{"id":152,"date":"2012-03-05T05:30:46","date_gmt":"2012-03-05T13:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=152"},"modified":"2012-03-04T22:33:50","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T06:33:50","slug":"an-obsession-with-the-afterimage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2012\/03\/an-obsession-with-the-afterimage.html","title":{"rendered":"An Obsession with the Afterimage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In June 2009, I was briefly in Washington, DC, visiting friends right after that year\u2019s Theatre Communications Group conference in Baltimore, MD.\u00a0 I was in their spare room, small and tightly packed, and it was humid because it was DC in the summer, and there was a CPU humming in the corner and various lights blinking under the desk, and I was on West Coast time still, I think\u2014so I was checking Facebook.\u00a0 Back then, I got a lot of different feeds\u2014many more people than I see now, thanks to Facebook\u2019s mysterious algorithms\u2014and as I was scrolling down I saw a posting pop up from a friend of mine who I knew from San Francisco, a woman about 20 years older than me.\u00a0 Well, not from her, not really\u2014it was from her son, and the posting was to let everyone know that she had been in a car accident in West Africa and that she was in the hospital, and that her husband, who I was also Facebook friends with, had been killed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

My breath caught.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know her or her husband very well, not really, certainly not enough to be one of the first people to know about a horrific accident that had disrupted one life so profoundly and ended the other so suddenly.\u00a0 Nevertheless, I found myself drawn to her husband\u2019s page, to her page\u2014rolling back through their feeds, back past the mourning and the sadness, all of the exclamations of distress from friends spread across the world, tripping backwards through the narrative of their trouble to the moment right before anything was wrong.\u00a0 Him, writing one quick sentence about how wonderful it was that his wife was joining him on the African tour.\u00a0 Her, posting something innocuous on another friend\u2019s wall.\u00a0 And then the messages from their son, and then the sadness.<\/p>\n

I compare that moment, threading backwards through the feeds of ten, twenty, thirty people digitally crying out, the strange companionship in that sort of sharing, with the wracking, deep, immovable weight of sadness that crushed me years earlier when I found out my grandfather had died, also in a car accident, also with my grandmother by his side, surviving.\u00a0 A curve in a highway, a descending hill and a bad decision by an old man, a flipped car, a box of old family photographs releasing like birds into the wind, a parakeet in a damaged cage singing by the side of the road.\u00a0 When I found out about that moment,\u00a0in a strange house away up north, my parents\u00a0far away and shocked\u00a0and making plans to cross the country and wondering what to do, all I could do was howl and turn inward and cry until I had no more water in me and my head throbbed and my eyes shut.<\/p>\n

Mourning has shifted, in a way, or at least has expanded, flattened out.\u00a0 We mourn in company now, just as we celebrate in company, break up in company\u2014all of it chronicled with a specificity that is startling in its clear, concise black text on a white background.\u00a0 There, in that innocuous white break between updates, that right there is the moment when it happens.\u00a0 That\u2019s the transformation.\u00a0 That\u2019s the instant of impact.<\/p>\n

We, as humans, innovate ourselves into new places all the time.\u00a0 And in this case, rather than morbid curiosity, I think when I read through these threads\u00a0I am responding to this new specificity, this common understanding\u2014the translation of the personal to the communal.\u00a0 And while this, yes, is about grief and death and sadness, it doesn\u2019t need to be, and I find myself equally attuned, though less believing of the genuine sentiment, to the fifty birthday wishes from people I haven\u2019t seen face to face in fifteen years.<\/p>\n

There is something precious (precious as in valuable, not precious as in quaint) about the ability to so clearly and specifically see the afterimage of life.\u00a0 It\u2019s inexact, of course, but the floating flag in front of us, hazy and blurred as it might be in the blank white space, is the remnant of our attention.\u00a0 It is not perfect, and even as my sadness at my grandfather’s passing is unfathomable and unknowable in a way, there is now something, the echoes around the space between.\u00a0 The before, the after, the wonder of that moment in the midst.\u00a0 As schoolchildren, we are all at one point or other asked to stare unceasingly at an orange, green and black facsimile of the flag, holding our lids open until our eyes swell with tears, and then to close them, turn to the white wall, and see what our retinas and brains have made of what was there.<\/p>\n

And so it should be in art.\u00a0 This is not to say that everything needs to be deep, or brooding, or steeped in sadness or significance.\u00a0 But it is to say that the best art, the best of what we do, is memorable\u2014and that that memorableness is not<\/em> a side effect; it is the goal.\u00a0 We make a difference in people, with our stories, and whether that difference is elation or defeat, glory at something new or wonder at something achingly familiar, we should pride ourselves on that effort.\u00a0 And we should take every step we can towards maximizing that effect, understanding that effect, measuring that effect.<\/p>\n

Today, I am officially the editor of a published book.\u00a0 It\u2019s called Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art<\/a><\/em>, and it\u2019s about many things,\u00a0but for me, personally, it is about\u00a0this, all of this: my obsession with the afterimage of what we do, my frustration at its departure from the center of how we talk about and value ourselves as artmakers, my need to understand where we\u2019re going if we are to keep afloat.\u00a0 It is full of voices that are articulate and strong, definitive in their understanding that things need to change, that the way we talk about our work, understand our impact, reach our goals needs to be reevaluated.\u00a0 And it is the hardest and most rewarding piece of art I\u2019ve ever had the pleasure of helping create.<\/p>\n

Alan Brown and Rebecca Ratzkin of the research firm WolfBrown<\/a> detail, with over 80 color graphs, exactly how specifically we can tell the impact we\u2019re making in their research report, \u201cMeasuring the Intrinsic Impact of Live Theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n

Diane Ragsdale<\/a> argues passionately that we have gotten ourselves to a dangerous place, right on the cusp of irrelevance, and that we make have to take drastic measures, in \u201cCreative Destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rebecca Novick dissects deep, searching interviews with five major artistic directors from across the country to try and understand how we could have moved the audience so far from the center of this audience-reliant enterprise in \u201cThe Importance of Beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arlene Goldbard<\/a> struggles with patron interviews, Plato, and the things we tell ourselves about our patrons in an effort to understand what makes the perfect patron in \u201cSymposium.\u201d<\/p>\n

And intermixed, twenty-four artistic leaders and patrons talk about their relationship to art, memory, joy, companionship.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always hard, when you write as much as I do, to find yourself inarticulate.\u00a0 And of course this sentence is buried under 1,000 words that belie that adjective, but still\u2014I cannot really express how proud I am of this compilation, how strongly I feel these thoughts of these people need to be injected into our field-wide conversation, how much I hope we can truly, together, begin to change the way we value and evaluate art. Nor how grateful I am for the foundation and government support, the hard work of our partners, the dedication of the companies involved, and the drive of so many to let this work see the light of day.<\/p>\n

For me, now, Facebook faces forward, toward my daughter, and I am now one of those insufferables who updates the world on an infant\u2019s accomplishments.\u00a0 It is a chronicle of memories, and I scroll back, I scroll back, I scroll back fourteen months, past running and walking and crawling and eating and rolling and smiling and burping and yowling through the night,\u00a0islands of black text memory in a stream of white, blazing life.\u00a0 And then I\u2019m there, and it is December 2010, and I can see it, literally, there on the screen\u2014white\u00a0walls with a brown wooden wainscoting, a shimmering blue hospital curtain backlit with sunlight, and my head bent downward as I hold my new daughter close to me and look at her beautiful face.<\/p>\n

That is the transformation.\u00a0 That is the instant of impact. And before that, what? After that, what?\u00a0A breath.\u00a0 A moment.\u00a0 The tumble of our world, the unfathomable complexity\u00a0of living.\u00a0 White space and a life, a memory: the afterimage.<\/p>\n

***<\/em><\/p>\n

Because I can, here\u2019s my moment to shamelessly plug the book.\u00a0 It\u2019s beautiful and awesome and I hope you will consider buying it, or at least reading the free excerpts, including the executive summary of WolfBrown\u2019s research report, at http:\/\/www.theatrebayarea.org\/intrinsicimpact<\/a>.\u00a0 I\u2019ll also be touring across the country presenting the results of the work, so check that website for the tour schedule as well.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In June 2009, I was briefly in Washington, DC, visiting friends right after that year\u2019s Theatre Communications Group conference in Baltimore, MD.\u00a0 I was in their spare room, small and tightly packed, and it was humid because it was DC in the summer, and there was a CPU humming in the corner and various lights […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-152","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-advocacy","8":"category-audience-development","9":"category-main","10":"category-research","11":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}