For we artists, in the collective sense of the word we, are Michelangelo's competition and he is/was and will always be a tough competitor. He didn’t get that nose of his from hugging someone too hard - that grumpy Florentine knew the score with creative types. He would and did dine on my entrails with a wicked smile. He understood something fundamental in my own character centuries before I was born which I myself understood not at all as I pressed my nose for the first time to the security glass of the Pieta and lay crying on the floor of the Sistine while Japanese tourists stepped over me like particularly embarrassing mugging. He knew what animated my research and my despair - every drawing, every fuzzy photographs, every critical reading, every recurrent pilgrimages to the Louvre, even the times I ran my hand over a reproduction like a lover’s caress. I looked at his work and it was love at first sight. And like all those in love I started immediately plotting to gain my love object.
If one chaste love, if one divine compassion,
If one destiny is equal for two lovers,
If one hard fate of the one is felt by the other,
If one spirit, if one will guides two hearts;
If one soul in two bodies makes itself eternal,
Lifting both to heaven with a single wing,
If Love in one blow and one golden arrow
The hearts in two chests can burn and tear;
If the one loves the other and neither loves himself,
With one pleasure and one delight, to such a measure
That one and the other desire to reach a single end:
Thousands and thousands would not make a hundredth
Of such a knot of love, or of such a faith:
And only anger could break and untie it.
- Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
In the beginning I thought my love unrequited. How could the great and more than ever so slightly misogamist Michelangelo long dead ever yearn for me, a dumb clueless girl from the future, as I yearned for him? I understood nothing of my potential dangerous attraction. Overtime as artists work, the inevitable happens - we discover at least unconsciously our artistic desires are mutual. Don’t doubt for a moment that Michelangelo and I are lovers, our relations intimate and mutually satisfying. That we aren’t monogamous to the other is a trifling thing that only adds to our mutual passion and spice our trysts. Even Smithson’s love letter to our shared chérie was also a naughty attempt to snare my cheating eye. Because you see between artists the real pillow talk is information. We want to know how the magic works. We don’t want to see behind the curtain of Oz to get back to hard-scrabble Kansas, we want to be the wizard. Leaving aside the mechanism amoureuse for the moment, why does this obstentious trans-temporal love-in seem to leave both parties so pissed?
First let get the sex and a few definitions onto and/or off the table.
First, for the purposes of this essay, love and sex are here essentially interchangeable word/concepts to be applied at the reader’s discretion. Use any person beliefs that you as a reader cherish about either love or sex and apply liberally- be it platonic idealism, free love, conservative monogamy, your child-rearing techniques, or the every special way you like your ear nibbled. Love and sex make for a very big tent in which you can put whatever you wish. Second, please, please try at least for the space of essay to think of both love and sex bodily. This is the creative act we are examining here. Creation is at least in part always, as they say in pop songs, a physical thing.
Then comes the whole hairy definition of artist. First let me state that my definition of an artist is that everyone is an artist. After all what is art but an archaic form of the verb `to be’? Everything I am describing could be apply to everyone. If you fall in love with your next door neighbor, or tattoos or movies, or computer games or Michelangelo it is all the same process. The critical thing remains identical. Do you yourself seek to create new manifestation of your passion? If you seek to create, whatever the field or final output, that which you also already adore, this is the love triangle in which you will be enmeshed. It is the chicken and egg family matter. Every chicken was a chicken’s egg. Every egg could be another chicken or it could just be someone’s breakfast.
Nor do I believe because I speak of myself in the same breath with my own inspiration that I have delusion* our output is necessary equally inspiring. Nor do I claim my only inspirations are from the visual arts. Yet all those other outside influences seem to me like uncomplicated freebee’s compared to my fellow artists, living or dead. Maybe their is no real difference other that the artist who have inspired me have received closer attention. From that close attention I have noticed we often seen to get pissed about the same things.
Now of course we didn’t start out angry with Michelangelo. Rather speaking for myself I didn’t start out angry. How Smithson felt I do not know.** I was fascinated, yes. Intimidated, more than a smidgen, but not angry. In fact, I remember meeting mid-career artists I admired when I was young and being struck by all the grudges they seemed to hold with other artists. He stole this technique from me. Her work is terrible but she get exhibits because of her legs etc. He is an empty braggart. The grudges themselves seemed silly. Looking back or my own checkered career, I would have love to had the sort of legs that could have opened the doors of the art world, with ease. So what? It’s so difficult to be an artist how can you begrudge your fellow artists any advantage they can muster, even the most venal? Worse, these were artists whose work I admired, who had managed to achieve at least some measure of recognition in the wide world. For the most part they were kind, generous people whose inter-artistic pettiness stood out in even sharper relief against their overall decency.
Since I have never been able to work up much anger towards my fellow living artists how did I get pissed about with Michelangelo? I Let’s circle back to Smithson. Our bitch with Mick is in rough outline the same. We are sick his 500 year old Italian boot to our throat. He burned those drawing at the end of his life as a cheap shot just to make working harder for us. Us personally. We are ready to give him props for the teflon personae he created that hides his true strengths behind his real weaknesses. Can’t he at least admit his imperfection to us with a wink and nod every now an then? St. Bart doesn’t count because we know he are no saint. We love the dying slaves but what’s with the nerve of claiming the whole neoplatonic tradition as his personal visual fiefdom. (See you one slave and up you one mirror. There, take that!) We are pissed about the sneaking suspicion that if our fantasy came true and we got the chance to met the master he would take an instant dislike to us either because we would either insufficiently useful to him or a threat. We comfort ourselves that we would be a threat because we shake with rage that an old grouch like that could still crush us with his rejection. Mostly we are pissed that no amount of clear-headed analysis and rationality can stop us from wanting the approval of a father/lover whose been dead for 444 years and counting. We are pissed because his gastric juices burn and we don’t want to be this morning’s breakfast of champions.
Our dirty secret is we were both only a little upset with Michelangelo. I grow more grateful as the years pass than I ever was miffed. Our anger just a trick. A kind of stone to substitute so we can escape his devouring grip. Michelangelo remains vital for each new generation of artists precisely because his understood both our needs and his goals so thoroughly. His principle artistic lesson was deliberately not technical per se. The crafty goat wanted no follower close enough to diminish the whole agony and the ecstasy legend. He was none the less wise enough to throw us a very tasty bone in exchange for our eternal artistic allegiance. He remains our collective touchstone at least part because he teach all who willing to learn to build their own stone. He maps that special path out of his corps of work which leaves no visible marks of our getaway. He shows the observant student how to escape the stomach of Father Cronos and all our ravenous muses. How to grow fat and strong enough to continue working on the very entrails those who would eat ours. How could we stay mad at Michelangelo for long?
Who are we both really mad at? What really spoils Smithson? Well let leave that for another day.....
