In a major publishing event we are proud to announce that PENICILLIN magazine have won the exclusive serialisation rights to M.T.White’s new as-yet-unpublished book ‘THE ARTIST’S FORTITUDE’, in a bidding war of unprecedented ferocity and confusion. I actually only got up to adjust a wardrobe malfunction in my trousers but the auctioneer interpreted my frenzied movements as the winning bid. I couldn’t have been happier though, on reflection.
“The Artist's Fortitude is not only a superb aesthetic essay, but a must if you are an artist and you feel like you are struggling in your path.”
Yugen
Which of us isn’t?
Today we start with a brief introduction from the master, an appetiser for the goodies to follow, which I intend to present in short weekly instalments, so that should keep us going for the best part of 5 years or so I expect. One page of M.T.White gold is enough for anyone in one sitting. They then must get up & take a walk around town to calm their storm-tossed souls. We all know that.
The Artist’s Fortitude
By
M.T. White
“The mass nature of today’s culture is destructive, and the artist will inevitably be among the first to suffer from it. Yet it is the same artist who will have the fortitude to stand firm.”—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Compulsion
I don’t quite remember when, but it was sometime in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I can’t remember the particular program, but I’m fairly certain it was on IFC—but it might’ve been Sundance. I’m certain the film director being interviewed in an audience setting was Ang Lee. Someone of college student age asked if he had any words of encouragement for aspiring filmmakers. Lee replied in the negative. He said (paraphrasing), if someone aspired to be a filmmaker, then they will not need any inspiring words, they will just do it. You don’t need words of inspiration to assist you.
So, why write a book like this?
For starters, I found Lee’s answer itself, well, inspiring. He avoided triteness, and got down to base practicality: You either want it or you don’t. After all, he had his own bumpy road to becoming a filmmaker. After some youthful promise, he floundered in creative inertia for years, spending most of his time in his kitchen cooking while his wife, a scientist, supported them. It wasn’t until he was 37 when he made his first film Pushing Hands. It wasn’t until he was 46 when he turned Kung Fu highbrow with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The pragmatism of his answer says, you or me have the power to do something similar—especially today, with the technology at our fingertips. No matter your circumstance, if you want to make art, it is in your power to do it. There’s really no need for “inspiring” words from Lee or anyone else. That’s probably the right kind of inspiration a room of callow youths need to hear. They, maybe everyone, need to hear a form of unvarnished truth.
And maybe that’s the real reason for this book: Unvarnished truth.
There seems to be a glut of motivational books out there—even ones geared towards artists. Books where the good intention of inspiration gives false or unrealistic expectations to the reader—especially when they attach divine favor and significance to the endeavors. That isn’t to diminish the divine in any way. I’m not an atheist for one. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the main inspiration for this book, was himself a devout Christian. But he endured many hardships: Poverty, war, prison camps, persecution in the Soviet Union and ostracization from American intelligentsia. These hardships helped bring him spiritual and creative truths. But the truths didn’t come easily. Nothing in his life was sugar coated.
Unfortunately, everything seems sugar coated today. Blunt truth, harsh truth or even truth in general, seems frowned upon. I believe one of the artists’ purposes is to discover, learn and communicate truth—at least a respective truth they have learned or observed—through creative means. But, as Solzhenitsyn said, we have a “mass culture” where other concerns, like entertainment, are enshrined as all important.
Parallel with mass culture is mass access. As stated above, ANYONE can explore an art form at relatively low cost compared to the past. Due to advances in technology, there has been a democratization of the arts. While some, like my friend and filmmaker Cody Clarke, herald this low barrier to entry as a greater opportunity for actual art to be created (with cameras and the like being just as accessible as paint brushes and pens), I’m not so sure. It just creates a glut of content, making it more difficult for a quality work to gain notice.
But this isn’t an argument for positives and negatives. Mass culture, mass access, democratization of the arts, et cetera, is a fact. No use complaining about it. And honestly, most are not using their unheard of technological privilege
to make art.
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