Books on Culture: Life after Art, part four

We often measure threshold moments in terms of before and after: the births, weddings, and deaths in our awareness all inhabit similarly pivotal space. Replay tapes, too, spin in our heads with the heady emotions of such times—anxiety, excitement, fear. Echoes of milestones crossed into new, strange territories. Memory may well be all we've got, once we've entered the "(here)after". There is no real going back. But parents and teachers alike reminisce, steeped in vicarious living through the children in their care.

While I cannot recommend nostalgia as an effective strategy to overcome fear, Matt Appling's brushwork in the painterly playground of his book Life after Art: What You Forgot about Life and Faith since You Left the Art Room. does recollect a time when coloring inside the lines was okay. For a rebellious art snob such as myself, it might be just what I needed to hear.

There was a time when even Appling was a rebel. His opening story in chapter five, a success-story about art as a tool to impress girls in high school, was a highlight for me. It was funny, self-interested, and petty, of course, but isn’t that high school? In his more assertive student-day persona, Appling is blatant and interesting. An A+ here.

Appling uses the illustration of videogames in his early years as an example of “coloring inside the lines”. He discusses how Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario Brothers, transcended Nintendo's technological restraints in those early days to create everyone's favorite pixel-bound plumber. Miyamoto's creativity overcame the very real limits of technology and funding.

Appling, however, does not clearly differentiate between Mario's world and the walls of the art room. Or for that matter between coloring inside the lines and inventing lines of your own. The only reason he brings up videogames at all is to criticize overprotective parents: videogames, he says, are often more "real" than the risk-free worlds we try to construct for our kids. But if my perception is correct, Appling is also ironically among the constructors. Something is beginning to unravel: it's either my grasp of Appling's argument, or the argument itself.

How, in a chapter about "Freedom to Fail", can Appling go on so relentlessly about respecting boundaries? Why, in a speech about letting go, does he insist on the need for control? Are the four walls of his art room really a haven of life, or are they a cage? Is not the idea of a "safe place to fail" essentially oxymoronic?

As for the therapy of nostalgia, it's not going to save America (or anyone, really). But I have to admit that it permeates my own art practice. The soothing aspects of the creative process are probably the most compelling reasons I have to keep-at-it. And there is solace in simplicity, even the simplicity of a limited set of stock techniques. My own familiar walls, the layered workspace of Adobe Photoshop, place their own particular limits on my fears, and I find myself continually coloring within those lines. Ultimately, these are my lines, and the walls of the art room are his. But if any of these lines matter, they all do.

I perceive in Appling's conclusion a measure uncertainty: should he "release" his fears or "suppress" them? He seems conflicted on that point. And in my own experience of reality (as well as my playful constructions of it), that's exactly how I feel. Don't we all fully and un-ironically inhabit that same tension? We will always be moving, in some sense, forward, even as we wrestle with the ghosts and angels of the past.

Who's up for a round of Donkey Kong?

On Mondays in September we're discussing Life after Art: What You Forgot about Life and Faith Since You Left the Art Room by Matt Appling. If you are reading along this month, join the discussion in the comments or drop you link there if you blog your thoughts. Next week Laura Boggess finishes up our discussion. Book club resumes in November with Todd Henry's Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day. Hope you'll join us!

Image by Harold Sikkema, used with permission. Post by Harold Sikkema too.