Spoken and written influences of the week…
On ‘This is Magritte’ [1] a radio programme, Gavin Turk suggested that being labelled an ‘artist’ could be restrictive. When discussing how the surrealist artist René Magritte would categorise himself Gavin Turk said ‘I think [at] the moment that Magritte would quite easily confess to be being an artist he would feel something would be lost‘ The choice of the word ‘confess’ was interesting. Could it be the risk of being labelled an artist? The risk of the negative connotations, such as narcissism or sentimentality. It can be difficult to use creative ability to express the individual experience; there is the risk the ‘expressed’ could appear separate to or above the common shared experience. I suppose the thing that can be unique is the creative ability. Narcissistic?
The following is taken from Doris Lessings (1972) preface to her novel The Golden Notebook [2]:
‘At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about ‘petty personal problems’ was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one’s own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions – and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas – can’t be yours alone. The way to deal with the problem of ‘subjectivity’, that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible and marvellous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a private experience – or so you think of it when still a child, ‘I am falling in love’, ‘I am feeling this or that emotion, or thinking that or the other thought’ – into something much larger: growing up is after all only understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.’ (LESSING 1972, p. 13)
[1] BBC RADIO 4. 2011. This is not Magritte, [radio programme]. BBC Radio 4. 16 June 2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b011vh4t/
[2] LESSING, D. 1972. The Golden Notebook, London: Harper Perennial.
