Art is Always Autobiographical

Preface

As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto.  This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art.  Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art.  More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.

My Art Manifesto

1. Art is cross-art by nature
2. Art is always autobiographical
3. Art is sensuous
4. Art is synesthetic
5. Art is never completely original
6. Art has value

Dr. Ron Art is a sizable complex with five main wings, under which several projects are at various stages of progress:

• Poetry in Multimedia 
• Shakespeare Talks! 
• Dramatis Personae 
• Art Intersections 
• T'ai Chi Empower

My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects.  This is the second of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto.

Art draws from experience

The 2006 film `Open Window stars Robin Tunney as Izzy and Joel Edgerton as her fiance Peter.  Theirs is a down-to-earth, genuinely loving relationship, but when a stranger enters through a window she left ajar, and rapes her, their lives turn inside-out and upside-down.  The film was so disregarded that there wasn't even a Wikipedia entry, but nevertheless I found it emotionally powerful and artistically compelling.

   

Here is the story of its writer and director:

One night in 1989, Mia Goldman awakened to find a menacing stranger sitting on top of her, ordering her to keep her mouth shut or he would "shoot [her] brains out" with a gun he had placed on a nightstand.

At the time, Goldman, a film editor, was living in a two-story condominium in rural Virginia, on location with the film, "Crazy People." Her assailant revealed that he knew she was working on the movie, that he had been stalking her and that he had entered the condo through a downstairs window she had left open a crack for air.

Over the next five hours, he brutally raped, tortured and beat Goldman, covering her body with bruises and injuring her neck. In the aftermath, she developed a heart murmur, endured cervical surgeries, experienced flashbacks and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome and lost her boyfriend, who had tried to be kind but ultimately could not deal with his own feelings of trauma and violation.

Goldman says it took her six years to work through her depression and to heal, which she did with the help of her psychoanalyst, her family and her growing spiritual connection to Judaism. She drew on her experience to write and direct her debut feature, "Open Window," which premieres on Showtime July 16 at 8 p.m.

The intense, intimate drama revolves around Izzy (Robin Tunney), a struggling photographer, Izzy's fiancé, Peter (Joel Edgerton), and how their relationship unravels after she is raped by a man who enters her studio through an open window.

Both Izzy and Peter are devastated by the rape: "I wanted to show how the act violates not only the woman, but also the man -- and how it creates circles of pain that may extend to the entire family," Goldman says.

Reference:  Mia Goldman’s film is an ‘Open Window’ into trauma and recovery.

Art draws on empathy

I first heard of Rodrigo García as the director of the mysterious 2008 film Passengers, starring Anne Hathaway as Claire and Patrick Wilson as Eric, among unlikely survivors of a horrific airplane crash. It was a box office bomb, but I found it to be a well-scripted, well-acted, imaginative albeit creepy story of the after-life.

Breaking new ground with award-winning scripted dramas for the digital age

When I stumbled on the WIGS channel on YouTube, I was already acquainted with co-creator García.  I found myself enthralled with the fine, sensitive, empathic portrayal of women.  In fact all of the WIGS films are titled simply by the names of the women who lead a range of stories.  My favorite among all of them is the story of `Blue, with Julia Stiles, who struggles with a turbulent past of addiction and a double-life now as a mother and a call girl.  García's writing and directing are just brilliant.  Though it isn't a perfect effort for him, I'd definitely vouch for the fact that he nails these women roles:

Glenn [Close], whom we interviewed after our chat with Rodrigo, theorized why the director excels in creating absorbing female characters: “Rodrigo has a wonderful mother and had a wonderful grandmother. I think he has a very strong wife (Dawn Hudson, executive director of Independent Filmmaker Project/West) and he has two daughters. He’s surrounded by women. He probably would say he has no choice. I’ve been in his first two movies. He writes fantastic roles for women. He’s a man who understands the feminine side of life and revels in what all that means.”

When he was told that actresses he has directed often talk about his great insight and sensibility toward women, Rodrigo cracked with a smile: “I hear my wife laughing right now.”

But he admitted to having “What feels to me like a very strong imagination. I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, but when I imagine the women characters that I write about, I feel them very strongly in my head. I’m glad that so many women respond to them. If they didn’t, I would have given it up a long time ago. One of the things that feeds me to keep writing women is that a lot of women connect with them. But it’s always a bit of a prayer. I am not saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to nail this one. This is what this woman is like.’ I have to go with my instinct and, like I said before, I just assume she has to be a little bit like me. She must. She wants things.”

He said that one of the best things he has read on this topic was when Gustave Flaubert was asked who was Madame Bovary. Rodrigo said, “Flaubert said, ‘Madame Bovary is me.’ We make movies about other men. We make movies about people in other periods, people in outer space or who’ve gone to space, fired a gun, been on a horse. Imagination – you have to have that as storytellers. Plus empathy to feel that everyone else is me and that I am everyone else. There’s a particular set of circumstances around Nobbs. She had to hide to survive but everyone hides an aspect of themselves in order to fit in and survive.”

Reference: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s son on the art of storytelling. 

All men have been around women in one way or another, of course. So while Close's theory sounds quite reasonable, García probably draws on more than just personal experience.  I think he also taps his empathic understanding of women to make such breathtaking, compelling art. It is empathy - psychologically putting yourself in others' shoes - that he draws from most, and his films speak to his personal instinct, grasp and imagination. 

Art draws on imagination

Vincent Van Gogh is one of my longtime favorites, and more than three decades after my university days, impressionism as a genre still draws me.  The story goes that his friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin advised him to paint from his imagination, that is, instead of reality.   While Van Gogh admired him, and paid lip service to his mentoring, he demured.  The deeply talented Dutchman preferred instead to paint scenes he saw in front of him, such as the following:

Bedroom in Arles (1888)

Then while in an asylum in Saint-Rémy, he didn't have his usual access to places that inspired him.  But inspired, he still was.  While there was an identifiable view of the following painting, that is, outside the east-facing window of his room, he apparently painted it during the daytime and in a different place at the asylum.  He painted it from memory, in other words, and the idyllic village in background and the bold fire strokes of the moon, stars and sky were his imaginative rendition.  

Starry Night (1889)

Bedroom in Arles and Starry Night are among the things that Van Gogh saw.  They speak to his remarkable ability not just to paint, but also to keep his dysphoria, delusions and torment under artistic control.  Besides imagination, there is emotionality to these paintings, which, pat psychiatric diagnoses notwithstanding, speak to a far greater complexity, richness and talent.

So just as Madame Bovary is Flaubert, and Blue is García, so Arles and Saint-Rémy are unmistakably Van Gogh. 

The foregoing works of art tell remarkable stories about the personal experience, empathy and imagination of the artists behind them.