We've been reading "The Art Life," by Stuart Horodner, and interesting and comforting book. Ten chapters each following a topic, each chapter beginning with a short essay by Mr. Horodner, followed by snippets of interviews and statements by various well known artists in a variety of disciplines and fields.
The first chapter is Motivation. Hmm... my thoughts on my motivation(s) follow:
When I started playing guitar, and became interested in music, I think my motivation was that it felt really good. It felt good to play a song, to improvise over a Cream record, to listen to all the sounds on the Beatles' Revolver album. There was something captivating and magical, and I wanted to be able to do the same thing.
When I was 17 I saw the one act play Birdbath, by Leonard Melfi. It was a college production. It was so powerful - more powerful than any theatre I had seen before, than any thing I had seen ever. It's still a production I think about, and that play still is under my skin. Again, I wanted to be able to make something like that, to make art so wonderfully bothersome.
But what is under this all, because the two examples above are symptomatic of something deeper.
What is deeper is a profound dissatisfaction, a dissatisfaction with myself mainly, and a dissatisfaction with the world. Art making is an attempt to get some relief. I'm either trying to figure out what is wrong with me and somehow excise it, or I'm trying to create some piece of world and/or existence that operates better for me. It's selfish. Art is a prayer. It is like praying for one's self, for some understanding of what is going on, for some recognition of what is screwed up. And ultimately, the prayer is asking what all great works of art seem to ask, which is, "Life is so hard, and so beautiful, and how do we deal with that." How can one possibly be satisfied when that is the reality of things?
