In Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning: Her Lifetime in Photography by Elizabeth Partridge (San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2013), I find the following paragraph: “Like many of the other San Francisco bohemians, Maynard [Dixon] and Dorothea found the label ‘artist’ highly suspect. In a kind of reverse snobbery, those who called themselves artists were thought to be more interested in being an artist than in making serious art ( . . . ) ‘I was a tradesman,’ Dorothea said. ‘I really and seriously tried, with every person I photographed, to reveal them as closely as I could.’” (p. 13)
This passage brought to mind the very different weights, different meanings even, that certain words hold for us, depending upon our cultural contexts and the time in which we live. Currently I am writing about the Cuban revolutionary leader Haydée Santamaría. In my research I come across an opposite interpretation of the word artist. In her farewell letter to Che Guevara, following his execution in Bolivia, Santamaría wrote: “( . . .) at your wake this great people didn’t know what rank Fidel would confer upon you. He called you artist. I felt that all possible descriptions were too few, too meager, and Fidel, as always, found the right one.
Dorothea Lange shied away from artist as self-description because it seemed pompous to her, and also because she was influenced in her thinking at the time by the creative milieu in which she worked. Her husband, Maynard Dixon, was 20 years older than she was, and his opinions and those of his friends must have carried weight. Lange preferred to think of her photography as craft, and herself as a craftsperson. Yet she had no problem with the term tradesman even when her condition as a woman (a small, physically challenged woman at that) very much defined the way she saw and shot. Because a feminist questioning of the language was still decades into the future, I’m sure she didn’t give the male definition a second thought. Or perhaps, like other artists of her generation I have known, she appropriated the male terminology as a way of claiming a credible space for herself. (The painter Elaine de Kooning, my longtime friend and mentor, never wanted to be called a woman artist; she rejected what she correctly interpreted at the time as a term that carried a condescending bias.)
In the above quote, Lange differentiates between being an artist and doing serious work, which she therefore preferred not to call art. I remember when I first apprenticed to my photographic mentor, Ramón Martínez “Grandal”, in Cuba in the late 1970s. We too had our preferred ways of talking about what we did. We did not take pictures. We made them. The distinction was important to us because taking implied stealing an image—something displeasing, even frightening, to many different groups of people who felt that the camera was invariably wielded by someone of a more powerful class and superior possibility. In other words, it signified appropriation, even exploitation. Making a picture denoted all the different elements that went into the art of photography (and yes, we very much thought of what we did as art). It did not only involve raising the camera to the eye, framing the image and snapping the shutter. It was also about choosing which pictures to keep, developing and printing the image. Artistry was required at every point on that journey.
In the United States of the 1950s, when I was coming up as a writer, the residual chill of McCarthyism was still a strong presence. My generation of developing poets was led to believe we couldn’t or shouldn’t write about political issues. We were told this not only by the most successful writers of the day, but through the clear evidence of who were getting the jobs, being taught in university literature courses, winning the grants, and achieving publication in the most prestigious journals and anthologies. The academy embraced “true artists,” and if we didn’t follow the academic prescription in vogue at the time we were dubbed pamphleteers. Judging a poem, or any piece of art, by whether or not it was good, whether or not it worked, was not yet an accepted notion.
If we were passionate about the issues of our time, and those issues found their way into our work, we were told we were producing propaganda rather than art. The true poem, we learned, must fly “above” overt political or even humanistic beliefs. I remember a great many dewdrops on flower petals. Content and form were thought to be separate. Today we understand that content and form are of a piece, a complex yet seamless continuum.
I was fortunate that I went to Mexico in 1961, and later also lived in other parts of Latin America. There I came in contact with poets and artists who had not had to deal with McCarthyism. Many were deeply involved in the social and political movements of their time, and their acknowledgment of struggle and passion for justice were natural elements in their work. It quickly became apparent to me that a poem or photograph or painting works if it is well made, transports us, is profound, moving, surprising. If it is not, it simply doesn’t qualify as art.
Today I would say tradesperson rather than tradesman. And I cannot believe that Lange, were she alive, would not agree. I suspect she might stick with her sense of her photography as craft rather than art, though. Which probably has more to do with the fact that so much of her work came from photographing people who were poor, struggling, surviving through shear courage and determination. Her genius, or part of it, lay in not beautifying misery, but in finding the essence of her subjects’ lives, their spirit, integrity and resilience. She and her contemporaries may have thought of the work of others, work that prettified poverty, as art. And what they did as more authentic.
Because artist and art do not at all imply a rarified state or preciousness to me, I embrace them in all their complexity. Haydée Santamaría’s use of art and artist resonates profoundly. I aspire to be an artist in the most complete sense of the word: someone who pays attention, is constantly relearning and enlarging upon my ability to see, and seeks new ways of transforming what I see (which also includes what I feel, intuit, think) into something worthy of the definition. Someone who respects the work of others, and engages in constant dialog with that work.
As a writer, how we use words is extremely important to me; how we name ourselves, others, and the things around us. Few phrases annoy me more than the oft-used “they say.” Who is the they being quoted? Such careless attribution is, I believe, at the root of our society’s easy acceptance of the claims made in so much commercial advertising. Too often the phrase “studies show” refers to studies financed by the very companies selling the medications that purport to cure particular ills, without acknowledging the obvious conflict of interests.
Of course the way I name is informed by the time in which I live, and the language usage and nuances that are a part of my evolving culture. In the United States how various groups of people name ourselves became particularly important in the 1970s: Chicano/a, Latino/a, African American, Native American, Indian, rebel, feminist, and so forth. Conscious of the fabricated value placed on marriage, feminist women began refusing the monikers Miss and Mrs.; we invented instead the neutral Ms.
This naming has gone through changes, as a deeper understanding of who we are produces an ever-changing consciousness and sensibility. Names such as nigger, queer, spinster, gimp, fat, and others, hateful in the mouths of those who would use them to denigrate us, have sometimes been retrieved, reimagined and turned on end when used by those who have been targets of their offensive usage. For example, an African American may call another African American nigger and it means something entirely different from that epithet when used by someone of another race. A heavy woman may call herself fat, when the word on someone else’s lips would be an insult. In recent years, even mainstream society has become more conscious of the racist and misogynist language used in commercial advertising and popular song lyrics. Public discussion has come from a number of different philosophical stances, and has ranged from patronizing to illuminating.
In Cuba, for many years we all said we rather than I when speaking in the first person singular. This was an attempt to identify with, or speak for, some vague proletariat, and in retrospect I find it cliquish and embarrassing. When feminism came along, I became conscious of the way my culture said mankind or men when we meant humankind or men and women. Slowly, I began to incorporate gender consciousness into my speech. Since Spanish is a gendered language, this was more complicated in Latin America than in the US, but Latin American feminists quickly found creative ways to do away with linguistic gender bias. More recently, when wanting to eliminate male assumption in written Spanish, Latin Americans have taken to using the at sign (@, a visual combination of the feminine and masculine) as a way of indicating a gender-neutral ending to nouns that traditionally end in a (feminine) or o (masculine).
Throughout my lifetime, how we women define ourselves has become more conscious and intentional. We no longer say we were abused, raped, battered (the passive tense implying an act that simply happened, free of a perpetrator—or even somehow casting the victim as responsible). We have learned to say “so and so abused me,” “so and so raped me,” “so and so battered me”—or harassed, exploited, demeaned or bullied me. We have learned to assign accountability, the first step in demanding redress. Similarly, we are not disabled but a person with a disability, not crazy but someone suffering from a mental illness, not homeless but a person (perhaps temporarily) without a home. In other words, we refuse to be defined by a condition that describes only one part of who we are or a situation in which we find ourselves.
We are all influenced by the way language is used, and those with the most power and deepest pockets are able to influence us in ways we may not immediately recognize. The science of subliminal messaging easily becomes “normal” or “the truth.” One simple example is the word embedded. US journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan were embedded with US troops. The public was expected to see this as privileged positioning rather than what it was: an entirely controlled positioning dependent upon the point of view our Military wanted to disseminate. In one moment, and with a single word, long-cherished journalistic freedom and presumed impartiality were sacrificed.
Just as dangerous is the plethora of commercials for drugs that are now such a pervasive part of our television viewing. “Ask your doctor if such and such is right for you” is accompanied by bright images of beautiful young people leading healthy and active lives. The voiceover is careful to enumerate the long list of possible side effects, almost always including other serious illnesses, “suicidal thought or actions,” and death. These litanies are meant to avoid legal challenges, and are often much longer than the text devoted to the medication’s promised positive results. Anyone really listening to the dangers involved would hesitate at the least, and probably shun the medication. But we have been trained otherwise. The way image and text are presented in these commercials is guaranteed to convince.
Serious independent studies have recently revealed how some conditions, such as Low-T, have in fact been invented by the pharmaceutical industry in order to prey on a socially fabricated sense of perceived male lack of vigor or sexual power. A condition caused by environmental factors, and easily remedied by diet change and exercise, is instead being advertised as a disease, something that must be targeted by a remedy proven to cause heart disease and some cancers. The pharmaceutical industry is counting on our having forgotten similar situations with hormone replacement therapies, statins, and a host of other medications. If we are not alert, we fall into these traps at our peril.
Many of us are deeply concerned about recent revelations that the government is collecting our personal data and that of people throughout the world. I too believe this to be an infringement upon our privacy. But corporate access to our personal information is no less a threat. Information gathering via the Internet is broad and deep these days. Our email providers categorize the messages we receive by the words they read in our letters. Our needs, tastes, consumer preferences and more are recorded and used to determine what ads show up on our computer screens. Most of us have had the experience of researching a topic or ordering a particular product and seeing items linked to that topic or product pop up every time we go on line.
On the one side we are ever more adroitly manipulated by the corporate world’s assumptions about our supposed identities and its ability to aim its propaganda at that individualized persona. On the other, our own creative growth and enhanced power of analysis make us ever more capable of understanding who we are and how we want to represent ourselves. This allows us to see through the corporate assault and demand accountability in language and image.
I began this piece talking about art and artists, and soon added governmental and corporate messaging to my concerns. This is because I see all language as relevant to that which we who call ourselves artists use, all images to be a part of the landscape that informs what we make and do. I also do not consider those of us who make art to be the only artists. I know teachers and doctors, gardeners and athletes, scientists and inventors and entrepreneurs who are great artists.
I believe the real artist is he or she who is most attentive to the world we inhabit, and most able to transform that awareness into art that puts us there. Not description, but experience. Not being told, but being invited in. Not being preached at, but being given the distillation of that unique combination of knowledge and feeling great art embodies. It may take the form of a poem, essay, novel, play, journalistic article, photograph, painting, dance, musical composition or interpretation, or manifestation in some other genre.
What we call ourselves may be less important than what we produce. But what we call ourselves also informs what we produce. When we understand the historical context in which a photographer prefers to call herself a tradesman than an artist, a woman artist prefers to be seen simply as an artist without the gender adjective, or a poet who is passionate about politics refuses the dictum that poetry with a point of view cannot be good poetry, we will be free to attend to the work in question free of contrived or culturally specific constraints. On the other hand, how an artist identifies gives us important clues to how he or she sees and interprets the world.
I keep telling myself, and want to tell others: pay attention! Demand that language—in whatever medium—does not misidentify, confuse, hurt, shame, bully or kill. Whether we call ourselves artists or simple citizens, we live in a time that requires conscious naming.
(Photo by cinnamon_girl)
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