Make Your Art No Matter What by Beth Pickens

Author:Beth Pickens [Beth Pickens]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

GRIEF AND ART

Grief is part of life, throughout life. Though we may be afraid of it, it isn’t bad; it simply exists, a shared human experience. Over a lifetime, we grieve loss, death, and change of every kind. Grief can, for some, become cumulative; feeling acute grief of a recent loss can tap into deep wells of older grief. Grief has its own timetable. Like water, it will find its way through a crack, seep through a wall, and take down entire structures if we don’t learn to ride the swells. We can’t will or wish it away. We can try to put it off, but it will find its way to the surface. If you have experienced major grief in your life, you may be able to trace the unexpected ways it manifested: irritability, depression, disorientation, profound sadness, lethargy, manic behavior, anxiety, mood swings, anger, and other expressions.

Grief can be frightening for us; its enormity—or our fear of its potential size and effects—may motivate us to avoid it at any cost. We may believe that we can detour around it through work, substances, other people, or sleep. I think of grief not as a looming threat, waiting for an in-between moment to finally nab us, but rather as a sorrowful companion, a wave returning us to the reality and conditions of our interior. Our capacity to grieve is connected to our capacity to love.

For many artists, their practice is a way for them to traverse grief. For people who have trouble accessing it, art—both the making and the taking in—can be a vital conduit for feeling and expression. I, for example, sob every time I hear “He Stopped Loving Her Today” sung by George Jones; this song by my grandparents’ favorite singer triggers my bereavement over their deaths. Pain that is otherwise difficult for me to feel is immediately summoned by that song. I know that the sadness is coming within the first few bars, whether I play the song or happen upon it.

Often, I am surprised by grief stirred through art; it’s unpredictable. Wandering the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2017, I came across a conceptual artwork by Peruvian artist Teresa Burga. Autorretrato. Estructura. Informe, 9.6.1972 (Self-portrait. Structure. Report, 9.6.1972) included a sound recording of her heartbeat over the course of a single day. I stood alone in the installation, listening to Burga’s heartbeat, surprised by my hot tears. It felt so intimate to listen to this woman’s body, someone I would never know; it was so generous of the artist to share this closeness with me. The enormity of the exhibition, the artists featured in it, and the feminist politics of Latin America discussed in the work suddenly caught up with me, and I cried listening to Burga’s heart beating, realizing that it would one day, like mine, stop.

The same year, in New York, I saw the play Indecent written by Paula Vogel and directed by Rebecca Taichman.

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