Joy in Repetition

Transcript

Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art for artists, art lovers, the art curious and anyone with an interest in mental health and wellbeing. It seemed as if a thousand lights had been lit around them and she was dazzled by the brightness of them. Then gently, as if he was afraid to frighten her, Lord Raven’s car put his arms around her and drew her close to him. For one moment he looked down at her face as her head fell back against his shoulder and he drew her closer still and his lips were on hers. For a moment she could not believe it was happening. Then the love in her heart rose like a warm wave up through her throat into her lips. She knew that this was what she had longed for, prayed and cried for, but thought it would never happen because Lord Raven’s car was in love with someone else. It was perfect and together they were one with the beauty all around them and yet also part of the sky, her prayers and all that she believed was sacred. Lord Raven’s car kissed her until she felt as if he drew her heart from between her lips and made it his. When at length he raised his head she could only look up at him with her lips trembling, her eyes full of the glory of sunset. I love you, he said a little unsteadily and now tell me my darling, what do you feel for me? I love you, I love you, Ramara cried, and I have done since the first moment I saw you although I did not know it was love. That piece of uplifting romantic prose was taken from Lord Raven’s car’s revenge which was written in 1978 by the queen of pulp romance Barbara Cartland. The same year Barbara published 17 other books. That wasn’t even her busiest year which was 1976 when she published 23 books earning her the Guinness World Record for the most books published in a single year. To say that Barbara Cartland was prolific is an understatement of the level that Barb’s herself was likely incapable of. For a while I’ve been a little obsessed by Cartland and her creative fecundity. There’s something almost superhuman about it. It’s hard not to draw parallels between her and generative AI but that’s for another day. 23 books in a year seems like an insane number for one person even with the help of AI. It didn’t seem plausible to me so I did some research. I had some questions for example. Did she have help? Maybe ghostwriters or the equivalent of studio assistants like Warhol or Da Vinci? The answer is yes, well sort of. Cartland often dictated her work to an assistant typist. Did she write essentially the same book over and over? Again sort of. Her works were somewhat formulaic but cover a variety of topics and subjects and are set in different periods although she mainly focused on historical fiction. Did she steal from other people? Yet again maybe a little bit. Rival romantic novelist Georgette Heyer alleged that Cartland has stolen characters names and plot lines from several of her books although this never made it to court. Overall though it seems that Cartland had an insane work ethic and dedication to her art that ordered on pathological. I decided a while ago that she would feature in one of my episodes and I figured that that being the case I would actually need to read some of her work. Since I struggled quite a lot with reading I went on the hunt for an audiobook. Given that she wrote so many and I wanted to experience her work at its most average I decided to pick one largely at random. This ended up being The Importance of Love which I think I chose because it was available and had the sort of title that I would have expected from a Cartland novel. It was four hours and 20 minutes long which equates to about 200 pages so not exactly an epic. I dived him. Here’s a synopsis. The Viscount Kennington never had a good relationship with his father, the Earl, but loved his grandparents. After a family scandal erupted with the death of his grandfather the feud worsens and he retreats to his inherited house in Devon. Meanwhile orphan Luella Ridgway pursued by Frank Connolly who threatens to expose a secret from her past unexpectedly shows up at the Viscount’s doorstep. The Viscount falls for Luella and when her life is endangered by Connolly he must save her and prove his love despite her past. This was a turn of the century period piece with general nods to the master of this genre Jane Austen. As is clear from the synopsis it was mostly predictable and formulaic. The writing was plain and workman-like but perfectly serviceable, the characters cliche but believable and likeable and the heroine was strong and independent despite the general error of princess rescuing melodrama. All just fine. Adequate. As expected. No surprises. Except for one. I didn’t hate it. It didn’t rock my world either but I expected to find the whole thing wincingly, hatefully dull sappy mushy unreadable nonsense but I found it generally charming, easy reading and at times quite enjoyable. The ending descends into cheesy saccharine happy ever after drivel sorry for spoilers if you happen to have this on your reading list but up until that point it was decent. I liked it. Which was precisely the problem. I liked it. What the hell was that all about? I almost exclusively read science fiction with the odd horror or thriller thrown in for variety. I most definitely don’t read period romance or any romance at all for that matter. Now I’m far from the stereotypical manly man who loves cars and football and would die immediately of rage-filled embarrassment at the suggestion that he would even so much as glance at a romance book. I have an almost pathologically open mind. If I like something I like it. I don’t really care whether society deems that acceptable or not. But of all the things that I thought I would not like romance novels were near the top of the list along with country music and genital torture. But the fact that I actually quite enjoyed reading this book sparked a bit of an identity crisis on the scale of finding out suddenly that I was adopted. It required some soul searching asking myself am I actually secretly a fan of romance? Have I lived my life missing out on my one true passion? To be clear I’m neither immune to nor repelled by romance in culture. I like a happy ending and I’m always satisfied when the right people find each other. But whole novels of the stuff give me a break. I had to find out what was going on here so I embarked on an experiment. I decided to read more romance. To dip my wick as it were into the sordid underbelly of romantic fiction. I tried among others Jilly Cooper, Jane Austen and Marion Keyes but none of these hit the mark. Not least because they were so damn long. So although I found much to like I didn’t find myself absorbed and addicted. Maybe I just read the wrong stuff but I concluded that I’m not a secret romance fan. So what was it about the Cartland novel that I liked? After pondering it for a while here’s what I concluded. Put simply Cartland is good at her trait. The reason I enjoyed it was because she put all the things in place that were required for an optimist like me to come along for the ride. It was well structured, paced well, the plot did what the plot was supposed to do, three acts, set up, confrontation and resolution. It didn’t piss around with lengthy self-indulgent descriptive prose or big words to make it sound clever. No pointless and confusing subplots, MacGuffins or digressions. So despite clearly being indebted to Jane Austen in all the ways it mattered it was a complete opposite. I’m not bashing Austen either. She was a pioneer and probably a genius. I love her use of language but probably not for the reasons I’m supposed to. I find her ability to use the longest and most obtuse or obscure words to say even the simplest thing comedically funny but it’s not leisurely reading especially if you’re dyslexic and have slow auditory processing like me. The importance of love is just simple to the point and does exactly what you would expect and given her target audience that’s exactly what it should be. Being any other way would be completely ridiculous. Cartland’s books have sold somewhere between three quarters of a million and two billion copies and is one of the best-selling authors in history. She must be doing something right. It might not be fine art but she hit the spot with a lot of people and time and time again over 76 years. That’s quite a skill. There were still 160 unpublished novels at the time of her death at the age of 99 in the year 2000. Cartland had a formula. She had a system. She had a routine. She knew her art and she knew it well and it made her a boatload of money. If it ain’t broke she figured out what people wanted and what she wanted to do and just did it compulsively. In a way I wish I was like that. Sometimes anyway. I wish I could find a thing that was sicker and made me some money and just keep doing that and keep doing it well. Keep pleasing myself and keep pleasing the punters and I don’t mean that in a haughty or derisive way. I’m not saying that life would be so easy if I could just keep pumping out drivel to the brainless masses. I’m in awe of Cartland. Maybe I don’t agree with everything she did or said. I’m not exactly a fanboy after reading one novel but taking her body of work as a whole, observing her skills and work ethic, it blows me away. I go on a lot on this podcast about pushing boundaries, breaking rules, experimenting, never standing still. But that’s just a symptom of how I’m configured. I’m always restless. The habitual jack of all trades. I never get really good at anything. My body of work is inconsistent and stylistically erratic. So as much as I believe art is about creating new things, new ideas, concepts, I also believe this can be achieved just as validly with hard work, consistency, skill, mastery and dedication. Maybe each work in Cartland’s portfolio isn’t a work of artistic genius but across her career she did something that no one else has ever done. I’m saying that there can be beauty and repetition. Passion can be displayed by doing one thing and doing it really well. Take Claude Monet. He painted 26 paintings of the same haystacks, capturing them in different light, capturing their inherent beauty and character as the environment changed but they endured. He painted 250 paintings of the water lilies in his garden. Monet found subjects that exemplified his aims and then studied them over and over. We think that we see the world around us but we rarely take the time to look, not properly. Everything has its own beauty if you take the time to observe it, be it a haystack or a high rise. In many ways the things that don’t change have the most to offer, the most interesting story to yield. A flower may be a gift to the senses but it’s fleeting, impermanent. But a rock, a rock can endure for centuries, providing a habitat for countless other species from mammals to insects to lichen and moss. Some rocks were put there by humans millennia before, some fell from the sky. Rocks are awesome, you might say that they rock. Sorry. If you go back and listen to my interview with artist Sharon Milton she talks of feeling compelled to paint the same picture over and over in an effort to perfect it. Just one picture. Sharon tends to bounce around between mediums and approaches so she’s not stuck in a rut. She’s not someone who has no interest in pushing her own boundaries. The point that she makes is at that point it was her way of controlling her life which felt somewhat out of control. If she could perfect one work at a time she would have some control over something and forget about all the rest of the crazy while doing so. There would be some days that I’d come home from work and be brave and took my coat off. I’d painted the same pictures 20 times and I now realise it was just absolutely about coping and stress relief and it was about the process rather than the outcome. For large parts of their careers Rothko and Mondrian depicted only squares, rectangles or grids. Frida Kahlo painted herself over and over. But I’m not specifically talking about obsessing about the same object or theme ad infinitum, that’s pretty extreme. I’m just pointing out that there is a value in doing one thing and doing it really well. Too many works of art and culture are unleashed on the world half cocked, unfinished, unpolished or poorly conceived. Some might say that the majority of cultural output falls into this category although that’s a bit harsh. But think about the final series of Game of Thrones, the Star Wars prequels and arguably the sequels too. The MCU is almost entirely pumping out subpar content at the moment. Ask any metal fan their opinion of Celtic Frost’s disastrous Cold Lake or Metallica’s ill-advised Lou Reed collaboration Lulu. All these were highly respected performers. Art Gala is a stroom with lazy self-indulgent, trend enthralled tat selling for silly money to brighten someone’s dining room. I suspect that much of this drivel is in the process of being superseded by AI generated 3D printed faux art that will probably sell for the same price. And don’t even get me started on ghost written celebrity literature and self-help books. I could probably do a whole 5000 episode series on bad art and culture, and maybe I should, but that’s not what we’re here for. My point is that good artists make bad work. Bad artists make bad work. And mediocre artists who make mediocre but consistent and generally desirable work are not only valid artists, but for the most part are the ones winning the game and in many cases will be happier for it. Bob Ross, Jack Retriano, Roger Corman’s entire film portfolio. I’ll definitely be returning to him at some point. ACDC, perhaps controversially Taylor Swift, Dan Brown etc etc. All these people know their craft, industry, medium and audience. That’s why you’ve heard of them. There’s nothing wrong with making lots of money from your art if you can do so by doing something you love or at least enjoy and are genuinely honest in doing so. I’ll sidestep the fact that there are many truly vile people hugely enjoying making grotesque and objectively immoral content or seeking to manipulate people to their detriment and own the grandizement and all the other horrors that can seem like the norm these days. The thing about selling lots of stuff is, and infuriatingly so, that you need to be consistent, often to the point of uniformity. The mass audience has fairly simple expectations and most just want what they expect, which is basically a variation in what they’ve seen before. This doesn’t just apply to established or legacy artists and performers. To be taken seriously in basically every creative space you need to be producing some variant of one of the existing styles or movements. Doing otherwise will simply result in you being ignored, so much for originality. Of course there are many people for whom this is natural course of action, those who revel in and endure the mainstream and so fit in quite nicely when they turn up with a barely distinguishable variant on the prevalent form. This is not cultural diktat, but merely a statistical reality. There has to be a mainstream or middle ground otherwise there would be no place for originality or divergent thinking. Just imagine a world where the finite number of cultural arenas were liked equally among the populace. You basically find a group and stick with it. When a group gets too big some folks are jettisoned to another group that’s lacking. Not only would this not be possible it would lead to the end of all novelty and innovation. It would also resemble or perhaps be some flavour of totalitarian fascism. Look around you right now and you’ll likely notice some signs of this creeping into political and social discourse. Be wary folks. It is however possible to constantly reinvent yourself or your style while remaining mainstream and commercial or at least popular. Consider Hockney, Radiohead, Madonna and Prince in their hey days, Spielberg, Kubrick and Ridley Scott switch their shit up almost permanently. What these all have in common is a dedication to quality and a certain signature style that resonates regardless of the genre or style they’re working in. A voice you might say. They also earn their success and freedom by doing their time producing more mainstream fair or basically define that mainstream in the first place. There are very few creators that have truly earned the permission from their audience to do basically whatever they want. And so we get to the paradox. If you want success you need quality and consistency of style but if like me consistency is not your strong point and attempting it is detrimental to the other benefits of the activity you’re doomed to obscurity and starvation and seething resentment. That said there are always exceptions and as creatives I think that’s what most of us strive to achieve. To be that unicorn who does something different yet still finds a significant audience. That’s part of the game I think. It’s our little drama and without tension and striving drama can’t exist. I’m not here to tell you to make good art. I’m here to encourage you to make any art with the proviso that improves your mental health. If you make amazing art but doing so makes you miserable then maybe you need to stop. If making truly horrible art floats your boat then good for you. There’s always a market and quite frankly it might be the biggest one. I don’t think we should look down on or sneer at people blessed with the skills and temperament to deliver mainstream level consistency even if it’s hard not to envy their success. Like our friend Barbara they definitely worked and continue to work just as hard. There is also a right place and right time aspect of this since there is many a workhorse mainstream appropriate creator that has never and maybe never will achieve commercial success through no real fault of their own. I recognize I’ve gone a bit light on the mastery aspect of this subject since practice makes perfect. Most people having slaved over a medium for decades tend to be really quite adept at it but I’m going to do a separate episode on the tension between mastery and creativity. Look out for that. So if you happen to be the type of person that does one thing really well then godspeed you go forth and multiply fill your boots etc. I’m off to obsess about this week’s new creative obsession of mashed potato crustaceans sculpting. Thanks as always for listening. Since I don’t have the ability to make consistent mainstream art I don’t make a lot of money from my passion. That being the case please consider supporting me and my podcast on Patreon for as little as £1 per month. That’s on patreon.com forward slash Alex Loveless. Please also rate, review and share this podcast. I’ll be back soon with an episode on something but since I’m so capricious and inconsistent I don’t know what that is yet so you’ll just have to tune in and find out. Bye!