davidartemiw.com

art in balance

I have spent most of my life trying to figure out the two halves of my life: art and, for lack of a better term, commerce. How to resolve these two sides - these contradictions? I had always assumed that I had to choose one or the other. The two couldn’t co-exist.

So I would choose one. And I’d be happy for a time. But only for a time.

I would grow restless. The other side of me, left dormant, would begin to stir. And then take over. Leaving the other to wither.

With photography, I believe I’ve found the balance. Answered the riddle I’ve been puzzling for nearly 15 years.

I was getting there when I first read this Hugh MacLeod’s “How to be Creative“ but I suspect I might not have if I hadn’t.

In point 7, “Keep your day job,” Hugh writes:

It’s balancing the need to make a good living while still maintaining one’s creative sovereignty. My M.O. is gapingvoid (”Sex”), coupled with my day job (”Cash”).

I’m thinking about the young writer who has to wait tables to pay the bills, in spite of her writing appearing in all the cool and hip magazines…. who dreams of one day of not having her life divided so harshly.

Well, over time the ‘harshly’ bit might go away, but not the ‘divided’.

“This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.”

As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career starts moving ahead faster. I don’t know why this happens. It’s the people who refuse to cleave their lives this way- who just want to start Day One by quitting their current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author… Well, they never make it.

I remember being in a job interview once maybe ten years ago and the interviewer, a high-ranking executive at a large insurance company, asked me what it was that I really loved. At the time, I couldn’t get enough of baseball. My childhood passion had been reawakened and it was all that I thought about, all that I read about, where I spent all of my disposable income. And I liked to write.

My interviewer asked why I didn’t try and get work as a baseball writer. He told me that he loved canoing. That nothing would make him happier than to get paid to paddle around in his birch bark. I said that I didn’t want to take that risk. Baseball was a hobby. If I had to do it to pay the rent, would I really love it so much?

A few years later, I ignored my own thinking and took a job in another field that had been a hobby. And my fears have largely been unfounded.

That’s not to say things haven’t changed. I very clearly have a “job” now rather than a hobby. Even though I love it it’s not as all-consuming as it once was.

Philip Roth appears to disagree with MacLeod in this passage from his book, I Married a Communist. The scales will tip, must tip, he implies.

“Politics is the great generalizer,” Leo told me, “and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other - they are in an antagonistic relationship. … How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance? As an artist the nuance is your task. …the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. …to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself-for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized. …Art…disturbs the organization. Literature disturbs the organization. … It disturbs the organization because it is not general. … Generalizing suffering: there is Communism. Particularizing suffering: there is literature. In that polarity is the antagonism.”

Sex and cash. Art and politics. Can they co-exist? In one person?

Photography. I enjoy it immensely. I enjoy holding my camera, turning on the iPhone, and wandering the city for hours. I enjoy going places with my friends and strangers - gatherings - and, with my camera in hand, standing to the side and watching. I enjoy taking pictures that people like. But more so, that I like.

Perhaps the greatest benefit has been how photography has changed how I see the world.

There was a day back in July that I had wandered around downtown for hours. For hours and didn’t take a single photo. Nothing was interesting. Nothing remarkable. I headed for home.

Walking past Nathan Phillips Square where I had been scores of times before. Debating whether to walk through or to walk past. I walked through.

I discovered, by the Peace Garden, something I had never noticed before - a giant copper sphere, a sundial.

The sphere was a gift to the City from Nathan Phillips.

 The inscription reads: “Presented to the City of Toronto by Nathan Phillips, Q.C., Mayor of Toronto 1955-1962 In appreciation of the opportunity to serve.”

The camera, the tool of my art, required me to pause. To slow down. To discover detail. Nuance. To particularize.

And, in so doing, to discover that this man, a giant in the history of the City, the man they named the Square after, a politician understood nuance. Understood that it wasn’t about him. It was about the City he led. He understood that public service really is an opportunity, a privilege, a responsibility.

In a year when there have been so many elections with more still to come, Mr. Phillips’ message is one we should work hard to remember.

Reflecting now, are MacLeod and Roth arguing? Are they even talking about the same thing?

MacLeod is arguing that your day job, the commerce, the politics, needs to exist in service of art.

Roth argues, on the other hand, that art cannot serve the commerce or the politics, because then it ceases to be art.

And there lies MacLeod’s cleavage.

And, in the end, an agreement, rather than an argument.

How’s that for nuance?