IS ART ARTIFICIAL

IS ART ARTIFICIAL has also appeared in the Cool Cleveland e-newsletter.

The difference between what’s art and what’s natural has something, but only something, to do with boundaries. What’s natural has no boundaries: it goes on and on. Art is boundaried. The artist, the poet, creates the boundary, and presents what’s inside as art. Merely framing the natural, though, is not enough. The framer must intend to make art in order to claim to make art -- and that intent has to come across to the audience within the work, not merely because of the possible claim to art that a frame can, but does not necessarily all by itself, make.

Art requires that a good deal more self-knowledge and intellectual honesty comes across through the work than a mere frame can provide. Art is not merely overcoming technical difficulties, or finding a way around them, or art would be merely technique. Art is a complicated complex of intention and reception of that intention coming across from artist to audience through a made thing. Some three-dimensional objects are art; some are not. Some painted surfaces are art; some are not. Some collections of words are art; some are not. Some movements through space are art; some are not.

Art is artificial. That word, "artificial", though, is a word that can bring unhelpful connotations with it, like comparing artificial daffodils with real ones. It seems to imply inferiority. Well, art is inferior to nature; it is inferior to experience. It is a good deal less than the natural, a good deal less than the experienced. Art is a presentation of an interpretation of a perception of reality, not reality; it is a map, not the terrain. No matter how eloquently we may speak of the container of art holding the soup of reality, the yap is not the tureen. Art is a human comment on reality, not reality itself, and that's why art must be regarded, by definition, as artificial.

Sometimes a poem, or a painting, or work in some other medium seems to flow so easily that the artist believes he or she is in possession of some natural force, or is possessed by it. But I hold that it’s more likely that those events happen when the artist is practiced enough in his or her techniques and ideas that the experience does indeed feel "spontaneous". But "spontaneous", is different from "artificial" and "natural". I think "spontaneous" is a good term for that marvelous concatenation of circumstances that produces a piece of art almost whole, in a continuous rush of effort -- but it’s still not "natural" in the sense that breathing is natural.

I think it’s important to distinguish two different uses of the notions of "natural" here. Confusion ensues if we’re not careful to keep in mind that when we call someone "a natural" with regard to a skill set such as baseball or poetry, we mean a different thing than calling a tree fallen across a ravine "a natural bridge". To call someone "a natural" at baseball or poetry is using "natural" metaphorically -- not as a claim that there are people who, by virtue of their hard-wired genetic abilities are baseball players or poets -- as if there were some deliberate end-point to evolutionary development that resulted in baseball players or poets. It’s simply not true: there is no endpoint, there is no intention, there is no boundary to evolution; it is natural. Boundaries created intentionally by humans who take a set of skills applied to a particular set of problems, and label them "baseball player" or "poet" are artificial, and the tension between the boundaries and the skills can, but do not necessarily, create art. Not only is not every boundary art, not even every intentional boundary is art.

Why do we not call, for example, basketball "art" but we do call ballet "art"? What distinguishes sport from art? Why is the spontaneity of basketball not considered art while the practiced choreography of the dance is? Why do we think of the practiced choreography of the Harlem Globetrotters as at least artful, while the spontaneity of ballroom dancing is not? Why do we not call, for example, a bridge "art" but we do call a mobile "art"? What distinguishes engineering, if anything does, from art? Can basketball
or bridge-building rise to the level of art from time to time?

That "it just poured out" is not good evidence that one's poem is "natural" or that there is a "natural way" to write poetry. One may happily find from time to time that one's facility has become so practiced that one can write out a whole poem "as if it were dictated" or "as if an afflatus" had taken one or the like. But happy as those occurrences may be, amazing as the experience is, that such effusions happen is not evidence that there is a "natural" way to write poems that trumps the "artificial" way of writing. If that were the case then every revision would necessarily be a worsening of the original. Those who want to make a claim for "natural" art are pretty much obliged to reject the very notion of revision. It is by practice, by writing and more writing and revision and more revision in pursuit of deliberately creating a frame and content that not only expresses one’s meaning, but that gets that meaning across to one’s intended audience, that transmutes the effort, the intent, and the content into art. Sometimes it all comes together easily; more often not. But that it comes together easily sometimes is not evidence that only then one is creating art.

Art is a made thing as opposed to a found thing. Not every made thing is art, but all art has to be made, not found. We don't say that the cliffs of Dover are art, nor the Grand Canyon, for example -- well, there might be some religious folks who say that God is the Artist and so they are art after all, but that, too, is a metaphor, not a useful beginning for criticism, or a definition, of art.

Some will say "But we're part of nature too", and that the urge to explore through making is an important aspect of human nature. But "human nature" is different from "nature" in the sense we're talking about when we distinguish "artificial" from "natural" -- another merely terminological confusion. Even if we agree that it is human nature to create boundaries, it is implicit in "create boundaries" that there exists some larger unboundaried area. I hold that not every boundary is artful, however intentional.

To say that making art is artificial, though, is not to say making art is unnatural. The term "unnatural" usually carries with it some seriously negative meanings, while the term "artificial" is much more ambiguous with regard to negative meaning. This seems to be a matter of connotation: many people think of "artificial" as "unnatural" in the sense of "unnatural acts", in the sense of something prima facie bad, because they unknowingly, or deliberately, substitute "unnatural" for "artificial". That's a pretty significant substitution, it seems to me. But I don't mean art is "artificial" in any such sense. Rather I mean art is artificial in the sense that it is "human-made" as opposed to "found in nature".

An airplane is an artificial bird, though it doesn’t fly like a bird; a submarine is an artificial fish, though it doesn’t swim like a fish; a poem is an artificial person, though it doesn’t exist like a person. A lot of misunderstanding about what poems are, and what they can do, and what they can’t do, may be cleared up by keeping in mind that a poem is as artificial as a plane or a submarine: that it is a made thing intended to do something artificially that made things don’t do naturally.

Art is artifice, an artificed thing, an artificial thing. The very notion that a poem can "be natural" is absurd. The best you can do is to create the illusion of naturalness by artificial means -- by picking this word instead of that, this phrase instead of that, this tone or manner or mode or style instead of that, by creating a "voice". To create and then speak in such a "voice" is the essence of the artificiality, of the artifice, of art: it is a creation of the intention to express and get something across, something important, or significant, or both, using one’s medium.

Marcus Bales