Artifice

What did I mean yesterday when I tried drunkenly and incompetently to write of the rarefaction of style that occurs in the later work of some artists? I suppose I am thinking of those who are criticised because the worlds they construct become hermetic and self-enclosed. The books seem only issue from an understanding of the world that has already formed, rather than one which is to be fought for anew. Here I think of the later books of Duras, or the last films by Tarkovsky. But I suppose it would be plausible to claim that this self-enclosure was present in the films, say, of Hal Hartley from the start. What I love – and this is what I wanted to say – is the artifice as it presents itself in its very artificiality, when it no longer hides the fact that it is a sham. At this moment, it is as though the mask knows that it is a mask, and that art, in some sense, is only a play of masks over the void.

What does it mean to invoke the void here? I have tried to write of this before, but failed miserably. I suppose it is the affirmation of a kind of matter or materiality: the heaviness of the word, the timbre of the tone, the nuance of colour. The artwork affirms its own heaviness or bulk – its unwieldiness. It does so by allowing it to be present in the very lightness and deftness of the artist’s touch. Just as the old calligrapher learns to create his work in a single stroke, a few elements are sufficient for the Durasian universe to be brought into creation, a few notes are all Smog needs to make a song. But the extraordinary grace through which a book as tiny as ‘The Slut of the North Atlantic Coast’, or ‘The Man Sitting in the Corridor’, or a song as self-effacing as ‘Rain on Lens’ or ‘Floating’, also brings us into contact with what I like to call fate, which is to say, the way things are and will be. I even like to think of this as ‘truth’, remembering the role Nietzsche assigns to art when he claims that its dignity lies in beautifying the ugly, in making truth endurable.