{"id":170,"date":"2012-06-20T12:12:26","date_gmt":"2012-06-20T19:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=170"},"modified":"2012-06-20T12:12:26","modified_gmt":"2012-06-20T19:12:26","slug":"first-the-seed-embracing-arts-as-a-means-to-and-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2012\/06\/first-the-seed-embracing-arts-as-a-means-to-and-end.html","title":{"rendered":"First the Seed: Embracing Arts as a Means to and End"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

First the Seed.<\/p><\/div>\n

As I head to TCG to moderate a panel with Diane Ragsdale, Diane Paulus and Chad Bauman on how to better integrate art and artists into a conversation about audience engagement, I feel a little like I’m walking into the set up for a joke and I don’t know the end of it.\u00a0 “An arts marketer and advocate walks into a bar full of artists and says, ‘Maybe art is really a means to an end…'”\u00a0 Then what?<\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking about this shift, from a mindset where the making of art is the center of the enterprise to a mindset where the making of art is a tactic towards a larger strategy for social engagement or advocating against injustice or perhaps just happiness or fulfillment or thought, and as I sit here preparing the questions for this panel (a dream panel of three of the people I respect most in the field), I find myself getting more and more riled up at what I see as an impulse towards navel-gazing self-pretense in much of the conversation about theatre and art and relevance and society.\u00a0 As I read Diane Ragsdale’s thought-provoking post on Jumper<\/a> about whether the socially-driven mission goals inherent in the non-profit structure have gotten in the way of a more basic impulse to nurture art, and as I read Polly Carl’s opus on the perceived perils of a transactional mindset in an artistic enterprise<\/a>, I find myself reacting much more strongly than I initially thought I would.<\/p>\n

In the late 1940\u2019s, the line of citrus stock responsible for the Persian lime (the most popular lime in the world, and what you probably use in your gin and tonic) started to suddenly contract a certain virus that drastically shortened the tree\u2019s life.\u00a0 In most cases, this would have been an easy problem to solve, as tree viruses of the type affecting the Persian lime are not transmitted to seedlings, so all you\u2019d have to do is plant a seed.\u00a0 The issue, however, as recounted in John McPhee\u2019s book Oranges<\/em><\/a>, was that \u201cPersian limes contain so few seeds, however, that the researchers\u2026cut up eighteen hundred and eighty-five Persian limes and found no seeds at all.\u201d\u00a0 So, in 1952, two researchers went to a processing plant in Florida and carted away two truckloads of pulp (all from Persian limes), picked through it, and found 250 seeds, which they planted.\u00a0 From those lime seeds \u201ccame sweet orange trees, bitter orange trees, grapefruit trees, lemon trees, tangerines, limequats, citrons\u2014and two seedlings which proved to be Persian limes.\u201d\u00a0 The part that surprises scientists who specialize in citrus plant growth, however, is that they were able to get any Persian lime trees at all.\u00a0 The genetic variability of citrus is so wide that those two Persian limes were precious, statistically unlikely gifts\u2014and at the same time were the only truly desired outcome of the exercise.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of this story recently as I was being driven back to the Raleigh airport by my brother after visiting my parents for a long weekend.\u00a0 The drive back is long, about two hours, and it runs mostly through planted fields of tobacco, cotton, corn, strawberries.\u00a0 Usually, I read to pass the time, but in this case, at one point I looked up just as we were passing a large barn-style building painted flawless white, and on the outside, above the main sliding door in large elegant cursive letters, were three words: \u201cfirst the seed.\u201d\u00a0 First the seed, yes, but not only<\/em> the seed.\u00a0 It is the most important part of a multi-part process that gets you a plant.<\/p>\n

I have occasionally thought of the Persian lime story since I first heard it in college because I think it has something to tell us about where we all sit in the ongoing journey of a patron through an artistic experience\u2014and at least to me, it serves as a reminder that the art, the seed, is the absolutely crucial, infinitely complex, wonderfully compact beginning of what is hopefully a long and fruitful unpacking and growing up of the full artistic potential of that piece for the patron, sometimes over years\u2014and that we need to understand that more nuanced context as we attempt to address questions of relevance, equity and impact in the field.<\/p>\n

The story of the Persian lime serves to remind me of exactly how little control we generally have over the final form of the memories our art makes in people\u2014and moreso, how little we seem to want to exert whatever small amount of control we have,<\/em> given the opportunity.\u00a0 Like the Persian lime, which is what McPhee calls \u201ca natural hybrid,\u201d the art that is presented is open to variation, interpretation and change.\u00a0 Some people are \u201cright on target,\u201d and interpret as we hope they will, and some people\u2014well, they\u2019re bitter oranges in a land of Persian limes.<\/p>\n

In horticulture, this makes sense.\u00a0 But when I start talking about cultivation (in the horticultural sense, as in attempting to cull out undesired outcomes) in context with artistic consumption and, more specifically, post-consumption interpretation, I experience a huge amount of pushback.\u00a0 Why is that?<\/p>\n

In 2011, David Dower told a story that, to me, illustrates what happens without cultivation.\u00a0 He was sitting in the house of Manhattan Theatre Club watching the New York production of Ruined<\/em>, a dark and lyrical, Pulitzer Prize-winning play about female genital mutilation in the Congo by Lynn Nottage.\u00a0 In front of him was a late-middle-age couple, a man and a woman. As the play progressed, the man quickly fell asleep and stayed that way almost without pause through the end of the play, when the houselights came up, people launched to their feet to give the show a stirring\u00a0 standing ovation, and his wife angrily hit him on the shoulder.\u00a0 As he groggily got to his feet at her insistence and began to clap, he said, \u201cWhat\u2019d I miss?\u201d\u00a0 And she said, \u201cOh, it was wonderful<\/em>.\u00a0 It was like South Pacific<\/em> set in the Congo!\u201d<\/p>\n

That, my friends, is a bitter orange. The answer, of course, is not to (as you would in a horticultural setting) to pull up the start.\u00a0 The answer, instead, is to be unafraid to be clear in your desired outcomes for the art as the artist, the producing organization and the marketer, and to be unafraid to power those outcomes forward into the minds of the audience in whatever imperfect way you can.<\/p>\n

In Diane Ragsdale\u2019s latest post<\/a>, she recounts a conversation with an immigrant playwright who was commenting on the state of American non-profit theatre, in particular the stipulation that, in being non-profits, theatre organizations must ultimately function from a place of education and social good.\u00a0 She writes:<\/p>\n

On my way out the door to grab a cab to Union Station I ran into a playwright (now based in the US but originally from outside the US) and we had a quick chat. In the midst of our conversation she commented on the nonprofit system of organizing and funding the arts in the US, making the point that the system is flawed because it puts all art in service of social or educational goals\u2014and in doing so constrains artists and art. Her point was that all work created in a nonprofit structure must serve the instrumental ends of education and be in service of a mission.<\/em> Her perspective as a playwright, in particular, was that nonprofit theaters create mission statements, and then programmatic strategies to fulfill those mission statements, and that such strategies inevitably filter or limit the types of plays that can or will be selected.<\/em> The question she seemed to be asking: What happens to the artists whose works falls between the mission cracks, so to speak? (italics mine)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess my reaction to this is, well, yeah.\u00a0 Yes, theatre organizations don\u2019t simply exist to allow your personal artistic expression without regard for what its point is in society.\u00a0 It is in part the role of the theatre organization to curate (cultivate?) the myriad possible offerings of the artistic community in order to make something happen for the audience.<\/p>\n

For Ragsdale and her interlocutor, the conversation seems to have centered mostly on straight-up instrumental benefits (\u201csocial good\u201d in the concrete context of reducing recidivism, teaching kids to read, improving test scores, etc), and in that context I understand more the issue\u2014but I think that non-profit mission-based curation can also be as much about setting the art up to be as impactful and memorable as possible in the larger context of the patron\u2019s life, the organization\u2019s season, and the hoped-for longitudinal impact.<\/p>\n

In Polly Carl\u2019s latest piece<\/a>, she closes with a list of admonitions for organizations and artists, one of which (for the artist) is:<\/p>\n

\u201cGive up the notion that you are of a more sacred stock that those you sit next to on an airplane. This holier than thou attitude keeps you believing in your own mythology and financially impoverished in ways that are going to make it incredibly difficult for you to raise a family, pay off student loans, and survive the onslaught of day-to-day transactions. Instead, think about the ways your gifts live in the world. In looking for places to share your gifts, imagine that they might live outside of a black box.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While Carl, here, is speaking mostly about a self-preservative instinct in order to demythologize the \u201cpoor artist\u201d trope, I think this attitude shift is equally about trying to understand further the role of the art in the experience.\u00a0 Increasingly (witness Alan Brown\u2019s writing on active participation<\/a> and understanding audience engagement<\/a>, efforts by the NEA<\/a>, the Duke Foundation<\/a>, the Irvine Foundation<\/a> and others to place more primacy on activities that happen along-side <\/em>the art, etc), we are given to understand that the art is the seed, and that as both artists and those who surround those artists, we are as much meant to be cultivating, directing, pruning, empowering as we are to be simply producing.<\/p>\n

Looping back to McPhee and that white barn by the side of the road, those scientists knew what they were aiming for.\u00a0 They sought to cultivate a set of traits, a progeny of a particular type that they had deemed the desired outcome of the experiment.\u00a0 We are not so different, we theatremakers.\u00a0 Artistic directors, artists, marketers\u2014we all, variously, perhaps in conflicting ways, have goals for a piece of art.\u00a0 We know why we wrote it, produced it, put it out in the world.\u00a0 Whether that is directed, as in Ragsdale\u2019s example, specifically at mission-based, instrumental, socially-driven outcomes or is more internal, we do not make art loosely, at least mostly we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The impressions and memories that art inscribes in our brains can last for a very long time.\u00a0 They can inform how we live our lives, how we set our path forward, how we act and interact with others.\u00a0 We have a powerful responsibility to try and instill what we actively mean<\/em> to instill\u2014to extend the intentionality that goes into season planning more fully toward the long arc of audience engagement, the impact echo of the experience over time.<\/p>\n

Ruined<\/em> categorically should not<\/em> be like South Pacific <\/em>set in the Congo.\u00a0 And this is not about treating the audience as incapable of making interpretive leaps.\u00a0 It is not blasphemy, I don\u2019t think, to say that perhaps the art isn\u2019t enough to fulfill the promise of the art\u2014nor is that a slight against the artist.\u00a0 Just as the playwright needs the director, the director needs the actor, the scenery, the lights, the audience, so the audience may need the marketers, the engagers, the connectivity experts, the dramaturgs.<\/p>\n

Everyone who can drive can travel on roads.\u00a0 But if you have a destination in mind, it sure is helpful to give the driver a map.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I head to TCG to moderate a panel with Diane Ragsdale, Diane Paulus and Chad Bauman on how to better integrate art and artists into a conversation about audience engagement, I feel a little like I’m walking into the set up for a joke and I don’t know the end of it.\u00a0 “An arts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171,"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":[5,8,7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-170","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-advocacy","8":"category-audience-development","9":"category-language","10":"category-main","11":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170","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=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}