DEATH BY AUDIENCE
& how we create inside out
Your audience is a beast. A many headed beast with ten-too many opinions.
A many headed beast that crowds in on you while you create. Leans over your desk, furiously shaking its head, raising a fist and growling in your ear.
It’s contradictory, this beast of audience! You toss and turn, twisting your spine at all kinds of awkward angles to figure out what it wants to eat. Is it a nuts and berries kind, or a stone-cold offal kinda beast?
You can never know what it wants.
The beast has wings!
We’re inextricably linked to this beast - now more than ever. The beast is all-encompassing, it’s everywhere all at once.
The artist loses her individualism by being swept under the gaping wingspan of this beast of audience. It’s everywhere - across multiple social media platforms and digital touch-points. All telling the artist how to create ‘right.’
The open expanse for original thought is closing! It’s increasingly difficult to get away from the voices and opinions of others, and light the diminishing fuel of our own creative energy.
Coupled with this newly created societal fear of being alone with ourselves, being (GOD FORBID) bored, being unable to sit with something without reaching for a distraction, and we’re in trouble guys.
So my argument today is this: Creating audience-first, is a sure-fire way to throttle creativity, throttle creative freedom, TANK original thought. Tank the swirling, unformed tadpole thoughts that got you to the page / canvas / instrument in the first place. It creates a stressful process, and deeply unfulfilling, uninspired art.
Placing too much focus on an audience’s response to your art, I am realising, is futile too. Counter-productive. Anti-art. There is, after all, nothing less attractive than a starving artist. An artist begging for approval…
Just ask Kafka.
Oh, Krapp
It’s Brighton Fringe at the moment ‘the largest annual open-access arts festival in England.’ The whole damn city comes alive with artists and absurdity. You revel in the terrible performances as much as the objectively ‘good’ ones. It’s straight-up MAGIC for 30 day.
I saw two one-man performances over two days that solidified my anti-audience stance.
Well, that and the two unsubscribes I received this week… ;)
First up was Franz Kafka’s The Hunger Artist, “a short story exploring alienation, the futility of art, and spiritual isolation, focusing on a professional faster whose popularity wanes as public interest shifts away from his extreme self-denial.”
He literally begs his audience to see him. Starves himself for approval! He’s obsessed with taking on a fast that lasts longer than 40 days but cannot - as that’s the understood commercial limit for the public to give a shit about what he’s doing.
Then there was Krapp’s last tape, a Samuel Beckett one-act play exploring aging, memory, and regret, centred on a 69-year-old man listening to recordings of his younger self.
UPLIFTING THEMES I’ll, sure you’ll agree.
Both were brilliant. But what really, really got me, moved me beyond belief, was the fact that I felt neither performer needed me to be there. Needed the audience to be there. They were so deeply in the art, in the moment, in the scene, it felt neither here nor there that anyone was watching.
They were inward focused, not outward seeking.
I was rapt.
Because it’s magnetic when someone is so in it. When they don’t appear to give a rat’s ass about the people who receive it, because they’re so deeply in love with the art itself. When you feel like that person gave absolutely no thought to you in the creation process.
To watch someone in love with their art is the thing that makes me fall in love with it most. Their connection to it is sometimes more interesting than the art itself.
And a quiet voice rose up on me as I watched, “art is commitment”. Each performer was deeply committed to the unfolding. Art is dedication. Art is adoration. To nothing but the art itself. To your own expression. Art is wrestling. Struggling and doing it anyway. Wondering why you can’t wrangle it into any kind of form. Wondering why you’re sitting doing it at all. But still doing it, because what else is there that is more important than this? It feels like a gentle insistent drum beat, it feels like flow, it more often than not feels painful. Sticky. Somehow confronting and freeing all at once. It feels like a sibling you cannot leave by the roadside. It feels like it needs you as much as you need it. It feels like something you cannot put down. Like a shaken snow globe. You can only peer in closer and watch as the insides fly.
Sharing over seeking
It feels uncomfortable to even write this. Maybe it’s a protective mechanism from those two unsubscribes I received. Ha.
After all, art is to be shared isn’t it? In community with beautiful, caring souls.
Well, yes. To a point.
But I don’t think it’s there to be shared from a place of seeking. Of validation craving.
I think it’s there to be put out on the line, like ‘here’s this thing, get into it or not, I’m gonna crack on anyway though…’
I don’t say this lightly. This is not easy. I am gaily spouting this and probably STILL wondering what you’ll make of it, wondering if this is my own thought, wondering if saying art if commitment is really BORING and not at all quotable, shareable, viral material. But still, I’m gonna put it out there (unsubscribes or not).
Note to self, note to us all: Stop looking out. Stop looking out. Start looking so fucking IN that you can see the churn of your guts. That gnawing at your spleen. The wellspring at your throat just aching to spring a leak. To gush all over the place. To neutralise the beast. Start with you. If the rest follow, so be it.
Thrash is a rebellion against fast-paced digital culture that leaves no space for idle moments, daydreaming and creating.
It’s for creatives with an edge trying to find each other across the digital abyss.
If you’re GAGGING to get back to your creative centre, come join us.