Then the keys of the kingdom are handed over and they are those of Demiurgy. The painter produces a world that is the double, the fraternal rival, of our own. In the instantaneous ambiguity of illusion, this world takes its place and has the same value as our own. On the roundel of Ser Piero Leonardo painted monsters whose powers of horror were as great as any found in nature. And in this return, in this perfection of the identical, a promise is fulfilled: man is delivered, as Filippo Lippi, according to the legend, was really liberated on the day he painted a supernatural resemblance of his master.
The Renaissance had an epic perception of the artist's individuality. This perception conflated already archaic figures of the medieval hero and Greek themes of the initiatory cycle. On this boundary appeared the ambiguous and overloaded structures of the secret and of discovery, of the intoxicating force of illusion, of a return to a nature that is basically other, and of access to new land which is revealed to be the same. The artist only emerged from the centuries old anonymity of epic balladeers by taking on the forces and the meaning of those same epic values. The heroic dimension passed from the hero to the one whose task it had been to represent him, at a moment when Western culture itself had become a world of representations. The artistic work no longer took its sole meaning from being a monument which figured like a memory in stone across the ages; it now belonged to the legend it had once commemorated. It was itself a "heroic deed" because it conferred eternal truth on men and on their ephemeral actions and also because it referred to the marvellous order of the artist's life as its natural birthplace. The painter was the first subjective inflection of the hero. The self-portrait was no longer a furtive participation by the artist in the corner of the painting, in the scene he was representing. It became, at the very center of the painting, the work of the work where the beginning joins the end, in the absolute heroic transformation of the very one who allowed heroes to appear and to continue to exist.
With this heroic deed, the artist thus established a relationship of the self to the self that the hero could never experience. Heroism became the primary manifestation - at the frontier of what appears and what is represented - as a way of doing only one thing, for oneself and for others, with the truth of the work. A precarious yet ineradicable unity. It is a unity which opens at its very foundation, the possibility of all dissociations. It allows for the "distraught hero" whose life or passions were continually in conflict with his work (this is Filippo Lippi tormented by the flesh who painted a woman whom he couldn't have, to "quench his passion"). Then there is the "alienated hero," who loses himself in his work and also loses sight of the work itself (for example Uccello, who "could have been the most elegant and original painter since Giotto had he devoted to human and animal figures the time lost in his studies of perspective"). There is also the "misunderstood hero," rejected by his peers (like Tintoretto who was driven away by Titian and spurned his whole life by the Venetian painters). These avatars, which gradually traced the dividing line between the artist's deeds and the deeds of heroes, give rise to the possibility of an ambiguous stance where it is a question at one and the same time and in a mixed vocabulary of both the work and what is not the work. Between the heroic theme and the expanses in which it is lost, a space opens which the sixteenth century begins to suspect, and which our own era cheerfully investigates in keeping with its basic forgetfulness. It is the space which is ultimately occupied by the "madness" of the artist; it is a madness that identifies the artist with his work in rendering him alien to others - to all those who remain silent - and it also situates the artist outside that same work rendering him blind and deaf to the things he sees and even to his own words. It is no longer a matter of that Platonic ecstasy which renders main insensible to illusory reality in order to place him in the full light of the gods, but of a subterranean relationship where the work of art and that which is not it formulate their exteriority in the language of a dark interiority. At this point, that strange enterprise we call the "psychology of the artist" becomes possible ‚ an enterprise always haunted by madness even when the pathological dimension is absent. It is inscribed against the background of that fine heroic unity that gave names to the first painters, but it also measures their separation, negation, and oblivion. The psychological dimension in our culture is the negation of epic perceptions. And we are now committed if we want to question what an artist was, to this diagonal and illusive path which allows mere glimpses of that old, mute alliance between the work and the "other than the work" whose ritual heroism and immutable cycles were once recounted to us by Vasari.
Our discursive understanding tries to restore the language of this unity. But is it lost to us? Or so fully incorporated as to become inaccessible to us in the monotony of discourses on "the relationship of art and madness"? In their repetitiveness (I am thinking of Vinchon), in their poverty (I am thinking of the good Fretet as well as many others) such discourses are only possible because of this unity. At the same time, this unity is constantly masked, repulsed, and scattered through these repetitions. It is a unity which lies dormant within these discourses and forced by it into stubborn oblivion.' (7)
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