(This article about photography and art originally appeared in LensWork #48 (Aug-Sep 2003). Reproduced with permission of the author.) Parsing the Good: What Makes Good Work Good? by Sean Kernan © 2003 Sean Kernan (posted December 2, 2003) When we look at the creative work in our media-soaked world we find, salted here and there, some fairly good work, and also a little really good work. But if we look around out beyond the reaches of the commercial to the realm of art, we can find work that is just another kind of good altogether. It stays with us, opens us to new things, enlarges our sense of the world. Call it capital G Good. That it even exists fascinates me perhaps because the mystery of making it is so deep, and because it suggests the possibility of transcending my limitations. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, trying to puzzle how really good art arises. Now, when talk about a kind of platonic Good I sound to myself like a pie-eyed innocent. In this difficult age of ours (arguably no more so than Plato's) the notion that there is Good can seem incredibly naive. But I'm talking about art, and art doesn't stand apart. Instead it lets us see into it in a way that nothing else does. It can be difficult, thorny, annoying, and beautiful, but its effect is that after we see it we're not quite the same person we were before. Literally. Of course, thinking about art at all is like thinking about smoke. When you try to break it down, its components blur and drift. Even so, trying to understand art offers insights that are different from analysis. Art starts with a small piece of existence, and by concentrating on it, enlarges it into a kind of gateway to everything else. A really good painting, a piece of music, a poem, a novel, or a sculpture provokes a larger, unifying awareness of objects, lives, atmospheres, even things that could exist but don't yet. When it's good, then, art is not a decoration or a possession but a powerful means of understanding. If there is some way we might recognize what's good in art and understand how it does its work--that's surely worth undertaking. It calls us out beyond what we know, out where we can begin to encompass life and the universe, being and becoming. Whew! I mean, doesn't that sound more interesting than coming up with some ideas for a client who only really cares what they cost? To be sure, the commercial work called "creative" occurs in the vicinity of art and partakes of some of its techniques and qualities. But it feels like it is always done at the back door, while the real stuff that gives Art its capital A goes on deep inside the house. So that's where I went looking for some understanding. Perhaps, I thought, I can find a way to bring it back out to the porch with us to use when we do our work for others. Or we might just contrive to stay inside. In any case, the investigation might help us recall why we began working with photography in the first place. Ways of Intelligence The first step in this investigation is to ask how our intelligence operates in making art. We do it in ways that are simply not measured by the predominant linguistic and mathematical tests of intelligence, but that are real and central to making it. Howard Gardner, a Harvard educator and a McArthur Fellow, calls them multiple intelligences in his book of the same name. For example, we have the body-kinesthetic intelligence that is the province of the dancer and the athlete. It lets one know, without calculating, just when to release a ball toward a basket that is behind one's back while moving through the air, or how to sculpt a perfect shape with the body for a split-second with a dance partner, or how to move the mind's eye through a space to construct a shot for a film. Outside the realm of art it also serves the sailor, the surgeon, and the engineer. Because intelligence tests don't measure this capability, we tend not even to call it intelligence, but Gardner argues that we should. In his expanded list of intelligences he also cites the interpersonal (directors), intrapersonal (novelists), musical (composers and musicians), along with the more familiar verbal (poets) and the mathematical (scientists). None of these intelligences excludes any other. To the contrary, they interact in complex (and beautiful) ways, and it seems clear that both making and apprehending art calls on several of them. Useful Obsession Herman Melville wrote that sadness starts with having no great enterprise. The opposite of sadness (which I would call engagement rather than happiness) lies in having some question, a bright obsession that goads one to creative action. If the artist doesn't have such an enterprise, he goes out and finds one. We're built to do this, and to work at it hard. I almost wrote that doing artwork makes us "feel good," but "good" doesn't seem to be what artists feel when they work. There's a fantasy that good artists experience work as a serene progression, but all accounts suggest that it's more like staggering between the poles of anxiety and drudgery. I've looked at work that I'd be thrilled to have made, and I know that its maker felt nothing but the struggle. And apparently it never ends. W.H. Auden said, "A poet thinks he's a poet when he's putting the last touches on a new poem. The moment before he's a potential poet, the moment after he's one who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever." Maybe it's sad that artists never get the same enjoyment that others get from what they do. Maybe it's not. I don't know. But I've read so many artists describing their work as difficult (Van Gogh described it somewhere as "coal miner's work"), that it occurs to me that the dissatisfaction may be, perversely, a part of what drives one on to new work. I think it's also true that the artist gets something from a work that no one else does--a sense of parentage, for one thing, and exhilarating views of the process that are hidden within the final work. For example, I have a friend who makes sculpture by pouring molten glass into matrices fashioned of found objects of old wood, metals, stone, etc. The results are stunning in a gallery, but only she sees them through the burst of flame and acrid smoke that accompany the exact--and uncertain--moment when the hot glass meets the matrix and becomes something that transcends material and idea. (Or, occasionally, doesn't.) One can't help but notice that there's also something about working intensely that is as exhilarating as a runner's high, that leavens the struggle. Perhaps working hard and deeply releases the same pleasure-inducing endorphins that running does, energizing us and making us crave more endorphins. So if we don't get happy working, then what do we get? Perhaps a level of satisfaction that we want ever more of; perhaps a strange moment of separation and pride when this creative thing that was born in us goes out on its own path through the world. As Carl Van Doren once said, at a certain point a poem no longer belongs to the person who wrote it but to the person who reads it. Intention as Power In the only real AHA! moment I've ever had about making art I learned that when an artist goes at his work with ferocious focus and power, that very power attracts others who come in contact with it. This realization came from an experiment I did with a photography class, and when it hit me it was like a flash of lightening illuminating an unexpected landscape. Here is the experiment: I asked a friend, [actor] Alan Arkin, to come and lead the class in some theater exercises. We all spent the morning doing improvisations, and it was quite delicious to see photographers pushed out of their cherished observer position and made to interact with each other. But the thing that at once became strikingly clear was that when a student really committed to his part in a scene, set self-consciousness aside and became the game, the very intensity of that commitment brought the game alive. And if one person did this strongly, other actors became more engaged too. And when that happened the spectators followed, and the scene became reality for everyone. On the other hand, if just one of the actors couldn't make that act of imaginative commitment to it, if he felt foolish and kept slipping out of it--asides and jokes to the audience, that kind of thing--the whole imaginative structure crashed to the ground like a dying kite. The power of this focus is easily visible in a great actor's work. Take a look at De Niro, or Streep, or Arkin. They can just stare into the air, and you'll wait and watch them, watch their very intensity, try to see what they're thinking, what they'll do next. It's part of what makes great actors great. But afterward I saw a more subtle correlation with photography and all the arts. I realized that all the best artists I know, in any medium, have that same intensity. Their energy alone creates an artistic reality and engages us in what they're doing, sweeps us along with them into that reality. Their art has a sense of having been made at high intensity, and it engenders an intensity in viewers. (I think of Joseph Cornell and Richard Serra, two different birds if there ever were different birds). Even their sketches and notes will have it. Picasso's notebooks positively vibrate. The Change So a good artist focussing on doing good work catches us up and brings us to an new place in ourselves that we never knew was there. We are enlarged by this excursion, a little or a lot. Big art, big change. Big bang. But a change absolutely has to take place first in the artist. Perhaps the very function of art, for the artist at least, is that change and enlargement of consciousness. There is a story that when Mondrian was painting over some old canvases he had lying around, a friend reproached him for covering up perfectly good paintings. "I'm not trying to make paintings," he said. "I'm trying to find things out." This art-as-change-of-mind idea moves me close toward a baseline definition of good art, and it has been confirmed again and again. But I'm just an artist; I couldn't prove any of this. Then I found the work of Antonio Damaso, a neurologist who is engaged in the mapping of brain activity using scanning techniques that show the brain's response to stimulation. Damasio has written an extraordinary book called The Feeling of What Happens that attempts to locate the phenomenon of consciousness. In it he says that "we become conscious when the organism's representation devices exhibit a specific kind of wordless knowledge--the knowledge that the organism's own state has been changed by an object." There it was. Damasio wasn't talking about art but about consciousness, yet he seemed to describe the mechanism of art as it exercises its effect. I take him to mean that the response generated by a stimulus (a painting or sculpture, or an organization of sounds, as in music, or words, or an installation) does not end when the encounter ends, that the neural structure of the brain does not simply drop back into to its pre-stimulated shape. Instead, it stays stretched, as does our consciousness. I think Mondrian understood that this stretch to a state of heightened awareness is the real point of the artist's making art. As the great painter and teacher Robert Henri said, "The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence." By the way, Damasio is not talking specifically about art. He doesn't require that the organism see something interesting, and the change doesn't have to be "good". The act of seeing can set a capability in motion, bring it alive as a tool of investigation and consciousness. A neuro-biologist friend told me that a kitten kept in the dark during a specific week or two in its development would never develop the ability to process visual information. The eyes would be mechanically sound, but the kitten would be blind. Take that thought further and imagine a more developed organism (you) encountering something everyday, say a cinderblock. Nothing new there, so no change. But if you see a new artwork, your mind has to shift and change to encompass it. When I first saw Mark Rothko's work I had a kind of luminous experience. There was no subject and no idea that I could articulate, but there was this great presence. I looked and looked, and then I saw the work, just saw it, and had the wonderful experience of stimulation and enlargement. Rothko's work had changed my mind. And the change let me look at that painting, his other paintings, as well as the color of light in air, differently. My reward was the change, the enlargement itself. The Place of Analysis Can we get an understanding of art through criticism? Certainly it will help us talk about art, but analysis uses a different part of the brain than the work's creator used. So it's not the same thing as having the experience, and it doesn't provoke the experience. (Note that Damasio referred to "wordless knowledge.") And art is, I think, only about experience. So analysis offers us a useful tool, but not, I think, a primary tool. When I start the first critique in a workshop, people look at the photos pinned up on the walls and start at once trying to fit them into the matrix of photography, look for ways they relate to things they've seen in some book or gallery. They look for what they know, and that's the wrong place to look for new work. So I ask a question that gets to the heart of our purpose, and that question is, "Is the picture alive?" To give us life it must have life within it. It can spring from what we know, but it can't depend on givens to do the work. Good work changes the mind, a little or a lot. If it is "good", if it is alive, it means that the photographer somehow had to get into a state of aware aliveness, had to see what the viewer would not have. Knowledge and critical thinking can serve to clarify a vision, but the vision comes first. It is in this state of awareness that good work is churned. The "good" of the work can't be planned. (I heard a composer call this "the fallacy of intention.") It arises from the doing. You slide paint around, or string words like beads, then restring them over and over. With persistence, something starts to happen, you see a shape, a glow that calls you on. It reveals itself as you work deeper. The work may start with a plan, but if it really takes off, it quickly enlarges and shatters the plan. You can choose direction, structure, materials, etc., but you just can't plan "good." The poet James Wright described it as, "(writing) to find out what it is I have to say." It's still the most succinct description of the process I know. (An aside to all of us who work in the commercial process: you will have noticed that the search for a transformative aliveness is mostly excised from the creative work we do for a living. Commercial art is negotiated from a set of givens. It is fine for what it does, but it is not art.) Ugly Art What if good art comes out ugly? Good work can be unfamiliar and disturbing. It is not about hanging it on the wall, it's about that change. And change is an irritant. In fact, for all that art generates in emotions, both negative and positive, I don't think its power lies there. I think the emotions come after, arising from us. Reviewing the recent Walker Evans retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Anthony Lane talked about what he calls the "ruthlessness" of the artist. "It should not be confused with meanness; it entails no more than looking with a clear eye, unclouded by the trace of a tear, and rebuffing all blandishments--the need to please, say, or the cry for change--as you struggle to set down your observations. The beauty is in the beholding, not in the beheld." Though we may feel emotion when faced with Evan's photography, the emotion is ours. (Lets take an interesting little side excursion into the realm of Eastern thought. This business of setting aside intention is alien to our culture, so it takes a bit of talking to explain it. But Taoism covers it with a simple phrase, wu wei. This is usually translated as non-doing, but that seems too passive. What it really means is allowing action to go forward naturally as it is going without controlling it. Water flowing downhill offers a good example of wu wei. The work of the Army Corps of Engineers in the Everglades, in which they dammed the slow flow that was the arterial circulation of the swamp, would be an example of its opposite. Wu wei is a state of awareness, and it's something that we lose sight of. There is a Tibetan meditation practice called Dzogchen that is done to recover it. Its aim is not a suspension of mental activity, but a state of alive awareness of that activity and of everything else that is taking place. I once asked a Dzogchen master if making artwork wasn't just a matter of spinning out more illusory existence, and he replied that, to the contrary, the state in which art is made is one of singular awareness and one-pointedness, not one of cogitation and interpretation, and this was well worth practicing, a meditation in itself.) So let's sum up this whole part of the discussion by saying that a piece of artwork that has changed the artist can change the viewer. Comfort is not the measure. Often I find myself coming to like, or at least appreciate, work that I didn't at first. So now, when I really don't like something, I wait to see how it ripens in me. After all, I don't want to be in the position of the French critics who wrote thing like, "Does Monsieur Monet really think his smears of paint are worthy of the Temple of the Goddess of Art?" Suspending Judgement An artist has to get out beyond his preferences. When he gets out to the front edge of his work, it is time to stop thinking. Poet Charles Wright spoke about keeping possibilities in the air and leaving them there as long as possible. He suggests that if one can keep everything floating, connections do develop that are new and unexpected and that make immediate and perfect sense. The newness and the sense combine to provoke that moment of insight when we get out beyond ourselves, when our mind changes. An example from writing: the Annie Proulx writes of a flock of wild ducks taking off "like a deck of cards flung into the air." The satisfaction, the release, comes exactly from the aptness of this image, which is both unexpected AND makes perfect sense. It wakes us. What's in a Picture Art is beyond its contents, and it can't be summarized by listing its parts. Content conjures the effect from somewhere quite beyond itself. In doing this it lets us experience things that we just can't get at any other way. This is the way art works. Actually, mediocre art does tend to reside in its information. So does advertising. It tells people things they already know, and that's why they like it. (Let's not be too harsh here, we all need things that we know well enough to nap through. Being constantly awake would be hellish or God-like, I'm not sure which.) Hey, What's Wrong with Advertising? Lots of us work in advertising. I do. And at this point there's usually someone who defends good advertising, pointing out that advertising has a place in our economy, and that good advertising should be recognized as creative. Within the closed world of advertising they are right. But if we take this market standard into the larger cultural arena, we wind up at the notion that what is good is what sells. It's not. Advertising is a genre, and as such it doesn't ever intend to rise above itself. Good advertising is good advertising, just as good soft rock is good soft rock, and people accept it as such. But really good work transcends limits and takes its maker and its audience somewhere far beyond where they thought they were heading. Occasionally a commercial project gets toward that in some of its particulars, but that is so, so rare. Art Slash Work So what is the point of all this in our commercialized world? Well, let's remind ourselves that our lives are not measured at some bottom line. Most of us started fooling with photography, sketching, designing things, or writing BECAUSE WE LEARNED THINGS DOING IT. Like Mondrian, we weren't trying to make art, we were trying to find things out. And when we did, one result was our first good photographs or paintings. And our response to them was to want to do more and to make them yet better. We were hooked and gone. Now, it's unlikely anyone reading this is an upcoming Mondrian or Mark Rothko or Robert DeNiro. But we are who we are, and if we're at all creative our mechanisms are set up the same way as theirs are, and we want--and even need--to do work that is good--ugly or messy or beautiful, but provocative of change. If really good work enlivens and stretches and changes the mind, if it touches everything in us, then that's all the reason we need to seek it out and think about it and try to make it ourselves. Words Fail Me, as They Must Well, after all this talk are we any closer to knowing what good work is? As you can see, I've convinced myself that I know some of the things that lead to making it and something of the way we function when we make it, and some of the ways it works on whoever sees it. But when I pull art apart there's always that tantalizing bit that I can't get at, and I know it's the most important part. For a while I thought I just wasn't smart enough, not sufficiently analytical and verbal. But lately I've concluded that the last bit lies beyond where thought even operates. The best I seem to be able to do is stand at the edge of intellect and point excitedly into consciousness, and anyone who wants to grasp what is there simply has to go and see for himself. A few years ago I saw a photograph in a retrospective of photographer Roy de Carava at the Museum of Modern Art. It was an amazing photo, and it struck me deeply. But I couldn't account for its power. Let me describe it to you. There is an empty hallway, dark gray planes of the walls, a ceramic tiled floor, and a halation of light from a light bulb hanging just out of frame. And that's it. But there's so much going on in the image. I got the book and turned to that page. And each time I looked at it I had the same undiminished response to its power and perfection and to the enigma of how it achieved them. I've showed it to others who are not photographers, and they've had the same response. I tried to write about it, but I wound up writing a poem to the picture. That was as close as I could get to expressing my response. In the end I looked at the harmonies, rhythms, and tensions of the picture and decided that it must work somewhat the way music does. And I have no idea how music works. So when I think about what good is, I get part of the way there, but the answer doesn't come, and I'm reduced to silence. But here's the important thing: it's not an empty silence. It's a kind of charged state--very awake, very intense, full of new possibilities. And that state is the result of experiencing a work. What gives rise to that state can't be extracted, because it is entwined in the work itself. One can only take away a memory of what the work has done to one. But to get to the state one has to go--travel, really--into the work itself, like a pilgrim. Because the good of the work is consciousness itself, embodied and then imparted. That's what good is. About the Author: Sean Kernan is an award-winning photographer who lives and works on the Connecticut coast. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Graphis, Communication Arts, and The Atlantic Monthly. He collaborated with respected Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges on The Secret Books, and his most recent book, Among Trees, was released this past spring by Artisan, New York. Kernan's website is www.seankernan.com, and he can be reached at sean@seankernan.com. 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