The Art Thing

In 2021, I had a conversation with an old friend about art. He’s a saxophone player. We used to play together in a jazz band. Later, he became a concert saxophonist, before entering into the world of experimental electronic music production. I asked him about this drastic change in style and he said something along these lines:

"I'm not trying to be the best musician, or even the best saxophone player. I'm just chasing that 'Art Thing'."

 

I went to Northwestern to be an actor. This is what I had wanted since childhood. I was a sensitive kid. I found solace in theatre, making what I thought was art. But, around the time of my conversation with the saxophone player, that sense of community had faded. I was fed up with the whole culture around theatre — it seemed that no one was talking about art or beauty or how to actually have a relationship with the audience that can move them. Instead, the theatre became a petty vehicle for in-group signaling and cheap one-upmanship. Not only that, but the theatre is a fundamentally risky medium for artistic expression.

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There are countless moving parts necessary to produce a true, moving work in the theatre. Not only must the lead actor be a true artist concerned with connection and expression, but every actor must be one; so too with the director, the designers, the producers, the composers, and the writer — all must be artists chasing a singular goal — to touch the audience and to create art. If one part of this machine breaks down, the glass sculpture we call "art" crumbles.

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Artists, at their best, pull back the curtain on sublime truth and allow the audience to glimpse it without going mad. Theatre, when done right, can achieve this. It can allow Gods and spirits and people long gone to inhabit the body of a performer and transport the audience into their world, changing them in the process. This is good theatre. It almost never happens. Especially where I was.

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This was the mentality I brought to the conversation with the saxophonist. And, for whatever reason, that phrase - “The Art Thing” struck me like a bolt of lightning.

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I was a sensitive kid. The world was hurtful and confusing. As I grew up, I needed to turn my sensitivity into something I could understand. For a long time, I thought that direction was theatre. But now, I was just as hurt and confused with theatre as I was without. It dawned on me that the answer to my sensitivity was not theatre but the thing theatre purports to create — The Art Thing.

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Since then, I have continued down this road to Damascus. I am a painter because I like for my art to be something I can hold, not gone with the wind as soon as it's over. I took classes in college on Storytelling and Fine Art, both of which taught me that The Art Thing can be most faithfully achieved through individual effort. A traditional theatrical production, especially under modern economic pressures, cannot afford to coordinate an Art Thing between the dozens of people needed to get it off the ground. But I can. If I have not achieved the art thing, I have only myself to blame. This leads to a greater ability to repeatedly achieve The Art Thing and, to paraphrase Mark Rothko, stretch my arms across the gap of human incommunicability.

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Art, at its best, is an expression of something real, raw, and ancient. I believe that humans are put on this earth for a greater purpose. That purpose is art. The Art Thing is our indication that we are on the right path. For too long have we neglected to dig in deep and to actually affect someone in the same way that a masked storyteller might have ten thousand years ago, surrounded by paintings on a cave wall. 

 

It was never a question of being the best actor, storyteller, painter, musician; but one of ending the solitude, reaching deep, and being a human being.