Work: Surviving the Arts

 
Exploring issues of sustainability in the arts.
 
~by Scott Pinkmountain
 
Excessive Celebration

It’s football season. Or was when I was writing this. I have a shameful, dirty secret, which is that I love football. It’s a newish infatuation that’s grown rapidly over the last few years, so maybe it will dwindle as infatuations often do. I’m kind of hoping it does because I’d like my Sundays and Monday nights back.

A big part of what I love about football is the potential at the beginning of each game, each play, that a new combination of actions is about to occur, and it could be anything. It could be a useless plodding scrum, or it could be a majestic, near-super-human record-breaking feat. The excitement at getting to witness some unique, spontaneous moment in real time is the same thing that drew me to improvised music in my teens. It’s all about the stakes, the risk, the unpredictability, the desire to accomplish the near impossible, and the potential that it could happen at any time.

I also love the visceral physicality, the dramatic arc of a game, the controlled chaos, the infinite variations on a theme, the naked emotion displayed on players’ faces. I love watching people who are 100% present and absolutely engaged with what they doing. It’s a rare thing to see in public, and I find it awe-inspiring and quite beautiful.

Like I said up top, I’m not proud of my infatuation. There are, of course, many, many things wrong with football – things that make me cringe or look away while I’m watching – heinous political implications, inexcusable misogyny and violence, capitalism at its greedy soul-gobbling (and body-destroying) worst. I won’t catalog them all here, but I want to touch on one thing in particular, a small one in the scheme of things, but relevant to me as an artist; excessive celebration.

I don’t know enough about football to identify exactly what qualifies a penalty for excessive celebration (there really is such a thing but it’s almost never enforced). I’m purely using my own definition of the term, which basically includes all and any celebration except after winning a game and maybe a small, half fist-pump after scoring a touchdown. But players routinely freak the fuck out after almost every single play – the big one now seeming to be unbridled self-congratulations by defenders upon sacking the quarterback – dancing, skipping, waving their hands in the air at the crowd, striking Mr. Universe poses, all but pretending to defecate on the opposing players and back-kicking sod over their corpses.

There could easily be over 100 such displays for reasons of varying significance in any given game. It’s fatiguing and embarrassing to watch at the very least, largely in part because you know that half of the people wasting their precious mid-game energy running around pounding their chests like psychotic invincible champions are going to skulk off that field losers at the end of the afternoon.

The reasons I listed above for loving football are all qualities I admire and strive to cultivate in my own creative practice and work – spontaneity, physicality, dramatic tension, presence. Not so the celebration. Why not?

Fist-pumping self-congratulation does not generally go hand in hand (fist in fist?) with quality art. This begs the question of what makes quality art. My incomplete shortlist of ingredients includes work that: fosters empathy; expresses an awareness of mortality and insight into the value of life; offers a perspective that acknowledges the past and the future, others and the self, light and dark; reveals a nuanced spectrum of the lived experience, not an imbalanced over-valuing of the highs or lows; views others as having equal worth; diminishes hierarchies and self-pride; balances a belief in the self with an understanding and acceptance of one’s own limitation.

There’s certainly quality art that celebrates achievement and victory, but the really good stuff does so through recognizing our weakness, the difficulty in attaining success and the fragility of keeping it, its inherent impermanence, while simultaneously humanizing and inspiring empathy for the losing side, equivocating the victor and vanquished, pointing out that the one could just as easily be the other with the slightest turn of chance events. Otherwise it feels too deeply unknowing of itself, or hubristic, or one dimensional, or delusional, or jingoistic like one side “deserves to win,” which generally correlates with a naïve or exclusionary religious fanaticism. Though mainly it reads like propaganda for the artist, a hollow sales pitch for a surface representation with nothing substantial to back it up.

But on a more personal level, I find the shouted celebration at tiny, potentially insignificant successes tacky and gross. Like with pretty much everything though, the problem, I’m sure, is me. I’m wary of both public and private celebrations of anything but the most absolutely confirmed success, skeptical of the whole take-pride-in-what-you’ve-achieved-thus-far (even-if-it’s-not-yet-remotely-what-you-were-striving-for) culture, superstitious of jinxing an opportunity by mentioning its existence to anyone other than my wife (and even then only out of some self-inflicted marital obligation of constant full disclosure I’m sure my wife would be more than happy to see me overcome), turned off by self-laudatory behavior disguised as crowd-sourced support-seeking (I only got three offer letters, is that good???), nervous to pat my own back for fear of tweaking my neck.

To clarify, I’m talking about little victories. Yes, if I had a signed book or record contract in hand, I’d spike it through the goal posts and do the Cabbage Patch through the living, high fiving my wife, chest bumping the dog. But anything short of that – an agent agreeing to read a manuscript, a label expressing interest in an album I’ve sent them – no celebration allowed.

I recognize I might be on the extreme end of the spectrum. If any fraction of an inkling of potentially decent news might occasionally come through, I slather it in negative unlikelihoods and so thoroughly shut down my wife’s supportive enthusiasm that moderately good news often puts the house in an extremely bad mood. I have all kinds of rationalizations for this behavior, some of it maybe even legitimate.

With regard to private and internal celebration, I believe it works against my values and goals as an artist. My job as an artist is to try to remain humble so I can gain access to the quality creative ingredients I listed above, so I can see that I have more to learn, areas to develop, ideas to assimilate and grow from. I also need to always be clear that it’s the work itself that matters. Responding to each external, surface ripple (some minor perceived success) could send me off course, chasing some fleeting rush or stroke. Granted, I have to apply this aloof distance to negative news too if I want to be consistent. I’m a little more lenient on myself regarding reactions to negative work, generously allowing myself to wallow and sulk to my heart’s delight. Excessive pouting can maybe be the topic of a different column.

As for public celebration, well, I’ve had enough late game turnarounds to see the folly in dancing Gangnam Style each time I score a point. I landed an agent (!!!) for a project that we spent a year developing and then failed to sell (!!!). I’ve had “important” people express enthusiasm and interest for my novel, then sit on it for six months and pass without the slightest indication that they’d actually read a full page. I’ve twice had labels verbally and passionately commit to releasing albums of mine only to have them never respond to another email or phone call. Had I raced onto Facebook and Twitter to trumpet in all caps my awesomeness (the contemporary artists’ form of striking the Mr. Universe pose), how pathetic would I look later when that awesomeness remained undelivered on?

There is a spectrum though, and it’s hard to know how to behave. When is the right time to go out for a nice meal, or raise a glass in acknowledgment that even if the little morsel of good news doesn’t manifest in ABSOLUTE CRUSHING VICTORY, it’s maybe a sign that not all the effort is a total waste? When is my reluctance to let in a little light, to accept an I’m Proud Of You hug from my wife my just being a petulant, superstitious shit (always). Was landing that agent the time to open a bottle of champagne even though it didn’t yield anything concrete, and may never? Will selling a book be the right moment for the Veuve Clicquot, even though it could take years to actually come to print (assuming it doesn’t get scuttled or the publisher doesn’t go out of business, or the tides don’t rise biblically before then), or it might get horrible, or worse, no reviews and even fewer sales, which could make it insurmountably difficult to ever sell a second book in this and several subsequent lifetimes, so I’m told.

You see the conundrum.

There’s some magical ratio of appropriate acceptance of positive potential tempered by realistic perspective of actual manifestation. I certainly don’t claim to have achieved it, but I know for sure it doesn’t look anything like a 350 lb man in bright white hip-huggers with arms the size of weaponized toddlers baring his teeth, attempting to curdle the blood of enemies (he has no reason to oppose other than that they are paid by a different franchise within the same organization) with deafening murder screeches while shimmying a macabre Charleston partway through a game he will likely lose though still be exorbitantly compensated for playing regardless.

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Scott Pinkmountain is a writer and musician living in Pioneertown, CA. His writing has appeared on This American Life, in The Rumpus, A Public Space, HTMLGIANT, and other publications, and he hosts the Make/Work podcast for The Rumpus. He has also released dozens of albums of both instrumental music and songs. He works as a music analyst for Pandora Radio. He can be found at www.scottpinkmountain.com and @spinkmountain.

Aaron Hawn is a photographer and musician who lives in Pioneertown, CA. In 2012, after cycling the back roads of Louisiana and Texas, he released a book of photography called, “Warm Dome”. Hawn’s images frequently feature barren and personal landscapes. www.aaronhawn.com