Growing up in a conspicuously concealing South-Slavic culture, I was raised with the belief that it is impolite, and outrageously improper to ‘drag one’s own dirty laundry in public’ when striving to create art. Whether or not autobiographical references within one’s artistic work are sent out to constitute a healthy way of ‘being present in society’, by recreating a space for memory to tell its tale, the ‘dealings of one’s life’ are not to be taken as examples of viable art-centric material. As a student (and an overzealous admirer) of American autobiographical narratives, I have continuously struggled with the notion of bringing one’s life into one’s work, and vice versa.
What would be the most stylistically effective way of re-inscribing one’s life experiences into one’s artwork, and at the same time, maintaining a sense of privacy and detachment?
How are life experiences to be narrated as they shape the structure of an artist’s craftsmanship? Should the artist write them down for posterity, encapsulated in the linearity of time, or ought they to be performed, on stage, in front of varied audiences, thus challenging the permanence of life as we remember it and art as we profess to understand it?
The late Spalding Gray’s one-man performance show titled Swimming to Cambodia opened a new venue for my afore mentioned fascination with autobiographically inspired ‘texts’ which question the imposed dividing line that may exist between the private self and its public re-creation through art. I had previously heard of Mr. Gray’s work but was never exposed to its understated grittiness and painfully humorous culpability. The first thing which struck me about Mr. Gray’s performative style was the unpretentious sense of ease with which he proceeded to ‘speak memory’. The anecdotes, if we could label them such, and the long graphic observations which Mr. Gray draws on a number of seemingly disarrayed topics (for example, the ideology of sanuk, and how it relates to the events of the Khmer Rouge massacre, on the one hand, and the pleasure of sanuk, and how it cannot quite tie in with the Western mentality of fighting first and then experiencing joy and harmony later, on the other hand) verbalize a multi-layered narration.
We meet with Mr. Gray’s ‘performative self’ (in the Jonathan Demme directed documentary) as he simultaneously re-members the idiosyncrasies of his personal life (his relationship to his ‘significant other’), his professional ‘artistry’ (his miniscule involvement in a big-budget production, namely that of The Killing Fields), his Americaness (his trying interpretation of the developments behind U.S.’s involvement in Cambodia in the 1970s), and thus, his bare humanity (the honesty with which he re-lives for us his ‘perfect moment(s)’).
Listening to Mr. Gray’s personalized expose of art imitating life imitating art, I felt a disquieting sense of hearing someone talk about my own life, not that I have personally experienced the same mixture of candor, humor and imaginative non-fictionality as Mr. Gray has; however, I managed to ‘find’ myself amidst the shifting points of reference, and strange as it may seem, I recognized my voiced memory in the singularity of Spalding Gray’s almost-too-meticulously rendered life experiences. In that respect, when Mr. Gray voiced the final thoughts of his performance, telling us that he finally understands what killed Marilyn Monroe, I came closer than before to acknowledging my own culture’s dismissal of autobiographical collage art. Do not get me wrong, I am still quite ‘skirmish’ about this set cultural premise, but I am willing to explore its immanent presence in my life. For example, if we deny the private self its sacred abode in the immediacy of our secluded life, then we break the umbilical cord that ties us to a historical past, and at the same time, we allow for that past to take over our memories and shape their representations on a greater cultural canvas, changing them beyond recognition. Thus, we are tempted, in turn, to look for ‘alternative’ ways which will satisfy our ‘disrupted’ private lives and its ‘affair with the past’. We go after men and women who seem to have lived their entire lives in the public eye, born and raised, and killed, in its vicinity. We crucify them over and over again, as they appease our sense of guilt, betrayal, inadequacy, disconnectedness, boredom. We need them today more than ever, since the present-day rules of ‘detached self-immersion’ are blighting. We create iconoclastic cultural narratives that no longer need the icon; only the thought of it will suffice.
Then again, if we share a part of who we are and what we see, with others around us, we allow for that treasured past to travel, to go in-between and re-member its multi-discursiveness; we allow for personal memory to become a part of cultural memory, we foster its/our ‘perfect moments’. We take part in someone else’ story but we do not rob them of it; it becomes ours through common sharing and active participation, as it continues to live among OUR own singular experiences. We grow with these experiences even though we may not agree with their impact on our lives. We perhaps understand why we GIVE BIRTH to someone like Spalding Gray; why we need someone to ‘speak memory’ for us, to tell us what it’s like to be present in life. And then again, I might be mistaken. Maybe at the end of the day, we crave an illusion rather than a lived account of life at its miserable artistic self. At least, it will not harm us in any way.
Subscribe