3 hours ago
Sunday, August 23, 2009
SOME SPEAK OF THE FUTURE
What follows is basically a combination of two pieces from 1975 and 1976, both about the then-booming field of studying the future. The first—reflecting several drafts—was a piece I reported and wrote for New Times magazine. It was never published, victim in part of my editor leaving the staff. His name was Frank Rich, future columnist for the New York Times, and before that its drama critic.
In 1975 he was an editor for this new national magazine called New Times, and he wrote its film reviews. He left to become the film critic for Time magazine. Before he left, he did some editing on one draft that I have, so some of what I present here reflects his edits. Before and after this, New Times published other articles I wrote, including "The Malling of America."
Only pieces of other drafts of this piece survive, including material I added after attending the 1975 World Future Society convention in Washington. That convention had its elements of drama, which I wrote about in a piece the next year, published in a fledgling alternative weekly called Washington Newsworks. I was its editor at the time, so getting this published was easier. That 1976 article focused more on Washington, and reported both on that WFS convention and its aftermath a year later. There’s less of this piece included here, partly because I cannibalized this New Times material for that article. I’ve made my own new edits, trying to balance relevance and historical record. It was a fascinating period.
Though this field has much less cache in the early 21st century, many of its characteristics are the same, including incipient problems I noted in the 70s, such as the lack of diversity in its practitioners (it is still criticized for lacking enough women and non-white leaders and participants, and various political, technological and national biases. Still, photos from the 2008 World Future Society convention show a lot more female and minority faces.) One place self-described futurists have flourished in the years since is the corporate world.
Also I note that after more than 30 years, they still haven’t settled on what to call themselves or their field: futurism, futuristics, futurology, futures studies and other variations are still at war (as recently as the debate in 2009 on Wikipedia.) Except for the clearly academic field of futures studies, I’m personally settling on futurism, even at the risk of offending the memory of my long lost uncle Gino Severini, founding member of the early 20th century Italian art movement called Futurism. I think the capital letter is good enough to distinguish them.
In reading this material now, I have a few impressions and updates. I wrote about the dramatic events surrounding Hazel Henderson at the 1975 World Future Society convention, and how she was basically pulled out of the crowd (at least from my perspective) to become the convention’s star. What I didn’t say—perhaps in deference to the reigning sensibilities of the publications I was writing for—is that besides being intelligent and articulate, she was also tall, blond, charming and convivial, which definitely enhanced her stardom. I had some correspondence with her for a few years after that. She’s since published several books and is a legend still actively working the futures field, although probably no one calls it that much anymore.
Apart from Senator Ted Kennedy, you might note that a Governor Carter of Georgia is mentioned as a futurism backer. Not much more than a year later he would be elected President. Another political figure I recall UMass at Amherst futurists talking about was a young conservative congressman named Newt Gingrich, who was interested in futurism. I recall mentioning him in earlier and now absent drafts.
While noting that a lot of major issues of the mid-70s remain the same as the first decade of the 21st century ends, some may feel comforted that the apocalypse didn't come. I don't think that invalidates these concerns. I'm reminded of the title of a book about the decline of the steel industry in Pittsburgh, after many warnings were dismissed as "crying wolf." The book was called And the Wolf Finally Came.
What follows is basically a combination of two pieces from 1975 and 1976, both about the then-booming field of studying the future. The first—reflecting several drafts—was a piece I reported and wrote for New Times magazine. It was never published, victim in part of my editor leaving the staff. His name was Frank Rich, future columnist for the New York Times, and before that its drama critic.
In 1975 he was an editor for this new national magazine called New Times, and he wrote its film reviews. He left to become the film critic for Time magazine. Before he left, he did some editing on one draft that I have, so some of what I present here reflects his edits. Before and after this, New Times published other articles I wrote, including "The Malling of America."
Only pieces of other drafts of this piece survive, including material I added after attending the 1975 World Future Society convention in Washington. That convention had its elements of drama, which I wrote about in a piece the next year, published in a fledgling alternative weekly called Washington Newsworks. I was its editor at the time, so getting this published was easier. That 1976 article focused more on Washington, and reported both on that WFS convention and its aftermath a year later. There’s less of this piece included here, partly because I cannibalized this New Times material for that article. I’ve made my own new edits, trying to balance relevance and historical record. It was a fascinating period.
Though this field has much less cache in the early 21st century, many of its characteristics are the same, including incipient problems I noted in the 70s, such as the lack of diversity in its practitioners (it is still criticized for lacking enough women and non-white leaders and participants, and various political, technological and national biases. Still, photos from the 2008 World Future Society convention show a lot more female and minority faces.) One place self-described futurists have flourished in the years since is the corporate world.
Also I note that after more than 30 years, they still haven’t settled on what to call themselves or their field: futurism, futuristics, futurology, futures studies and other variations are still at war (as recently as the debate in 2009 on Wikipedia.) Except for the clearly academic field of futures studies, I’m personally settling on futurism, even at the risk of offending the memory of my long lost uncle Gino Severini, founding member of the early 20th century Italian art movement called Futurism. I think the capital letter is good enough to distinguish them.
In reading this material now, I have a few impressions and updates. I wrote about the dramatic events surrounding Hazel Henderson at the 1975 World Future Society convention, and how she was basically pulled out of the crowd (at least from my perspective) to become the convention’s star. What I didn’t say—perhaps in deference to the reigning sensibilities of the publications I was writing for—is that besides being intelligent and articulate, she was also tall, blond, charming and convivial, which definitely enhanced her stardom. I had some correspondence with her for a few years after that. She’s since published several books and is a legend still actively working the futures field, although probably no one calls it that much anymore.
Apart from Senator Ted Kennedy, you might note that a Governor Carter of Georgia is mentioned as a futurism backer. Not much more than a year later he would be elected President. Another political figure I recall UMass at Amherst futurists talking about was a young conservative congressman named Newt Gingrich, who was interested in futurism. I recall mentioning him in earlier and now absent drafts.
While noting that a lot of major issues of the mid-70s remain the same as the first decade of the 21st century ends, some may feel comforted that the apocalypse didn't come. I don't think that invalidates these concerns. I'm reminded of the title of a book about the decline of the steel industry in Pittsburgh, after many warnings were dismissed as "crying wolf." The book was called And the Wolf Finally Came.
My own interest in the future as a topic did not begin with these articles, nor did it end there. I’m still writing about it in 2009, so for me in particular it’s worth revisiting the future’s past... Which suggests this final warning: the present tense ("is," etc.) in the following posts dated today is located in 1975-76.
The Future Debate: How to Profit From the Coming Apocalypse
“Some speak of the future,
my love she speaks softly.
She knows there’s no success like failure
And failure’s no success at all.”
Bob Dylan Love Minus Zero/No Limit
Apocalypse: “A prophetic disclosure or revelation.”
American Heritage Dictionary
Some say the world will end in fire; some say in the year 2115. Others wonder, why quibble? But figuring out the future is now an international obsession, occupying scientists, government leaders and professional consultants, as well as students in over a thousand Futures Studies courses offered by North American universities, and many more around the world. Besides the think tanks and other government and quasi-government consultants, there are global-oriented organizations like the Transnational Institute and the Club of Rome, the more exotic independents like World Game and Earthrise, and a host of groups and individuals who are constructing, forecasting, analyzing, planning and actively pursuing possible and probable states of the future, correlating vast amounts of information and looking at it from a bewildering array of perspectives.
Futurists have become public figures, beginning with Herman Kahn, formerly the Doctor Strangelove of the RAND Corporation, and now proprietor of the Hudson Institute. Well-known futurist authors include Alvin Toffler (Future Shock), Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future), Robert Theobald (Futures Conditional), John McHale (Future of the Future), Buckminster Fuller (Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth), Robert Heilbroner (The Future As History), Paul Ehrlich, Daniel Bell, Kenneth Boulding, Stewart Brand and Gregory Bateson.
Futurism (or futuristics, futurology, future studies, or even futistics) has been quietly cooking in the back stacks for several years: suddenly, in 1975, with three-quarters of this unquestionably weird century gone and only a generation left until the apocalyptic-sounding year 2000, it is booming.
Futurists include those whose work extends in scale from microbiology to the demographics of all humanity, to the climate cycles of the earth, to the untapped but perhaps useful potentials of space—both outer and inner. What they all have in common is their preoccupation with what is going to happen to us in the next ten or 25 or 100 years…So, according to them, what is going to happen? What is the future, if any, going to be like?
They don’t know.
“Forecasting the future is now in about the same shape as forecasting the weather was before the United States Weather Bureau,” says Billy Rojas, a pioneer in academic futures studies who is associated with Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock. “It’s disorganized. There’s no set of standards that everybody goes by. I’d say it will be ten or fifteen years before future forecasting is validated.”
But, I objected, everything I’d been reading indicates that the decisions made in the next decade, partly based on forecasting, were going to be crucial to the world’s survival. What about that? I asked him. “Yes,” Rojas agreed. “That does make it…awkward.” We both laughed. You don’t have to have a sense of humor to be a futurist, but it helps.
But forecasting is not the only goal. “We’re not all Herman Kahns,” Billy Rojas quipped. Within the burgeoning futures movement there are activists as well as scientists, and a strong humanist wing that is trying to solve the crucial problem of how to plan for the future without yielding to totalitarian solutions.
The challenge is the sheer multiplicity of factors and possibilities: the intimate relationships of everything from technology to sexual preferences to insect habitats to society’s moods are relevant to what the future might be like—and important to shaping what it should be like. What futurists do and think about is as various as whatever the future may hold.
“Some speak of the future,
my love she speaks softly.
She knows there’s no success like failure
And failure’s no success at all.”
Bob Dylan Love Minus Zero/No Limit
Apocalypse: “A prophetic disclosure or revelation.”
American Heritage Dictionary
Some say the world will end in fire; some say in the year 2115. Others wonder, why quibble? But figuring out the future is now an international obsession, occupying scientists, government leaders and professional consultants, as well as students in over a thousand Futures Studies courses offered by North American universities, and many more around the world. Besides the think tanks and other government and quasi-government consultants, there are global-oriented organizations like the Transnational Institute and the Club of Rome, the more exotic independents like World Game and Earthrise, and a host of groups and individuals who are constructing, forecasting, analyzing, planning and actively pursuing possible and probable states of the future, correlating vast amounts of information and looking at it from a bewildering array of perspectives.
Futurists have become public figures, beginning with Herman Kahn, formerly the Doctor Strangelove of the RAND Corporation, and now proprietor of the Hudson Institute. Well-known futurist authors include Alvin Toffler (Future Shock), Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future), Robert Theobald (Futures Conditional), John McHale (Future of the Future), Buckminster Fuller (Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth), Robert Heilbroner (The Future As History), Paul Ehrlich, Daniel Bell, Kenneth Boulding, Stewart Brand and Gregory Bateson.
Futurism (or futuristics, futurology, future studies, or even futistics) has been quietly cooking in the back stacks for several years: suddenly, in 1975, with three-quarters of this unquestionably weird century gone and only a generation left until the apocalyptic-sounding year 2000, it is booming.
Futurists include those whose work extends in scale from microbiology to the demographics of all humanity, to the climate cycles of the earth, to the untapped but perhaps useful potentials of space—both outer and inner. What they all have in common is their preoccupation with what is going to happen to us in the next ten or 25 or 100 years…So, according to them, what is going to happen? What is the future, if any, going to be like?
They don’t know.
“Forecasting the future is now in about the same shape as forecasting the weather was before the United States Weather Bureau,” says Billy Rojas, a pioneer in academic futures studies who is associated with Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock. “It’s disorganized. There’s no set of standards that everybody goes by. I’d say it will be ten or fifteen years before future forecasting is validated.”
But, I objected, everything I’d been reading indicates that the decisions made in the next decade, partly based on forecasting, were going to be crucial to the world’s survival. What about that? I asked him. “Yes,” Rojas agreed. “That does make it…awkward.” We both laughed. You don’t have to have a sense of humor to be a futurist, but it helps.
But forecasting is not the only goal. “We’re not all Herman Kahns,” Billy Rojas quipped. Within the burgeoning futures movement there are activists as well as scientists, and a strong humanist wing that is trying to solve the crucial problem of how to plan for the future without yielding to totalitarian solutions.
The challenge is the sheer multiplicity of factors and possibilities: the intimate relationships of everything from technology to sexual preferences to insect habitats to society’s moods are relevant to what the future might be like—and important to shaping what it should be like. What futurists do and think about is as various as whatever the future may hold.
The Limits to Growth/Lifeboat Ethics v. Spaceship Earth debate illustrates one problem of forecasting the future.
The future of the future: Lifeboat v. Spaceship Earth
Futurism begins with an attitude towards time. It is best expressed by John McHale, author of The Future of the Future, in what might be called McHale’s Litany: “The future of the past is the future/The future of the present is in the past/ The future of the future is in the present." Time interrelates, feeding backward and forward. What will happen depends partly on what has been done already and partly on what we do now, as well as on what people are going to do (including what unforeseen inventions or insights they come up with.)
For example, by figuring out the effects of decision that have been made, scrutinizing the decision that can be made now—and by adding some shrewd imagination in the process—forecasters can begin to make scenarios of various possibilities for the future.
Forecasting begins by trying to answer the basic question: What will the future be like? This is usually approached by assuming that things will continue pretty much on their present course, with foreseeable innovations in technology. This could mean a future generally like the present, or it could mean a very different one, depending on the strength and interrelationships of these trends.
But by weighing data and assumptions differently, perhaps adding or subtracting some factors, forecasters can develop what are called alternative futures. These can be ranked as “probable” or “possible” futures.
These forecasts can then become information that other sorts of futurists use in considering the question they want to answer: What kind of a future do we want? From possible futures they select their desirable futures. The third question may then be: how do we make our desirable future happen? This is the area of futurist activism.
In practice, these categories often overlap and intermix. But there are strong advocates and practitioners who concentrate on one, and may even criticize and disparage those who practice the others.
Large-scale, computer-generated scenarios are the most obvious illustration of forecasting. The first Club of Rome report, Limits to Growth, tabulated and compared statistics on food, population and industrial growth, and came up with a single forecast of world-wide collapse. But partly because of the furor it created, and partly because the process became more sophisticated, the second report (Mankind at the Turning Point) developed short, medium and long-range alternative scenarios for the world, separated into ten economic, energy and resources regions. It also considered politics and values as well as material factors.
The difference between these first two reports illuminates the public debate now going on about these titanic (and I use that word advisedly) world problems. In particular, the Lifeboat vs. Spaceship Earth debate is a classic confrontation, specifically dealing with world food distribution policy but ultimately all the major issues of world survival.
The debate begins with some givens: millions of people are starving. Over 400 million suffer from malnutrition, and 10,000 die of hunger and hunger-related diseases each day. The controversy over what to do about this situation has raged in academic journals and at various international meetings, such as the Rome Food conference. The debate began in earnest with articles by California social scientist Garrett Hardin, proposing that the population problem in the undeveloped world was so severe that nothing could be done by developed countries to prevent starvation there, and that both rich and poor nations would suffer if they tried.
Hardin asserted that Buckminster Fuller’s metaphor of Spaceship Earth, which stresses the interdependence of all humanity, “can be dangerous when used by misguided idealists to justify suicidal policies for sharing our resources through uncontrolled immigration and foreign aid.” His substitute metaphor was the Lifeboat, representing the rich nations, with the poor nations swimming around it. Because even the resources of the rich are finite, bringing the swimming aboard by sharing food would only result in everything being eaten up faster. Hardin concluded that if the poor are brought aboard, “…the boat swamps, everyone drowns. Complete justice: complete catastrophe.”
Hardin based his assessment partly on the first Club of Rome report, and his conclusions were shared by M.I.T.’s Jay Forrester, a major figure on the Limits to Growth team. Together they proposed that the U.S. save its resources, and engage in triage (parceling out surplus food for political benefits.) Their proposals were greeted with shock and moral outrage, and then by informed critiques.
Rodger Revelle of the Harvard Center for Population Studies called the report’s population projections oversimplified, and questioned its understanding of what limits population growth. Alan Berg of the World Bank questioned the accuracy of the food figures. Ecologist Barry Commoner predicted that “Wars of Redistribution” would be encouraged by Hardin’s approach. Economist Robert Heilbroner also foresaw political and military conflicts induced by such policies, including nuclear terrorism.
Geoffrey Barraclough of Brandeis University maintained that economics is the real culprit: price and monetary policies rather than actual scarcities are responsible for shortages. Others pointed out that the U.S. already practices triage—in 1974, 43% of Food for Peace aid went to allies South Vietnam and Cambodia—and this only makes the situation worse, since most of the food wound up on the black market.
Others saw the problem in a larger context. They emphasized that the limits to growth are real, but they are planetary, so the more practical approach is not an isolated Lifeboat but a global Spaceship Earth. Climatologist Stephen Schneider pointed out that long range climate change affecting agriculture, for example, can hit the currently rich nations as well as the poor. Harvard’s Jean Mayer asserted that the real population and food problem is in the rich nations, because they consume and pollute more. Nutritionist Frances Moore Lappe claimed that rich nations are wasting incredible amounts of protein food through poor agricultural planning and overly beefy diets--in other words, that Lifeboat Ethics is really Hamburger Ethics.
So what seemed like a simple forecast turned out to be, if not totally inaccurate, then at least not so simple, and therefore such a harsh policy prescription seems to lack prudent justification. Part of the lesson is the complexity of future forecast, based on the true complexity of present reality. Food availability, a range of experts were saying, is a consequence of the interplay of distribution, organization, energy, diet, consumption, weather, transportation, monetary policy and population—which in turn are affected by everything from levels of industrialization to dominant religious beliefs to the number of young females who watch television.
The second report of the Club of Rome reflected an adjusted perspective. It concluded: “…what is really needed is a simultaneous consideration of all aspects of mankind’s evolution from individual values and attitudes to ecological and environmental conditions.” The third report is expected to concentrate on values that inhibit positive change, which itself reflects a trend in futurism: the examination of values and the emphasis on human consciousness in shaping change.
Futurism begins with an attitude towards time. It is best expressed by John McHale, author of The Future of the Future, in what might be called McHale’s Litany: “The future of the past is the future/The future of the present is in the past/ The future of the future is in the present." Time interrelates, feeding backward and forward. What will happen depends partly on what has been done already and partly on what we do now, as well as on what people are going to do (including what unforeseen inventions or insights they come up with.)
For example, by figuring out the effects of decision that have been made, scrutinizing the decision that can be made now—and by adding some shrewd imagination in the process—forecasters can begin to make scenarios of various possibilities for the future.
Forecasting begins by trying to answer the basic question: What will the future be like? This is usually approached by assuming that things will continue pretty much on their present course, with foreseeable innovations in technology. This could mean a future generally like the present, or it could mean a very different one, depending on the strength and interrelationships of these trends.
But by weighing data and assumptions differently, perhaps adding or subtracting some factors, forecasters can develop what are called alternative futures. These can be ranked as “probable” or “possible” futures.
These forecasts can then become information that other sorts of futurists use in considering the question they want to answer: What kind of a future do we want? From possible futures they select their desirable futures. The third question may then be: how do we make our desirable future happen? This is the area of futurist activism.
In practice, these categories often overlap and intermix. But there are strong advocates and practitioners who concentrate on one, and may even criticize and disparage those who practice the others.
Large-scale, computer-generated scenarios are the most obvious illustration of forecasting. The first Club of Rome report, Limits to Growth, tabulated and compared statistics on food, population and industrial growth, and came up with a single forecast of world-wide collapse. But partly because of the furor it created, and partly because the process became more sophisticated, the second report (Mankind at the Turning Point) developed short, medium and long-range alternative scenarios for the world, separated into ten economic, energy and resources regions. It also considered politics and values as well as material factors.
The difference between these first two reports illuminates the public debate now going on about these titanic (and I use that word advisedly) world problems. In particular, the Lifeboat vs. Spaceship Earth debate is a classic confrontation, specifically dealing with world food distribution policy but ultimately all the major issues of world survival.
The debate begins with some givens: millions of people are starving. Over 400 million suffer from malnutrition, and 10,000 die of hunger and hunger-related diseases each day. The controversy over what to do about this situation has raged in academic journals and at various international meetings, such as the Rome Food conference. The debate began in earnest with articles by California social scientist Garrett Hardin, proposing that the population problem in the undeveloped world was so severe that nothing could be done by developed countries to prevent starvation there, and that both rich and poor nations would suffer if they tried.
Hardin asserted that Buckminster Fuller’s metaphor of Spaceship Earth, which stresses the interdependence of all humanity, “can be dangerous when used by misguided idealists to justify suicidal policies for sharing our resources through uncontrolled immigration and foreign aid.” His substitute metaphor was the Lifeboat, representing the rich nations, with the poor nations swimming around it. Because even the resources of the rich are finite, bringing the swimming aboard by sharing food would only result in everything being eaten up faster. Hardin concluded that if the poor are brought aboard, “…the boat swamps, everyone drowns. Complete justice: complete catastrophe.”
Hardin based his assessment partly on the first Club of Rome report, and his conclusions were shared by M.I.T.’s Jay Forrester, a major figure on the Limits to Growth team. Together they proposed that the U.S. save its resources, and engage in triage (parceling out surplus food for political benefits.) Their proposals were greeted with shock and moral outrage, and then by informed critiques.
Rodger Revelle of the Harvard Center for Population Studies called the report’s population projections oversimplified, and questioned its understanding of what limits population growth. Alan Berg of the World Bank questioned the accuracy of the food figures. Ecologist Barry Commoner predicted that “Wars of Redistribution” would be encouraged by Hardin’s approach. Economist Robert Heilbroner also foresaw political and military conflicts induced by such policies, including nuclear terrorism.
Geoffrey Barraclough of Brandeis University maintained that economics is the real culprit: price and monetary policies rather than actual scarcities are responsible for shortages. Others pointed out that the U.S. already practices triage—in 1974, 43% of Food for Peace aid went to allies South Vietnam and Cambodia—and this only makes the situation worse, since most of the food wound up on the black market.
Others saw the problem in a larger context. They emphasized that the limits to growth are real, but they are planetary, so the more practical approach is not an isolated Lifeboat but a global Spaceship Earth. Climatologist Stephen Schneider pointed out that long range climate change affecting agriculture, for example, can hit the currently rich nations as well as the poor. Harvard’s Jean Mayer asserted that the real population and food problem is in the rich nations, because they consume and pollute more. Nutritionist Frances Moore Lappe claimed that rich nations are wasting incredible amounts of protein food through poor agricultural planning and overly beefy diets--in other words, that Lifeboat Ethics is really Hamburger Ethics.
So what seemed like a simple forecast turned out to be, if not totally inaccurate, then at least not so simple, and therefore such a harsh policy prescription seems to lack prudent justification. Part of the lesson is the complexity of future forecast, based on the true complexity of present reality. Food availability, a range of experts were saying, is a consequence of the interplay of distribution, organization, energy, diet, consumption, weather, transportation, monetary policy and population—which in turn are affected by everything from levels of industrialization to dominant religious beliefs to the number of young females who watch television.
The second report of the Club of Rome reflected an adjusted perspective. It concluded: “…what is really needed is a simultaneous consideration of all aspects of mankind’s evolution from individual values and attitudes to ecological and environmental conditions.” The third report is expected to concentrate on values that inhibit positive change, which itself reflects a trend in futurism: the examination of values and the emphasis on human consciousness in shaping change.
Politics of the Future: Government, Grassroots, Education
Another lesson of the Club of Rome controversy is the role, not only of morality and shared values but also the “political realities”: not just the influence of those values, but also the impact of self-interest, as well as selfishness, ignorance, venality and stupidity of leaders and the groups of various sizes they represent. Which is why some futurists despair... and some get involved in politics.
Those who despair of the future or the usefulness of futurism often make the same objections: people and nations cannot learn to cooperate or plan because they will always take the short-run benefit over the long-range good. Democracy in particular, they say, is a poor form for effective planning, and the only realistic (perhaps inevitable) alternative is planning imposed by a dictatorship.
But there are others in today’s futurism trying to build what Alvin Toffler calls “anticipatory democracy”—political forms that allow a future-aware public to participate in the planning of their own futures. Some elected officials, such as Governors Ray of Iowa, McCall of Oregon and Carter of Georgia, have personally involved themselves in mass planning meetings sponsored by their state governments. Hawaii has held similar planning events, and the University of Hawaii is a leader in futures studies.
There are a few grassroots groups, such as Earthrise in Rhode Island, that undertake community future-consciousness raising. Earthrise, loosely affiliated with the Rhode Island School of Design, is also involved in the state’s official long-range planning effort.
One group that is trying to apply new communications technology to such a process is the Committee for the Future, headquartered in Washington, that experimented with using video to conduct “Meetings to Design a Desirable Future” in eight U.S. cities. These meetings drew a diversity of people into gradually widening discussions on the future of government, technology, the arts, economics and social needs.
This organization was founded and is run by Barbara Marx Hubbard (heir to the Marx toys fortune who poured considerable funds into the project) and John Whiteside, a former NASA press officer. They and a group of young associates used an experimental form called SYNCON (for Synergistic Convergence) which divides participants into separate rooms to discuss a given subject from a future point of view. The groups are initially connected by closed circuit television, which has on occasion been broadcast to a larger community, with feedback from outside viewers. In Boston, a three day Town Meeting of the Future was broadcast on WGBH, the public television station. Later in the process, walls between the participants literally come down, as groups combine until everyone is discussing all the issues together.
But futurism of one kind or another is also influencing more traditional politicians. In the U.S. Congress, futurists point to two victories: the Foresight Provision of H.R. 988, which requires that all committees of the House study the future impact of all bills they send to the floor, and the creation of an Office of Technology Assessment, which is responsible for keeping Congress informed on the possible effects of technological change, and recommends new technological solutions. Senator Edward Kennedy, one of the prime movers behind OTA and its first Chairman, is drafting three future-oriented bills.
Senators Jacob Javits and Hubert Humphrey proposed an Office of Economic Planning, a bill endorsed by the United Auto Workers. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Russell Train has called for “a continuing and comprehensive census of the future.” Ann Cheatham, an aide to Representative Rose of North Carolina, operates a “Congressional clearinghouse on the future,” seminars reputed to be among the most successful futurist activities in Washington.
Senator John Culver of Colorado believes that political decision-makers, under increasing pressure from constituents to solve critical problems before they become insurmountable, will turn for help to those who are prepared—the futurists.
Meanwhile, according to a survey by consultant W. W. Simmons, long-range planning of some kind was underway in at 13 states in 1973. Futurism has infiltrated the corporate world as well. W.W. Simmons shows that more than 35 major U.S. corporations engage in futures forecasting, most of them in research of social and environmental conditions up to 20 years away. They include General Electric, AT&T, Ford, Mobil Oil and Xerox. MIT professor and Club of Rome consultant Carroll Wilson has even persuaded executives of major companies to study ways to limit their own growth.
Functional futurism can seem to be pretty mundane. Some forecasters and planners look at a particular area (what will mental health services be like in our state in 1985?) or particular places (what will Southern California cities be like?) Futures research is often conducted with an eye toward what can be done in the present. The city governments of California wanted to know how bad smog and traffic would be, and what they could do about it. (A consultant told them that all cars would have to be banned from downtowns by 1985.)
Scott Paper hired future researchers to find out whether people are likely to want paper towels in 1990, whether there will be resources available to make them, and what other products might fit the times. Meanwhile, the Washington (DC) Chamber of Commerce claims to employ 30 professional futures researchers, to help it lobby for business interests.
These are some of the targeted tasks performed by professionals who use forecasting, trend analysis and other techniques, and may not necessary even want to call themselves futurists. But to find the more visionary views, and to locate the future of futurism, look on campus.
The range of courses being offered just at North American colleges and universities include “Utopias, Dystopia and Scenarios” (Harvard), “The Sociology of Aerospace” (Simpson), “California As the Wave of the Future” (Case Western Reserve in Ohio), “Conflict Research” (UCLA), “Geography of the Future” (Penn State), “Future of the Family” (Colorado State), “On the Limits of Prediction” (Simon Fraiser in Canada), as well as numerous courses on the the future and…drugs, computers, bioengineering, sex, government. The University of Massachusets offers a PhD in Futures Studies.
There are futures studies courses in high schools—the Maslov-Toffler School on Long Island is completely devoted to a futures curriculum—and in adult education, notably at the New School in New York City. Courses at all levels are increasing by about 50% every two years, according to Dartmouth sociologist H. Wentworth Eldridge, who watches the field closely. Classroom approaches vary from the usual lecture format to modular, team-teaching system
Some of the big names in the futures field—Toffler, Daniel Bell, Robert Theobald, John Platt, Robert Heilbroner—teach futures courses, or used to, but most of the work in education is being done by people like Rojas and Eldridge, who have become active since academic futurism started catching on in 1968, plus teachers who were trained in social studies, science or theology. They are being joined by graduates from their own programs.
Yet as a discipline, Futures Studies is still in its formative stage. “Identification of ‘futurism’ and clarification of the concept,” Eldridge wrote in his latest report on futures education, "remains the dominant problem.”
Another lesson of the Club of Rome controversy is the role, not only of morality and shared values but also the “political realities”: not just the influence of those values, but also the impact of self-interest, as well as selfishness, ignorance, venality and stupidity of leaders and the groups of various sizes they represent. Which is why some futurists despair... and some get involved in politics.
Those who despair of the future or the usefulness of futurism often make the same objections: people and nations cannot learn to cooperate or plan because they will always take the short-run benefit over the long-range good. Democracy in particular, they say, is a poor form for effective planning, and the only realistic (perhaps inevitable) alternative is planning imposed by a dictatorship.
But there are others in today’s futurism trying to build what Alvin Toffler calls “anticipatory democracy”—political forms that allow a future-aware public to participate in the planning of their own futures. Some elected officials, such as Governors Ray of Iowa, McCall of Oregon and Carter of Georgia, have personally involved themselves in mass planning meetings sponsored by their state governments. Hawaii has held similar planning events, and the University of Hawaii is a leader in futures studies.
There are a few grassroots groups, such as Earthrise in Rhode Island, that undertake community future-consciousness raising. Earthrise, loosely affiliated with the Rhode Island School of Design, is also involved in the state’s official long-range planning effort.
One group that is trying to apply new communications technology to such a process is the Committee for the Future, headquartered in Washington, that experimented with using video to conduct “Meetings to Design a Desirable Future” in eight U.S. cities. These meetings drew a diversity of people into gradually widening discussions on the future of government, technology, the arts, economics and social needs.
This organization was founded and is run by Barbara Marx Hubbard (heir to the Marx toys fortune who poured considerable funds into the project) and John Whiteside, a former NASA press officer. They and a group of young associates used an experimental form called SYNCON (for Synergistic Convergence) which divides participants into separate rooms to discuss a given subject from a future point of view. The groups are initially connected by closed circuit television, which has on occasion been broadcast to a larger community, with feedback from outside viewers. In Boston, a three day Town Meeting of the Future was broadcast on WGBH, the public television station. Later in the process, walls between the participants literally come down, as groups combine until everyone is discussing all the issues together.
But futurism of one kind or another is also influencing more traditional politicians. In the U.S. Congress, futurists point to two victories: the Foresight Provision of H.R. 988, which requires that all committees of the House study the future impact of all bills they send to the floor, and the creation of an Office of Technology Assessment, which is responsible for keeping Congress informed on the possible effects of technological change, and recommends new technological solutions. Senator Edward Kennedy, one of the prime movers behind OTA and its first Chairman, is drafting three future-oriented bills.
Senators Jacob Javits and Hubert Humphrey proposed an Office of Economic Planning, a bill endorsed by the United Auto Workers. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Russell Train has called for “a continuing and comprehensive census of the future.” Ann Cheatham, an aide to Representative Rose of North Carolina, operates a “Congressional clearinghouse on the future,” seminars reputed to be among the most successful futurist activities in Washington.
Senator John Culver of Colorado believes that political decision-makers, under increasing pressure from constituents to solve critical problems before they become insurmountable, will turn for help to those who are prepared—the futurists.
Meanwhile, according to a survey by consultant W. W. Simmons, long-range planning of some kind was underway in at 13 states in 1973. Futurism has infiltrated the corporate world as well. W.W. Simmons shows that more than 35 major U.S. corporations engage in futures forecasting, most of them in research of social and environmental conditions up to 20 years away. They include General Electric, AT&T, Ford, Mobil Oil and Xerox. MIT professor and Club of Rome consultant Carroll Wilson has even persuaded executives of major companies to study ways to limit their own growth.
Functional futurism can seem to be pretty mundane. Some forecasters and planners look at a particular area (what will mental health services be like in our state in 1985?) or particular places (what will Southern California cities be like?) Futures research is often conducted with an eye toward what can be done in the present. The city governments of California wanted to know how bad smog and traffic would be, and what they could do about it. (A consultant told them that all cars would have to be banned from downtowns by 1985.)
Scott Paper hired future researchers to find out whether people are likely to want paper towels in 1990, whether there will be resources available to make them, and what other products might fit the times. Meanwhile, the Washington (DC) Chamber of Commerce claims to employ 30 professional futures researchers, to help it lobby for business interests.
These are some of the targeted tasks performed by professionals who use forecasting, trend analysis and other techniques, and may not necessary even want to call themselves futurists. But to find the more visionary views, and to locate the future of futurism, look on campus.
The range of courses being offered just at North American colleges and universities include “Utopias, Dystopia and Scenarios” (Harvard), “The Sociology of Aerospace” (Simpson), “California As the Wave of the Future” (Case Western Reserve in Ohio), “Conflict Research” (UCLA), “Geography of the Future” (Penn State), “Future of the Family” (Colorado State), “On the Limits of Prediction” (Simon Fraiser in Canada), as well as numerous courses on the the future and…drugs, computers, bioengineering, sex, government. The University of Massachusets offers a PhD in Futures Studies.
There are futures studies courses in high schools—the Maslov-Toffler School on Long Island is completely devoted to a futures curriculum—and in adult education, notably at the New School in New York City. Courses at all levels are increasing by about 50% every two years, according to Dartmouth sociologist H. Wentworth Eldridge, who watches the field closely. Classroom approaches vary from the usual lecture format to modular, team-teaching system
Some of the big names in the futures field—Toffler, Daniel Bell, Robert Theobald, John Platt, Robert Heilbroner—teach futures courses, or used to, but most of the work in education is being done by people like Rojas and Eldridge, who have become active since academic futurism started catching on in 1968, plus teachers who were trained in social studies, science or theology. They are being joined by graduates from their own programs.
Yet as a discipline, Futures Studies is still in its formative stage. “Identification of ‘futurism’ and clarification of the concept,” Eldridge wrote in his latest report on futures education, "remains the dominant problem.”
Herman Kahn in the 70s, and a rare photo probably also from the 70s, with Barbara Marx Hubbard (far left) and Hazel Henderson (sitting on the floor.)
1975: Futurequake in Washington
It isn’t the only problem. The sudden prominence, as well as the internal strengths and weaknesses of today’s futurism were on dramatic display at the 1975 international convention of the World Future Society at the Hilton hotel in Washington.
The WFS was begun in 1968, and this was just its second quadrennial convention. Though the society reserves its inner sanctums for professionals, its convention turned out to be the big tent of futurism. The turnout was impressive, in numbers and especially in variety.
The luminaries of established futurism were there, including Herman Kahn and super-sociologist Daniel Bell. Authors Alvin Toffler and Paul Goodman roamed the halls, both wearing sunglasses. Counterculturalists were well-represented, including Whole Earth cataloger Stewart Brand and Karl Hess. Frances Fitzgerald was covering the convention for Harper’s (and I was there representing New Times magazine.)
Participants included the director of Technological Forecasting of Tel-Aviv University, government planners from Japan and India, and the director of marketing for Hooker Chemicals and Plastics. City planners in Hush Puppies and corporate forecasters in khaki suits mingled with university students in cutoff jeans.
There were parapsychologists, members of communes dedicated to ecological self-sufficiency, and at least four Members of Congress. Sessions explored topics from long-range economic and environmental planning to new technologies and systems analysis, to science fiction and the future of religion. The exhibit hall was filled with future-oriented products, from flushless toilets to books on the anthropology of outer space.
There was heady talk, of challenges and trends. Daniel Bell said the era of “American Exceptionalism” is ending, and American must adjust in attitudes and lifestyle to the inevitable economic, political and cognitive changes. The Third World will become increasingly important, and the future will depend a great deal on whether the U.S. can recognize new realities. That perspective echoed that of several Third World speakers, who startled some of their listeners by asserting that they weren’t interested in American advice anymore.
Senator Ted Kennedy was a principal speaker, and proposed the creation of an Experimental Futures Agency to showcase new technologies. “We have to openly assess future trends and options,” he told the assembly, “not to lay out some precise master plan which would be imposed on our people, but to honestly present the full range of ‘alternative futures,’ with their relative costs and benefits…Only in this way can our citizens may informed choices on the vital issues before us.”
Accordingly he also proposed a Citizens Assessment Act, “to provide adequate financing for public participation in complex policy issues involving technology…These CAA’s would be voluntary associations of citizens joined together to address major policy issues like environmental quality, nuclear power plant siting, mass transit programs, the use of pesticides…” It sounded to some listeners like a program for federally funded Nader’s Raiders.
He also provided futurist inspiration with the Kennedy touch. “But what we need above all else is the courage and commitment to shape the future. In the words of [philosopher Alfred] Whitehead, ‘Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and technology make the transition through time from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure. The very benefit of wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skills to avert evils. We must expect, therefore, that the future will disclose dangers. It is the business of the future to be dangerous;and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.’”
“Let us take up the spirit of the American pioneers,” he said. “But this time, we must be pioneers in time, rather than space.” He finished with a line that both his revered brothers used. “I should like to say that my brother Robert was always a futurist at heart. His favorite quote from George Bernard Shaw, which he repeated through his last campaign in 1968, is, I believe the central charge of this assembly: ‘Some men see things as they are and say, ‘why.’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not’?”
But not everything went so well. In fact, the convention almost collapsed on the first day.
Because futures studies by its own premise is comprehensive, and has to include everything about the future, the logical policy for the WFS is to be inclusive and open. Since new interest in the future is coming from young veterans of 1960s upheavals and those engaged in subsequent political and social activisms, as well as those pursuing new consciousness and ideas, they were interested and included. But they didn’t come without a cost. They were just as they were determined to have their voices heard by the futurist establishment as they had been by political leaders.
The futurist establishment—principally the first postwar generation of Think Tank forecasters—was on full view for the convention’s opening press conference. Among the luminaries on the stage was Herman Kahn himself, the paradigmatic establishment futurist, trying to leave behind his identification with thermonuclear war and megadeaths, and reinvent himself as predictor of a sunny American future.
Kahn, looking more like Santa Claus than Dr. Strangelove, was speaking softly, gravely and authoritatively, when suddenly a woman invaded the stage. She was Wilma Scott Heide, a past president of NOW, and her presence made her point: standing uninvited among a group of middle-aged white men, she was protesting the exclusion of women in the convention's planning and from the list of main speakers.
At first organizers had tried to handle the situation by literally shoving her off the stage. But when she finished speaking to the applause of onlookers, conference representatives sheepishly mumbled something conciliatory.
Among other things, it was a moment of high irony: the principal organization dedicated to anticipating the future found itself having its feminist crisis five years after everybody else. Anticipating it wouldn't have required a systems analysis, just reading the newspaper.
But this turned out to be only a prelude. That night a women's caucus was formed, and the convention's leaders were persuaded to add a woman as a main speaker, the very next morning. She was Hazel Henderson, a highly independent and creative former economist, and she galvanized the convention. Her speech was what many of the new futurists had been waiting for.
She told the assembly that she wasn't interested in developing strategies and scenarios. "I have humbler goals. They are to open up processes and decision mechanisms, to expose underlying values and assumptions buried deeply in our so-called value-free methodologies. Citizens now understand that professionals with narrow, specialist training cannot adequately define our problems. Not that professionals aren't essential to the debate, but they must now see where the limits of their technical competence end, and where their values carry no more weight than those of any other citizen in a democracy."
Hazel Henderson was instantly the new star of the convention, and her message inspired a fierce energy and focus for the rest of the proceedings. Henderson was an economist and a consultant to the Office of Technology Assessment, and so she knew Senator Ted Kennedy. When they later walked into the hall together for his speech, it symbolized the character of the convention. No one from the World Future Society had predicted this.
Towards the end of the convention, an alternative session led to a list of recommendations which were shouted from the podium in a free-form manifesto for the emerging future-populists. In the last hours, several individuals, including Alvin Toffler, tried to set up some sort of continuing communications network. But while those efforts were incomplete, there was a sense that something had begun.
It isn’t the only problem. The sudden prominence, as well as the internal strengths and weaknesses of today’s futurism were on dramatic display at the 1975 international convention of the World Future Society at the Hilton hotel in Washington.
The WFS was begun in 1968, and this was just its second quadrennial convention. Though the society reserves its inner sanctums for professionals, its convention turned out to be the big tent of futurism. The turnout was impressive, in numbers and especially in variety.
The luminaries of established futurism were there, including Herman Kahn and super-sociologist Daniel Bell. Authors Alvin Toffler and Paul Goodman roamed the halls, both wearing sunglasses. Counterculturalists were well-represented, including Whole Earth cataloger Stewart Brand and Karl Hess. Frances Fitzgerald was covering the convention for Harper’s (and I was there representing New Times magazine.)
Participants included the director of Technological Forecasting of Tel-Aviv University, government planners from Japan and India, and the director of marketing for Hooker Chemicals and Plastics. City planners in Hush Puppies and corporate forecasters in khaki suits mingled with university students in cutoff jeans.
There were parapsychologists, members of communes dedicated to ecological self-sufficiency, and at least four Members of Congress. Sessions explored topics from long-range economic and environmental planning to new technologies and systems analysis, to science fiction and the future of religion. The exhibit hall was filled with future-oriented products, from flushless toilets to books on the anthropology of outer space.
There was heady talk, of challenges and trends. Daniel Bell said the era of “American Exceptionalism” is ending, and American must adjust in attitudes and lifestyle to the inevitable economic, political and cognitive changes. The Third World will become increasingly important, and the future will depend a great deal on whether the U.S. can recognize new realities. That perspective echoed that of several Third World speakers, who startled some of their listeners by asserting that they weren’t interested in American advice anymore.
Senator Ted Kennedy was a principal speaker, and proposed the creation of an Experimental Futures Agency to showcase new technologies. “We have to openly assess future trends and options,” he told the assembly, “not to lay out some precise master plan which would be imposed on our people, but to honestly present the full range of ‘alternative futures,’ with their relative costs and benefits…Only in this way can our citizens may informed choices on the vital issues before us.”
Accordingly he also proposed a Citizens Assessment Act, “to provide adequate financing for public participation in complex policy issues involving technology…These CAA’s would be voluntary associations of citizens joined together to address major policy issues like environmental quality, nuclear power plant siting, mass transit programs, the use of pesticides…” It sounded to some listeners like a program for federally funded Nader’s Raiders.
He also provided futurist inspiration with the Kennedy touch. “But what we need above all else is the courage and commitment to shape the future. In the words of [philosopher Alfred] Whitehead, ‘Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and technology make the transition through time from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure. The very benefit of wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skills to avert evils. We must expect, therefore, that the future will disclose dangers. It is the business of the future to be dangerous;and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.’”
“Let us take up the spirit of the American pioneers,” he said. “But this time, we must be pioneers in time, rather than space.” He finished with a line that both his revered brothers used. “I should like to say that my brother Robert was always a futurist at heart. His favorite quote from George Bernard Shaw, which he repeated through his last campaign in 1968, is, I believe the central charge of this assembly: ‘Some men see things as they are and say, ‘why.’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not’?”
But not everything went so well. In fact, the convention almost collapsed on the first day.
Because futures studies by its own premise is comprehensive, and has to include everything about the future, the logical policy for the WFS is to be inclusive and open. Since new interest in the future is coming from young veterans of 1960s upheavals and those engaged in subsequent political and social activisms, as well as those pursuing new consciousness and ideas, they were interested and included. But they didn’t come without a cost. They were just as they were determined to have their voices heard by the futurist establishment as they had been by political leaders.
The futurist establishment—principally the first postwar generation of Think Tank forecasters—was on full view for the convention’s opening press conference. Among the luminaries on the stage was Herman Kahn himself, the paradigmatic establishment futurist, trying to leave behind his identification with thermonuclear war and megadeaths, and reinvent himself as predictor of a sunny American future.
Kahn, looking more like Santa Claus than Dr. Strangelove, was speaking softly, gravely and authoritatively, when suddenly a woman invaded the stage. She was Wilma Scott Heide, a past president of NOW, and her presence made her point: standing uninvited among a group of middle-aged white men, she was protesting the exclusion of women in the convention's planning and from the list of main speakers.
At first organizers had tried to handle the situation by literally shoving her off the stage. But when she finished speaking to the applause of onlookers, conference representatives sheepishly mumbled something conciliatory.
Among other things, it was a moment of high irony: the principal organization dedicated to anticipating the future found itself having its feminist crisis five years after everybody else. Anticipating it wouldn't have required a systems analysis, just reading the newspaper.
But this turned out to be only a prelude. That night a women's caucus was formed, and the convention's leaders were persuaded to add a woman as a main speaker, the very next morning. She was Hazel Henderson, a highly independent and creative former economist, and she galvanized the convention. Her speech was what many of the new futurists had been waiting for.
She told the assembly that she wasn't interested in developing strategies and scenarios. "I have humbler goals. They are to open up processes and decision mechanisms, to expose underlying values and assumptions buried deeply in our so-called value-free methodologies. Citizens now understand that professionals with narrow, specialist training cannot adequately define our problems. Not that professionals aren't essential to the debate, but they must now see where the limits of their technical competence end, and where their values carry no more weight than those of any other citizen in a democracy."
Hazel Henderson was instantly the new star of the convention, and her message inspired a fierce energy and focus for the rest of the proceedings. Henderson was an economist and a consultant to the Office of Technology Assessment, and so she knew Senator Ted Kennedy. When they later walked into the hall together for his speech, it symbolized the character of the convention. No one from the World Future Society had predicted this.
Towards the end of the convention, an alternative session led to a list of recommendations which were shouted from the podium in a free-form manifesto for the emerging future-populists. In the last hours, several individuals, including Alvin Toffler, tried to set up some sort of continuing communications network. But while those efforts were incomplete, there was a sense that something had begun.
1976: Futurequake Follow-Up and Futurism in Washington
A year later, futurists in Washington were still talking about what happened at the Hilton. A few weeks after the convention, Toffler’s Anticipatory Democracy Network sent follow-up letters noting, “Clearly the Washington meeting was an intense experience for many people.” A gathering of Washington futurists after the convention resulted in an ongoing group, the Planning Committee for a Model Futurist Organization, which produced a simulated annual report dated 1980, four years in the future. It anticipates and promotes a more participatory and rigorous futurism.
But not much else survived the burst of enthusiasm. Toffler’s network died on the vine, and other groups, in the words of Washington futurist Bill Moore, “just melted away…Futurists don’t like to organize,” he explained.
Sally Cornish of the WFS international office had another explanation. “You know how it is at a convention,” she said. “People have an interesting time, but there’s not a lot of follow-through.”
Meanwhile, there was still Herman Kahn. His new book, The Next Two Hundred Years, forecasting a sunny future for government and corporations as long as they keep doing what they are doing, received respectful coverage in the news columns of major newspapers. Kahn is probably still the only futurist who can command that kind of attention, and some younger futurists were getting really sick of it.
“What’s the mechanism by which he gets so much attention?” asked Dick Maynard, president of the Washington chapter of the World Future Society. “Does it mean what he says is true? It doesn’t say he’s right—it just says he’s good at P.R. But when it’s time for a futurist to testify at a congressional hearing, they call Herman because they know his name.”
“These guys are really playing a safe game,” Maynard continued. “They get famous for saying things that can’t be validated. The people who predicted the energy crisis didn’t get big press, but Herman did, and he missed it.”
But Maynard also expressed a frustration reflecting the perspective Hazel Henderson articulated. “How many people really get a chance to talk with Herman? It’s always a select group. People like Herman are so closed off and culture bound. That’s why we need wider participation and chances for feedback.”
“All our problems are interacting on a daily basis. I think it would be fantastic if they all worked out as he says they will. But we have a capability to monitor these things—we don’t have to play a high risk game. We don’t have to depend that Herman is right. We can’t afford to take the chance that Herman is wrong.”
Where futurism in Washington is right now may be best symbolized by the Committee for the Future, gearing up to host an international symposium with phone hook-ups to other cities as part of the Bicentennial Horizons Day. With an emphasis on communications technology and process, this group would seem to be what future populists are looking for: a way for everyone to learn and communicate about the future equally.
But their Syncon process and their technology have problems. “We started out six years ago to search out new options for the future and get them out to the public,” said co-founder John Whiteside. “But we still don’t really know how to do that.” Their attempt to use video at the end of the Washington convention to replay comments made by participants earlier, failed entirely when the technology wouldn’t work.
The organization otherwise seems caught between the two strong personalities of its founders: Barbara Marx Hubbard, a strong visionary who calls herself a “transformational evolutionist” and radiates a sense of purpose and care for people that attracts future populists. And Whiteside, a former military and NASA communications officer who exudes technical enthusiasm and optimism. His technocratic bias shouldn’t make any difference, but it’s one thing to take at face value the list of priorities for the next century he says he wrote one morning in his room, and something else to hear him say, while chatting about 1976 presidential candidates, “I’m not for any of them but I’ll tell you who I’m against—Jerry Brown. He’s contrary to the human spirit—he’s a Buddhist.”
Dick Maynard defends the role of technology in fostering communication. “Futurism does have its technical problems,” he said. “We’re always surer about technology than what it does. It’s easier to do the tangible things that to understand how to use it.” But he defends the attempts because eventually they may show results in greater understanding of complex problems inherent in studying events, causes, effects and patterns systematically.
“Computer graphics and video tape will be really helpful to people who have to make decisions,” he said. “Congressional staffers can compare what witnesses say, and see by means of computer graphics the implications of what they’re advocating. Now at these meetings you just get people waving their hands at each other because they don’t know what the other one is talking about.”
A year later, futurists in Washington were still talking about what happened at the Hilton. A few weeks after the convention, Toffler’s Anticipatory Democracy Network sent follow-up letters noting, “Clearly the Washington meeting was an intense experience for many people.” A gathering of Washington futurists after the convention resulted in an ongoing group, the Planning Committee for a Model Futurist Organization, which produced a simulated annual report dated 1980, four years in the future. It anticipates and promotes a more participatory and rigorous futurism.
But not much else survived the burst of enthusiasm. Toffler’s network died on the vine, and other groups, in the words of Washington futurist Bill Moore, “just melted away…Futurists don’t like to organize,” he explained.
Sally Cornish of the WFS international office had another explanation. “You know how it is at a convention,” she said. “People have an interesting time, but there’s not a lot of follow-through.”
Meanwhile, there was still Herman Kahn. His new book, The Next Two Hundred Years, forecasting a sunny future for government and corporations as long as they keep doing what they are doing, received respectful coverage in the news columns of major newspapers. Kahn is probably still the only futurist who can command that kind of attention, and some younger futurists were getting really sick of it.
“What’s the mechanism by which he gets so much attention?” asked Dick Maynard, president of the Washington chapter of the World Future Society. “Does it mean what he says is true? It doesn’t say he’s right—it just says he’s good at P.R. But when it’s time for a futurist to testify at a congressional hearing, they call Herman because they know his name.”
“These guys are really playing a safe game,” Maynard continued. “They get famous for saying things that can’t be validated. The people who predicted the energy crisis didn’t get big press, but Herman did, and he missed it.”
But Maynard also expressed a frustration reflecting the perspective Hazel Henderson articulated. “How many people really get a chance to talk with Herman? It’s always a select group. People like Herman are so closed off and culture bound. That’s why we need wider participation and chances for feedback.”
“All our problems are interacting on a daily basis. I think it would be fantastic if they all worked out as he says they will. But we have a capability to monitor these things—we don’t have to play a high risk game. We don’t have to depend that Herman is right. We can’t afford to take the chance that Herman is wrong.”
Where futurism in Washington is right now may be best symbolized by the Committee for the Future, gearing up to host an international symposium with phone hook-ups to other cities as part of the Bicentennial Horizons Day. With an emphasis on communications technology and process, this group would seem to be what future populists are looking for: a way for everyone to learn and communicate about the future equally.
But their Syncon process and their technology have problems. “We started out six years ago to search out new options for the future and get them out to the public,” said co-founder John Whiteside. “But we still don’t really know how to do that.” Their attempt to use video at the end of the Washington convention to replay comments made by participants earlier, failed entirely when the technology wouldn’t work.
The organization otherwise seems caught between the two strong personalities of its founders: Barbara Marx Hubbard, a strong visionary who calls herself a “transformational evolutionist” and radiates a sense of purpose and care for people that attracts future populists. And Whiteside, a former military and NASA communications officer who exudes technical enthusiasm and optimism. His technocratic bias shouldn’t make any difference, but it’s one thing to take at face value the list of priorities for the next century he says he wrote one morning in his room, and something else to hear him say, while chatting about 1976 presidential candidates, “I’m not for any of them but I’ll tell you who I’m against—Jerry Brown. He’s contrary to the human spirit—he’s a Buddhist.”
Dick Maynard defends the role of technology in fostering communication. “Futurism does have its technical problems,” he said. “We’re always surer about technology than what it does. It’s easier to do the tangible things that to understand how to use it.” But he defends the attempts because eventually they may show results in greater understanding of complex problems inherent in studying events, causes, effects and patterns systematically.
“Computer graphics and video tape will be really helpful to people who have to make decisions,” he said. “Congressional staffers can compare what witnesses say, and see by means of computer graphics the implications of what they’re advocating. Now at these meetings you just get people waving their hands at each other because they don’t know what the other one is talking about.”
The Trick to Save the Future
But confusion within futurism also reflects division on how a desirable future can be fostered and attained—or even whether it is futurism’s role to try.
But the point of forecasting the future would seem to be to prepare for what will happen, to try and change what is undesirable before it happens, and encourage the best possible future to emerge. The idea must be to not be a complete captive, especially when it seems our society has at least some control over some of the forces that determine the future.
For apart from the ever-present possibility of cataclysmic accident (not just the great Bomb-bath but such doleful freakishness as a laboratory-created, air-delivered, no-cure epidemic), what happens in the future will depend largely on what people do now. The scenarios vary, but they tell the same basic story: we can continue a society of mechanized junk, with all the snowmobiles and electric hair curlers we want, with the same unlimited growth and without developing a cooperative world economy, and with luck we can reach 2001 with only a few jolts, though we might have to meet 1984 along the way. But there are no longer any serious scenarios for civilization getting very far into the twenty-first century that don’t require major changes.
“There is only one crisis in the world. It is the crisis of transformation.” So states John Platt, in his eloquent call for a mobilization of the world’s scientists to save the future. From Buddha to Emerson and Chardin, there have been individual champions of transcendental attitudes, but after looking at the numbers on their charts, some forecasters are saying that our survival literally depends on change in that direction. That’s partly why futurism includes currently esoteric branches of biology and religion, as well as unconventional possibilities of the mind. Willis Harman, Director of the Social Policy Institute at Stanford writes, “The most carefully designed social measures will not achieve their desired goals unless they involve not only rationally designed programs and structures, but also changes in deep-rooted beliefs, values, attitudes and behavior patterns."
So Billy Rojas practices Buddhism as well as futuristics. At an MIT futurist seminar I met an advertising copywriter who talked about vector analysis and Gurdjieff, and a social scientist who was also a transcendental meditator. Also a Harvard Business School student who had spent four years in Vietnam, an Israeli physicist, several biologists and one economist---and they all talk to each other. There is an operating principle common to biology and futurism, which is that survival during periods of change depends not so much on being well-adapted as on being collectively adaptable.
All of these futurists—as well as Donald Stern, who majors in extraterrestrial sociology at the University of Washington, and Elliot Jacobson, who teaches environmental studies at the University of Massachusetts—are involved in what UMass futurist Fran Koster calls “imaging a richer future.” From forecasts of failure they are developing scenarios for success. The post-hippie program calls for de-toxification of the individual (the road to the future begins with your last cigarette) and new techniques of body and psychological knowledge, as well as technology.
The Spaceship Earth scenario calls for global consciousness, expressed in such mechanisms as a world food bank, world resource monitoring (begun by young adherents of Buckminster Fuller’s World Game) and a cooperative economic system. All scenarios call for alertness, resistance to the shock of rapid change, fortitude, creativity and planetary reverence. Such transformations are not impossible: cultural change is slow but visible.
As systems theorist and member of the Club of Rome Mihajlo Meserovic writes, “If, during the coming half-century, a viable world system emerges, an organic growth pattern will have been established for mankind to follow thereafter. If a viable system does not develop, projections for the decades thereafter may be academic.”
Apocalypse means revelation. Either all of us profit from the coming apocalypse or none of us does. We may be on the brink of complete disaster, or on the threshold of the first conscious evolutionary step on Earth, taken not by mechanization or by manipulating genes, but by solving problems. We will have to solve those problems to get to the intensely involving future some of the more visionary futurists see ahead of us: a future whose tantalizing outlines can be discerned by studying the most advanced sciences and the most ancient knowledge.
“The trick,” futurist Draper Kaufman says, “is to wake up those who are complacent without convincing the rest that things are hopeless.”
If there is hope for reaching that future, some of it is in the people who care enough about it to dedicate their present to not only their own fulfillment but posterity’s, and thereby to the spiraling gleam of life itself. Or as one young futures studies student said to me, “Have you watched that TV series, The Ascent of Man? Can’t you see how essentially beautiful human life is! We’ve got to find a way to go on.”
But confusion within futurism also reflects division on how a desirable future can be fostered and attained—or even whether it is futurism’s role to try.
But the point of forecasting the future would seem to be to prepare for what will happen, to try and change what is undesirable before it happens, and encourage the best possible future to emerge. The idea must be to not be a complete captive, especially when it seems our society has at least some control over some of the forces that determine the future.
For apart from the ever-present possibility of cataclysmic accident (not just the great Bomb-bath but such doleful freakishness as a laboratory-created, air-delivered, no-cure epidemic), what happens in the future will depend largely on what people do now. The scenarios vary, but they tell the same basic story: we can continue a society of mechanized junk, with all the snowmobiles and electric hair curlers we want, with the same unlimited growth and without developing a cooperative world economy, and with luck we can reach 2001 with only a few jolts, though we might have to meet 1984 along the way. But there are no longer any serious scenarios for civilization getting very far into the twenty-first century that don’t require major changes.
“There is only one crisis in the world. It is the crisis of transformation.” So states John Platt, in his eloquent call for a mobilization of the world’s scientists to save the future. From Buddha to Emerson and Chardin, there have been individual champions of transcendental attitudes, but after looking at the numbers on their charts, some forecasters are saying that our survival literally depends on change in that direction. That’s partly why futurism includes currently esoteric branches of biology and religion, as well as unconventional possibilities of the mind. Willis Harman, Director of the Social Policy Institute at Stanford writes, “The most carefully designed social measures will not achieve their desired goals unless they involve not only rationally designed programs and structures, but also changes in deep-rooted beliefs, values, attitudes and behavior patterns."
So Billy Rojas practices Buddhism as well as futuristics. At an MIT futurist seminar I met an advertising copywriter who talked about vector analysis and Gurdjieff, and a social scientist who was also a transcendental meditator. Also a Harvard Business School student who had spent four years in Vietnam, an Israeli physicist, several biologists and one economist---and they all talk to each other. There is an operating principle common to biology and futurism, which is that survival during periods of change depends not so much on being well-adapted as on being collectively adaptable.
All of these futurists—as well as Donald Stern, who majors in extraterrestrial sociology at the University of Washington, and Elliot Jacobson, who teaches environmental studies at the University of Massachusetts—are involved in what UMass futurist Fran Koster calls “imaging a richer future.” From forecasts of failure they are developing scenarios for success. The post-hippie program calls for de-toxification of the individual (the road to the future begins with your last cigarette) and new techniques of body and psychological knowledge, as well as technology.
The Spaceship Earth scenario calls for global consciousness, expressed in such mechanisms as a world food bank, world resource monitoring (begun by young adherents of Buckminster Fuller’s World Game) and a cooperative economic system. All scenarios call for alertness, resistance to the shock of rapid change, fortitude, creativity and planetary reverence. Such transformations are not impossible: cultural change is slow but visible.
As systems theorist and member of the Club of Rome Mihajlo Meserovic writes, “If, during the coming half-century, a viable world system emerges, an organic growth pattern will have been established for mankind to follow thereafter. If a viable system does not develop, projections for the decades thereafter may be academic.”
Apocalypse means revelation. Either all of us profit from the coming apocalypse or none of us does. We may be on the brink of complete disaster, or on the threshold of the first conscious evolutionary step on Earth, taken not by mechanization or by manipulating genes, but by solving problems. We will have to solve those problems to get to the intensely involving future some of the more visionary futurists see ahead of us: a future whose tantalizing outlines can be discerned by studying the most advanced sciences and the most ancient knowledge.
“The trick,” futurist Draper Kaufman says, “is to wake up those who are complacent without convincing the rest that things are hopeless.”
If there is hope for reaching that future, some of it is in the people who care enough about it to dedicate their present to not only their own fulfillment but posterity’s, and thereby to the spiraling gleam of life itself. Or as one young futures studies student said to me, “Have you watched that TV series, The Ascent of Man? Can’t you see how essentially beautiful human life is! We’ve got to find a way to go on.”
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Site Index
(if the link doesn't work, just go to the archive for that date)
Steve Allen Profile 09/08/2002
H.G. Wells & Empire of the Ants 10/06 /2002
Penn's Hard Woods (Pennsylvania Forests, from Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine)10/20/2002
Dawn of the Eagle: Haida Artist Robert Davidson (Smithsonian Mag.) /11/17 /2002
Christmas 1951 (unpublished fiction) 12/15/2002
THE MAN WHO LOVED MOVIES: Francois Truffaut profile (Rolling Stone)
and "Aesthetics of the Double Feature: 01/26 /2003
Summer at the O'Neill with August Wilson and other playwrights (Smithsonian m) 06/01/2003
Walk in Two Worlds:Native Americans in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh City Paper) 06/08 /2003
Mystery of the White Indians (Pgh Post Gazette Magazine) 08/03 /2003
Andy Warhol Museum (atelier International Art Magazine) 08/31 /2003
CHILDREN OF THE BLACKLIST (new version; part from Washington Newsworks) 09/07/2003
Christmas at Greengate Mall (The Malling of America) 12/21/2003
A Working Class Hero (In Pittsburgh) and A Letter from Berkeley 1969 (View from the Bottom) /01/04/2004
Why is there a Best Actress Award? (LA Times) 02/15/2004
Return to Tuluwat (San Francisco Chronicle) 02/29/2004
Traffic Koans 2004/03/28
Day Before Day After Tomorrow (SF Chronicle Insight) 2004/05/23
The Library Builder ( North Coast Journal & unpublished) 9/26/2004
ART AND SOUL (series of columns, "Tales", In Pittsburgh); ARTIST IN GRAY FLANNEL SUIT (New York Daily News Magazine); Awake: Art, Buddhism and Consciousness (Urthona Magazine, UK) 3/06/2005
In Praise of Live Theatre (In Pittsburgh), The Price of Art (In Pittsburgh), RUNNING ON ICE: Young Artists in Pittsburgh (for Pittsburgh Magazine) 3/13/2005
(if the link doesn't work, just go to the archive for that date)
Steve Allen Profile 09/08/2002
H.G. Wells & Empire of the Ants 10/06 /2002
Penn's Hard Woods (Pennsylvania Forests, from Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine)10/20/2002
Dawn of the Eagle: Haida Artist Robert Davidson (Smithsonian Mag.) /11/17 /2002
Christmas 1951 (unpublished fiction) 12/15/2002
THE MAN WHO LOVED MOVIES: Francois Truffaut profile (Rolling Stone)
and "Aesthetics of the Double Feature: 01/26 /2003
Summer at the O'Neill with August Wilson and other playwrights (Smithsonian m) 06/01/2003
Walk in Two Worlds:Native Americans in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh City Paper) 06/08 /2003
Mystery of the White Indians (Pgh Post Gazette Magazine) 08/03 /2003
Andy Warhol Museum (atelier International Art Magazine) 08/31 /2003
CHILDREN OF THE BLACKLIST (new version; part from Washington Newsworks) 09/07/2003
Christmas at Greengate Mall (The Malling of America) 12/21/2003
A Working Class Hero (In Pittsburgh) and A Letter from Berkeley 1969 (View from the Bottom) /01/04/2004
Why is there a Best Actress Award? (LA Times) 02/15/2004
Return to Tuluwat (San Francisco Chronicle) 02/29/2004
Traffic Koans 2004/03/28
Day Before Day After Tomorrow (SF Chronicle Insight) 2004/05/23
The Library Builder ( North Coast Journal & unpublished) 9/26/2004
ART AND SOUL (series of columns, "Tales", In Pittsburgh); ARTIST IN GRAY FLANNEL SUIT (New York Daily News Magazine); Awake: Art, Buddhism and Consciousness (Urthona Magazine, UK) 3/06/2005
In Praise of Live Theatre (In Pittsburgh), The Price of Art (In Pittsburgh), RUNNING ON ICE: Young Artists in Pittsburgh (for Pittsburgh Magazine) 3/13/2005
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
In Praise of Live Theatre
By William S. Kowinski
You've got a cableful of TV channels 24 hours a day, and for your VCR there is a sizeable selection from the history of cinema down at the grocery store. For drama or comedy outside your house, there's the neighborhood multiplex: where the big stars flash across the screen, along with the thundering cars, guns and starships. If it's flamboyant theatrical experience you crave, you can catch the latest rock star tour.
So for many people the special and unique rewards of going to a theatre and seeing a play are, in this time and place, something of a wonderful secret.
I grew up on TV and the movies---everything from Captain Video to Dr. Strangelove. The theatre was inaccessible where I lived, and if anyone I knew ever went to a play, I don't remember knowing about it. My high school had no drama class, and put on one silly play a year, like Seventeenth Summer and Time Out for Ginger.
As a so-called adult, the arts I was paid to write about were mostly rock & roll, literature, movies and TV. I wrote about theatre only rarely. Few people I knew---even the sophisticated ones---went to plays, even living in New York or Boston or Washington. (Unless of course they were actors or theatre critics.) Over the last several years I've been a traveler and not part of a community which nurtures theatre and regular theatergoing... All of these being reasons why I shouldn't care about the theatre.
But I do. I won't go into why live theatre attracts me as a writer of plays, or my affinity for performing. I want simply to send a love letter from my place in the dark, from out here in the seats. And to let you in on a few secrets.
The first secret is the one that the uninitiated may be most afraid of: there is something very different about watching a play. It isn't like watching TV or a movie. But instead of avoiding the problem by spending your going-out money at a restaurant (where you can still see glamorous, attractive actresses and actors, and even be waited on by them), consider that the rewards may be worth the effort. That no pain no gain thing.
There are lots of adjustments for the tube addict to make. Once you're there, you're stuck with the play---even if it's worse than Police Academy XX, you can't zap to the shopping channel. You can't even check out the fridge during a slow moment. Besides, those are live people up there, and to indicate that you don't like or understand what they're up to seems impolite. It's embarrassing.
But the most uncomfortable thing you can't escape is the violence. It's unlikely to be as graphic as on film, but it's more relentless. Since drama concerns conflict (which is a kind of violence) it often enacts pain. Even comedy commonly revolves around "problems." The answers aren't so easy as on TV. Watching unhappiness and tragedy unfold, witnessing the heat and sting of conflict, or sorting through intellectual difficulty is tough on the watcher. Of course, it's supposed to be. Even though a good production gives you plenty to be pleased about along the way, pitty and terror, or even joy and wonder, don't come cheap. Unless of course they are cheap---EZCatharsis, tastes great and less filling.
It takes an attention span, too, and that in itself can be painful for generations accustomed to having their retinas lit up by some new bit of visual dazzle every millisecond. And as much as people complain about them, one of the theatre's problems is that it has no commercials. Instead you get the unmitigated art of the play: the rhythms that guide you through a story and an experience, that are the story and experience: the sculpting of time as well as space on stage. Deciding where the funny bits and the melancholy soliloquies go is as important as the content. On TV you get pieces; at the theatre you get the flow.
Still, the payoff is usually some relentless rendering of events, when emotion gets piled upon emotion, threads of plot and character fly together even as pretenses and illusions are shed like coats of sugar in a rainstorm. It's called transformation, and the experience of it is proportionate to the audience's immersion. And there's no substitute for time. You've got to be there.
So why not just go to the movies? You've heard about the "magic of live theatre" and that nebulous "relationship between the actor and the audience," but what does it mean? Is it only the rush you get in realizing that you're in the same room with the lasers and the trained animals? Is this "relationship" like the club comedian who singles you out for abuse and you're supposed to be a good sport, or the fascist smiley face at the microphone who demands you "put your hands together!"
There is an undeniably special quality about actually being in the presence of real people and objects collaborating in a fantasy, and because you're there, being part of that collaboration. So much depends on you, and everything is designed for you. But on any given tonight, nobody knows what will really happen.
You don't get that every time, or at least I don't. If I'm too far away, and the audience is emotionally remote, or the play is dishonest, or the actors are relying entirely on memorized effects, I feel distant or cheated or trapped. But there are moments, sometimes entire acts, entire plays, when it is like nothing else, in a very good way.
So there is the thrill of sharing the uniquely here and now, the sharing of the mutually unexpected, the quality of quiet of a spellbound audience, or even the audience's forgiveness for the lapses or accidents onstage, or a sudden moment of intimacy with the actors and action---all part of the live theatre experience, the palpable relationship that links audience to actor and text in complex and involved play. When all the elements are in balance, the experience is unique, yet there is also the sense that it has been repeated since antiquity.
Plus, if you're seeing a play in your own town, those people up there probably come from the same community as you. They are your representatives in this communal art of fun and meaning, your cosmic stand-ins.
A play can take you through a process---from interest to identification to involvement: you laugh, you cry, you feel---not once, not just one feeling, but many, sometimes many at once. You share amusement, amazement, recognition, embarrassment---you suddenly sense the essence and enjoy the ephemera. And you do it seeing real bodies move and speak in real world continuity---you don't see only the pores on their faces one moment, and their blurred backs speeding away in a car the next. You see whole persons but in an artificial space, and in smaller theaters you are forcibly reminded of their humanness, and therefore your own, our own, even as you always know that what you are looking at is a play on a stage.
I think of moments during Arthur Miller's The Creation of the World and Other Business, as produced by Pittsburgh's New Group Theater this fall. The performance space was large but the few rows of seats were very close to the action. Although humorous, the play is about very weighty matters, which is hard to avoid when God has a speaking part. But that physical closeness brought the philosophy home. You could stare into the eyes of the actors---a very different experience than watching close-ups distanced by film or tape---and when that actor does not break character as you stare, the reality of the moment takes on greater power.
And you could be startled at the connection made by something as simple as...their bare feet. Close up and personal, real feet of real people: puffy or long-toed, healthily hued or vulnerably pale, feet are simultaneously grotesque and graceful, mundane and impressive and assertively human, right there alive and doing their thing. The play's questions of meaning of good and evil, of individuality and community, fate and freedom---are what theater has always been about. But that search for meaning, the few uncertain discoveries of our exploration, are not completed until the connection is made to our full beings, to our aspirations and vulnerabilities, our confusions and our capabilities---from God to our bare feet.
Of course, the ideal theatre experience doesn't happen all the time---being ideal, it never happens. It's a gamble, and for me, a play that didn't make it, or inadequate direction and acting of a great script, has been more painful to experience than a bad movie. But each production is different---it can say different things to be brought alive, again and again. So I've learned patience, which pays off in appreciation.
But the second secret is that there are wonderful surprises out there. Not just in Pittsburgh and not just in shiny culture palaces, but in an alley past a dumpster and an old washing machine, and up some stairs at the Changing Scene theater in Denver; and at the Solar Stage in the bowels of an office complex underground in Toronto. Even in New York I've seen some terrifically acted, highly intelligent plays performed both to packed houses on Broadway (such as Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and David Rabe's Hurlyburly) and to an audience consisting of myself and four or five members of the cast's families (when I saw Mark Pizzato's very worthy The Crime of Art at the 13th Street Playhouse.)
All kinds of theater, from lavish musicals to avant garde performances, can call up the magic. Theater is old---old enough encompass everything and infuse different styles into various forms, so the most rarified is reenergized (the application of gospel music to Greek tragedy in Gospel at Colonus) and the popular is enhanced (as when the musical met ballet, and classical elements of music and storytelling in the original productions of Showboat and West Side Story.)
But theatre is new. It is the one form of the lively arts that can embrace everything: story, poetry, oratory, painting, song and dance of all kinds, and increasingly these days, even the electronic media have become features of---and characters in---stage plays. Performers like Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Lily Tomlin and Spalding Gray show how the stage can be used to synthesize and create exciting and invigorating new experiences, and paths to meaning. American theater also includes styles that reflect the diversity of the country and the world: styles born in Asia and Africa and Latin America.
When Polonius sees the Players coming, he describes to Hamlet all the styles of theater they can perform: tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, and so on. But Hamlet's request of the Players was more basic: "Come," he said. "A passionate speech!"
And this is the final and most important secret. In these strange times, when the arts are more respected but artists are less supported---when, in the words of Dan Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times, there are "millions for the roof, pennies for the fiddler," there are nevertheless still people willing to not only work for next to nothing in the theatre, but to support their work and the theatre by depleting their energies doing menial jobs unworthy of their talents. The theater lives by their passion.
They are playwrights, actors, directors and theater craftspeople who come together and work hard to do what the rest of society judges by word and deed to be frivolous if not insane, and they do it with dedication, with intense love, and more often than anyone has a right to expect, with brilliance. It is impossible for me not to feel this fact every time I see a play, especially in the 1980s.
I think of Lee Strucker and Nadine Curacciolo, two modern day minstrels I met in Seattle, where at the Pioneer Playhouse they performed The Gump Show, a "trans-dimensional comedy" they wrote. They are married and performed their previous plays---wild, fetchingly homemade but often breathtaking amalgams of music, text, science fiction and puppetry---all over Europe and North America. "I know a lot of starving artists," Lee mused one afternoon. "But it's funny---I don't know any starving arts administrators."
Nevertheless they keep going, although they know there's no telling how long they'll be able to continue on the edges of their resources, depending on youthful energy, good health, charity and luck. Others like them, in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, struggle to share a basic version of the American life their audience has (some decent digs, a respectable place in the community, and maybe even a family) while they do this one weird thing: they make theatre.
We know that the myth of talent always winning out is a lie, as corrupting as it is comforting, just as we know that we don't get the quality of theatre we could have. So for the spectator it is all the more astonishing when the magic really happens, the kind you will always remember: not just William Hurt's tour de force in his first Broadway performance at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, but when Kathyrn Charles does her woman-in-the-moon dance to end the world premiere of "Frontiers" by M.Z. Ribalow in that theatre in the alley in Denver.
To make this magic takes years of effort and hearts full of belief. I don't mean just the actors, writers, producers and directors and so on, though they are the main ones. I mean those of us out here, too. If we approach the theatre actively, with humility and passion, our rewards can be multiplied---and a night of fun is just the beginning. How about the jolts to our hearts, the permanent changes in the way we see ourselves and the world, like growing secret extra eyes and new dancing bare fugitive feet? We enact our part of the human mystery. We share in the secret.
POSTSCRIPT
This piece was originally published in In Pittsburgh weekly in 1989 or so, and reflects theatre experiences of that year and a few immediately preceding. Some Internet nebbyness reveals that today M.Z. Ribalow is a writer in residence at Fordham U., having been a production associate to Joe Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the author of some 20 produced plays, 10 childrens books, poetry and screenplays. Mark Pizzato is now Dr. Mark Pizzato, an assistant professor of theatre at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, an author and playwright. The most recent item I found for Nadine Caracciolo and Lee Strucker was 1996, and their contribution ("Falling 1980") to the Twentieth Century Project of linked ten minute plays, at the American Living Room.
A strange and sad postscript to this article, which is one of those personal associations that nevertheless leaps out at me every time I even think about this piece: for me, the central experience that led to it was the production of Arthur Miller's "The Creation of the World..." in Pittsburgh. Later I got to know several of the people involved in that theatre and production, including the actress whose bare feet most impressed me. I'm pretty sure she played God. Her day job (I later found out) was working for In Pittsburgh, the weekly tabloid where this article appeared, so I would see her around the office. She was still in her twenties I believe, just a few years later, when she suddenly collapsed and died, on stage, during a performance.
By William S. Kowinski
You've got a cableful of TV channels 24 hours a day, and for your VCR there is a sizeable selection from the history of cinema down at the grocery store. For drama or comedy outside your house, there's the neighborhood multiplex: where the big stars flash across the screen, along with the thundering cars, guns and starships. If it's flamboyant theatrical experience you crave, you can catch the latest rock star tour.
So for many people the special and unique rewards of going to a theatre and seeing a play are, in this time and place, something of a wonderful secret.
I grew up on TV and the movies---everything from Captain Video to Dr. Strangelove. The theatre was inaccessible where I lived, and if anyone I knew ever went to a play, I don't remember knowing about it. My high school had no drama class, and put on one silly play a year, like Seventeenth Summer and Time Out for Ginger.
As a so-called adult, the arts I was paid to write about were mostly rock & roll, literature, movies and TV. I wrote about theatre only rarely. Few people I knew---even the sophisticated ones---went to plays, even living in New York or Boston or Washington. (Unless of course they were actors or theatre critics.) Over the last several years I've been a traveler and not part of a community which nurtures theatre and regular theatergoing... All of these being reasons why I shouldn't care about the theatre.
But I do. I won't go into why live theatre attracts me as a writer of plays, or my affinity for performing. I want simply to send a love letter from my place in the dark, from out here in the seats. And to let you in on a few secrets.
The first secret is the one that the uninitiated may be most afraid of: there is something very different about watching a play. It isn't like watching TV or a movie. But instead of avoiding the problem by spending your going-out money at a restaurant (where you can still see glamorous, attractive actresses and actors, and even be waited on by them), consider that the rewards may be worth the effort. That no pain no gain thing.
There are lots of adjustments for the tube addict to make. Once you're there, you're stuck with the play---even if it's worse than Police Academy XX, you can't zap to the shopping channel. You can't even check out the fridge during a slow moment. Besides, those are live people up there, and to indicate that you don't like or understand what they're up to seems impolite. It's embarrassing.
But the most uncomfortable thing you can't escape is the violence. It's unlikely to be as graphic as on film, but it's more relentless. Since drama concerns conflict (which is a kind of violence) it often enacts pain. Even comedy commonly revolves around "problems." The answers aren't so easy as on TV. Watching unhappiness and tragedy unfold, witnessing the heat and sting of conflict, or sorting through intellectual difficulty is tough on the watcher. Of course, it's supposed to be. Even though a good production gives you plenty to be pleased about along the way, pitty and terror, or even joy and wonder, don't come cheap. Unless of course they are cheap---EZCatharsis, tastes great and less filling.
It takes an attention span, too, and that in itself can be painful for generations accustomed to having their retinas lit up by some new bit of visual dazzle every millisecond. And as much as people complain about them, one of the theatre's problems is that it has no commercials. Instead you get the unmitigated art of the play: the rhythms that guide you through a story and an experience, that are the story and experience: the sculpting of time as well as space on stage. Deciding where the funny bits and the melancholy soliloquies go is as important as the content. On TV you get pieces; at the theatre you get the flow.
Still, the payoff is usually some relentless rendering of events, when emotion gets piled upon emotion, threads of plot and character fly together even as pretenses and illusions are shed like coats of sugar in a rainstorm. It's called transformation, and the experience of it is proportionate to the audience's immersion. And there's no substitute for time. You've got to be there.
So why not just go to the movies? You've heard about the "magic of live theatre" and that nebulous "relationship between the actor and the audience," but what does it mean? Is it only the rush you get in realizing that you're in the same room with the lasers and the trained animals? Is this "relationship" like the club comedian who singles you out for abuse and you're supposed to be a good sport, or the fascist smiley face at the microphone who demands you "put your hands together!"
There is an undeniably special quality about actually being in the presence of real people and objects collaborating in a fantasy, and because you're there, being part of that collaboration. So much depends on you, and everything is designed for you. But on any given tonight, nobody knows what will really happen.
You don't get that every time, or at least I don't. If I'm too far away, and the audience is emotionally remote, or the play is dishonest, or the actors are relying entirely on memorized effects, I feel distant or cheated or trapped. But there are moments, sometimes entire acts, entire plays, when it is like nothing else, in a very good way.
So there is the thrill of sharing the uniquely here and now, the sharing of the mutually unexpected, the quality of quiet of a spellbound audience, or even the audience's forgiveness for the lapses or accidents onstage, or a sudden moment of intimacy with the actors and action---all part of the live theatre experience, the palpable relationship that links audience to actor and text in complex and involved play. When all the elements are in balance, the experience is unique, yet there is also the sense that it has been repeated since antiquity.
Plus, if you're seeing a play in your own town, those people up there probably come from the same community as you. They are your representatives in this communal art of fun and meaning, your cosmic stand-ins.
A play can take you through a process---from interest to identification to involvement: you laugh, you cry, you feel---not once, not just one feeling, but many, sometimes many at once. You share amusement, amazement, recognition, embarrassment---you suddenly sense the essence and enjoy the ephemera. And you do it seeing real bodies move and speak in real world continuity---you don't see only the pores on their faces one moment, and their blurred backs speeding away in a car the next. You see whole persons but in an artificial space, and in smaller theaters you are forcibly reminded of their humanness, and therefore your own, our own, even as you always know that what you are looking at is a play on a stage.
I think of moments during Arthur Miller's The Creation of the World and Other Business, as produced by Pittsburgh's New Group Theater this fall. The performance space was large but the few rows of seats were very close to the action. Although humorous, the play is about very weighty matters, which is hard to avoid when God has a speaking part. But that physical closeness brought the philosophy home. You could stare into the eyes of the actors---a very different experience than watching close-ups distanced by film or tape---and when that actor does not break character as you stare, the reality of the moment takes on greater power.
And you could be startled at the connection made by something as simple as...their bare feet. Close up and personal, real feet of real people: puffy or long-toed, healthily hued or vulnerably pale, feet are simultaneously grotesque and graceful, mundane and impressive and assertively human, right there alive and doing their thing. The play's questions of meaning of good and evil, of individuality and community, fate and freedom---are what theater has always been about. But that search for meaning, the few uncertain discoveries of our exploration, are not completed until the connection is made to our full beings, to our aspirations and vulnerabilities, our confusions and our capabilities---from God to our bare feet.
Of course, the ideal theatre experience doesn't happen all the time---being ideal, it never happens. It's a gamble, and for me, a play that didn't make it, or inadequate direction and acting of a great script, has been more painful to experience than a bad movie. But each production is different---it can say different things to be brought alive, again and again. So I've learned patience, which pays off in appreciation.
But the second secret is that there are wonderful surprises out there. Not just in Pittsburgh and not just in shiny culture palaces, but in an alley past a dumpster and an old washing machine, and up some stairs at the Changing Scene theater in Denver; and at the Solar Stage in the bowels of an office complex underground in Toronto. Even in New York I've seen some terrifically acted, highly intelligent plays performed both to packed houses on Broadway (such as Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and David Rabe's Hurlyburly) and to an audience consisting of myself and four or five members of the cast's families (when I saw Mark Pizzato's very worthy The Crime of Art at the 13th Street Playhouse.)
All kinds of theater, from lavish musicals to avant garde performances, can call up the magic. Theater is old---old enough encompass everything and infuse different styles into various forms, so the most rarified is reenergized (the application of gospel music to Greek tragedy in Gospel at Colonus) and the popular is enhanced (as when the musical met ballet, and classical elements of music and storytelling in the original productions of Showboat and West Side Story.)
But theatre is new. It is the one form of the lively arts that can embrace everything: story, poetry, oratory, painting, song and dance of all kinds, and increasingly these days, even the electronic media have become features of---and characters in---stage plays. Performers like Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Lily Tomlin and Spalding Gray show how the stage can be used to synthesize and create exciting and invigorating new experiences, and paths to meaning. American theater also includes styles that reflect the diversity of the country and the world: styles born in Asia and Africa and Latin America.
When Polonius sees the Players coming, he describes to Hamlet all the styles of theater they can perform: tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, and so on. But Hamlet's request of the Players was more basic: "Come," he said. "A passionate speech!"
And this is the final and most important secret. In these strange times, when the arts are more respected but artists are less supported---when, in the words of Dan Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times, there are "millions for the roof, pennies for the fiddler," there are nevertheless still people willing to not only work for next to nothing in the theatre, but to support their work and the theatre by depleting their energies doing menial jobs unworthy of their talents. The theater lives by their passion.
They are playwrights, actors, directors and theater craftspeople who come together and work hard to do what the rest of society judges by word and deed to be frivolous if not insane, and they do it with dedication, with intense love, and more often than anyone has a right to expect, with brilliance. It is impossible for me not to feel this fact every time I see a play, especially in the 1980s.
I think of Lee Strucker and Nadine Curacciolo, two modern day minstrels I met in Seattle, where at the Pioneer Playhouse they performed The Gump Show, a "trans-dimensional comedy" they wrote. They are married and performed their previous plays---wild, fetchingly homemade but often breathtaking amalgams of music, text, science fiction and puppetry---all over Europe and North America. "I know a lot of starving artists," Lee mused one afternoon. "But it's funny---I don't know any starving arts administrators."
Nevertheless they keep going, although they know there's no telling how long they'll be able to continue on the edges of their resources, depending on youthful energy, good health, charity and luck. Others like them, in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, struggle to share a basic version of the American life their audience has (some decent digs, a respectable place in the community, and maybe even a family) while they do this one weird thing: they make theatre.
We know that the myth of talent always winning out is a lie, as corrupting as it is comforting, just as we know that we don't get the quality of theatre we could have. So for the spectator it is all the more astonishing when the magic really happens, the kind you will always remember: not just William Hurt's tour de force in his first Broadway performance at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, but when Kathyrn Charles does her woman-in-the-moon dance to end the world premiere of "Frontiers" by M.Z. Ribalow in that theatre in the alley in Denver.
To make this magic takes years of effort and hearts full of belief. I don't mean just the actors, writers, producers and directors and so on, though they are the main ones. I mean those of us out here, too. If we approach the theatre actively, with humility and passion, our rewards can be multiplied---and a night of fun is just the beginning. How about the jolts to our hearts, the permanent changes in the way we see ourselves and the world, like growing secret extra eyes and new dancing bare fugitive feet? We enact our part of the human mystery. We share in the secret.
POSTSCRIPT
This piece was originally published in In Pittsburgh weekly in 1989 or so, and reflects theatre experiences of that year and a few immediately preceding. Some Internet nebbyness reveals that today M.Z. Ribalow is a writer in residence at Fordham U., having been a production associate to Joe Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the author of some 20 produced plays, 10 childrens books, poetry and screenplays. Mark Pizzato is now Dr. Mark Pizzato, an assistant professor of theatre at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, an author and playwright. The most recent item I found for Nadine Caracciolo and Lee Strucker was 1996, and their contribution ("Falling 1980") to the Twentieth Century Project of linked ten minute plays, at the American Living Room.
A strange and sad postscript to this article, which is one of those personal associations that nevertheless leaps out at me every time I even think about this piece: for me, the central experience that led to it was the production of Arthur Miller's "The Creation of the World..." in Pittsburgh. Later I got to know several of the people involved in that theatre and production, including the actress whose bare feet most impressed me. I'm pretty sure she played God. Her day job (I later found out) was working for In Pittsburgh, the weekly tabloid where this article appeared, so I would see her around the office. She was still in her twenties I believe, just a few years later, when she suddenly collapsed and died, on stage, during a performance.
Monday, March 14, 2005
The Price of Art
Also for the In Pittsburgh weekly, I did several features which, in the process of reporting, tried to get at the experience of various art forms. I knew that my audience came from more or less the same background as I did, so I went at the subject partly from a personal point of view. This one is from 1987. I've omitted some material that I'd recycled from my research on New York arts, included elsewhere in this bloggical archive.
by William Severini Kowinski
"Here we are now, living in a world of painting which is unutterably paralytic and miserable. The exhibitions, the picture stores, everything, everything, is in the clutches of fellows who intercept all the money. And do not suppose for a moment this is only my imagination. People give a lot of money for the work after the painter himself is dead."
Vincent van Gogh
I don't remember really looking at a painting until I went away to college. Even then it was intimidating. Although the campus artists felt free to invade our literary circles, we weren't made welcome in their precincts of paint and print-making. I didn't know that just as we were diligently copying Joyce, Hemingway and Fitzgerald in our stories, their awesomely original paintings were in fact earnest imitations of de Kooning and Pollock.
After college I got interested in Dada and surrealism and the painters as well as the writers who occupied Paris in the first decades of this century. There I found not only kindred spirits but actual kin: Gino Severini, painter and theoretician, who was the living link between the Italian Futurists and the Cubists in Paris, was a blood relative. My maternal grandfather's family didn't talk about him, though: the black sheep of the family who wouldn't learn a trade and fled to France. That he became an intimate of Braque and Apollinaire, that he was saved from starvation one winter by no less than Picasso himself---wouldn't have cut any gelato with them anyway.
So after that, every time I went to Manhattan I made a point of visiting the Museum of Modern Art, where a large Severini was exhibited. I still didn't know all that much about paintings, but I was immensely attracted and deeply involved by their physicality---the bold Picassos with gaps of canvas and lines painted out, the softly swirled and twined colors of Renoir, the muted moodiness of Manet, even the photo-like objects mysteriously juxtaposed by Magritte (who once said, "There is a mystery to life, but what is it?") They were all different, all intensely beautiful, and most moving to me, seeing them as actual objects a few inches from my eyes---they were perfect and imperfect at once, all suddenly revealing that they were in fact painted by real fellow human beings.
Seeing a real painting is a tactile as well as visual experience---there are dimensions totally missed by flat, dulled reproductions in a book or poster. It was true for me again when I went to see "The Plain of Auvers," an oil canvas by Vincent van Gogh, in the Scaife Gallery of the Carnegie Museum of Art.
It's not only that the brilliance of its colors and its textures are barely suggested by postcard reproductions. Up close, this Van Gogh no longer looks like a textbook illustration but something a man did with his hands---he painted, he painted over, he used brush and palette knife, he patiently worked on this corner (the Japanese-like daubs of detail); over here he slashed bold, perfect, passionate strokes. Suddenly a few squiggles of paint become a stand of trees on the horizon. The colors become tones---these luminous blue-greens in several shades, these sudden swirls of white, the strange corrupted reds, the famous yellows. The patterns play and repeat. You can almost see the actual time its composition took, incorporated in it. You can see the action still taking place...and it became a picture, and it became a painting. This is the process before you, and the result.
The experience of seeing it is somehow strengthening: you see what an odd sort of perfect a work of art is. Once it's done, it seems inevitable: yet the day before it was created, it was at best an unorganized potential of ideas, feelings accidents waiting to happen and choices yet to be made, and tomorrow's light.)
But you also see that it doesn't arrive fully perfected from some alien life-form or machine: no conglomerate or textbook company manufactured it from a pre-set, committee-derived design. It was pulled into existence from the talent and experience and (dare we say this today?) the soul, and the sweat and passion of a given person on a given day. So now a relationship: one person who painted it on that day or days, and one person who is looking at it now, today.
And here it is: the one, the only. The very one that a man named Vincent van Gogh made with his own hands in some silent field in another country, almost a hundred years ago...
But how long will it be here?
It's a good question, even in 1987, especially after the latest sale of a van Gogh for a shade under $54 million. With the proceeds from just two previous sales, van Gogh's take this year is over $114 million. Not bad for a painter whose health was ruined by worry over money and not getting enough to eat, who never made more than a few cents---let alone a living---from his prodigious artistry, who died in despair with a bullet in his brain at the age of 38.
This latest record-breaking price for a single painting raises questions that concern art exhibitors, the arts audience and artists themselves. For with rising insurance and security costs---and the temptations to sell major paintings to private bidders---the sight of a real van Gogh could become an experience of the past for all but a few.
Consider the story behind the sale of van Gogh's "Irises," the $54 million canvas. Back in 1947, an American named Joan Whitney Payson bought it as a gift for her seven year old son, John. She paid about $80,000. John eventually built a gallery in his mother's memory at tiny Westbrook College in Portland, Maine, and the painting was exhibited there. Portland was proud to have it, and the college told everyone it would eventually be theirs by bequest. Most people thought it was part of the gallery's "permanent collection."
But then early in 1986, van Gogh's "Sunflowers" sold to a Japanese insurance company for $39.9 million, then the world's record for a single painting. This, ironically or not, sent insurance costs sky high as other van Goghs of similar prominence were immediately revalued, including "Irises." John Payson, who still owned the painting, decided he couldn't afford to keep it.
He promised to donate part of the proceeds to the college and another chunk to the gallery, plus an even dozen paintings: a Renoir, a Chagall, a Degas. Although many Portlanders were shocked to learn he (and not the gallery) owned "Irises," his plans for the money won general but not unanimous approval. Portland takes its art seriously (their new museum is one of the best designed for viewing that I've experienced in this country.) One strong dissenting voice was that of Edgar Allen Beem, art critic for the weekly alternative paper, Maine Times. "This is one of the few works of genius in our midst," he said. "The local press has portrayed Payson's plan to spread the money around as 'a great act of philanthropy,' when in fact to me it looked like nothing but greed...The rich are the custodians of culture, and we get what they give us. I'm not sure how to change that, but they are not to be applauded."
Pittsburgh has two van Goghs, the aforementioned "Plains of Auvers" (1890) and "Le Moulin de la Galette" (1886-88), both in the permanent collection of The Carnegie. I talked to Vicky Clark, curator of education, shortly after the "Irises" sale in November. "We're absolutely amazed at the prices," she said. "Not just for van Gogh---it's everybody." The sale will probably make a "tricky" insurance situation even trickier, she admitted. "It could affect us in the future. But we have no problems yet. We're certainly not going to sell our van Goghs." One reason is that "even if you can sell it, you can't replace it with anything comparable, because prices are so high." As it is, art museums can't afford to buy a van Gogh or anything like one. Anonymous corporations and private collections buying art for investment and perhaps prestige are, in Clark's words, "pricing museums out of the market."
Could major paintings disappear from view, only to be seen as color plates in art books, never to be experienced as paintings? Some have, but many works of art have always been in private collections. One reason the prices for van Goghs are so high, one theory goes, is that so many of them are already in museums, and few come on the market.
Should we be afraid that museums won't be able to acquire or exhibit art (especially if the insurance gets so high and restrictive that security becomes prohibitively expensive?) Maybe, but according to John Russell, eminent art critic for the New York Times, not quite yet, as long as we still have collectors who "have their community in mind, and an awareness of the enormous pleasure that can be had from works of art than even now do not involve a lot of super-numerary noughts."
So, you notice, we are still dependent on the rich.
But what effect does all this monumental money-changing have on living artists? The market for old and modern masters is only part of a high-priced international art casino variously described as "hot" and "inflated." All that money is bound to affect artists and the art they make.
"The prices paid for contemporary art are so high," says Sande Deitch, director and curator of exhibitions of the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, "that artists feel they have to cash in." In order to get known immediately---which is particularly important in today's Young Flavor of the Month art market---even the first sale has to be for a high price.
"For emerging artists as well as artists in mid-career, psychologically, money is the bottom line today," Deitch said. "Instead of developing their own skills as art makers, the art market is a great part of what they think about. Art has become a commodity."
Part of the reason is the money it takes to survive, especially in the high-rent New York scene, but it's also middle class expectations and increasingly, upper middle class entitlement, since surviving takes some hefty patronage and helpful connections. The bottom line for today's artist is is someone who isn't a big success finds it difficult to even survive as an artist.
Which brings us back to Vincent van Gogh, perhaps the prototype of the popular "starving artist" and "need to suffer" images. As is usual with clichés, there are kernels of truth however distorted. Van Gogh certainly starved, but he was far from naïve about money or the art market. In fact, before he became a painter he was an art dealer, and his brother, who supported him all his life, remained one. It wasn't that van Gogh didn't understand the role of money. He just felt it necessary to reject it as a force that would determine what kind of pictures he would make. Although his letters almost all begin with financial matters, they go on to talk about the really serious substance of his life: colors.
"Van Gogh was one of the comparatively few artists whose anguish really was inextricable from his talent," writes art critic Robert Hughes. But that is not the same as saying that van Gogh needed to be poor, to be constantly begging for small sums of money, or even to be tortured by abrupt rejection by the woman he loved, or by his attraction to the simple family life he was unable to sustain. He had enough demons in his head, enough passions pulling and pushing and driving him, enough doubts and obsessions and emotional turmoil. The anguish that informed his paintings would not have disappeared if he'd had a decent income, although it might have been mitigated by better nutrition, and he might have lived longer and painted wonders we still can't dream of.
As for demons, the devil's chief function (according to novelist Robertson Davies) is to put a price on things.
I wonder sometimes if there aren't relatively unexplored aspects, dark and hidden, to the attitudes of non-artists towards artists. Isn't it possible that the role of the artist is given in society (generally to be poorer than anybody except the most wretchedly poor) and the paradigmatic arc of an artist's career (isolation, rejection and apologetic praise after they're dead) is an acting out of resentment, envy and jealousy? Businesspeople think of artists as impractical, as children---and like children, they seem to get away with murder. They don't have to sweat getting to work on time, or worry about what their suits say about them, or play any of the hypocritical games that go into a regular career. They drink and sleep too much, and they get to sleep around. They can be indulged for awhile, like cute children with their fingerpaints, but sooner or later, they have to be punished.
Sure, the social and economic facts tell us that art involves business, but saying that art is business is something else. and isn't turning art work into a commodity a kind of revenge? Listen for example to a manager's praise for a theatrical group's marketing style (which incidentally brings national touring shows to Heinz Hall.) "They know how to market a Broadway touring show the way it needs to be marketed---like a bar of soap. They don't look at it as art for art's sake, but hard-sell it like a consumer product." Remember, this is praise.
So if the Pittsburgh Symphony, as another example, markets itself as a kind of aural Magic Fingers for the huddled masses in the office buildings of the Golden Triangle, fine, maybe, but...what are composers supposed to compose? Lullabies for yuppies? Is it still possible to understand and accept the simple formulation made by James Rosenquist, a financially successful artist? "Business is business," he said. "And art is art."
Some artists can perhaps deal with all this, and most must try, though it is increasingly difficult. It's also harder for the public, which could be more confused than pleased by being pandered to. The kind of artist who survives may be the less senitive, the better businessman. the audience may feel misled by marketing into believing that art is solely a form of recreation (as harmless and empty as a sitcom) or conversely, just a civic duty...or a good investment.
The socioeconomic context is always a problem for art in our culture. It invites phony piety or self-righteous ignorance from the audience, and pretentiousness and dishonesty from artists. And some problems are the result of the sheer quantity of art. But when art and artists are bought and sold, things get complicated, and there is plenty of paradox and irony to go around---and, I suspect, a fair amount of suppressed conflict, rage and violence.
Why do we find the suffering and tragic lives of artists romantic? Is it the triumph of art we love, or the tragedy? A twisted enjoyment of whatever forces prevent artists from doing their best work and also living decent lives, because, why should they get away with it, when we can't?
The blindness of those who didn't buy van Gogh's paintings when he was alive is at least matched by the obscenities committed today by those who bid them up and lock them behind steel doors. The beginning of antidotes to any of this may be quite simple: go and experience a work of art as nothing but itself in a room with you. A real one. While you still can.
Also for the In Pittsburgh weekly, I did several features which, in the process of reporting, tried to get at the experience of various art forms. I knew that my audience came from more or less the same background as I did, so I went at the subject partly from a personal point of view. This one is from 1987. I've omitted some material that I'd recycled from my research on New York arts, included elsewhere in this bloggical archive.
by William Severini Kowinski
"Here we are now, living in a world of painting which is unutterably paralytic and miserable. The exhibitions, the picture stores, everything, everything, is in the clutches of fellows who intercept all the money. And do not suppose for a moment this is only my imagination. People give a lot of money for the work after the painter himself is dead."
Vincent van Gogh
I don't remember really looking at a painting until I went away to college. Even then it was intimidating. Although the campus artists felt free to invade our literary circles, we weren't made welcome in their precincts of paint and print-making. I didn't know that just as we were diligently copying Joyce, Hemingway and Fitzgerald in our stories, their awesomely original paintings were in fact earnest imitations of de Kooning and Pollock.
After college I got interested in Dada and surrealism and the painters as well as the writers who occupied Paris in the first decades of this century. There I found not only kindred spirits but actual kin: Gino Severini, painter and theoretician, who was the living link between the Italian Futurists and the Cubists in Paris, was a blood relative. My maternal grandfather's family didn't talk about him, though: the black sheep of the family who wouldn't learn a trade and fled to France. That he became an intimate of Braque and Apollinaire, that he was saved from starvation one winter by no less than Picasso himself---wouldn't have cut any gelato with them anyway.
So after that, every time I went to Manhattan I made a point of visiting the Museum of Modern Art, where a large Severini was exhibited. I still didn't know all that much about paintings, but I was immensely attracted and deeply involved by their physicality---the bold Picassos with gaps of canvas and lines painted out, the softly swirled and twined colors of Renoir, the muted moodiness of Manet, even the photo-like objects mysteriously juxtaposed by Magritte (who once said, "There is a mystery to life, but what is it?") They were all different, all intensely beautiful, and most moving to me, seeing them as actual objects a few inches from my eyes---they were perfect and imperfect at once, all suddenly revealing that they were in fact painted by real fellow human beings.
Seeing a real painting is a tactile as well as visual experience---there are dimensions totally missed by flat, dulled reproductions in a book or poster. It was true for me again when I went to see "The Plain of Auvers," an oil canvas by Vincent van Gogh, in the Scaife Gallery of the Carnegie Museum of Art.
It's not only that the brilliance of its colors and its textures are barely suggested by postcard reproductions. Up close, this Van Gogh no longer looks like a textbook illustration but something a man did with his hands---he painted, he painted over, he used brush and palette knife, he patiently worked on this corner (the Japanese-like daubs of detail); over here he slashed bold, perfect, passionate strokes. Suddenly a few squiggles of paint become a stand of trees on the horizon. The colors become tones---these luminous blue-greens in several shades, these sudden swirls of white, the strange corrupted reds, the famous yellows. The patterns play and repeat. You can almost see the actual time its composition took, incorporated in it. You can see the action still taking place...and it became a picture, and it became a painting. This is the process before you, and the result.
The experience of seeing it is somehow strengthening: you see what an odd sort of perfect a work of art is. Once it's done, it seems inevitable: yet the day before it was created, it was at best an unorganized potential of ideas, feelings accidents waiting to happen and choices yet to be made, and tomorrow's light.)
But you also see that it doesn't arrive fully perfected from some alien life-form or machine: no conglomerate or textbook company manufactured it from a pre-set, committee-derived design. It was pulled into existence from the talent and experience and (dare we say this today?) the soul, and the sweat and passion of a given person on a given day. So now a relationship: one person who painted it on that day or days, and one person who is looking at it now, today.
And here it is: the one, the only. The very one that a man named Vincent van Gogh made with his own hands in some silent field in another country, almost a hundred years ago...
But how long will it be here?
It's a good question, even in 1987, especially after the latest sale of a van Gogh for a shade under $54 million. With the proceeds from just two previous sales, van Gogh's take this year is over $114 million. Not bad for a painter whose health was ruined by worry over money and not getting enough to eat, who never made more than a few cents---let alone a living---from his prodigious artistry, who died in despair with a bullet in his brain at the age of 38.
This latest record-breaking price for a single painting raises questions that concern art exhibitors, the arts audience and artists themselves. For with rising insurance and security costs---and the temptations to sell major paintings to private bidders---the sight of a real van Gogh could become an experience of the past for all but a few.
Consider the story behind the sale of van Gogh's "Irises," the $54 million canvas. Back in 1947, an American named Joan Whitney Payson bought it as a gift for her seven year old son, John. She paid about $80,000. John eventually built a gallery in his mother's memory at tiny Westbrook College in Portland, Maine, and the painting was exhibited there. Portland was proud to have it, and the college told everyone it would eventually be theirs by bequest. Most people thought it was part of the gallery's "permanent collection."
But then early in 1986, van Gogh's "Sunflowers" sold to a Japanese insurance company for $39.9 million, then the world's record for a single painting. This, ironically or not, sent insurance costs sky high as other van Goghs of similar prominence were immediately revalued, including "Irises." John Payson, who still owned the painting, decided he couldn't afford to keep it.
He promised to donate part of the proceeds to the college and another chunk to the gallery, plus an even dozen paintings: a Renoir, a Chagall, a Degas. Although many Portlanders were shocked to learn he (and not the gallery) owned "Irises," his plans for the money won general but not unanimous approval. Portland takes its art seriously (their new museum is one of the best designed for viewing that I've experienced in this country.) One strong dissenting voice was that of Edgar Allen Beem, art critic for the weekly alternative paper, Maine Times. "This is one of the few works of genius in our midst," he said. "The local press has portrayed Payson's plan to spread the money around as 'a great act of philanthropy,' when in fact to me it looked like nothing but greed...The rich are the custodians of culture, and we get what they give us. I'm not sure how to change that, but they are not to be applauded."
Pittsburgh has two van Goghs, the aforementioned "Plains of Auvers" (1890) and "Le Moulin de la Galette" (1886-88), both in the permanent collection of The Carnegie. I talked to Vicky Clark, curator of education, shortly after the "Irises" sale in November. "We're absolutely amazed at the prices," she said. "Not just for van Gogh---it's everybody." The sale will probably make a "tricky" insurance situation even trickier, she admitted. "It could affect us in the future. But we have no problems yet. We're certainly not going to sell our van Goghs." One reason is that "even if you can sell it, you can't replace it with anything comparable, because prices are so high." As it is, art museums can't afford to buy a van Gogh or anything like one. Anonymous corporations and private collections buying art for investment and perhaps prestige are, in Clark's words, "pricing museums out of the market."
Could major paintings disappear from view, only to be seen as color plates in art books, never to be experienced as paintings? Some have, but many works of art have always been in private collections. One reason the prices for van Goghs are so high, one theory goes, is that so many of them are already in museums, and few come on the market.
Should we be afraid that museums won't be able to acquire or exhibit art (especially if the insurance gets so high and restrictive that security becomes prohibitively expensive?) Maybe, but according to John Russell, eminent art critic for the New York Times, not quite yet, as long as we still have collectors who "have their community in mind, and an awareness of the enormous pleasure that can be had from works of art than even now do not involve a lot of super-numerary noughts."
So, you notice, we are still dependent on the rich.
But what effect does all this monumental money-changing have on living artists? The market for old and modern masters is only part of a high-priced international art casino variously described as "hot" and "inflated." All that money is bound to affect artists and the art they make.
"The prices paid for contemporary art are so high," says Sande Deitch, director and curator of exhibitions of the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, "that artists feel they have to cash in." In order to get known immediately---which is particularly important in today's Young Flavor of the Month art market---even the first sale has to be for a high price.
"For emerging artists as well as artists in mid-career, psychologically, money is the bottom line today," Deitch said. "Instead of developing their own skills as art makers, the art market is a great part of what they think about. Art has become a commodity."
Part of the reason is the money it takes to survive, especially in the high-rent New York scene, but it's also middle class expectations and increasingly, upper middle class entitlement, since surviving takes some hefty patronage and helpful connections. The bottom line for today's artist is is someone who isn't a big success finds it difficult to even survive as an artist.
Which brings us back to Vincent van Gogh, perhaps the prototype of the popular "starving artist" and "need to suffer" images. As is usual with clichés, there are kernels of truth however distorted. Van Gogh certainly starved, but he was far from naïve about money or the art market. In fact, before he became a painter he was an art dealer, and his brother, who supported him all his life, remained one. It wasn't that van Gogh didn't understand the role of money. He just felt it necessary to reject it as a force that would determine what kind of pictures he would make. Although his letters almost all begin with financial matters, they go on to talk about the really serious substance of his life: colors.
"Van Gogh was one of the comparatively few artists whose anguish really was inextricable from his talent," writes art critic Robert Hughes. But that is not the same as saying that van Gogh needed to be poor, to be constantly begging for small sums of money, or even to be tortured by abrupt rejection by the woman he loved, or by his attraction to the simple family life he was unable to sustain. He had enough demons in his head, enough passions pulling and pushing and driving him, enough doubts and obsessions and emotional turmoil. The anguish that informed his paintings would not have disappeared if he'd had a decent income, although it might have been mitigated by better nutrition, and he might have lived longer and painted wonders we still can't dream of.
As for demons, the devil's chief function (according to novelist Robertson Davies) is to put a price on things.
I wonder sometimes if there aren't relatively unexplored aspects, dark and hidden, to the attitudes of non-artists towards artists. Isn't it possible that the role of the artist is given in society (generally to be poorer than anybody except the most wretchedly poor) and the paradigmatic arc of an artist's career (isolation, rejection and apologetic praise after they're dead) is an acting out of resentment, envy and jealousy? Businesspeople think of artists as impractical, as children---and like children, they seem to get away with murder. They don't have to sweat getting to work on time, or worry about what their suits say about them, or play any of the hypocritical games that go into a regular career. They drink and sleep too much, and they get to sleep around. They can be indulged for awhile, like cute children with their fingerpaints, but sooner or later, they have to be punished.
Sure, the social and economic facts tell us that art involves business, but saying that art is business is something else. and isn't turning art work into a commodity a kind of revenge? Listen for example to a manager's praise for a theatrical group's marketing style (which incidentally brings national touring shows to Heinz Hall.) "They know how to market a Broadway touring show the way it needs to be marketed---like a bar of soap. They don't look at it as art for art's sake, but hard-sell it like a consumer product." Remember, this is praise.
So if the Pittsburgh Symphony, as another example, markets itself as a kind of aural Magic Fingers for the huddled masses in the office buildings of the Golden Triangle, fine, maybe, but...what are composers supposed to compose? Lullabies for yuppies? Is it still possible to understand and accept the simple formulation made by James Rosenquist, a financially successful artist? "Business is business," he said. "And art is art."
Some artists can perhaps deal with all this, and most must try, though it is increasingly difficult. It's also harder for the public, which could be more confused than pleased by being pandered to. The kind of artist who survives may be the less senitive, the better businessman. the audience may feel misled by marketing into believing that art is solely a form of recreation (as harmless and empty as a sitcom) or conversely, just a civic duty...or a good investment.
The socioeconomic context is always a problem for art in our culture. It invites phony piety or self-righteous ignorance from the audience, and pretentiousness and dishonesty from artists. And some problems are the result of the sheer quantity of art. But when art and artists are bought and sold, things get complicated, and there is plenty of paradox and irony to go around---and, I suspect, a fair amount of suppressed conflict, rage and violence.
Why do we find the suffering and tragic lives of artists romantic? Is it the triumph of art we love, or the tragedy? A twisted enjoyment of whatever forces prevent artists from doing their best work and also living decent lives, because, why should they get away with it, when we can't?
The blindness of those who didn't buy van Gogh's paintings when he was alive is at least matched by the obscenities committed today by those who bid them up and lock them behind steel doors. The beginning of antidotes to any of this may be quite simple: go and experience a work of art as nothing but itself in a room with you. A real one. While you still can.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
RUNNING ON ICE: State of the Arts, Pittsburgh 1991
by William Severini Kowinski
Except for her paintings propped against the walls, the living room of her Friendship apartment was bare. Twenty-one year old Christine McBride sat crosslegged in the meager November sunlight that slanted through a small window, and talked about her next move towards an arts career. She wants to go to New York.
She was busy working on her portfolio that would mark her graduation from the Pittsburgh Institute of the Arts, while she prepared her first gallery show at the Turmoil Room in Wilkinsburg. Meanwhile, every late Friday night she adds her acting energy to a comedy improv group that plays to enthusiastic crowds in the Cathedral of Learning basement studio theatre.
Christine grew up in Edgewood, where her father had a dry cleaning business. She started taking Saturday art classes at the Carnegie when she was ten, and began acting in community theatre at thirteen. Now she can't conceive of a life that isn't centered on painting and performance. "This is how I understand things. I do this because I have to. I don't know much about the art world. I'm inspired by the world around me---things take hold of me and I can't shake them. I get fascinated. Painting makes me really happy. Acting is part of who I am. This is what I'm good at, what I have to offer the world."
But now school was almost over, her parents were nervous and Christine was facing decisions. She had visited a Pittsburgher she knew in New York, an art student at the Cooper Union. It opened her eyes. "New York is this mythical, magical place. You think all kinds of wonderful things are going to happen. But when I was there I saw it was a lot of hard work. But if I go and I last six months there, I last six months. I'm going there not expecting anything from the city except to learn from it."
But feeling that she lacked the formidable means to survive in New York on her own, Christine decided to apply to Cooper Union for the fall. Meanwhile she'll stay in Pittsburgh and work, probably as a waitress.
Her friend and classmate, Sharon Majorien, was also applying to study art in New York, but first she concentrated on starting her commercial career. "I came to art school because I love to paint, I love to draw. But the question is, how to eat?" She rigorously researched advertising agencies with New York offices and invited their local representatives to her portfolio review. Her resume in the style of an ee cummings poem begins, "independent freethinker for hire."
"Pittsburgh is a good place to start out but not a good place to stay," Sharon said. "I'm not saying I'd never come back here, but as an art student you need to expose yourself to different experiences." Sharon wears a colony of tiny gold earrings on one ear, none on the other. On her feet are a handsome pair of wingtip shoes. "I know the lifestyle in New York would be hard, and things like marriage and children run through my head. But I'm very, very young. I need to be jarred. to grow as an artist and as a person you can't be comfortable."
Derek Walton is a founding member of the improv group Christine belongs to, and a founding member of the Young Company at the Pittsburgh Shakespeare Festival. With an MFA in acting from the University of Pittsburgh and almost qualified for his Actor's Equity card, he would seem to be a prime candidate for New York. But he isn't going.
"The actors from New York who came to the Shakespeare festival told me not to do it," he said over coffee, on his day off from selling clothes at a downtown store. "Half of them are afraid for their lives. Actors get rejected for parts if they're an inch taller than the producer wants. I don't want to sacrifice my integrity or my standard of living. I don't want to be afraid and alone."
The dreams and fears of these young and aspiring artists, the textures of their idealism and pragmatism, the choices they face, suggest the outlines of Pittsburgh's place in the United States of the arts, as well as what it's like to be an artist today. There are elements of the classic search for success and fulfillment, but there are also new wrinkles in the struggle to balance art and life, the ways and means of survival, the relationship of artists in Pittsburgh to New York, and to Pittsburgh itself.
Pittsburgh is part of a new national arts context. Beset by high costs and a deteriorating urban environment, New York is declining while the arts have been growing phenomenally almost everywhere else. Some cities, like Chicago, Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul provide new opportunities that are in some ways superior to New York.
This growth implies and depends on a change in the artists themselves, who typically are now as well-educated as members of most professions. However, artists have the distinction of being in the only profession that fails to pay a living wage to those it qualifies, credentials and employs.
Even in Pittsburgh, the work of artists generates prosperity. More people attended performing arts events in 1989 than saw the Steelers, Pirates and Penguins combined. The growth of the arts in America has created new careers in arts institutions, universities and corporations, but the financial security of artists has not noticeably improved. While controversies rage over all the arts should be financed, it is a salient but often overlooked fact that the arts in America are subsidized chiefly by the artists themselves.
Artists are often viewed as frivolous and impractical---perhaps more so in Pittsburgh, with its combination of corporate and working class cultures. But in this era, each artist typically has three careers: the art, the business of the art, and the job that pays the rent.
The business of the art is about getting work commissioned, sold, shown, published or mounted---or for performing artists, getting to work at all. Especially in recent years, this aspect consumes more time, energy and attention, as has making a living.
To try to be an artist at all is to invite insecurity and hardship. To try this as a Pittsburgher in Pittsburgh can resurrect working class attitudes of self-doubt, self-subversion and social pressure against those with different dreams. They also face the assumption that artists are supposed to suffer, and so exploitation is justified; their internal struggles aren't enough.
So why do artists stay in Pittsburgh? For even though many leave, many do stay, and more are arriving from elsewhere. These are not necessarily often seen at the Carnegie or the Benedum or Heinz Hall. Their work may not fill museums or theatres for years to come, if ever, and therefore they are the artists with the most delicate relationship to society. But their presence, their creativity and their survival helps to enliven and define Pittsburgh as a city.
The New York Question
Born in Ambridge, David Goldstein has been painting and showing in Pittsburgh for about fifteen years. He lives on the South Side, across the street from the Carson Street Gallery, where he most often exhibits. In fact, for a month in 1989, he moved his furniture into the gallery itself, and lived there among his paintings for the run of his one-person show.
He saw the banner strung across the Carnegie façade that year, advertising the Andy Warhol show: "Success is a job in New York," it said. He doesn't buy it.
He has a friend, another Pittsburgh artist who moved to New York two years ago. "He was happy here," David said. "He was broke all the time but he painted all the time, and his work was very well regarded here. But in New York he has not painted at all, because he's so busy making a living so he doesn't get thrown out of his apartment. He's had art-related jobs there, but the only time he's done any of his own work is when he's come back here and used my studio."
David respects New York as the historical Mecca of American art, and likes to visit the city. But he wonders about the effects on artists of the extreme financial pressures there, and the resulting need to make it big very fast just to survive.
"New York is a little tarnished for me now because it seems to be so fashion oriented," he says. "Artists produce work in order to shock people or grab their attention, because it's a tough place to get noticed. So I often wonder about the sincerity of what they're producing. I don't think that makes for the kind of art that lasts, that has value. I often wonder if New York really has the best artists anymore. I almost tend to doubt it."
Paying heed to the horror stories from New York is easier when there are prominent examples of Pittsburgh artists (like ceramic artist Ed Eberly), playwrights (Arthur Giron, Frank Gagliano) and actors (Lenore Nimitz, Tom Atkins) who manage to hold onto New York careers while living in Pittsburgh. And it's better still when there's a steady stream of dancers (Judith Leifer, Douglas Bentz, Maria Rendina), actors (Larry Myers) and even a performance artist ("Animal X") who've escaped to Pittsburgh from Manhattan's madness.
But there are lots of caveats: most artistic immigrants are already successful, and come for specific positions in established organizations or academia. For Pittsburghers without prior contacts, there is considerably less chance of gaining international recognition while living here. There is still a prejudice, both outside the city and inside it, that defines anything produced here as "regional" or otherwise limited in nature or quality. Often that attitude lessens an artist's success even within the city, where its infamous inferiority complex causes it to ignore anyone whose achievements haven't been recognized elsewhere---and even then, Pittsburgh residency makes that success suspect.
Most of the artists Pittsburgh likes to claim for its own did not live here in their productive years. So why do we have artists here at all?
Their stories are different. As composer Virgil Thompson observed, "The outcome of everything is the way it happens, and the way it happens is the story of your life." But there are a few common elements, perhaps symbolized by David Goldstein's month-long residence within the exhibition of his paintings: Pittsburgh's artists are trying to find better ways to bring their art and their lives together. Or as Goldstein put it, "My art should enhance my life---not drive me crazy." For artists trying to manage three careers when even one of them is almost all-consuming, such considerations are important.
The Life of Art
Many talk of the quality of life, lower costs, and slower pace of Pittsburgh that allows them more of a life outside the pressures of their art, and its attendant business.
Playwright Melissa Martin, whose plays have been produced at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and other western Pennsylvania theatres, moved here from Chicago when she married a Pittsburgher. "It was the smartest thing I ever did," she says, "and the dumbest professionally. But you can only bring to your work what you are as a human being. This career is unpredictable, and I've had problems with the art-management side of it. But when you bottom out as I did, you realize that a life of grace and dignity is best. Theatre successes come and go, but I have a husband and child who keep me alive. I won't look back at 65 and say, I didn't make it in the theatre, so nothing ever happened to me."
For artists on their own, Pittsburgh's more modest cost of living still requires sacrifices, which loom larger when social respectability is more expensive, and artists have middle class expectations. Avi Wenger, a mixed-media performance artist, left New York because of its economic pressures, and returned home to Pittsburgh. He does financial analysis for a living, but worries about the future. "When I got serious about my performance pieces, my upward mobility ended because I had to let my business slide. Right now a new car is out of the question. But I'm struggling with that now. I've got to decide what to do for the long term."
Although not yet as bad as New York, living costs often still require more time and better jobs than the old stand-bys of waiting tables and driving cabs. Wenger's last work, performed in February, was a collaboration involving actors, singers, artists and a musical composer. "We've become a company, an ongoing unit, so we accumulate and use this common experience. One reason we can do that is that no one has financial problems---everyone owns or partly owns their business."
The balance and integration of art and life is crucial to why many former New Yorkers come here. Before coming to Pittsburgh, dancer Janet Popeleski had a career that started in New York with the American Ballet Theatre, and became international. She had residencies in several European cities, and (before the fall of the Shah) in Iran. "They used to say I was the only ballerina between Tel Aviv and Tokyo."
She joined Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre as the company's prima ballerina for both professional and personal reasons. "To grow as a dancer, you have to dance," she says, "and I liked the repertoire, the director and the company, and the number of performances. I also wanted to put down some roots after traveling around so much. I feel at home here. It's a civilized city. And now I'm engaged to be married---so I'm getting more roots than I thought."
Managing Clarity
It isn't just a matter of making life better that attracts artists to Pittsburgh---it's giving their art a chance to be better. Even though Helena Ruoti, perhaps Pittsburgh's most prized actress, moved here from Philadelphia to be with her husband and raise a family, she works here because Pittsburgh gives her the opportunity to fulfill her artistic goals.
"My ambition was for a career in regional theatre," she says. "To be able to do good roles with good people is what I always wanted to do. That I would be able to do this in Pittsburgh is something I didn't know."
Her list of credits---lead roles in plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Tom Stoppard and Lanford Wilson, among others---plus an artistic home at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre and good parts in two Pittsburgh-based Hollywood movies, all add up to a career that would be the envy of any serious actress, especially one who in Manhattan must endure humiliating rejection if she's an inch too tall, or whose credits tilt towards soap operas and Draino commercials.
With this premise of integrity and quality, artists manage their three careers in different ways. Nationally known glass artist Kathleen Mulcahy recently stopped teaching, and she uses the business of her art to give her more time to dream, develop her ideas and work at her art. "I have more control over my time now," she says. "I need to concentrate fully on my work, not be interrupted. I never could say no to my students. And without all those responsibilities, I'm free to show more across the country and sell my work." She can also accept interesting local commissions, like the installation she and her husband, artist Ron Desmett, are doing for the Temple Rodef Shalom in Oakland.
But Derek Walton uses his day job to protect himself from becoming too dominated by the need to have a consistently profitable acting career. "If you 'businfy' yourself too much---make yourself into what succeeds---you lose your spark," he says. "It's not you anymore. You aren't an artist---you're a businessman."
Art of the Future
What's missing in Pittsburgh that its artists need? More galleries and especially people who buy art. More performances and performance spaces. More knowledgeable critics. At least one professional theatre that develops playwrights as well as directors and actors. Day job employers who are less intimidated by artists...These are among the items on artists' wish lists.
Perhaps the most vital question for the future of Pittsburgh's artists is whether the arts here will attain a certain critical mass, a high enough level of activity, energy and community to move Pittsburgh up a notch among civic centers of the arts. It's not inconceivable---and it could happen quickly.
"I just spoke to a friend in Seattle," says Bob Hoffman, Assistant Producing Director of Pittsburgh Public Theatre. "There was a lot going on when I was there five years ago. But he says it's doubled since then."
There are some encouraging signs here. At least for actors, the prospects for livelihood here may be improving. Lamont Arnold, a McKeesport native who has managed to make a living ("not a great living") primarily by acting and theatre-related activities in Pittsburgh for the past ten years, points to increasing film and television production as the key to the future. "That's giving actors a strong base to stick around here, and their presence will help stimulate small theatres and other activity, because actors want to work and be seen. And this becomes a good regional base---for New York, Chicago, Washington, Toronto, whatever."
In fact, Pittsburgh is virtually unique in being within five hundred miles of all of those cities.
The completion of the Cultural District with smaller and more locally oriented facilities, the forthcoming Andy Warhol Museum, the health of the Public Theatre and the expansions of the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the City Theatre (which moves into the steadily growing arts district of the South Side) all help solidify an institutional base. Meanwhile, places like the Mattress Factory, the Artery and Metropole are more receptive to new and multi-art work, fostering a certain entrepreneurial openness.
The next step would be an actual artistic community, a perennial dream of artists and a major part of the New York myth (though New York artists lament that it no longer exists there.) "Things are beginning to jell," as Melissa Martin observed.
Attaining that critical mass depends in part on larger factors. When Pittsburgh was officially the most livable city, it still lost population. But Seattle, its most livable successor, is growing fast, and so are its arts. Among Seattle's new citizens are such ex-Pittsburghers as playwright August Wilson and best-selling novelist Michael Chabon.
But one thing Pittsburgh can do now is a better job of honoring its own. After all, for Andy Warhol, success was in fact a job in New York---he was not successful here. Neither was August Wilson, despite writing plays about Pittsburgh now known around the world.
This Pittsburgh penchant for ignoring its own unfortunately continues. The latest case in point is Pittsburgh playwright Elvira DiPoalo, whose "Bricklayers" was selected for the most prestigious play development workshop in the country, the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights summer. It was produced by one of the most prestigious theatres in America, the Yale Repertory. Soon it will be part of an exchange program with Russia. But no Pittsburgh theatre has plans to produce it: this play about Pittsburgh by a playwright who still lives here.
The Art of Success
Even in the recent past, aspiring artists could see their prospects in a more romantic glow. What is remarkable now is that despite their new pragmatism, they still insist on trying to become artists. Their reasons for doing this are even more remarkably echoed by those Pittsburgh artists who've achieved some success, but are still struggling.
While living here, playwright Margaret Kelso's first professional production was in New York. Pittsburgh affords her opportunity to work in interactive drama with the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science department, edit radio dramas for WYEP, have a short play done on short notice at the Artery, and obtain an occasional commission, such as her play for the Pittsburgh Regatta a few years ago. But she must also continue to try to find time to write and seek productions, while earning a living teaching and freelance writing.
"I started later than most, but when I finally discovered playwriting, I fell in love with it," she says. "Now I tell students, if you can do something else, do something else. People are in this who have to be in it. Maybe you'd like to have a different life, but if you have to do this, you take the life that comes with it."
"You have to have that desire, that want," says Kathleen Mulcahy. "There is no logic in it. This is what I have to do." And the internal struggle never stops. "I reject failure as a concept," Melissa Martin says. "The only failure is not taking a risk."
Young artists who leave Pittsburgh may or may not return, but in the increasingly fluid United States of the arts, others will come for significant parts of their careers. Whether they will be the best artists---and not simply the best able to survive and manage their other two careers---will depend in large part on the understanding, respect, acceptance and support they find.
The city already benefits from the presence of its artists. "In Pittsburgh, art isn't just what's on the wall," says David Goldstein. "There are artists here, and they are available to everyone. You can know them. This is a wonderful thing---what chance would you have to meet an artist in New York? You certainly can't call them on the telephone as you can here. And artists are real interesting people."
How to be an Artist in Pittsburgh (and elsewhere)
"For young artists, different experiences are so vital. You have to go away to encounter different things, and then you can come back or not."
---Kathleen Mulcahy
"I wouldn't advise every black actor to stay in Pittsburgh. There are places you can get a lot more positive experience. I'm kind of an exception in the skills I have and in having a support group rooting for me, and I've been lucky in the people I've worked with. But I know a number of very talented black actors who were forced to leave because they got pigeon-holed in a situation where they couldn't find work here."
---Lamont Arnold
"It's so important to have someone who believes in you. There's a prominent theatre agent who won't even take a client who doesn't have a 'life partner' because it's just so difficult without emotional support."
---Margaret Kelso
"If you're a playwright, a university is where you need to be. Then New York may happen." -Melissa Martin
"Even in a form as new as performance art, it's important for young artists to know what's come before so they can build on it. If they don't, their work is often simplistic and can't compete."
---Avi Wenger
POSTSCRIPT
This article was commissioned in 1991 by Pittsburgh Magazine, but the magazine changed editors and it was never published. I'd been living in the city of Pittsburgh for a few years, and for awhile I had three jobs: my first real job in awhile as a senior writer for an editorial agency, a weekly column in the In Pittsburgh tabloid, and I taught a course in magazine writing at the University of Pittsburgh. By 1991, I'd lost or left all three, (the separation from In Pittsburgh being a story in itself) but remained in the city as a freelance writer and editor until 1996. I'd grown up in a town less than forty miles away, so western Pennsylvania and its people were pretty familiar.
So I knew some of the people in this story when I began it, and several I met remained part of my life in Pittsburgh, some pretty prominently. Margaret Kelso (who I'd met less than a year before this article) became my partner, and I moved to California with her. I'd met her at a Carnegie Mellon Drama Department event. I'd rather unexpectedly gotten a public reading of a play I'd written several years before, at one of Pittsburgh's home-grown theatres, while I was in my last months at the editorial firm. (That no one from the company came to the reading made it a lot easier to leave it. And ironically, given the themes of these articles, the people who ran the theatre advised me to take the play to New York. Indeed, somebody at Joe Papp's Public Theatre wrote me a nice letter about it---it was a rejection letter however.) So when I was free of daily job obligation, I decided to put more energy and attention into becoming part of Pittsburgh theatre, as a playwright. Meeting the CMU folks and other theatre people was part of that.
One of my first efforts was a short script for an art event called "Luxus" at the Artery. I directed it as well, and Christine McBride was in it. I don't recall how I met her. But I do remember that in reporting this story I went to the Turmoil Room gallery with her to help set up her show. Just hours before the opening, the place was locked up. We had to essentially break into the basement, and I'm afraid I was the lead breaker. Got a little too involved in the story, it seems.
It was at about that time that Ted Hoover, a long-time local playwright and the theatre critic for In Pittsburgh, and several others put together a playwright's group and several productions of short plays. Ten minute plays were just beginning to be the rage, and my first was called "Naked Under Their Clothes." Margaret also had a play on the bill, and later she asked to direct the script I'd written originally for the Luxus event: "A Brief History of Light." It was done at the Birmingham Lofts, with two excellent CMU student actors (Maduka Steady, who had a featured part in the film, "Lorenzo's Oil," and worked as an actor in New York theatre and television.) I knew it was a special night for me, though I didn't realize it would be the high point of my life in the theatre. (I did win an award and a little production for a one-act from the Pittsburgh new plays contest the next year.)
In any case, this is how I'd met Melissa Martin, along with other local playwrights, like Tammy Ryan. In 2001, Melissa directed a feature film, released on DVD as "A Wedding for Bella" but also called "The Bread, My Sweet." Her husband had quit his corporate job to take over a small bakery, and the story was based on real people in Pittsburgh. Melissa had joined up with a former producer of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood (a Pittsburgh production) and they continued to pursue film and TV projects.
I met Helena Ruoti at Pittsburgh Public Theatre receptions. Since this interview, she's continued her prominent acting career in Pittsburgh and other regional theatres. Lamont Arnold has been seen in several feature films shot in Pittsburgh, including "Bob Roberts," "Lorenzo's Oil" and "Silence of the Lambs."
Elvira DiPaolo's play "Bricklayers" did get a Pittsburgh production, and a very prominent one. It was the first production at the new City Theatre, a beautiful facility on the South Side. But Elvira stopped writing, and if I may venture an opinion, I think it was the success of this play that stopped her. She was clearly uncomfortable with so much attention, and I recognized the immigrant working class inferiority complex at work. It must have all seemed phony to her, and she may have felt undeserving and phony herself. I've felt those feelings, in any case.
by William Severini Kowinski
Except for her paintings propped against the walls, the living room of her Friendship apartment was bare. Twenty-one year old Christine McBride sat crosslegged in the meager November sunlight that slanted through a small window, and talked about her next move towards an arts career. She wants to go to New York.
She was busy working on her portfolio that would mark her graduation from the Pittsburgh Institute of the Arts, while she prepared her first gallery show at the Turmoil Room in Wilkinsburg. Meanwhile, every late Friday night she adds her acting energy to a comedy improv group that plays to enthusiastic crowds in the Cathedral of Learning basement studio theatre.
Christine grew up in Edgewood, where her father had a dry cleaning business. She started taking Saturday art classes at the Carnegie when she was ten, and began acting in community theatre at thirteen. Now she can't conceive of a life that isn't centered on painting and performance. "This is how I understand things. I do this because I have to. I don't know much about the art world. I'm inspired by the world around me---things take hold of me and I can't shake them. I get fascinated. Painting makes me really happy. Acting is part of who I am. This is what I'm good at, what I have to offer the world."
But now school was almost over, her parents were nervous and Christine was facing decisions. She had visited a Pittsburgher she knew in New York, an art student at the Cooper Union. It opened her eyes. "New York is this mythical, magical place. You think all kinds of wonderful things are going to happen. But when I was there I saw it was a lot of hard work. But if I go and I last six months there, I last six months. I'm going there not expecting anything from the city except to learn from it."
But feeling that she lacked the formidable means to survive in New York on her own, Christine decided to apply to Cooper Union for the fall. Meanwhile she'll stay in Pittsburgh and work, probably as a waitress.
Her friend and classmate, Sharon Majorien, was also applying to study art in New York, but first she concentrated on starting her commercial career. "I came to art school because I love to paint, I love to draw. But the question is, how to eat?" She rigorously researched advertising agencies with New York offices and invited their local representatives to her portfolio review. Her resume in the style of an ee cummings poem begins, "independent freethinker for hire."
"Pittsburgh is a good place to start out but not a good place to stay," Sharon said. "I'm not saying I'd never come back here, but as an art student you need to expose yourself to different experiences." Sharon wears a colony of tiny gold earrings on one ear, none on the other. On her feet are a handsome pair of wingtip shoes. "I know the lifestyle in New York would be hard, and things like marriage and children run through my head. But I'm very, very young. I need to be jarred. to grow as an artist and as a person you can't be comfortable."
Derek Walton is a founding member of the improv group Christine belongs to, and a founding member of the Young Company at the Pittsburgh Shakespeare Festival. With an MFA in acting from the University of Pittsburgh and almost qualified for his Actor's Equity card, he would seem to be a prime candidate for New York. But he isn't going.
"The actors from New York who came to the Shakespeare festival told me not to do it," he said over coffee, on his day off from selling clothes at a downtown store. "Half of them are afraid for their lives. Actors get rejected for parts if they're an inch taller than the producer wants. I don't want to sacrifice my integrity or my standard of living. I don't want to be afraid and alone."
The dreams and fears of these young and aspiring artists, the textures of their idealism and pragmatism, the choices they face, suggest the outlines of Pittsburgh's place in the United States of the arts, as well as what it's like to be an artist today. There are elements of the classic search for success and fulfillment, but there are also new wrinkles in the struggle to balance art and life, the ways and means of survival, the relationship of artists in Pittsburgh to New York, and to Pittsburgh itself.
Pittsburgh is part of a new national arts context. Beset by high costs and a deteriorating urban environment, New York is declining while the arts have been growing phenomenally almost everywhere else. Some cities, like Chicago, Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul provide new opportunities that are in some ways superior to New York.
This growth implies and depends on a change in the artists themselves, who typically are now as well-educated as members of most professions. However, artists have the distinction of being in the only profession that fails to pay a living wage to those it qualifies, credentials and employs.
Even in Pittsburgh, the work of artists generates prosperity. More people attended performing arts events in 1989 than saw the Steelers, Pirates and Penguins combined. The growth of the arts in America has created new careers in arts institutions, universities and corporations, but the financial security of artists has not noticeably improved. While controversies rage over all the arts should be financed, it is a salient but often overlooked fact that the arts in America are subsidized chiefly by the artists themselves.
Artists are often viewed as frivolous and impractical---perhaps more so in Pittsburgh, with its combination of corporate and working class cultures. But in this era, each artist typically has three careers: the art, the business of the art, and the job that pays the rent.
The business of the art is about getting work commissioned, sold, shown, published or mounted---or for performing artists, getting to work at all. Especially in recent years, this aspect consumes more time, energy and attention, as has making a living.
To try to be an artist at all is to invite insecurity and hardship. To try this as a Pittsburgher in Pittsburgh can resurrect working class attitudes of self-doubt, self-subversion and social pressure against those with different dreams. They also face the assumption that artists are supposed to suffer, and so exploitation is justified; their internal struggles aren't enough.
So why do artists stay in Pittsburgh? For even though many leave, many do stay, and more are arriving from elsewhere. These are not necessarily often seen at the Carnegie or the Benedum or Heinz Hall. Their work may not fill museums or theatres for years to come, if ever, and therefore they are the artists with the most delicate relationship to society. But their presence, their creativity and their survival helps to enliven and define Pittsburgh as a city.
The New York Question
Born in Ambridge, David Goldstein has been painting and showing in Pittsburgh for about fifteen years. He lives on the South Side, across the street from the Carson Street Gallery, where he most often exhibits. In fact, for a month in 1989, he moved his furniture into the gallery itself, and lived there among his paintings for the run of his one-person show.
He saw the banner strung across the Carnegie façade that year, advertising the Andy Warhol show: "Success is a job in New York," it said. He doesn't buy it.
He has a friend, another Pittsburgh artist who moved to New York two years ago. "He was happy here," David said. "He was broke all the time but he painted all the time, and his work was very well regarded here. But in New York he has not painted at all, because he's so busy making a living so he doesn't get thrown out of his apartment. He's had art-related jobs there, but the only time he's done any of his own work is when he's come back here and used my studio."
David respects New York as the historical Mecca of American art, and likes to visit the city. But he wonders about the effects on artists of the extreme financial pressures there, and the resulting need to make it big very fast just to survive.
"New York is a little tarnished for me now because it seems to be so fashion oriented," he says. "Artists produce work in order to shock people or grab their attention, because it's a tough place to get noticed. So I often wonder about the sincerity of what they're producing. I don't think that makes for the kind of art that lasts, that has value. I often wonder if New York really has the best artists anymore. I almost tend to doubt it."
Paying heed to the horror stories from New York is easier when there are prominent examples of Pittsburgh artists (like ceramic artist Ed Eberly), playwrights (Arthur Giron, Frank Gagliano) and actors (Lenore Nimitz, Tom Atkins) who manage to hold onto New York careers while living in Pittsburgh. And it's better still when there's a steady stream of dancers (Judith Leifer, Douglas Bentz, Maria Rendina), actors (Larry Myers) and even a performance artist ("Animal X") who've escaped to Pittsburgh from Manhattan's madness.
But there are lots of caveats: most artistic immigrants are already successful, and come for specific positions in established organizations or academia. For Pittsburghers without prior contacts, there is considerably less chance of gaining international recognition while living here. There is still a prejudice, both outside the city and inside it, that defines anything produced here as "regional" or otherwise limited in nature or quality. Often that attitude lessens an artist's success even within the city, where its infamous inferiority complex causes it to ignore anyone whose achievements haven't been recognized elsewhere---and even then, Pittsburgh residency makes that success suspect.
Most of the artists Pittsburgh likes to claim for its own did not live here in their productive years. So why do we have artists here at all?
Their stories are different. As composer Virgil Thompson observed, "The outcome of everything is the way it happens, and the way it happens is the story of your life." But there are a few common elements, perhaps symbolized by David Goldstein's month-long residence within the exhibition of his paintings: Pittsburgh's artists are trying to find better ways to bring their art and their lives together. Or as Goldstein put it, "My art should enhance my life---not drive me crazy." For artists trying to manage three careers when even one of them is almost all-consuming, such considerations are important.
The Life of Art
Many talk of the quality of life, lower costs, and slower pace of Pittsburgh that allows them more of a life outside the pressures of their art, and its attendant business.
Playwright Melissa Martin, whose plays have been produced at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and other western Pennsylvania theatres, moved here from Chicago when she married a Pittsburgher. "It was the smartest thing I ever did," she says, "and the dumbest professionally. But you can only bring to your work what you are as a human being. This career is unpredictable, and I've had problems with the art-management side of it. But when you bottom out as I did, you realize that a life of grace and dignity is best. Theatre successes come and go, but I have a husband and child who keep me alive. I won't look back at 65 and say, I didn't make it in the theatre, so nothing ever happened to me."
For artists on their own, Pittsburgh's more modest cost of living still requires sacrifices, which loom larger when social respectability is more expensive, and artists have middle class expectations. Avi Wenger, a mixed-media performance artist, left New York because of its economic pressures, and returned home to Pittsburgh. He does financial analysis for a living, but worries about the future. "When I got serious about my performance pieces, my upward mobility ended because I had to let my business slide. Right now a new car is out of the question. But I'm struggling with that now. I've got to decide what to do for the long term."
Although not yet as bad as New York, living costs often still require more time and better jobs than the old stand-bys of waiting tables and driving cabs. Wenger's last work, performed in February, was a collaboration involving actors, singers, artists and a musical composer. "We've become a company, an ongoing unit, so we accumulate and use this common experience. One reason we can do that is that no one has financial problems---everyone owns or partly owns their business."
The balance and integration of art and life is crucial to why many former New Yorkers come here. Before coming to Pittsburgh, dancer Janet Popeleski had a career that started in New York with the American Ballet Theatre, and became international. She had residencies in several European cities, and (before the fall of the Shah) in Iran. "They used to say I was the only ballerina between Tel Aviv and Tokyo."
She joined Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre as the company's prima ballerina for both professional and personal reasons. "To grow as a dancer, you have to dance," she says, "and I liked the repertoire, the director and the company, and the number of performances. I also wanted to put down some roots after traveling around so much. I feel at home here. It's a civilized city. And now I'm engaged to be married---so I'm getting more roots than I thought."
Managing Clarity
It isn't just a matter of making life better that attracts artists to Pittsburgh---it's giving their art a chance to be better. Even though Helena Ruoti, perhaps Pittsburgh's most prized actress, moved here from Philadelphia to be with her husband and raise a family, she works here because Pittsburgh gives her the opportunity to fulfill her artistic goals.
"My ambition was for a career in regional theatre," she says. "To be able to do good roles with good people is what I always wanted to do. That I would be able to do this in Pittsburgh is something I didn't know."
Her list of credits---lead roles in plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Tom Stoppard and Lanford Wilson, among others---plus an artistic home at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre and good parts in two Pittsburgh-based Hollywood movies, all add up to a career that would be the envy of any serious actress, especially one who in Manhattan must endure humiliating rejection if she's an inch too tall, or whose credits tilt towards soap operas and Draino commercials.
With this premise of integrity and quality, artists manage their three careers in different ways. Nationally known glass artist Kathleen Mulcahy recently stopped teaching, and she uses the business of her art to give her more time to dream, develop her ideas and work at her art. "I have more control over my time now," she says. "I need to concentrate fully on my work, not be interrupted. I never could say no to my students. And without all those responsibilities, I'm free to show more across the country and sell my work." She can also accept interesting local commissions, like the installation she and her husband, artist Ron Desmett, are doing for the Temple Rodef Shalom in Oakland.
But Derek Walton uses his day job to protect himself from becoming too dominated by the need to have a consistently profitable acting career. "If you 'businfy' yourself too much---make yourself into what succeeds---you lose your spark," he says. "It's not you anymore. You aren't an artist---you're a businessman."
Art of the Future
What's missing in Pittsburgh that its artists need? More galleries and especially people who buy art. More performances and performance spaces. More knowledgeable critics. At least one professional theatre that develops playwrights as well as directors and actors. Day job employers who are less intimidated by artists...These are among the items on artists' wish lists.
Perhaps the most vital question for the future of Pittsburgh's artists is whether the arts here will attain a certain critical mass, a high enough level of activity, energy and community to move Pittsburgh up a notch among civic centers of the arts. It's not inconceivable---and it could happen quickly.
"I just spoke to a friend in Seattle," says Bob Hoffman, Assistant Producing Director of Pittsburgh Public Theatre. "There was a lot going on when I was there five years ago. But he says it's doubled since then."
There are some encouraging signs here. At least for actors, the prospects for livelihood here may be improving. Lamont Arnold, a McKeesport native who has managed to make a living ("not a great living") primarily by acting and theatre-related activities in Pittsburgh for the past ten years, points to increasing film and television production as the key to the future. "That's giving actors a strong base to stick around here, and their presence will help stimulate small theatres and other activity, because actors want to work and be seen. And this becomes a good regional base---for New York, Chicago, Washington, Toronto, whatever."
In fact, Pittsburgh is virtually unique in being within five hundred miles of all of those cities.
The completion of the Cultural District with smaller and more locally oriented facilities, the forthcoming Andy Warhol Museum, the health of the Public Theatre and the expansions of the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the City Theatre (which moves into the steadily growing arts district of the South Side) all help solidify an institutional base. Meanwhile, places like the Mattress Factory, the Artery and Metropole are more receptive to new and multi-art work, fostering a certain entrepreneurial openness.
The next step would be an actual artistic community, a perennial dream of artists and a major part of the New York myth (though New York artists lament that it no longer exists there.) "Things are beginning to jell," as Melissa Martin observed.
Attaining that critical mass depends in part on larger factors. When Pittsburgh was officially the most livable city, it still lost population. But Seattle, its most livable successor, is growing fast, and so are its arts. Among Seattle's new citizens are such ex-Pittsburghers as playwright August Wilson and best-selling novelist Michael Chabon.
But one thing Pittsburgh can do now is a better job of honoring its own. After all, for Andy Warhol, success was in fact a job in New York---he was not successful here. Neither was August Wilson, despite writing plays about Pittsburgh now known around the world.
This Pittsburgh penchant for ignoring its own unfortunately continues. The latest case in point is Pittsburgh playwright Elvira DiPoalo, whose "Bricklayers" was selected for the most prestigious play development workshop in the country, the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights summer. It was produced by one of the most prestigious theatres in America, the Yale Repertory. Soon it will be part of an exchange program with Russia. But no Pittsburgh theatre has plans to produce it: this play about Pittsburgh by a playwright who still lives here.
The Art of Success
Even in the recent past, aspiring artists could see their prospects in a more romantic glow. What is remarkable now is that despite their new pragmatism, they still insist on trying to become artists. Their reasons for doing this are even more remarkably echoed by those Pittsburgh artists who've achieved some success, but are still struggling.
While living here, playwright Margaret Kelso's first professional production was in New York. Pittsburgh affords her opportunity to work in interactive drama with the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science department, edit radio dramas for WYEP, have a short play done on short notice at the Artery, and obtain an occasional commission, such as her play for the Pittsburgh Regatta a few years ago. But she must also continue to try to find time to write and seek productions, while earning a living teaching and freelance writing.
"I started later than most, but when I finally discovered playwriting, I fell in love with it," she says. "Now I tell students, if you can do something else, do something else. People are in this who have to be in it. Maybe you'd like to have a different life, but if you have to do this, you take the life that comes with it."
"You have to have that desire, that want," says Kathleen Mulcahy. "There is no logic in it. This is what I have to do." And the internal struggle never stops. "I reject failure as a concept," Melissa Martin says. "The only failure is not taking a risk."
Young artists who leave Pittsburgh may or may not return, but in the increasingly fluid United States of the arts, others will come for significant parts of their careers. Whether they will be the best artists---and not simply the best able to survive and manage their other two careers---will depend in large part on the understanding, respect, acceptance and support they find.
The city already benefits from the presence of its artists. "In Pittsburgh, art isn't just what's on the wall," says David Goldstein. "There are artists here, and they are available to everyone. You can know them. This is a wonderful thing---what chance would you have to meet an artist in New York? You certainly can't call them on the telephone as you can here. And artists are real interesting people."
How to be an Artist in Pittsburgh (and elsewhere)
"For young artists, different experiences are so vital. You have to go away to encounter different things, and then you can come back or not."
---Kathleen Mulcahy
"I wouldn't advise every black actor to stay in Pittsburgh. There are places you can get a lot more positive experience. I'm kind of an exception in the skills I have and in having a support group rooting for me, and I've been lucky in the people I've worked with. But I know a number of very talented black actors who were forced to leave because they got pigeon-holed in a situation where they couldn't find work here."
---Lamont Arnold
"It's so important to have someone who believes in you. There's a prominent theatre agent who won't even take a client who doesn't have a 'life partner' because it's just so difficult without emotional support."
---Margaret Kelso
"If you're a playwright, a university is where you need to be. Then New York may happen." -Melissa Martin
"Even in a form as new as performance art, it's important for young artists to know what's come before so they can build on it. If they don't, their work is often simplistic and can't compete."
---Avi Wenger
POSTSCRIPT
This article was commissioned in 1991 by Pittsburgh Magazine, but the magazine changed editors and it was never published. I'd been living in the city of Pittsburgh for a few years, and for awhile I had three jobs: my first real job in awhile as a senior writer for an editorial agency, a weekly column in the In Pittsburgh tabloid, and I taught a course in magazine writing at the University of Pittsburgh. By 1991, I'd lost or left all three, (the separation from In Pittsburgh being a story in itself) but remained in the city as a freelance writer and editor until 1996. I'd grown up in a town less than forty miles away, so western Pennsylvania and its people were pretty familiar.
So I knew some of the people in this story when I began it, and several I met remained part of my life in Pittsburgh, some pretty prominently. Margaret Kelso (who I'd met less than a year before this article) became my partner, and I moved to California with her. I'd met her at a Carnegie Mellon Drama Department event. I'd rather unexpectedly gotten a public reading of a play I'd written several years before, at one of Pittsburgh's home-grown theatres, while I was in my last months at the editorial firm. (That no one from the company came to the reading made it a lot easier to leave it. And ironically, given the themes of these articles, the people who ran the theatre advised me to take the play to New York. Indeed, somebody at Joe Papp's Public Theatre wrote me a nice letter about it---it was a rejection letter however.) So when I was free of daily job obligation, I decided to put more energy and attention into becoming part of Pittsburgh theatre, as a playwright. Meeting the CMU folks and other theatre people was part of that.
One of my first efforts was a short script for an art event called "Luxus" at the Artery. I directed it as well, and Christine McBride was in it. I don't recall how I met her. But I do remember that in reporting this story I went to the Turmoil Room gallery with her to help set up her show. Just hours before the opening, the place was locked up. We had to essentially break into the basement, and I'm afraid I was the lead breaker. Got a little too involved in the story, it seems.
It was at about that time that Ted Hoover, a long-time local playwright and the theatre critic for In Pittsburgh, and several others put together a playwright's group and several productions of short plays. Ten minute plays were just beginning to be the rage, and my first was called "Naked Under Their Clothes." Margaret also had a play on the bill, and later she asked to direct the script I'd written originally for the Luxus event: "A Brief History of Light." It was done at the Birmingham Lofts, with two excellent CMU student actors (Maduka Steady, who had a featured part in the film, "Lorenzo's Oil," and worked as an actor in New York theatre and television.) I knew it was a special night for me, though I didn't realize it would be the high point of my life in the theatre. (I did win an award and a little production for a one-act from the Pittsburgh new plays contest the next year.)
In any case, this is how I'd met Melissa Martin, along with other local playwrights, like Tammy Ryan. In 2001, Melissa directed a feature film, released on DVD as "A Wedding for Bella" but also called "The Bread, My Sweet." Her husband had quit his corporate job to take over a small bakery, and the story was based on real people in Pittsburgh. Melissa had joined up with a former producer of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood (a Pittsburgh production) and they continued to pursue film and TV projects.
I met Helena Ruoti at Pittsburgh Public Theatre receptions. Since this interview, she's continued her prominent acting career in Pittsburgh and other regional theatres. Lamont Arnold has been seen in several feature films shot in Pittsburgh, including "Bob Roberts," "Lorenzo's Oil" and "Silence of the Lambs."
Elvira DiPaolo's play "Bricklayers" did get a Pittsburgh production, and a very prominent one. It was the first production at the new City Theatre, a beautiful facility on the South Side. But Elvira stopped writing, and if I may venture an opinion, I think it was the success of this play that stopped her. She was clearly uncomfortable with so much attention, and I recognized the immigrant working class inferiority complex at work. It must have all seemed phony to her, and she may have felt undeserving and phony herself. I've felt those feelings, in any case.
I met Kathleen Mulcahy while doing this story, and she became a friend, particularly to Margaret. We prominently display one of her "Spinners" glass sculptures (as well as several ceramics pieces by Ed Eberly, who we met at about this time.) Kathleen and her husband Ron continue to work in their art forms and sell nationally, and remain important art community figures in Pittsburgh.
On the net, there is an Avi Wenger listed with Allegheny Investments in Pittsburgh, and an Avi Wenger credited with some song lyrics. So maybe he's continued with feet in both camps. As I recall, Christine McBride did leave Pittsburgh and returned, probably more than once (not uncommon in western PA), but I don't have any fresh information on her or her friends quoted in the first part of the piece.
I've only been back to Pittsburgh a few times since 1996, though I miss it quite a bit. Tey Stiteler, who I'd worked with at In Pittsburgh, is publicity director for the Carnegie now, and she brought me up to date on Melissa and Ted Hoover (who has stopped writing plays, she said, but he's done that before) and others. The Pittsburgh Public Theatre moved to a new facility in the downtown cultural district, and from what Tey said, there's even more vitality in Pittsburgh arts these days. But the city continues to lose population, and the city government is officially bankrupt. Some corporation have moved their headquarters away, and the once promising growth in high tech businesses seems to have stalled. The U. of Pittsburgh's medical facilities have expanded, taking over many of the old steel mill sites on the South Side. But I'm told that's been the only economic bright spot. Still, Pittsburgh has been counted out before. I wouldn't count it out now.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
ART AND SOUL
a series published in 1988 in my column called "Tales," which appeared in the In Pittsburgh weekly.
I The Arts of Marketing
We all know about censorship of art and thought in totalitarian countries. How it limits the information people have; strangles free expression; how it's a tool those in power use to stay in power. But what does censorship mean in America?
In a symposium sponsored by Triquarterly literary magazine (and presented in the book, The Writer in Our World) novelist Mary Lee Settle defines three kinds of censorship in contemporary America: self-censorship, commercial censorship and aesthetic censorship. All three are directly related to the domination of the arts by business, marketing and demographics. These have the same effects as the more familiar forms of book-banning and book burning and control of art and thought we righteously condemn in other nations.
Self-censorship means that you think of something and immediately decide, "I can't write that." Perhaps because you are afraid the CIA won't like it and they'll get the IRS after you. Or because the Church won't like it, or the School, or your boss. But more often because you think: "publishers won't buy it. They won't think it will sell. So I shouldn't waste my time. I'll write something they will like."
And pretty soon, self-censorship becomes so automatic that you don't think of those objectionable and uncommercial things at all.
Commercial censorship means that because a few publishers in league with a few huge bookstore chains decide that your work is not commercial, few if any people will get the opportunity to see your work in print. This is censorship, Settle says, "because they are literally keeping you from reading, keeping you from finding out what you want."
Aesthetic censorship is when literary-minded people tell you that it's not respectable to read science fiction novels or other popular stuff. But as Settle says, the source of this reaction isn't so much snobbery as fear: every book Judith Krantz sells confirms the opinions of mass-minded publishers, and further dooms other writers. It's a kind of protective reaction to commercial censorship.
Settles' points about books are easily applied to movies and TV, and in slightly altered form, to the visual and performing arts. Publishing is no different from Hollywood anymore, and Hollywood is not what it was either. It, too, is in the hands of people who know nothing and care less about the content or even the form of what they sell. They've made their money playing financial games and selling shoes, cigarettes and guided missiles; art is just another product or another investment. Some are in it for the power and the glamour, but that doesn't change the basic game. They're selling, and the guiding principles remain: marketing. Demographics.
These days demography in America means profiling people by age, location and so on, matched with what they buy (or say they buy, or are said to buy) to predict what they will buy in the future. These demographic numbers are used in "target" and "niche" marketing, which aims products at the people they figure are the most likely to buy them. If they can't figure out who will buy a product, or if they don't think there are enough of these folks, or especially if they don't spend enough money, that product just won't get into the marketplace.
The idea seems to make sense---you don't make money selling snow shoes in Florida---but it's taken to extremes: it pretends to know what it cannot know, and in the arts, it is applied to something it should never get close to: information from, by and for the souls of individuals, the culture and the human race.
I object to demographic marketing in general because it says everybody is predictable, and therefore it is helping to make people predictable, and divided on the basis of what we buy. Linked to advertising it is a powerful engine of self-fulfilling prophesy, separating us into income cults, lifestyle tribes and zip code clans. That's bad enough in general. But when it's applied to art and thought, it's a crime.
One question that makes me apopletic with anger just happens to be the first one that every publisher, agent, editor or person who's trying to sound professional will ask about the book you're trying to get commissioned or published: "What's your market?" The first time an editor asked me that I felt deeply embarrassed---for the editor. Defining markets, I thought, is not the writer's job. It's not really the editor's job either. Publishers have people on the payroll whose job it is to sell the books that writers write and editors edit. Isn't it the writer's job to write the book?
By now I have learned this is a rhetorical question.
Mary Lee Settle says that writers must recover their arrogance, and by that I think she means that for a start they must refuse to let themselves be defined by marketing. Figuring out a market is not only not my job, it's contrary to what my job is. Which is to get ideas and explore them, to investigate the subject and the outer world and the corresponding areas of my inner world, and to write.
Which is damn hard enough, thank you, and it does require a certain concentration, enthusiasm, attentiveness, not to mention integrity and yes yes yes---innocence. Trying to dummy up a market at the same time is not conducive. It is soul destroying.
Which is not to say that writers don't care about readers. But our relationship to readers is on a way different level than demographics. We write words, readers read words. Maybe they say or write words back. But that's the deal of our art. We don't prejudge them, and we hope they don't prejudge us. Sure, we may have some reader or readers in mind, and readers will have some image of the writer, but it's way more complicated, and has way more to do with the words and what we're writing about and why they're reading it---which are all very individual---than with some set of averages and statistics nobody really understands (let alone writers), which describe little and predict nothing.
Target marketing may work to some degree for specialized books of one kind or another. Books by specialists, like egronomists or celebrities, on specialty subjects. But this doesn't necessarily work for people whose specialty is writing, or reading. Even long-term business strategy might suggest that publishers nurture writers who will gradually build an audience and perhaps sell books over many years, adding up to many books perhaps. But short term rules today. Niche marketing says you can manufacture stars and formulas for genre audiences and keep the masses happy with a tome or two from the hot face of the moment.
I know what I'm talking about, because I have written a book that got semi-published. As a result I've met and heard from actual readers, and guess what? THERE IS NO DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERN. Students in the South, TV producers in London, bigwigs with well-known names and six figure incomes, and an assistant police chief in rural Oklahoma. And a guy in prison in California. To name but a few.
Demographic marketing probably works fine for a lot of products, practically all of which I don't have the slightest interest in. But especially for that which is profaned by being called "product," it is laziness in the guise of being scientific. Why is it that ground-breaking books, the most important (and often popular) movies, almost always have this long history of rejection? You hear it every year at the Academy Awards---"We had to struggle for ten years to make this movie, every studio in town turned it down," etc. Don't these people ever get the point?
An agent once told me that publishers would not think my book idea was commercial. And when I looked a little nonplussed, he tried to soften the blow by saying: more than half the books publishers publish fail anyway. But he never for a moment put those two observations together.
Instead of hiding behind demographics and marketing voodoo talk, these folks might try developing some taste, honing their intelligence and building up confidence in their own curiosity. If that's not too radical a suggestion.
Marketing gets some pseudo-scientific basis (otherwise known as justifying your title and covering your ass) from ever more detailed surveys and testing of audiences, including sticking electrodes on them and monitoring their skin twitches. But how do you survey opinion on an art work that hasn't yet been created? Or one that won't be close to fully understood for years? Or that twitches the synapses and the heart months from now, instead of the skin this second?
Right now publishers and bookstores and purveyors of fine art and music use famous artists of the past as instant advertising, as recognizable figures that suggest credibility. But they don't for a moment consider that many of these famous artists would never get past their marketing departments if only their once-scary work was the criteria.
Even in promotion it seems to me that niche marketing does a certain amount of damage to the integrity and value of the work or even the art form itself. I can understand how a symphony for example needs to broaden its audience, but why can't it sell itself on the basis of what it does, which is play the music of the best composers? Educating the audience is what the arts need, not pandering.
Once the pandering starts, and there is some image being sold to audiences of what they are supposed to like, then the artists will be expected to provide it. Aren't the whims of fashion enough? Self-censorship follows logically, as an internalization of commercial censorship.
Marketing talks in audience. Writers only know readers. Marketing is about quantities. Art is about individuals. Marketing and promotion stimulate the hand to reach into the pocket. Art lights the mind, caresses the soul, and jabs a finger in the heart.
2. Arts of Survival
The sun lit the cobblestones and my friend Brenda's hair as we stood and talked in the cold outside the Birmingham Lofts. I told her I'd been reading statements and interviews with contemporary artists in various fields, about the state of the arts in the 1980s. Since she's been around the arts in Pittsburgh for awhile, I thought she'd be interested.
"What do they say?" she asked.
"The playwrights are very, very depressed. The performance artists are feisty and political and the most optimistic. The painters and writers are somewhere in between."
"We don't have performance artists in Pittsburgh that I know of," Brenda said, sighing. "What if you are a performance artist in your heart, and you're in Pittsburgh? Do you have to leave?"
"Or a revue writer or director."
"Or a cutting-edge multi-media playwright."
"Or a cutting-edge anything."
"No," she said finally. "You can stay. As long as you also do PR for Westinghouse."
"Or you're a lawyer for USX."
"Or a radio personality."
"Or a wait-person."
"What do wait-persons wait for?" she mused, dancing out of the way of a passing car.
"Someone to let them be artists."
We thought we'd switch to a happier subject, like rock & roll. But it didn't turn out to be much better.
"Did you see Ronda Z's debut at the Grafitti?" Brenda asked. "Yeah. Wow. Great band, great voice, great stage presence."
"And her eyes. And the way she moves. A post-modern Betty Boop," I suggested.
"You know when you see her on stage you're really seeing her," Brenda said. "I can't imagine how she does anything else. But of course, she does. Most of the time. She has a job."
"A part-time rocker."
"How many of them do you know?"
"Rock & roll graphic designer. Rock & roll accountant. Rock & roll cab drivers. All of them."
So we talked about some we knew, as well as some of the others who used to be, or used to want to be, full-time rockers. By day they develop other people's photographs, nurse other people's children, count other people's money. And by night, they're...
"Tired," Brenda said.
"Hassling to get the band together on no money. Hassling to keep the band together with almost no money. Taking care of business. And yeah, now and again, the music."
Sure, we agreed, real life experience is invaluable for an artist of any kind. Locked away in your own world produces hermetic, self-absorbed and usually self-pitying work, warped and wilted. On the other hand, you only had so much energy, and art demands a lot.
And it isn't just the jobs you have to do, but the kind of jobs. Maybe as a young single person you can get by waiting tables, but as you get older and you still haven't "made it" (which means being able to do your art full time) and you've been dumb enough to fall in love and have some kids, it takes more money to get by. And that means a bigger job, the kind that takes up your time and energy and concentration. The kind that usually means you have to become this other person, this emotionally guarded, outward-directed, always-on-time and never-daydreaming person who is fixated on office politics, money management, client relationships, delivery schedules and corporate strategy---not to mention day care and tax returns. Truth and beauty? They'll have to wait.
"It gets you down," Brenda said. "It messes you up."
I told her about this 20 year old who said he had friends who wanted to be writers and actors, but didn't want to live in closets in New York for five years, or watch their friends in Pittsburgh buying cars and houses while they starved.
"Yeah, it's not like it used to be," Brenda said. "Rags aren't in. Being a Bohemian, a hippie even----that's being a chump. And it's more expensive anyway. There are always trade-offs. But now the price is pretty high."
So we talked about that strange and shifting line between part-time art and no art, and how people cross it. Like from being an actor who waits tables to someone in the restaurant business who used to audition. Some do it so gradually they don't even notice. Some even do it on the brink of success. Some don't regret the time they gave and the growth they experienced trying to be an artist. But some are haunted and even destroyed by their "failure." In giving it up, they gave up a major part of themselves.
Brenda mentioned a friend. "He was a musician for all those years but he had to quit. He has a family to feed. But now he gets up and he doesn't recognize himself. It isn't him, going out to work in the morning. He's in torment, every single day."
Despite the gloomy subject, I always feel great after talking with Brenda. But I had a lot to think about as I walked home. About middle class expectations, and people who want it all, including money, status, family and the freedom to pursue their art. Maybe some of them aren't willing to make legitimate sacrifices, and they are weeded out because their desire and their insistence on protecting and using their talent isn't strong enough. And maybe their talent isn't strong enough either. Or maybe their timing is wrong, and not their fault.
But I don't think that's the main story. Artists are in some ways privileged, but in most ways they are exploited. This country devotes less of its resources to supporting culture, and especially directly supporting artists, than just about any civilized country on this planet.
Sure, all artists have battles to fight in their own time and place, and as Goethe writes, "A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torments." But contrary to popular belief, artists don't need society to heap suffering on them; there's enough in their own souls and in the nature of what they do, thank you very much.
Artists don't need poverty; they may need simplicity, but basically they need the conditions that allow them integrity and concentration. To be poor in this society especially is to be generally treated like shit. It means continual humiliation. No one needs that. There is no mystery in its encouragement of drug and alcohol addiction and violence. Besides the anxiety of living on the edge, there's the humiliation of the regular rejection most artists not only get, but must practically invite.
Yet even in Pittsburgh, think of how many people make a good living off the arts, and who wouldn't be doing those jobs unless they were well paid. What was it that guy said, the theatre artist who had just come back from Europe and was touring with his new show? "I've heard of starving artists," he told me. "But I've never heard of starving arts administrators."
Studying the social circumstances that encourage or inhibit creativity, a Brandeis University psychologist came up with this conclusion: "Creativity is a fragile phenomenon, easily crushed." There are enough reasons not to create, enough barriers. It's hard, it's disruptive, it almost always hurts or offends someone. It's wrenching and exhausting, and it opens the deepest part of you to cutting criticism and misunderstanding. The fulfillment is seldom fully shared, the "high" and the effort leave you vulnerable, unprotected. Acceptance or understanding, if it comes at all, often comes too late.
But even without the pressures of New York or L.A. (and also without their energy and cutting-edge arts) those in Pittsburgh born with a talent and the inborn desire to express it, who don't feel fully alive or fully themselves, or fully contributing what they have that's most valuable to others unless they are expressing it---also face the daily question: how do you work a full-time job and be a part-time artist, and be any good? And maybe others ought to think about that, too.
All of these issues are societal issues, affecting more than artists. But what they do to artists, along with the artists' special concerns, continue to produce more tragedies in life than they do in art. "You need encouragement and opportunities," says playwright David Rabe, and those are the artist's bottom lines.
Then I remembered something else Brenda said as we stood in the sunshine, talking about Ronda Z's performance. "I loved when they did that Sly Stone song, 'Thank You for letting me be my self---again,'" Brenda said smiling. "That's what it's all about, isn't it? For Ronda. For a lot of us."
3. Art of Darkness
(Libretto for Philip Glass, in town this week, and in honor of James Joyce's birthday on February 2.)
Lean sun, dot moon still visible as he idles outside the Hilton. Trying to shake the last blanketing dream (William Shakespeare, Herman Melville and Wallace Stevens dressed and dancing like the Temptations singing to him, "If words are our special bliss/ you will die of freakishness/ dah dah do-wah.") He turns on the radio, WYES doing an all day concert of artist's voices: painters, performance artists, writers, dancers, with occasional commentary. The voices fade in and out. It might be this old radio, this odd distance, or not.
...that we are passing through a Dark Age, it has been going on for hundreds of years and may well...
First fare of the day: sweaty man with stolid face, brown suit, brown briefcase. "Airport," the man says. "USAir." The driver thinks: blue of Magritte sky is either twilight or dawn; that's the mystery.
Baryshnikov's is above all the career of a true artist, who works not for his own glory but in service of a vision...There he was admist the rest of the company in the same saggy exercise suit as the others, pouring radiance on each sculpted reach and lunge. He was the image of the soul of honor.
Driver looks in the rear view mirror, catching a glimpse of his forgotten manuscripts, the ones of which he thought first, this is not nothing, this is something, this is not polished but it is very much of me. And of which he thought second, no one on earth I know of will give this a life outside the room of its making.
You can really see it when a writer's work is part of a continuing dialogue. It's really a shame that the audience is no longer in touch with the dialogue.
Driver thinks: Virgil Thompson knew Stravinsky who knew Satie and Diaghilev, Balanchine and Danilova, Utrillo and Cocteau, who knew Apollonaire and Severini, who knew Braque and Picasso, who knew Joyce and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, who knew Pound and Eliot, who knew Groucho Marx. Who the fuck do I know?
Fare is reading the Wall Street Journal. Driver remembers the Doonesbury line, Duke says to Trump, "I just love that you call dealmaking an art. It really puts painting and literature in their place.."
...very little energy in the art community these days. Energy has been replaced by cynicism.
Fare gone, driver doses outside USAir baggage claim. I have great fear of the moral will of Americans to do anything that requires more than a week, okay? Anger's a much more socially and historically useful emotion than despair. But if the guiding principle is producing sellable objects, being a businessman, then the reasons for which most artists originally became interested in art have been lost.
"Hey dream guy, a fare's waiting."
Driver opens an outer eye: long gangler, loaded grin, face of peace and tangerine hair. Tommy Popper, climbing in.
"Nice to see a friendly face." Popper says. "I return from the grant wars."
"Arts Council?" driver asks, engining into the flow.
"Endowment," Tommy says, "as in National. You shoulda been there. We have star power this year---bigtime Hollywood producer, right? Charters a plane to Washington to participate in the grant selection. Our grantees get $5,000 or $15,000 for a year, tops. His plane trip cost $30,000."
...the total resistance of the system to being used for any ends other than its own, and the resultant domestication of the artist as decorative parakeet.
"Can't you get music on that thing?" Tommy says. "But she's right. I hear artists talking fondly of the days when Jasper Johns or somebody could punch out an obnoxious dealer. No artist would dare do that now. The dealers and the money folks are the flakes, the artists wear the timid clothes. It's bad enough for middle class whites but for those that ain't...well, Like those black grafitti artists in New York, remember them? Some got out of hand and threw some rich patron's color TV in the swimming pool of her Long Island estate, and they were history. Drop me at the Vista---I've got to attend some conference where they'll be discussing the role of the arts in reviving downtown. How to niche market afternoon mime, how to get big stars to your arts festival, apart from paying them. If they thought to invite any artists, they'll be immediately recognizeable. They're the ones looking angry and confused. Can you pick me up at five? I'll need a friendly face even more."
Perhaps the most difficult thing for us artists is to recognize in our place and time...
Driver sighs: time. Is all I ever think about.
She surprises him, her clattering stride hasn't changed. Her face more vivid, of course, bright with the light of celluloid and Xenon suns. Camille in the back seat suddenly, favoring him with a friendly, impersonal smile. "Hi," she says. "The airport? Umm..TWA." And disappears into herself.
Driver thinks: sure, she, a new movie, a publicity tour, the Vista: I see. He, no longer bearded, hair longer, it was long ago. Badly directed in an oddly written scene, in a small bare rehearsal room, she had been impossible not to watch. Then a coincidence, like this, both alone at a Truffaut double feature, meeting again after The Man Who Loved Women, sitting together for Mississippi Mermaid. Cognacs and candles at a Casablanca bar, dancing cheek to cheek. Long walk through winter cold to her apartment; she riding a ways on his back, he on hers. Talk of their aspirations. Tunes on her guitar, he one of his songs, she sang "You've Got a Friend." He left in the silence around her sleeping. It was his last night in that city, which was the other part of that night's fate.
They wrote, then not, a long time, and he did not see her again, until now. Except of course on the big screen, seeing her body again floating before him 40 feet high. In other romantic bars with Harrison Ford, across other candlelight with Al Pacino, singing songs with Jeff Bridges.
Driver looks at her in the rearview mirror and thinks: now when we are in a movie theatre together, I'm the only one of us out there in the seats.
Fare gone.
The movement is towards the control of a meaningful context, creating environments not just to support art, but that create the possibility for new scales of creativity across all disciplines and boundaries...
Driver thinks: well, New York. Put it off and put it off. Wanted to be someone when he arrived, not just another punk on the make. And the years went by, and that became even more important. Clarissa, always there, beckoning him, but she stuck with that unsuccessful rock singer. She knew his heart for her, but kept him at a distance, until his heart grew wary, and making his move might mean losing her crucial friendship. He could wait, for her, for his time. Until the first day of his answering machine (so no important agent calls would be missed), getting home from his shift, seeing the green message light, eager to hear his first message. Which was: cousin of Clarissa...hard to say this...after a short illness...Clarissa passed away. Can you speak at the memorial?
Promptly at five outside the Vista, Tommy folds himself in. "Jeez, I'm tired. Take me home, pal."
Silence for awhile. I would like to keep writing for the theatre. I have no illusions about what good can come to me as a result of it, I'm not counting on it to bring me anything. What I hope is that it doesn't kill me. Driver looks in the rear view mirror: surprised to see Tommy looking at him, looking away.
"So, how old are you now, Dick?"
Driver pauses. "Forty."
"Right. It's forty until forty-five," Tommy says. "Then it's forty-five until fifty. I know a director in New York, his last show was Timon of Athens, went on at 4 a.m. in some kind of marathon of all Shakespeare's plays. He's also a waiter. He's mainly a waiter, same restaurant for years. Cast the whole show out of that restaurant. He's fifty. God help us all. So---you should either be famous, or dead from drink and drugs, right? How come you ain't?"
"Good living."
"You make a good living? Driving a cab? Or did you say good liver. My hearing's going, and I'm only...thirty. Till I'm thirty-five."
Driver thinks: that John Donne fragment, so romantic in college. Now hovers around me, a wraith, a beacon, a question: I am rebegot/of absense, darkness, death/things which are not.
I am seizing the opportunity to grant myself the right to hope...The next college art generation will be activist, antiracist, antisexist, and antimaterialist with a vengeance and will reinvigorate the art world with its energy. By the end of the century we''' see the death of the myth of artists as drunken bohemians, irresponsible children who live in poverty and die broke; they will begin to be seen as strong, reliable individuals deeply involved in public life, with a sense of personal responsibility for their own lives and health and that of their fellow humans.
Tommy rouses by the cab's sudden stillness, peers at his home: his blond wife inside, his blond children. "Well, these days anything can happen, right? Philip Glass drove a cab till he was forty-two, didn't he?"he says. "That's it, Dick---you could be the next Philip Glass."
Driver drives away into the Magritte sky. It could be twilight, or dawn. That's the mystery.
a series published in 1988 in my column called "Tales," which appeared in the In Pittsburgh weekly.
I The Arts of Marketing
We all know about censorship of art and thought in totalitarian countries. How it limits the information people have; strangles free expression; how it's a tool those in power use to stay in power. But what does censorship mean in America?
In a symposium sponsored by Triquarterly literary magazine (and presented in the book, The Writer in Our World) novelist Mary Lee Settle defines three kinds of censorship in contemporary America: self-censorship, commercial censorship and aesthetic censorship. All three are directly related to the domination of the arts by business, marketing and demographics. These have the same effects as the more familiar forms of book-banning and book burning and control of art and thought we righteously condemn in other nations.
Self-censorship means that you think of something and immediately decide, "I can't write that." Perhaps because you are afraid the CIA won't like it and they'll get the IRS after you. Or because the Church won't like it, or the School, or your boss. But more often because you think: "publishers won't buy it. They won't think it will sell. So I shouldn't waste my time. I'll write something they will like."
And pretty soon, self-censorship becomes so automatic that you don't think of those objectionable and uncommercial things at all.
Commercial censorship means that because a few publishers in league with a few huge bookstore chains decide that your work is not commercial, few if any people will get the opportunity to see your work in print. This is censorship, Settle says, "because they are literally keeping you from reading, keeping you from finding out what you want."
Aesthetic censorship is when literary-minded people tell you that it's not respectable to read science fiction novels or other popular stuff. But as Settle says, the source of this reaction isn't so much snobbery as fear: every book Judith Krantz sells confirms the opinions of mass-minded publishers, and further dooms other writers. It's a kind of protective reaction to commercial censorship.
Settles' points about books are easily applied to movies and TV, and in slightly altered form, to the visual and performing arts. Publishing is no different from Hollywood anymore, and Hollywood is not what it was either. It, too, is in the hands of people who know nothing and care less about the content or even the form of what they sell. They've made their money playing financial games and selling shoes, cigarettes and guided missiles; art is just another product or another investment. Some are in it for the power and the glamour, but that doesn't change the basic game. They're selling, and the guiding principles remain: marketing. Demographics.
These days demography in America means profiling people by age, location and so on, matched with what they buy (or say they buy, or are said to buy) to predict what they will buy in the future. These demographic numbers are used in "target" and "niche" marketing, which aims products at the people they figure are the most likely to buy them. If they can't figure out who will buy a product, or if they don't think there are enough of these folks, or especially if they don't spend enough money, that product just won't get into the marketplace.
The idea seems to make sense---you don't make money selling snow shoes in Florida---but it's taken to extremes: it pretends to know what it cannot know, and in the arts, it is applied to something it should never get close to: information from, by and for the souls of individuals, the culture and the human race.
I object to demographic marketing in general because it says everybody is predictable, and therefore it is helping to make people predictable, and divided on the basis of what we buy. Linked to advertising it is a powerful engine of self-fulfilling prophesy, separating us into income cults, lifestyle tribes and zip code clans. That's bad enough in general. But when it's applied to art and thought, it's a crime.
One question that makes me apopletic with anger just happens to be the first one that every publisher, agent, editor or person who's trying to sound professional will ask about the book you're trying to get commissioned or published: "What's your market?" The first time an editor asked me that I felt deeply embarrassed---for the editor. Defining markets, I thought, is not the writer's job. It's not really the editor's job either. Publishers have people on the payroll whose job it is to sell the books that writers write and editors edit. Isn't it the writer's job to write the book?
By now I have learned this is a rhetorical question.
Mary Lee Settle says that writers must recover their arrogance, and by that I think she means that for a start they must refuse to let themselves be defined by marketing. Figuring out a market is not only not my job, it's contrary to what my job is. Which is to get ideas and explore them, to investigate the subject and the outer world and the corresponding areas of my inner world, and to write.
Which is damn hard enough, thank you, and it does require a certain concentration, enthusiasm, attentiveness, not to mention integrity and yes yes yes---innocence. Trying to dummy up a market at the same time is not conducive. It is soul destroying.
Which is not to say that writers don't care about readers. But our relationship to readers is on a way different level than demographics. We write words, readers read words. Maybe they say or write words back. But that's the deal of our art. We don't prejudge them, and we hope they don't prejudge us. Sure, we may have some reader or readers in mind, and readers will have some image of the writer, but it's way more complicated, and has way more to do with the words and what we're writing about and why they're reading it---which are all very individual---than with some set of averages and statistics nobody really understands (let alone writers), which describe little and predict nothing.
Target marketing may work to some degree for specialized books of one kind or another. Books by specialists, like egronomists or celebrities, on specialty subjects. But this doesn't necessarily work for people whose specialty is writing, or reading. Even long-term business strategy might suggest that publishers nurture writers who will gradually build an audience and perhaps sell books over many years, adding up to many books perhaps. But short term rules today. Niche marketing says you can manufacture stars and formulas for genre audiences and keep the masses happy with a tome or two from the hot face of the moment.
I know what I'm talking about, because I have written a book that got semi-published. As a result I've met and heard from actual readers, and guess what? THERE IS NO DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERN. Students in the South, TV producers in London, bigwigs with well-known names and six figure incomes, and an assistant police chief in rural Oklahoma. And a guy in prison in California. To name but a few.
Demographic marketing probably works fine for a lot of products, practically all of which I don't have the slightest interest in. But especially for that which is profaned by being called "product," it is laziness in the guise of being scientific. Why is it that ground-breaking books, the most important (and often popular) movies, almost always have this long history of rejection? You hear it every year at the Academy Awards---"We had to struggle for ten years to make this movie, every studio in town turned it down," etc. Don't these people ever get the point?
An agent once told me that publishers would not think my book idea was commercial. And when I looked a little nonplussed, he tried to soften the blow by saying: more than half the books publishers publish fail anyway. But he never for a moment put those two observations together.
Instead of hiding behind demographics and marketing voodoo talk, these folks might try developing some taste, honing their intelligence and building up confidence in their own curiosity. If that's not too radical a suggestion.
Marketing gets some pseudo-scientific basis (otherwise known as justifying your title and covering your ass) from ever more detailed surveys and testing of audiences, including sticking electrodes on them and monitoring their skin twitches. But how do you survey opinion on an art work that hasn't yet been created? Or one that won't be close to fully understood for years? Or that twitches the synapses and the heart months from now, instead of the skin this second?
Right now publishers and bookstores and purveyors of fine art and music use famous artists of the past as instant advertising, as recognizable figures that suggest credibility. But they don't for a moment consider that many of these famous artists would never get past their marketing departments if only their once-scary work was the criteria.
Even in promotion it seems to me that niche marketing does a certain amount of damage to the integrity and value of the work or even the art form itself. I can understand how a symphony for example needs to broaden its audience, but why can't it sell itself on the basis of what it does, which is play the music of the best composers? Educating the audience is what the arts need, not pandering.
Once the pandering starts, and there is some image being sold to audiences of what they are supposed to like, then the artists will be expected to provide it. Aren't the whims of fashion enough? Self-censorship follows logically, as an internalization of commercial censorship.
Marketing talks in audience. Writers only know readers. Marketing is about quantities. Art is about individuals. Marketing and promotion stimulate the hand to reach into the pocket. Art lights the mind, caresses the soul, and jabs a finger in the heart.
2. Arts of Survival
The sun lit the cobblestones and my friend Brenda's hair as we stood and talked in the cold outside the Birmingham Lofts. I told her I'd been reading statements and interviews with contemporary artists in various fields, about the state of the arts in the 1980s. Since she's been around the arts in Pittsburgh for awhile, I thought she'd be interested.
"What do they say?" she asked.
"The playwrights are very, very depressed. The performance artists are feisty and political and the most optimistic. The painters and writers are somewhere in between."
"We don't have performance artists in Pittsburgh that I know of," Brenda said, sighing. "What if you are a performance artist in your heart, and you're in Pittsburgh? Do you have to leave?"
"Or a revue writer or director."
"Or a cutting-edge multi-media playwright."
"Or a cutting-edge anything."
"No," she said finally. "You can stay. As long as you also do PR for Westinghouse."
"Or you're a lawyer for USX."
"Or a radio personality."
"Or a wait-person."
"What do wait-persons wait for?" she mused, dancing out of the way of a passing car.
"Someone to let them be artists."
We thought we'd switch to a happier subject, like rock & roll. But it didn't turn out to be much better.
"Did you see Ronda Z's debut at the Grafitti?" Brenda asked. "Yeah. Wow. Great band, great voice, great stage presence."
"And her eyes. And the way she moves. A post-modern Betty Boop," I suggested.
"You know when you see her on stage you're really seeing her," Brenda said. "I can't imagine how she does anything else. But of course, she does. Most of the time. She has a job."
"A part-time rocker."
"How many of them do you know?"
"Rock & roll graphic designer. Rock & roll accountant. Rock & roll cab drivers. All of them."
So we talked about some we knew, as well as some of the others who used to be, or used to want to be, full-time rockers. By day they develop other people's photographs, nurse other people's children, count other people's money. And by night, they're...
"Tired," Brenda said.
"Hassling to get the band together on no money. Hassling to keep the band together with almost no money. Taking care of business. And yeah, now and again, the music."
Sure, we agreed, real life experience is invaluable for an artist of any kind. Locked away in your own world produces hermetic, self-absorbed and usually self-pitying work, warped and wilted. On the other hand, you only had so much energy, and art demands a lot.
And it isn't just the jobs you have to do, but the kind of jobs. Maybe as a young single person you can get by waiting tables, but as you get older and you still haven't "made it" (which means being able to do your art full time) and you've been dumb enough to fall in love and have some kids, it takes more money to get by. And that means a bigger job, the kind that takes up your time and energy and concentration. The kind that usually means you have to become this other person, this emotionally guarded, outward-directed, always-on-time and never-daydreaming person who is fixated on office politics, money management, client relationships, delivery schedules and corporate strategy---not to mention day care and tax returns. Truth and beauty? They'll have to wait.
"It gets you down," Brenda said. "It messes you up."
I told her about this 20 year old who said he had friends who wanted to be writers and actors, but didn't want to live in closets in New York for five years, or watch their friends in Pittsburgh buying cars and houses while they starved.
"Yeah, it's not like it used to be," Brenda said. "Rags aren't in. Being a Bohemian, a hippie even----that's being a chump. And it's more expensive anyway. There are always trade-offs. But now the price is pretty high."
So we talked about that strange and shifting line between part-time art and no art, and how people cross it. Like from being an actor who waits tables to someone in the restaurant business who used to audition. Some do it so gradually they don't even notice. Some even do it on the brink of success. Some don't regret the time they gave and the growth they experienced trying to be an artist. But some are haunted and even destroyed by their "failure." In giving it up, they gave up a major part of themselves.
Brenda mentioned a friend. "He was a musician for all those years but he had to quit. He has a family to feed. But now he gets up and he doesn't recognize himself. It isn't him, going out to work in the morning. He's in torment, every single day."
Despite the gloomy subject, I always feel great after talking with Brenda. But I had a lot to think about as I walked home. About middle class expectations, and people who want it all, including money, status, family and the freedom to pursue their art. Maybe some of them aren't willing to make legitimate sacrifices, and they are weeded out because their desire and their insistence on protecting and using their talent isn't strong enough. And maybe their talent isn't strong enough either. Or maybe their timing is wrong, and not their fault.
But I don't think that's the main story. Artists are in some ways privileged, but in most ways they are exploited. This country devotes less of its resources to supporting culture, and especially directly supporting artists, than just about any civilized country on this planet.
Sure, all artists have battles to fight in their own time and place, and as Goethe writes, "A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torments." But contrary to popular belief, artists don't need society to heap suffering on them; there's enough in their own souls and in the nature of what they do, thank you very much.
Artists don't need poverty; they may need simplicity, but basically they need the conditions that allow them integrity and concentration. To be poor in this society especially is to be generally treated like shit. It means continual humiliation. No one needs that. There is no mystery in its encouragement of drug and alcohol addiction and violence. Besides the anxiety of living on the edge, there's the humiliation of the regular rejection most artists not only get, but must practically invite.
Yet even in Pittsburgh, think of how many people make a good living off the arts, and who wouldn't be doing those jobs unless they were well paid. What was it that guy said, the theatre artist who had just come back from Europe and was touring with his new show? "I've heard of starving artists," he told me. "But I've never heard of starving arts administrators."
Studying the social circumstances that encourage or inhibit creativity, a Brandeis University psychologist came up with this conclusion: "Creativity is a fragile phenomenon, easily crushed." There are enough reasons not to create, enough barriers. It's hard, it's disruptive, it almost always hurts or offends someone. It's wrenching and exhausting, and it opens the deepest part of you to cutting criticism and misunderstanding. The fulfillment is seldom fully shared, the "high" and the effort leave you vulnerable, unprotected. Acceptance or understanding, if it comes at all, often comes too late.
But even without the pressures of New York or L.A. (and also without their energy and cutting-edge arts) those in Pittsburgh born with a talent and the inborn desire to express it, who don't feel fully alive or fully themselves, or fully contributing what they have that's most valuable to others unless they are expressing it---also face the daily question: how do you work a full-time job and be a part-time artist, and be any good? And maybe others ought to think about that, too.
All of these issues are societal issues, affecting more than artists. But what they do to artists, along with the artists' special concerns, continue to produce more tragedies in life than they do in art. "You need encouragement and opportunities," says playwright David Rabe, and those are the artist's bottom lines.
Then I remembered something else Brenda said as we stood in the sunshine, talking about Ronda Z's performance. "I loved when they did that Sly Stone song, 'Thank You for letting me be my self---again,'" Brenda said smiling. "That's what it's all about, isn't it? For Ronda. For a lot of us."
3. Art of Darkness
(Libretto for Philip Glass, in town this week, and in honor of James Joyce's birthday on February 2.)
Lean sun, dot moon still visible as he idles outside the Hilton. Trying to shake the last blanketing dream (William Shakespeare, Herman Melville and Wallace Stevens dressed and dancing like the Temptations singing to him, "If words are our special bliss/ you will die of freakishness/ dah dah do-wah.") He turns on the radio, WYES doing an all day concert of artist's voices: painters, performance artists, writers, dancers, with occasional commentary. The voices fade in and out. It might be this old radio, this odd distance, or not.
...that we are passing through a Dark Age, it has been going on for hundreds of years and may well...
First fare of the day: sweaty man with stolid face, brown suit, brown briefcase. "Airport," the man says. "USAir." The driver thinks: blue of Magritte sky is either twilight or dawn; that's the mystery.
Baryshnikov's is above all the career of a true artist, who works not for his own glory but in service of a vision...There he was admist the rest of the company in the same saggy exercise suit as the others, pouring radiance on each sculpted reach and lunge. He was the image of the soul of honor.
Driver looks in the rear view mirror, catching a glimpse of his forgotten manuscripts, the ones of which he thought first, this is not nothing, this is something, this is not polished but it is very much of me. And of which he thought second, no one on earth I know of will give this a life outside the room of its making.
You can really see it when a writer's work is part of a continuing dialogue. It's really a shame that the audience is no longer in touch with the dialogue.
Driver thinks: Virgil Thompson knew Stravinsky who knew Satie and Diaghilev, Balanchine and Danilova, Utrillo and Cocteau, who knew Apollonaire and Severini, who knew Braque and Picasso, who knew Joyce and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, who knew Pound and Eliot, who knew Groucho Marx. Who the fuck do I know?
Fare is reading the Wall Street Journal. Driver remembers the Doonesbury line, Duke says to Trump, "I just love that you call dealmaking an art. It really puts painting and literature in their place.."
...very little energy in the art community these days. Energy has been replaced by cynicism.
Fare gone, driver doses outside USAir baggage claim. I have great fear of the moral will of Americans to do anything that requires more than a week, okay? Anger's a much more socially and historically useful emotion than despair. But if the guiding principle is producing sellable objects, being a businessman, then the reasons for which most artists originally became interested in art have been lost.
"Hey dream guy, a fare's waiting."
Driver opens an outer eye: long gangler, loaded grin, face of peace and tangerine hair. Tommy Popper, climbing in.
"Nice to see a friendly face." Popper says. "I return from the grant wars."
"Arts Council?" driver asks, engining into the flow.
"Endowment," Tommy says, "as in National. You shoulda been there. We have star power this year---bigtime Hollywood producer, right? Charters a plane to Washington to participate in the grant selection. Our grantees get $5,000 or $15,000 for a year, tops. His plane trip cost $30,000."
...the total resistance of the system to being used for any ends other than its own, and the resultant domestication of the artist as decorative parakeet.
"Can't you get music on that thing?" Tommy says. "But she's right. I hear artists talking fondly of the days when Jasper Johns or somebody could punch out an obnoxious dealer. No artist would dare do that now. The dealers and the money folks are the flakes, the artists wear the timid clothes. It's bad enough for middle class whites but for those that ain't...well, Like those black grafitti artists in New York, remember them? Some got out of hand and threw some rich patron's color TV in the swimming pool of her Long Island estate, and they were history. Drop me at the Vista---I've got to attend some conference where they'll be discussing the role of the arts in reviving downtown. How to niche market afternoon mime, how to get big stars to your arts festival, apart from paying them. If they thought to invite any artists, they'll be immediately recognizeable. They're the ones looking angry and confused. Can you pick me up at five? I'll need a friendly face even more."
Perhaps the most difficult thing for us artists is to recognize in our place and time...
Driver sighs: time. Is all I ever think about.
She surprises him, her clattering stride hasn't changed. Her face more vivid, of course, bright with the light of celluloid and Xenon suns. Camille in the back seat suddenly, favoring him with a friendly, impersonal smile. "Hi," she says. "The airport? Umm..TWA." And disappears into herself.
Driver thinks: sure, she, a new movie, a publicity tour, the Vista: I see. He, no longer bearded, hair longer, it was long ago. Badly directed in an oddly written scene, in a small bare rehearsal room, she had been impossible not to watch. Then a coincidence, like this, both alone at a Truffaut double feature, meeting again after The Man Who Loved Women, sitting together for Mississippi Mermaid. Cognacs and candles at a Casablanca bar, dancing cheek to cheek. Long walk through winter cold to her apartment; she riding a ways on his back, he on hers. Talk of their aspirations. Tunes on her guitar, he one of his songs, she sang "You've Got a Friend." He left in the silence around her sleeping. It was his last night in that city, which was the other part of that night's fate.
They wrote, then not, a long time, and he did not see her again, until now. Except of course on the big screen, seeing her body again floating before him 40 feet high. In other romantic bars with Harrison Ford, across other candlelight with Al Pacino, singing songs with Jeff Bridges.
Driver looks at her in the rearview mirror and thinks: now when we are in a movie theatre together, I'm the only one of us out there in the seats.
Fare gone.
The movement is towards the control of a meaningful context, creating environments not just to support art, but that create the possibility for new scales of creativity across all disciplines and boundaries...
Driver thinks: well, New York. Put it off and put it off. Wanted to be someone when he arrived, not just another punk on the make. And the years went by, and that became even more important. Clarissa, always there, beckoning him, but she stuck with that unsuccessful rock singer. She knew his heart for her, but kept him at a distance, until his heart grew wary, and making his move might mean losing her crucial friendship. He could wait, for her, for his time. Until the first day of his answering machine (so no important agent calls would be missed), getting home from his shift, seeing the green message light, eager to hear his first message. Which was: cousin of Clarissa...hard to say this...after a short illness...Clarissa passed away. Can you speak at the memorial?
Promptly at five outside the Vista, Tommy folds himself in. "Jeez, I'm tired. Take me home, pal."
Silence for awhile. I would like to keep writing for the theatre. I have no illusions about what good can come to me as a result of it, I'm not counting on it to bring me anything. What I hope is that it doesn't kill me. Driver looks in the rear view mirror: surprised to see Tommy looking at him, looking away.
"So, how old are you now, Dick?"
Driver pauses. "Forty."
"Right. It's forty until forty-five," Tommy says. "Then it's forty-five until fifty. I know a director in New York, his last show was Timon of Athens, went on at 4 a.m. in some kind of marathon of all Shakespeare's plays. He's also a waiter. He's mainly a waiter, same restaurant for years. Cast the whole show out of that restaurant. He's fifty. God help us all. So---you should either be famous, or dead from drink and drugs, right? How come you ain't?"
"Good living."
"You make a good living? Driving a cab? Or did you say good liver. My hearing's going, and I'm only...thirty. Till I'm thirty-five."
Driver thinks: that John Donne fragment, so romantic in college. Now hovers around me, a wraith, a beacon, a question: I am rebegot/of absense, darkness, death/things which are not.
I am seizing the opportunity to grant myself the right to hope...The next college art generation will be activist, antiracist, antisexist, and antimaterialist with a vengeance and will reinvigorate the art world with its energy. By the end of the century we''' see the death of the myth of artists as drunken bohemians, irresponsible children who live in poverty and die broke; they will begin to be seen as strong, reliable individuals deeply involved in public life, with a sense of personal responsibility for their own lives and health and that of their fellow humans.
Tommy rouses by the cab's sudden stillness, peers at his home: his blond wife inside, his blond children. "Well, these days anything can happen, right? Philip Glass drove a cab till he was forty-two, didn't he?"he says. "That's it, Dick---you could be the next Philip Glass."
Driver drives away into the Magritte sky. It could be twilight, or dawn. That's the mystery.
Friday, March 11, 2005
THE ARTIST IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT
by William Severini Kowinski
by William Severini Kowinski
Backstory
Between the time that my book, THE MALLING OF AMERICA, had been accepted for publication and the time it actually was published, I worked on a story assigned by the New York Times Magazine. I'd done three pieces for my editor there, two of them covers. He talked to me about doing a story that concerned the difficulties young people were having when they came to New York to start their careers. The cost of living had shot up during the inflation of the late 1970s and afterwards. The city seemed more dangerous and more frenetic, and the 1980s brought a Darwinian mood of succeed or die. It was the dress for success era, when the heroes of the Reagan decade were entrepreneurs, Wall Street brokers and business people in general.
I suggested that the scope of the article be narrowed to young people coming to New York from elsewhere for a career in the arts. He agreed, and I started on the assignment.
The New York Times is a magic phrase for getting access, especially in New York, so I was able to interview some stellar names in the arts. I talked on the phone with Joe Papp of the Public Theatre, and movie actors Mary Steenburgen and JoBeth Williams, to get their sense of how things had changed. I interviewed Jason Robards, Jr., backstage after a matinee performance of the revival of "You Can't Take It With You" in which he starred. Robards seldom gave interviews, but it turned out he was very interested in this subject, partly because his two sons were beginning their professional careers as actors: Sam Robards, and Jason III, who was also in the cast and who was present for part of the interview. Since Jason Jr.'s father had also been a New York actor, I was hearing about the experiences of three generations. I also spent a delightful hour with the rest of the cast, which included Elizabeth Wilson, who I remembered from her role in one of my favorite TV shows as a teenager, "East Side, West Side" starring George C. Scott. I also saw a performance of Peter Nichol's play, "Passion" and interviewed several cast members, and then went off with them to dinner. I enjoy the company of actors.
When I was doing the Times story I had already resolved to make the arts in America the subject of my next book. At that moment in my life, many things seemed possible. My agent was predicting great success for the mall book, and a person who advised movie studios on books about to be published also predicted a bright future for my book. I even had a screenplay mostly done, concerning two rival shopping malls in suburban Minnesota, an old small one, and the new super-mall, the biggest in the country. The screenplay never went anywhere, but not too many years later, the Mall of America appeared in the Twin City suburbs, just down the road from the first enclosed mall.
I spent a couple of weeks in New York reporting this story, and I had masses of good material. By the end of my time there I was afraid I had too much. So when a press agent called to say he had a client I should talk to, a young actress back in town from Hollywood, I had to say I was leaving and couldn't do it. That's how I missed meeting Kim Bassinger.
I did several drafts of the story back in Pennsylvania, but ultimately the Times Magazine decided not to publish it (my editor was apparently the only one on the staff that thought they should.) Eventually a shorter version was published in the rival New York Daily News Sunday Magazine. When my mall book was abandoned by my publisher, interest in my second book dwindled. I'm still waiting for it to reignite.
What follows is a combination of two versions I did for the Times, the Daily News version, and some later revisions for book proposals. Since at this point, some 20 years later, the value of this story is in the material, and not as a magazine piece per se, I'm opting for completeness rather than economy.
So what is the significance of this story, and the companion piece I'll describe and present later, on young artists in Pittsburgh? That many of these stories mirror what's happening today is not only a matter of the perennial struggles of young and not so young in the arts in America. In many important ways, we are still in the 1980s. What began in that decade continues to dominate today, culturally, politically and economically. Here we get a glimpse of how it began, when people could still recall when it was different.
In 1972, a young woman of nineteen arrived in New York City from a small town in Arkansas, in love with the theatre and crazy to become an actress. She had little experience, and no theatre connections in New York, so she took a room in a hotel for women at $42 a week, began attending acting classes and auditions, and supported herself by waitressing. She did this for six years, and in that time she never had an acting job that paid her more than $10 a week.
One hot summer day she was stuck in the city, getting ready to go to her waitress job at the Magic Pan. "I was pressing my apron for the millionth time," she recalled. "I felt a flood of discouragement, because it had been so long without substantial feedback, except just getting close to things. At that moment I knew I had to decide whether I was willing to be an aspiring actress, even if I was just aspiring for the rest of my life, or be a success back home in Arkansas as a teacher. And I knew I wanted to be an actress. That's as close as I came to giving up."
Not long after that, this unknown actress got her big break, an audition that led to a major role in a Hollywood movie---costaring with Jack Nicholson, who personally chose her. The movie was "Goin' South," not a big hit at the time, but it led to other major roles for her, including one in "Melvin and Howard." So a few years after that moment of truth at the ironing board, Mary Steenburgen won the Academy Award as Best Actress.
Standard story. Inspiring. Happy ending. We love it.
In 1983, another young woman from a small town in Arkansas (Beebe: population 2500) arrived in Manhattan determined to become an actress. Beebe didn't have even a movie theatre, but Suzanne Doss grew up wanting to act. "My Barbie dolls did Shakespeare," she said. Several times in her teens she slept by the side of the road leading out of town, intending to catch the bus to Hollywood in the morning, but her parents always found her first and took her back home.
But after convincing her high school principal to start a drama class, and then to stage a senior class play, and then stealing the script from his desk the night before auditions so she would be prepared to try out for the lead; and after starring in two plays at the University of Arkansas and treading the boards at Murray's Dinner Theatre in Little Rock, and spending a summer at the Jacob's Pillow dance theater workshop, Suzanne took her dreams and talent, her pure good looks and intelligence and determination (plus $1500 in cash) to the Big Apple, where she got a room in a hotel for women, a job as a waitress, and began her acting classes and auditions. She was 22.
It's the standard beginning of a tale like Mary Steenburgen's, or of something out of "A Chorus Line" (and when the movie version auditioned, Suzanne was there among the 2,000 hopefuls.) From "Stage Door" to "Stayin Alive," the portrait of the starving young artist has fascinated audiences. But in the New York of the 1980s, the nature of that struggle has changed, and the chance of survival has lessened---some say dramatically.
Though the aspiring Brandos (Libertyville, Illinois), Rauschenburgs (Port Arthur, Texas) and Styrons (Newport News, Virginia) still stream in from small towns and cities all over America, the likelihood of someone like Suzanne making it has greatly diminished. Talent is still a major factor, and luck and timing, especially when there are more aspirants chasing fewer opportunities . But other factors have assumed greater significance than ever before.
It is now more important than ever to come from an upper middle class home with artistically-aware parents who will support you, and who have the right connections. It is also increasingly important to be educated in the right prestige universities and specialized institutions.
In other words, it's more like succeeding in business. While the images of Bohemian free-spirits and the myths of innocents conquering and redeeming the city with honest vitality and homegrown talent are still cherished, they are fading further into make-believe.
With declining opportunities for new actors, playwrights and fiction writers, and a hot art market emphasizing star power and art-as-investment, there is overwhelming pressure for quick commercial success that more and more defines the characteristics necessary for survival. Talent, creativity, sensitivity and artistic commitment are not only insufficient, they may be counter-productive. Today the necessary qualities include shrewd business sense, relentless and refined social skills, an eye for hype and media, management and marketing savvy, and the ability to suppress and mask emotions and manipulate others: in other words, all of the 1980s qualities promoted in best-selling success manuals for aspiring high tech managers and fast-track junior executives.
Such attitudes are now part of the air a new artist breathes. Newcomers like Suzanne Doss learn it from other young artists who've been in New York a little longer. "The actors who make it aren't necessarily the most talented," said Lauren Cloud, a 24 year old actress who arrived three years ago. "They're the best businessmen. That's what you learn."
Part of the new struggle is due to changes in the city itself. Because housing is so scarce and so much more expensive, especially in areas which traditionally have been home to young artists, fewer aspirants can afford to live in the city, and those who do must devote more time than their artistic predecessors to making a living rather than pursuing their careers. So they feel pressured to make it sooner, and bigger. And with the Village and SoHo thoroughly gentrified, young artists are isolated in cheap apartments all over the city and even well beyond its borders, cut off from the energy and sustenance of an arts community. As a result, their struggle is also lonelier.
"It has definitely gotten harder---even harder than it was five or six years ago," says actress JoBeth Williams, who labored in Off-Broadway theater and did soap operas until her movie career began in Hollywood. Even the steely Bette Davis confessed to a student audience that if she were starting out today, she would not even try to be an actress---it's just too difficult.
There are common problems felt by young aspirants in all the arts, and there are special pressures of specific art forms emerging from particular and differing circumstances. For example, the art market is hot, but the theatre is not. And while New York remains the center of publishing, it is no longer the literary community of legend.
These are conclusions drawn from stories told by veterans and aspirants in the New York arts. They are the realities that real people must face, though few are prepared for them. Moreover, many question whether the arts can fulfill their social and cultural functions, or even survive, if such conditions persist.
SPACE CADETS
Suzanne Doss began her New York acting career by tearfully talking her way into a rented room in a Manhattan hotel for women, past a substantial waiting list.
Of all the factors that have changed the experience of starting out in New York, the most extreme is the high cost and scarcity of space. It affects every part of a young artist's life, creating a web of complication and effort.
The average rent for all of New York City is almost four times what it was in 1960, and more than double the 1970 average. This rise has contributed to a near doubling of the consumer price index for New York from 1978 to 1983. But even more meaningful are the current rentals in areas of Manhattan where young artists have traditionally lived and worked.
Because of the complexities of rent control and rent stabilization laws, arriving at an indicative overall figure is difficult, but knowledgeable real estate sources say that rents three and four times higher now than just ten years ago in Manhattan are common. Moreover, finding a decent apartment at any price in these areas is increasingly difficult, especially for newcomers without contacts to get unadvertised sublets or private deals on rent-controlled apartments.
Most people with experience in recent Manhattan apartment hunting agree that the rental situation began getting much worse in 1978, when the coop and condo booms began, attracting more affluent residents and real estate speculators. "Where I live, people who have been here for five years pay $500 for a real apartment," Lauren Cloud observes. She lives in the east Village. "You can't get a studio for that now, even if you could find one."
Rents are even more of a problem for those artists who need space for more than a place to live. Two years ago, when she was 22, Rene Lynch lived in Richmond, Virginia, where she painted and directed a gallery performance space. But even though she was part of a vibrant arts community, she felt isolated there. "If you're an artist," she said, "New York is still the Mecca of the world."
In Richmond, Rene paid $25 a month for a studio, and her share of the rent of a large house was $30 a month. But when she came to New York in 1981 she found herself living and painting in a small apartment on an addict-riven street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which she shared for $424 a month.
"I couldn't find a studio I could afford, or that I could even work in," she said. Then last year Rene got a break---she was one of 32 artists to be allocated a studio for one year in P.S. 1, a foundation-run arts complex in Long Island City, in Queens. The rent is $70 a month, which is still not easy for her to pay.
So this year Rene works a waitress job in SoHo from 10:30 a.m. until 7 p.m. at least four days a week, and then commutes to Long Island City to paint. If she paints past midnight she doesn't risk riding the subway or walking through her neighborhood alone, so she sleeps in her studio.
"You hear stories about Rauchenberg renting a loft for $15 a month," Rene said, her gaze drifting over some of her recent canvases. "I sense that even five years ago I could have gotten a loft in Tribeca. It's impossible now. Things have changed a lot." And then she made an observation that sums up the difference for young artists of all kinds now. " Before, you painted and grabbed a job when you needed it. But now you work a job, and paint when you can."
There in one sentence is a major shift in the experience of aspiring artists, with ramifications still unknown.
"In the past you could get a little apartment for $50 or $100, and get a little job to pay for it," said veteran actor Bill McCutcheon, appearing in the Broadway revival of You Dan't Take it With You. But today a walk-up in the Village lists for $745. Studio apartments list from $250 in one of the worst neighborhoods in Manhattan to $1050 for a large studio in Chelsea. Lower East Side apartments start at $500, and a one bedroom for $750 on the Upper West Side is considered a steal. Meanwhile, SoHo lofts which were obtainable for next to nothing even a decade ago (although sometimes illegally, as "storage space") now rent as living lofts for from $900 to $2500 a month. A Tribeca co-op loft lists for $1200.
Rents are so high that many aspiring artists find that even with a part time job they cannot make ends meet, so they must turn to others for help. "I don't know anyone who gets by without some form of patronage," a young book editor said, referring to aspiring artists in all fields. Many newcomers agree, and they uniformly estimate that more than three quarters of young artists they know are being substantially supported by parents or spouse.
The housing situation also means that nearly every young artist must share living space, and often that means sharing one bedroom among three or four people, or three bedrooms among eight. Space is at such a premium that it is a factor in relationships. A young painter who once shared a loft with her boyfriend and had to move when the relationship soured, confirms that because of the horrors of finding and renting space, "...people are very reluctant to split up. Friends would say to me, 'Can't you patch this up? You need the space.'"
The high costs radiate out from Manhattan to areas of the other boroughs, so while many find affordable space in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island neighborhoods, some find themselves living in Hoboken, Jersey City and other places in New Jersey and Long Island. Living there can be practical and pleasant, but commuting significant distances to galleries or auditions or even to see shows or friends add extra elements of time, difficulty and discouragement.
For some it is as if they are not "in" New York at all. "It was important for me to live in Manhattan when I first got here," said actor Bob Gunton, now working regularly in theatre and television, "because I really had to have the since of being right in it. So he took a cheap room on 42nd street when he arrived ten years ago. "I could step out on the porch of my rooming house and see five Broadway theatre marquees. If I'd had to live in Brooklyn, it would have dissipated that."
The idea of living outside Manhattan frankly baffles the veteran actor Richard Woods, who came from Buffalo a generation ago. "My niece is just getting started now, and she's living in Jackson Heights. Jackson Heights! It seems like Buffalo to me."
The crisis of space is felt most acutely by artists and dancers who need studios, and their migration outward has led to a dispersal of artistic activity. This is good for those places and in some sense for those artists (a visual arts group on Staten Island, a dance group in Brooklyn, for instance) but it does raise the question of what their relationship is to the New York that drew them here.
The effects of the higher cost of living are common to aspirants in all the arts. But each art has its particular demands and particular situation in the culture and economy of New York.
ACTING OUT
Suzanne Doss arrived in Manhattan from Little Rock in the gray slush of February, with $1500 in savings. At the Christian-run hotel for women she emoted her way into, she paid $80 a week for a room with breakfast and dinner included---not the same as the $14 a week actress Elizabeth Wilson paid for similar digs when she arrived from Grand Rapids in 1942, but something of a bargain in today's Manhattan. She got a waitress job, having trained for it in Little Rock specifically because she knew that actresses work as waitresses in New York. But even though she once waited on actor Malcolm McDowell, married at the time to her role model, Mary Steenburgen ("I got all excited and tried to explain it to him," she said, "but he didn't know what I was talking about") she wasn't able to keep up with the pace of a Manhattan restaurant, and she was fired.
She talked her way into a gofer job in an office , and started acting classes, but couldn't resist trying her wings at auditions. On her first day in the city she had been chosen as one of four dancers for a commercial, but the producers were so disconcerted that she had no agent, photos or resume, that they dropped her. When she did get pictures and a resume and took them to agents' offices, she was usually told to slip them under locked doors.
The office job didn't last long and by summer she was working at a women's clothing shop six or seven days a week, where she "sold shorts for women to wear in the park that cost more than I made in a week."
She practiced her voice and dance in the mornings, and the rest of her time she spent meeting with acting partners and attending acting, dance and voice classes.
By the end of her first year, finding the time and energy to study, rehearse and audition became impossible. So Suzanne began taking another class, in word processing, so she could get a better paying job that might allow her more time to pursue the career that brought her to New York in the first place.
Lauren was one of a group of San Francisco actors who felt they'd outgrown the work they were doing there, and left to seek their fortunes and careers. About half left for Los Angeles, and the other half headed to New York.
Lauren chose New York because "I studied the situation and saw that the actors who make it are New York trained." But her first adjustment was the difference in what it took to support herself. In San Francisco she lived well on $200 a month. In New York it took her a year to find a Manhattan apartment, a one-bedroom in the East Village which she shares for $575 a month.
"And this is a toy apartment," she said. "It's as big as a dollhouse. "
But making the rent is only part of the necessary expenses. While stealing lunch between a few hours sleep after her waitress shift and an afternoon acting lesson, Lauren described some of what starting an acting career involves. In an increasingly competitive market, actors must have professional looking resumes and especially expensive photographs ("head shots") taken by photographers who specialize in them. ("You have to know which photographers are "in" for your 8x10s," Lauren explained, "and which ones are better with women or men.") The minimum cost she estimates at $200 for the 8 x 10s plus another $50 for 100 reprints on postcards. Then more to have the resume printed and the photo glued onto it.
She uses the resumes and photos not only for auditions but to send to agents and theatres. She sends out at least 15 postcard photos as reminders.
Acting classes, she estimates, cost around $175 for an 8-week course, and private study is $45 an hour minimum. She takes dance classes ($5 a session, just to keep trim) and voice lessons (the most expensive of all). She looks for parts in "showcase" productions (usually a handful of actors on a small stage or in a living room, with no one getting paid), and then makes sure that the director invites agents and producers. There must be a guest book for them to sign, she said, so she can follow up with a postcard and a phone call.
All of that takes money and time. There must be time as well for auditions, even though they are often "cattle calls" for hundreds at a time. These auditions can end in summary rejection on the basis of shoe size (as happened to Suzanne Doss, when she discovered she was expected to literally fill the shoes of a dancer departing a Broadway musical if she had any hope of getting the part.)
Above all it takes making constant decisions. How many auditions can you schedule in one day, so you won't be late for any or all of them? Should you go after a part and risk making a lasting bad impression, or go to class more? Do you devote time trying to get scarce work in commercials for more money and exposure, or do you use the flexibility of waitressing hours to audition for parts you really want? And of course there is the constant rejection, and even the deflating daily experience of showing up for auditions with hundreds of others who look just as right for the part as you do.
The process is all the more difficult the farther from Manhattan theatres the aspirant lives. "It's very debilitating to live outside Manhattan when you're beginning,," said Roxanne Hart, a young actress establishing herself with a critically acclaimed performance in Peter Nichol's play, "Passion," on Broadway. "What you're basically doing is not a creative exercise---it's selling yourself. When you have to travel into the city for auditions and so on, it's a lot easier to just say to yourself, 'not today."
Even within each decision there are new pitfalls. Lauren chose to earn her living waitressing, but just finding a decent job was itself a struggle. "Even in the worst restaurants they demand NEW YORK waitressing experience---nowhere else will do. There are just so many attractive, intelligent people who work as waiters and waitresses that restaurants can pick and choose, and then they can treat you badly, make outrageous demands and fire you for no reason, because there will always be somebody to replace you."
Finally Lauren got a good situation working at Googies on Sullivan Street, but after the struggle to find a good job she discovered she had to struggle against it. "The problem with a good restaurant situation is that it becomes like a womb. It's safe. Going out there day after day with your pictures and your resume, going to auditions at nine in the morning when you went to bed at six after your shift---you know you probably won't get the part because you look terrible---it's all so scary. So you go to fewer auditions and stop for awhile, and pretty soon you've stopped for a long time. It happened to me. I came here to be an actress and I was becoming a waitress. I had to go to a shrink to get it all straightened out."
Yet in three years, Lauren had acted in only two shows, both part of a marathon of all Shakespeare's plays (a "Shakespearathon") at the No Smoking Playhouse, which was virtually cast out of her restaurant---the cook, a bartender and several waitresses. Lauren appeared in "Pericles", which was directed by a man in his fifties, who works as a waiter at her restaurant five days a week. The show that began at 3:30 a.m., and was seen by fifteen people.
After just one year, Suzanne is starting to get worried. "Every day I meet waitresses who are 28, 29, and basically they're just waitressing," she said. "They aren't aspiring---they just say it. I don't want to wake up 30 years old and be a waitress."
It is a temptation, which Lauren Cloud knows well. The restaurant business in New York is booming, especially the fancier places catering to a monied clientele. The skills of an attractive, charming, efficient, personable waiter or waitress or bartender are qualities that actors bring, especially as these new restaurants with fantasy themes themselves become a branch of show business. It's especially seductive for outgoing people and women, Lauren said, because there are more women chasing fewer acting jobs than men, but more restaurant jobs for women. People get involved in their roles, and often get interested in the business. If it's a pleasant and secure situation with growing financial rewards, it can be a lot more tempting than sweating auditions and dealing with rejection.
Beyond economic imbalances, a number of factors that make making it in the New York arts more difficult now are part of the pressures Lauren and Suzanne feel. Thanks in part to the baby boom, and its effect on expanding higher education and arts training all over America, there are more and better trained aspirants coming to New York. At the same time, the opportunities are shrinking. Together they create intense competition, which seems to be changing what people must do to succeed, and even the kind of the people who do make it.
But why are opportunities in New York theatre shrinking? In the middle of three generations of New York actors, Jason Robards, Jr. is well placed to observe the change. We talked backstage after a matinee of the Broadway revival of the Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman comedy, "You Can't Take It With You." Robards, the celebrated star of stage, screen and television, has two sons pursuing acting careers, Sam Robards, and Jason Robards III, who was an understudy in this production, and joined us for part of the conversation. (After his father's departure from the cast, Jason III took on a featured role.)
"When I was starting out just after World War II," Jason Robards, Jr. said, "my father came to see me and he told me---'this is terrible! When I was an actor, there were 700 road shows out, and two hundred some-odd theatres on Broadway!'
"Even when I was starting out we still had 134 theatres in New York, and many road shows and stock jobs and resident theatre jobs...Now I think theatre in New York is going to become like the opera, if it isn't already becoming that: a small, specialized thing."
Robards believes that one major reason for theatre's decline is the postwar move to the suburbs, and the loss of the middle class New York audience this exodus implies.
Whatever the reasons, the decline is palpable. Theatre was once synonymous with New York. But although it is still important to the legend, it is less of a presence in reality. "Pick up VARIETY by the theatre pages and let it hang," suggests Richard Frankel, managing director of the Circle Repertory. "Legitimate theatre is on seven pages north of the obituaries."
There are only 38 Broadway theatres left, about as many as a decade ago. However, Off Broadway theatres (with 100 to 499 seats) have declined by half (from about 30 to 15) in that time. But perhaps the most important decline for younger theatre artists is in Off Off Broadway, which has nurtured new actors and new plays since the 1960s. The number of Off-Off houses continued to grow every year through the 1970s, but the Alliance of Residence Theatres (ART/New York) reported its first decline in theatres, from 98 in 1980 to 87 in 1983. As leases signed when rents were cheaper run out, more theatres are likely to close.
For experienced actors like Robards, Jr., this decline means that movies, TV movies and commercials become their major sources of income. Established playwrights like Neil Simon, possibly the last in a long line of playwrights whose fortunes and reputations were made in New York theatre, now also must depend on Hollywood. The same is true for established directors (according to one estimate, no more than four or five directors make a living primarily from New York theatre.)
For newcomers like Jason III, the squeeze begins before they can become established. With theatre stagnating if not shrinking, those who depend on its marginal incomes find their expenses outrunning their means. "A lot of Off Off Broadway theatres were started in the 1970s by people in their twenties," said Gary Steur, Director of Programs for ARTS/New York. "They were content to make $6,000 a year, and they could live on that then. But the money hasn't gotten better in theatre, so they're in their thirties now and still making $6,000---and that doesn't even buy subsistence anymore."
The disappearance of small theatres in particular also hurts young playwrights. Sam Shepard, Pulitzer playwright and Oscar nominated actor, acknowledges that without the Off Off Broadway scene of the 1960s he would never have become a writer or an actor.
Even for the theatres that survive, the economics demands are reshaping what and who are seen. Theatres need established acting stars to attract audience, and they shy away from unpopular plays. "Now they have to do plays that are safe and likeable," commented playwright Kevin Heelan, who had productions in all types of New York houses, including Broadway. "But these little places where people talk to the kids who come off the bus with their plays---when that kind of place disappears, all those kids are really going to have a tough row to hoe."
Who has the best shot at survival? To simply get by during the years of struggle and apprenticeship, it has become almost mandatory to have an independent source of income or support: a trust fund, or a spouse or parents willing to subsidize them for several years.
Then to get noticed, it helps to have connections. As difficult as things are for the younger Robards, prospects are worse for beginning actors with less familiar names. But in some ways even better is some entrée into the "old artist network" which largely emanates from the right schools. If you're an actor it helps a great deal if you've gone to the Julliard School's Theatre Center (as did Kevin Kline, William Hurt and Patti LuPone) or the Yale Drama School (graduates include Sigourney Weaver, Mark Linn-Baker and Meryl Streep, who admitted she attended Yale partly because it would give her a competitive edge.)
Absent pedigree, it may become a matter of guile and luck, as well as talent and attitude. Daniel Hugh Kelly came from an urban New Jersey neighborhood, where he was often in trouble as a teenager. He wound up studying theatre at an obscure college in western Pennsylvania. He knew he wanted to act in New York. But "you can't just come to New York," he said. "You have to be smart about it. You have to treat it like a business."
When I talked to him one afternoon at a West Side restaurant, Kelly was just about to become a star, though not in New York theatre. He'd just played the lead in a Stephen King movie (Cujo), and in the fall he would co-star in a series that would become a hit, "Hardcastle and McCormick." But to that point, he had managed a fairly long apprenticeship, starting with his decision not to go directly to New York from college. "Kids come straight to New York and spend the first five years just trying to get in doors---that's ridiculous," he said. His plan was to be patient, and to act as much as he could in the growing network of regional theatres throughout the country, gaining experience and working with directors and other actors on the way up.
He built up his resume for four years before coming to New York, and even then it wasn't easy. He took a considerable risk from the start by deciding he would not get a day job. "I always swore that if I couldn't work in acting, I wouldn't work," he said. "I'm an actor, not a waiter."
He had some luck with housing: the City of New York had just opened an apartment complex called Manhattan Plaza, which mandated 70% of its apartments for performing artists on a sliding rent scale based on income. Kelly was its first tenant. But that left the problem of eating, and at times he didn't.
Once when he hadn't eaten for days, he cadged a meal from a stockbroker who was also a buddy from his old neighborhood, but he was so weak that after a pre-dinner beer, he passed out.
The next day was Christmas Eve, and Kelly attended the annual party of his New Jersey friends. "That was always hard, going to see the guys I grew up with---there was a lot of pity in their eyes," he recalled. "These guys had gone on to become bankers and stuff, they'd become real respectable. It was always weird trying to explain what I was doing." But during this party he got a phone call. His agent had tracked him down with the news that he'd been offered an important part on the TV soap opera, "Ryan's Hope." "I got off the phone and said,'you guys are not going to believe this.' It was the best Christmas present I ever had."
But as Kelly also observed, another actor didn't have such a great Christmas---the one he replaced, who was also called on Christmas Eve with the news that he was fired.
Yet his good fortune became a new challenge. Acting in New York based soap operas has many advantages beyond the regular pay check: exposure, maybe even fame, and experience. But it is also a place where the ambitions and careers of some actors die: they call it the Velvet Coffin.
Soap operas favor quick and conventional acting, and only the patina of realism. After a few years, some actors get stale and restless, but they are locked into contracts and the daily grind. JoBeth Williams remembers feeling like climbing the walls in frustration. She was terrified that she would be stuck in soap operas forever.
Kelly thought he could outsmart the process. He played Senator Frank Ryan on "Ryan's Hope" for four years, and negotiated contracts that allowed him the freedom to do New York plays and Hollywood films and television. But when he felt the lazy habits he acquired as a soap actor affecting his other work ---the stock mannerisms, reading lines off a teleprompter---he quit. "Every little thing is an important decision in this business," he said. "And they never stop."
To actors of Jason Robards Jr.'s generation, the present situation is so different as to represent a different world. Several cast members of You Cant Take It With You gathered in the homey basement of the Plymouth Theatre to consider the changes. They talked about their early days, not in terms of looking for work, but of working almost constantly, in one kind of production or another, in New York or any of many road show circuits. Between jobs they made the rounds of agents and producers, most of whom they knew on sight. Then they hung out with other actors, directors, playwrights and journalists in the Times Square drugstores.
"In a strange way, there wasn't any pressure, really," said Elizaeth Wilson, who came from Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 1950s. "It was more fun when we were starting out," said Richard Woods, who came from Buffalo. "I think being poor was not so awful as it must be these days."
Part of what makes it awful is that it seems like it never ends. Even what used to be clear indications of success don't necessary mean as much today. The Big Break may not be enough.
At first, Kevin Hellan' s story was a fairy tale of New York. Born and raised in Nebraska, he attended Smith College where he met Kim Davis. They went to New York together: he was going to be a playwright, and she was going to be an actress. They got married in Manhattan.
Their living situation was uncomfortable but almost immediately they each tasted success. Kim was acting regularly on a TV soap opera and waiting tables at a midtown hotel. Kevin picked up odd jobs and was churning out plays. When they returned from their honeymoon, Kevin got a call from an interested producer. Soon after that another of his plays, called "Heartland," was mounted on Broadway---almost unheard of for a new playwright.
But then suddenly the fairy tale ended. Kim lost both of her jobs simultaneously. "They got a new set on the soap, and a new dining room at the Sheraton," Kevin said. "Meanwhile, I just had a play on Broadway, I had three other plays produced in New York, and I'd written a short film that was nominated for an Academy Award---and I was still photocopying at Lincoln Center for a living."
. "We were living in this kind of dungeon apartment when things had stopped, "he said. "But everything in New York is tolerable as long as something is going on: even a reading in a living room, with four or five really good actors---that's phenomenal. When the bottom falls out-when the pressures get to you and you can't work---then the city overwhelms you."
"At first it was exciting to be in New York and living on the edge, but finally I found it stifled creativity. Basically it came down to money, and the shocking revelation that you could have plays produced and you still don't have anything."
THE ART OF LIVING
In apparent contrast to theatre, the art market is booming. But there is little evidence that the greater amount of money is being spread among a significantly larger number of artists.
But the notoriety and high prices attained by artists in their 20s and 30s such as Julian Schnabel and David Salle seem to have increased the pressure on young artists to succeed quickly or become permanently overlooked. The competition is fierce. New York City Cultural Affairs deparment conservatively estimates the number of gallery artists in the city at 50,000, and more are applying for artist certification (which qualifies them for artist-zone housing) every week.
The hot art market combined with the overall increase in real estate values to turn the old warehouse districts where artists of the 50s through the 70s bought cheap lofts into fashionable and expensive areas. High building values either forced artists out (and certainly kept struggling young artists from moving in) or turned their heads with the prospect of instant riches, when their property was more valuable than their art would ever be. For a long time, said a woman art photographer who has lived in SoHo for eight years, artists in SoHo talked more about real estate deals than art. "I've seen more artists destroyed by real estate than by cocaine," she said.
Another difference may be that an artist didn't have to become a big name to survive in New York. "I have a friend, a painter who is about Robert Rauchenberg's age," the photographer said. "He saw Rauchenberg at one of his openings, wearing his gold shoes and charming the crowd around him. He told me that's still his goal---he still wants to be like Rauchenberg. But he's been here a long time. He paints, he works as a carpenter, he has a family and friends. He has a life."
She mentioned Louise Bourgeois, the painter who had her first show at the Museum of Modern Art when she was in her eighties. "It was touch and go whether Louise Bourgeois would die before the Modern discovered her. But she had a life."
Today however there are those in them art world, young artists among them, who worry that it is no longer possible to just have a life as a New York artist. The expenses and the pressures (such as the growing role of media attention, publicity and marketing) mandate either major and early success, or giving up.
"We are dealing with a different art world now," says Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney museum, "and the pressures are felt very early. There is more concentration on the externals of success. It is not as important whether you've made a good painting as whether you're in the right gallery. Someone who isn't successful finds it difficult to make a go of it at all."
But while places like Long Island City may be the new SoHo, the old romance seems to be lacking. Perhaps it is that poverty is not so genteel, and a good deal more dangerous and debilitating. Or perhaps, as some suggest, children of the middle class have middle class expectations.
"It's really ironic," says Rita Sirignano, a young painter who is also on the administrative staff of P.S. 1. "My parents escaped Brooklyn for the suburbs of New Jersey, and now a generation later I'm back there, in a worse dive than they ever had to live in." She counts herself among the disillusioned. "When you get out of school, the world is in front of you---you think you can do anything if you're young. But it isn't like that."
There are also the urges towards family and settling into a life that become more urgent as time goes on. Rita talks about a couple she knows, both artists, who live in a cheap but awful apartment in lower Manhattan. "She waitresses, he works construction. She doesn't show her work, he sells a little. They want a child but they don't want to raise one in such a bad neighborhood."
For Rita, the sacrifice is becoming too great. She wants a life as well as art. "I don't want to live like this anymore," she says. " It isn't romantic anymore."
THE LITERARY UN-COMMUNITY
Everyone knows that the publishing capital of America, if not the world, is in New York City. Everyone knows that to make it, a writer has to live in New York. But at least on the second premise, everyone would be wrong.
"Most of the major younger writers who come to mind---Sam Shepard, Tom McGuane, Hunter Thompson, Tom Robbins---they all stay as far away from New York as possible," a literary book editor observed. "With a few exceptions, you have to go back to when Mailer and Styron were young to find writers who live here and identify with New York."
(New York, Sam Shepard recently insisted to an interviewer, "is not the cultural center of America. New York's about as provincial as the smallest town in east Texas." )
But young fiction writers, steeped in legends of Fitzgerald and Mailer, come to New York looking for the watering holes and delis where literary types conduct their impassioned intellectual discourse. They don't find them. Writers are alone almost everywhere, but nowhere so much as New York.
"I expected to find a semblance of a literary community," said Lee Phillips, a young fiction writer from Cleveland. "But that hasn't turned out to be the case at all. People find a sympathetic group of friends, some of whom might happen to be writers, but the literary community is mostly a romantic notion."
Chip McGrath, fiction editor of the New Yorker, agrees. "I suspect that the literary life of New York is still a draw, but the irony is that it doesn't exist."
The lack of community is common, but perhaps felt most acutely by wirters, whose work is done alone in private. The reasons are complex, but the dispersion caused by real estate prices is part of it, which has also erased the kind of low cost places artists used to gather. Nothing seems to have replaced the old drugstore meeting places around Times Square for theatre people, nor do there seem to be new writers and artists bars as important as the Lion's Head or the Cedar Tavern in the Village. The effect is not only fewer places for young writers to meet each other as writers, but nowhere to see older writers, outside of university classes and television interviews.
Writers also don't usually have rehearsals and classes to share, though writing and publishing workshops are becoming more common. For writers of book length fiction in particular, the path is lonely.
"You have to have a lot of confidence in yourself, "says fiction writer Jay Liebold. "You don';t have a lot of money and you have to put at least two or three years into your work before publishing. During that time you're basically living on faith. You don't have any badges of success and you aren't going up any ladders. You're going out on a limb. And the fear is that in five years, you'll realize you're on the wrong limb."
There are additional pressures that reflect a changing publishing industry, as small literary houses are absorbed into conglomerates with commitment only to profit margins higher than publishing has ever yielded. There are more books being published, but there are fewer names on the best seller lists, and among them, even fewer writers.
"You don't just write anymore," said Paul Stark, a young writer from Seattle. "You're supposed to design what you write for a target market. Newcomers I know feel embattled by the large forces acting against them. It's very difficult to find people in this city doing creative work that they don't feel is compromised."
Again, business values and conformity are more important than artistic intent or even quality. "People here decide what books are going to be published and which aren't, but they don't really know what they are doing," said a young editor at a major Manhattan publishing house, who refused to be named for obvious reasons. "They base decisions on all kinds of things, and if an author is charming and cooperative and understands the business, that's going to be important in those decisions. From what I've seen it's unfortunately true in other arts, too---those artists without social skills are a lot less likely to succeed, or even be heard."
Although many newcomers arrive with the motivation of dreams, they also come thinking they have few illusions: they know they won't make it overnight, but they count on their energy, optimism and persistence to carry them through. But they often find it's much worse than they imagined, if only because it gets harder every year. There are changes they haven't foreseen, because of the gap between the old expectations and the new realities in the New York arts and entertainment world, and the city's relationship to it.
ART AND THE ECONOMY OF THE CITY
"The economy has no place for you really," said Douglas McDonald, a young theatre director. "You have a vague outlaw status."
If the economy of New York has no established place for individual artists or aspirants, it certainly does depend a great deal on the arts themselves. A study by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey figures the total impact of the arts at $5.6 billion annually. Another study maintains that Broadway and Off-Broadway theatre alone account for $480 million a year pumped into metropolitan area businesses. The city sustains a $2 billion a year international art market. The arts support bureaucracies of administrators, advertising and talent agencies, and the practices of lawyers, fund-raisers, and publicists.
New York City does have the most elaborate system of government and private support for the arts. The New York State Council on the Arts distributes about $20 million a year to arts organization in New York City, including groups such as Young Concert Artists which have as their primary purpose the support of new talent. New York's department of Cultural Affairs devotes $3.3 million of its $52 million budget to programs for artists, which include supplying funds to 100 local arts organizations.
Manhattan Plaza , funded under a federal program to provide 70% of its 1689 apartment units to performing artists on a sliding scale, has been a conspicuous success. According to a Plaza administrator, turnover has been very low and there is a waiting list of thousands. "But that's an indication of the need," he said," and that this one place is not much of a solution."
However, compared to the one time in American history that individual New York artists received meaningful and sustained support---during the Great Depression---today's programs are feeble (the last such program was C.E.T.A. during the Carter administration, and it was quite small.)
But arts observers point out that the 1930s was a particularly vibrant time for the arts in New York. Jackson Pollock painted under the aegis of the Federal Arts Project from its inception in 1935 until its demise in 1943. He was one of several subsequently famous artists whose work was chiefly responsible for making New York the art capital of the world, and therefore of creating the multi-billion dollar art market of today. Projects in theatre, writing and music also materially aided the development of major figures as well as directly supporting innovative work (such as New York's "Living Newspaper") that remain influential in those fields.
In a survey of visual, literary and performing artists, Columbia University found that 77% work other jobs to support themselves. 75% earn less than $12,000 a year from their art, and more than half earn less than $3,000. Consider that in virtually no other field is it expected and accepted that after years of formal education and specific training, and then unpaid or barely paid apprenticeships, professionals are very likely to need employment outside their profession to survive.
Engraved on the Kennedy Center terrace in Washington are these words of President John F. Kennedy: "I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft." Certainly those few who achieve greatly are grandly rewarded. But for most whose achievements are the backbone of the arts and entertainment of a nation, President Kennedy's vision is yet to be fulfilled.
THE ORGANIZATION ARTIST
Some would argue that many of the challenges young artists face are a natural part of the winnowing process, however Darwinian that might be. But while many of the pressures enumerated here will soon become standard, they are at this moment new enough in kind or degree to call forth the question of what kind of art will emerge from these changes.
"Natural selection today plays a smaller and smaller part in the making of artists' careers," according to Barbara Rose, noted art critic. "Those with wealthy relations and connections are infinitely better placed to show and sell than is the odd have-not with the temeritry and tenacity to play the art game. Does this make any difference in the kind of art produced? You know as well as I do that it does."
"Around the end of the 1970s, there was a shift in attitude among college students," said fiction writer Jay Liebold. "At Williams, where I went, it was palpable. They began worrying about earning power. There was a sense you had to start early or others will get ahead of you. It's different than in the 60s or 70s when there was a lot more encouragement to do something creative. That makes it harder: when the values of people around you are less encouraging."
This attitude of calculation and playing it safe based on the pressure to succeed fast before failure overwhelms you, merges with the psychology of the 80s, which makes financial success. There is little cultural patience for poverty and struggle evne in New York, where such support or at least indulgence was part of the cultural scene for decades. Today the starving artist is out of style, except as a slogan to sell mass-produced paintings in motel lobbies. Bohemianism in whatever guise, from pre-Beatnik to post-hippie, is all but gone: shabby-genteel has yielded to dress for success. As the famous actress Elizabeth Ashley memorably said, "Money is the long hair of the 80s."
It is very difficult as youth slips by not to notice the difference with your similarly educated contemporaries. "You see people your own age making 50 or 75 thousand a year," said Lee Phillips. "All you can do is screw up your courage and realize you're not in it for the money, but for the beauty."
But the effect isn't just on morals and motivation, but on the art itself. "There is a real schzophrenia that happens," says Roxanne Hart. "The things that we need in a business sense are to a certain extent opposed to the openness, the willingness to reveal oneself that is important to the work. And a lot of people who are immensely talented do not survive personally...Sometimes it's amazing to me the kind of gall I had walking through closed doors in agent's offices or just ignoring signs that said, 'don't come in.' I don't think I have as much of that now, but I think I'm a better actress. I am more willing to be vulnerable."
"If you're a system that takes in knowledge and experience," Bob Gunton said, "sifts it through yourself and produces something---which is what an artist basically is and does---and you live in a very insular world of small ideas, and you start regurgitating the same stuff all the time, it becomes very inbred and pallid and, after awhile, lifeless."
"Talent is the bottom line," Jason Robards, Jr. said. "It takes talent to play the great parts. But a lot of talented people fade away---they leave. They don't want the mediocrity. We're trying to say something about the human condition, and nobody's listening. They don't buy what we're saying."
There may be cumulative effects on the arts themselves. "I think acting students tend to be more superficial today," legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner told writer Jennifer Dunning in the New York Times Magazine. In that same article, actor and acting teacher Austin Pendelton remarked, "It's notr a really juicy generation coming up...But the structure of the industry supports such literalness. The shocking way we audition, stressing the processed and homogenous, for instance, encourages mechanical acting. It would kill the soul of anyone."
The personal and commercial pressures, and the system they breed, all interact with the peculiar ethos of the 80s. Producer Joseph Papp agrees that for the young artist in New York, "It is more difficult in every way," but the causes and effects are more complex than simple economics. "There's a kind of furtive caution now, a sluggishness," he said. "What theatre needs is the driving force of people aching to say something. Moribund ideas are deadly for the arts." But new ideas are not good gambles for organization artists, for show business survivalists in gray flannel suits.
The old notion was that artists aren't supposed to be like other people, especially not business types. While others 'take charge", artists are receptive, observant, sensitive. While others suppress and falsify emotions, artists express them. While others improvise a social identity, artists work to refine a private vision. While others follow established procedures, artists explore and create. While others adapt quickly to prevailing circumstances and fashions, artists apply themselves deliberately, with great concentration, to originality and craft. And when others are serious and businesslike, artists are instinctive, open and free. Their allegiance is not to money and expediency, but timeless beauty and the truth of the moment.
But those images seem to have gone the way of the abacus and the epic poem. In the 80s, the image of creativity has been appropriated by entrepreneurs and manipulators of financial instruments. There are legends of misbehaving artists like Jackson Pollock. But in today's art world, observers agree, it is artists who must be well-behaved and compliant to be successful, while self-indulgence, impulsiveness and flamboyance have become the privilege of managers, agents, gallery owners and producers.
So people in the arts in New York do ask themselves, could Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman make it today? Or Jackson Pollock? Or Sam Shepard?
There are some who do survive, or at least develop value from the experience. "You have to think of your life as a picaresque novel---think of yourself as Tom Jones," advised Douglas McDonald, a young theatre director. "He's broke and in the ditch and everyone despairs of him, but the reader still likes him and reads on...When you decide to be a playwright or an actor or any artist you're essentially admitting yourself to an elite, and there's a cost. I know any number of people who lived for the theatre in college but got scared, and now they're in law school and they're unhappy."
Bob Gunton is an actor who has earned the right to speak about the costs and value of what he's done. He has harrowing tales of surviving on nothing but a cookie and an apple a day, both of which he had to tie in a bundle and hang from the bare light bulb in the center of his room, to keep it from the rats he heard scurrying in the night.
"If someone comes here saying I want to be rich, or I want to be a star, it's all out of their hands really," said Bob Gunton. "It's fate, it's chance. But if someone comes here and says I want to do better work each time I go out, I want to work with the best people I can, I want to challenge myself to grow as a human being as well as an artist---making those kinds of decisions and sticking with them in the face of the absurdities of the business part---if you can do that, then you'll survive. Whether you become a celebrity or rich, that's in somebody else's hands. But you can accomplish or work towards the goals you set for yourself, if they are worthwhile goals. And that's the hardest thing for us to do."
"The healthiest people I know are those who think that success is only being able to work at what you want to do," says Douglas Hughes, a young theatre director who believes that good theatre can exist outside New York. "The toil is what sustain you---the joy in the craft itself."
NEW YORK OR NOT NEW YORK, THAT IS THE QUESTION
On a hot summer night, thousands of young people stream down Sixth Avenue and into the Village, past the meditative eyes of a bearded wino crouched in a doorway. Suddenly he raises his arms and says in a clear, thoughtful voice ringing with finality, "A few of you will make it. A FEW."
Part of what haunts Lauren and Suzanne is all around them: the death of dreams. The wait staff and bartenders at Upper West Side bars with movie-set decors are replete with half-familiar faces from commercials or one part in a memorable play or movie. Some of them may be actors who are still trying, but others have given up.
"I worked with an actress who had a major role on a soap for awhile," Daniel Hugh Kelly recalled. "But she took a job at an Upper West Side in-spot bar, and she hasn't acted in three years. She got caught up in her restaurant job and just sort of faded away. That happens a lot."
There are of course many advantages to living and learning in New York. For one thing, being an aspiring artist is not as unusual or potentially weird as it might be in other places. "In New York you're expected to learn your craft," Mary Steenburgen observed. "I didn't feel ashamed to be learning for five or six years."
"Those I knew who didn't stay that I saw later recall that time as having been generous to them,:" Mary S. "None of them regret having tried. It also gave a richness of life they took home with them. Not many people I know who came to New York felt it was a bad choice in their lives."
Some thrive on the hardships, and if they succeed, it becomes part of their New York cred. Dancer and choreographer D. J. McDonald said, "My reaction is to get more determined. No one wishes for more struggle, but there's a value in it. You get stronger and faster." Actor Thomas Waits remembers living in what he describes as a "Dostoevsky dive." "That's where I began to cement my desire," he said," and to realize the task ahead."
But others are wary of the costs. "This business is like dancing on the edge of a black hole," said established actress and playwright E. Katherine Kerr. "You are endangered if you fall out, or if you fall in. You can get sucked in and disappear. I've seen people whose whole personalities disappear in the theatre and they come out the other end bitter and in pain, with no lives other than the theatre."
So some newcomers try to manage a balance, as they assess the costs against their own dreams. Nancy Demechek and her roommate, Tracy Eula, came to New York last spring from the Indiana University drama department (which also graduated Kevin Kline). Both are actresses and both are now working full time at skilled and relatively well paying jobs. They live above their means in a $1050 apartment with a third roommate, because they want to feel safe and have a pleasant home to return to. Tracy has done some children's theatre, but Nancy especially casts a cautious eye on all the people she sees who are "one step below almost making it."
"I could probably give up everything and get some parts," Nancy said, "but I've been here six months and I can afford to see Broadway shows. I now actors who have been here ten years and can't afford to see Broadway." She, too, is haunted by those who have been in New York longer and have given up, like a young woman who came from Chicago and worked as an intern at the Circle in the Square theatre, but after awhile went back home. "She told me she just couldn't live that way any longer," Nancy said. "She wanted to be able to afford makeup, she wanted to have clothes, she wanted to be able to go out."
Penniless and spent, Kevin and Kim Heelan left New York. They moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, where Kevin teaches, and where he advises young writers heading for New York to learn a trade: "something that will pay you $8 an hour instead of $3.50." He also told them to "be prepared for things to take a long time. There are no laws, no rules of conduct, no steps that if you follow them, you will get specific rewards. That's a hard thing to accept, especially for middle-class kids."
" I left because there wasn't any need to stay there," Heelan said on the phone from Massachusetts, where he began writing again. "The most important thing is to get the work done. You can have all the business acumen, all the get-up-and-go, but if you don't have anything to show, it's useless. I had to get back a little of the innocence I started with."
Lauren Cloud is not sure she can continue with her New York life either, so she is going back to San Francisco to evaluate things. "I don't know if I have the drive to make it big this way," she said. "Maybe I'll travel the world, and act in smaller theatres somewhere." The escape from New York isn't uncommon, even for those who in fact do return. Roxanne Hart quit the business and hid out in Paris, but came back when she realized that changing her career to journalism was going to be about as hard as being an actress. More than one actor has been on their way out the door, when the phone call they'd been waiting for finally came. Yet others who finally got that call disappeared anyway.
"I've seen many who had talent but didn't get the lucky break being undermined and eaten away by frustration," said Jobeth Williams, whose lucky break was a nude stroll down a hallway in Kramer v. Kramer. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But there are people who are driven to do it, and you aren't going to stop them."
"You've got to really want to do it now," concludes painter Rene Lynch. "It can't be because it's fashionable. You either really want to make art, or you do something easier."
But the stories of individuals also accumulate, and though individuals make their decisions, experience their fates and perhaps seek their balance, there are effects in the trends of what they face that have consequences beyond them.
"The theatre is lucky that so many artists are impelled by their passion to create, rather than guided by realistic assessment of the situation," writes Mindy Levine in the Theater Times. "But at some point, there must be a reckoning...In several years when we wonder, 'Where are all our theater artists, both young and old?' we may have to turn to businessmen, lawyers and doctors and ask them what their dreams were when they were young."
But something else has changed: in many art forms, New York is no longer the only alternative. Cities throughout the U.S. are showing more interest in the arts, and providing more financial support than ever before. In fact, many visual arts based in New York get their most lucrative work showing or holding master classes in other cities and states, as well as in Canada and Europe. Actors have been going to Hollywood for a long time, as well as on the road with touring Broadway shows, but added to that mix are new opportunities in regional and university associated theatres.
"...it is our local bad luck," wrote Brendan Gill in the New Yorker, "that at the moment there are probably more plays worth going to see in Seattle than in the tinselly reaches of Times Square. So much the better for Seattle (and for the country), so much the worse for us!"
But even beyond the growing emphasis on tourist spectacle in Times Square, it is more than bad luck. Theatre artists agree that new plays are seldom produced in New York, except in a few venues like Playwright's Horizon and the Ensemble Playhouse, which are committed to this process. Even established serious playwrights like Edward Albee and Arthur Miller find New York productions scarcer.
At the same time opportunities are increasing for artists to leave New York altogether, frequently finding not only better living situations, but more exciting artistic opportunities. Adventurous, high quality theatre is flourishing in such cities as Seattle, Chicago and Dallas. Long established theatre, music and art scenes in cities like San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis-St. Paul are being joined by ambitious new commitments in Denver, Portland, Oregon and even smaller, more isolated cities like Wichita, Kansas. Or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Judith Leifer was born in New York, and attended the New York High School of Performing Arts before becoming a young member of the Martha Graham dance company. Several years ago she was invited to go down to Pittsburgh to perform with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, then in residence at Point Park College. She went, and liked the dancers and the environment so much that she stayed.
She found that her quality of life was immediately better. "In New York I had to search for a cubicle," she said. "Here I have a huge house to myself." But the effect on her work was just as significant. "In New York I knew of performances that went on with only two or three rehearsals at ungodly hours" because dancers had full time jobs. But in Pittsburgh, the dancers she works with all have part-time jobs in the evenings, so they can rehearse nearly every day.
Leifer formed a new company, the Extension, with dancer Douglas Bentz, a Pittsburgh native who had moved to New York. But his career there had reached an impasse. He had begun to choreograph, and his dream was to start a company. But studio rents were too high, and the time for dancers to rehearse too difficult to find. On visits home he realized that Pittsburgh was more enthusiastic about the arts, and more dancers were staying.
"Five years ago there wasn't as much variety here," Bentz said. "But Pittsburgh is the third largest corporate capital in the country, and people from Los Angeles and Chicago and New York work for those companies. They expect cultural variety. And the people of Pittsburgh support us...It's also easier to survive here. Dancers can afford a nice place to live on a waitress salary, and still have time to dance and do other things."
Bentz found he could devote 25 to 30 hours a week to his company and still make enough money teaching to support himself. He got a large rehearsal and performance space in a good neighborhood for $200 a month. He found that the corporate community was willing to help fund a new and somewhat experimental company.
"New York may be the dance capital of the world," Bentz said. "But that doesn't mean it's the only place with a good supply of quality dancers. And a lot of New York dancers are too jaded to try something new."
The Extension performs beyond Pittsburgh as well, including engagements in New York City.
POSTSCRIPT 2005
Although it seems to me that the changes for aspiring artists in the 80s have continued in pretty much the same direction since, the world has changed in other ways in the 20 plus years since this article was written (and rewritten and rewritten.) Namely, there's the Internet, and the search engine, which allows us to ask the question, Where are they now? And even come up with some answers.
I'm pretty sure it's the same Rene Lynch I met at PS 1 who is co-founder of Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, an organization for "emerging and mid-career artists." She's had a career as a painter, and perhaps an illustrator. I know the Rita Sirignano I met there now lives in Calgary, where she is again painting (and selling) and is an often published writer and community arts activist, as well as a mother. I know because we've exchanged emails since I started assembling this (the article is so old that it preceded my first computer.) Rita left New York in 1991 with her husband to be, and is now a Canadian citizen.
Sticking with certainties, I wrote about two dancers who left New York to start a dance company in Pittsburgh. They are still there. Douglas Bentz and Judith Leifer-Bentz (how about that) are both associate professors of dance at Point Park University, which used to be Point Park junior college.
Suzanne Doss is a puzzle so far. I kept in touch with her for a few years---she was married (to an actor) and living in Long Island City for awhile, but I think the last time I heard from her she was pregnant, and I believe they were living in upstate New York. But now the Internet shows me a Suzanne Doss in Los Angeles who is an assistant director for a production at West Coast Ensemble in LA. And there is a Suzanne Doss who belongs to the Cable and Telecom Association for Marketing in Alexandria, Virginia. When I think about it she could be either one, or, of course, neither. (Who knows, she could even be both.)
Lauren Cloud shows up in the acting credits of a low-budget movie in 1989, and was a production manager or assistant director on several more in the 90s. This year there's a Lauren Cloud directing a play for Theatre Neo in LA.
I can't find anything new on playwright Kevin Hellan---his Broadway play, "Heartland" is now famous for introducing the world to Sean Penn, who played the lead in his first major role.
The only novels listed for a Lee Phillips are genre westerns. Jay Liebold has published several children's books. I can't find anything by Paul Stark.
Suzanne Opton (who did the photos for the original "Malling of America") had an established career as an art photographer in New York, and still does. Her website is www.suzanneopton.com.
It's funny how once you interview somebody, you follow their careers as if they were friends, and cheer them on from afar. I last saw Daniel Hugh Kelly in "Star Trek: Insurrection," which makes him an immortal in my eyes. Sweet Roxanne Hart was a regular on the TV series, "Chicago Hope," and has done a number of films and TV shows, including a TV movie filming now. movie. Bob Gunton works pretty regularly in film and TV, usually as a heavy. E. Katherine Kerr had a nice part in a movie I liked a lot, called "Reuben, Reuben," and she's been on several episodes of "Law & Order" (along with just about every other New York actor I've known, including Hart and Gunton.)
The great Jason Robards, Jr. died in 2000. His children, Jason III, Jake Shannon and especially Sam Robards have acted professionally in film, TV and on the stage. JoBeth Williams has worked steadily as a film actor (with two movies to be released in 2005) as well as a producer and director. Mary Steenburgen has also had a constant film and TV career since her Oscar in 1980, followed in the business by her two children with Malcolm McDowell, Lilly McDowell (actress) and Charlie McDowell (producer.) Mary also was executive producer of a film and a TV series in the 90s. All this reminds me what a kick it was to talk with people whose very voices I love, like Mary Steenburgen and Jason Robards.
This article was supposed to be the start of a book project about the arts in America. While I was bouncing around North America for speaking engagements for "The Malling of America," I often scheduled extra time to look into the arts in various places, like Seattle, Denver, both Portlands, and Wichita, which was a real eye opener. There I saw one of the largest collections of quality outdoor sculptures in the country, including several Henry Moore's (donated by an eccentric Wichita millionaire who carries a Henry Moore on his private Jet); a university with a fine writing program and a composer who wrote the first piece ever performed for percussion and professional wrestlers, and several art galleries---a cooperative of feisty young painters, called Ball Park, and Gallery XIII, created and staff by middle-aged, middle class women artists, whose work was shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. Their motto, displayed on bumper stickers, was "Support Your Local Louvre."
I then got a sublet in Manhattan for several months to do more New York research. The art world was suddenly centered in the area of the alphabet avenues of the East Village. I vividly recall that area of the city then, looking more forlorn and destroyed than pictures of London during the Blitz, or Berlin after World War II. In particular I remember walking on a street, Avenue D maybe, and passing one gutted abandoned building after another, until I came to small one that seemed intact but otherwise not very different from the others. However, in the street in front of it, amidst broken glass and scattered garbage, a Rolls Royce was parked. It was an unmarked art gallery.
I was also in New York to meet with agents and editors to get some interest in this book project. It never happened. I'll conclude with a portion of a letter I received from an agent---a hot young agent then, a very distinguished one now---whose response was atypical only in being so forthright. "I think you've got a fresh approach...As far as I know, no one's written about what this world [of the arts] is like today, and as you point out and as I know from friends' experience, it's completely different, in a tragic way..."
The agent's letter continued: "One of the writers you quote complains, justly, that' You don't just write anymore. You're supposed to write for a target market.' I find that as depressing a thought as anyone else does, but since I make a living from this game, I've become one of the world's leading exponents of this kind of thinking. You have to, if you're writing or selling books for a living, and not just for self-fulfillment."
He went on to say that except for people in the arts---who can't afford to buy hardback books anyway---there would be no market for the book I wanted to write. So he (along with every other agent and editor I talked to) declined to do it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Blog Archive
-
►
2005
(12)
- ► 03/13 - 03/20 (3)
-
►
03/06 - 03/13
(8)
- ART AND SOUL a series published in 1988 in my col...
- THE ARTIST IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT by William Sev...
- AWAKE: Art, Buddhism and the Dimensions of Conscio...
- THE SKILLS OF PEACE by William Severini Kowinski ...
- Skills of Peace: What is Peace? "For me world pea...
- Skills of Peace:Language of the Heart "Conversat...
- Skills of Peace: Dialogues of Peace If dialogue ...
- The Skills of Peace: The Power of Positive Feeling...
-
►
2003
(13)
-
►
09/07 - 09/14
(7)
- CHILDREN OF THE BLACKLIST I got interested in...
- CHILDREN OF THE BLACKLIST by William Severini...
- II "You know, it only takes one man"- Tales from ...
- III "Can They Teach Us Something About How We Sho...
- IV Sins of the Father Gordon Kahn was a screenw...
- V Herein Fail Not All Buffy and Debbie O...
- Postscript/Update After "The Front" in 1976, Ma...
-
►
09/07 - 09/14
(7)
-
►
2002
(6)
- ► 09/08 - 09/15 (1)
- ► 08/25 - 09/01 (1)
