from "On Unimportant Art"
by Stan Apps
I think art is unimportant. I think this because I live in a society and I look around me and people seem to think that art is unimportant. I agree with them. I guess I choose to agree with them. Anyway, people are more important than art, even horrible people. Awful people are very important and powerful. It seems that I do not want to be important, or that one some level I feel that I will never be important. I am not and have not been important. I think this is an attraction of art for me: I’m looking for an unimportant context, in which to situate my unimportantness. I guess it’s a sort of ego-mania. If I can’t be important, at the first least I’ll be unimportant in a very unimportant place. And so: poetry. Of all the arts, poetry is considered the most unimportant in this society where I live. And so naturally it’s the best one. Poetry is the most beautiful of all the arts, the most excellent, the most flexible and expressive, and poetry actually gives me infinite power, to be unimportant with an infinite plasticity. Poetry makes me a dynamo of potential. I think it is because it is so unimportant that the power it confers on me is so infinite. Naturally, the more of this power I express, the more ridiculous other people think I am, because I am an unimportant person, and unimportant ego-maniacs are mad. They don’t understand that I’ve already handled this issue of my unimportantness, handled it and moved on from it. I’m content to be a master of the least important art.
Now I also write essays (like this one) which are a much more important medium, and so naturally one should be more modest and make more limited claims about what’s true in an essay, because the more important the medium you are working in is, the less ego-maniacal you should be. But an artist who is truly unimportant has the power to create and destroy. Consider a man who draws the pictures in a comic book. One day he draws a whole book, 24 pages, of pictures of the Earth being destroyed. They are simple, brutal pictures. The cities are leveled; the buildings fall; the fields burn; the envelope of air around the world is ripped and living things are hurled off into space where they float a moment before bursting into clouds of blood; the surface of the world is totally desertified. The best moment in this (imaginary) comic book is a picture of a milk-cow in orbit. The cow is about to die and is puffing up its cheeks to try to hold its air in, and then (next panel) the cloud has popped into a cloud of blood. This all takes a page and illustrates with a specific example what happens to living things from Earth when a destructive cataclysm suddenly (and in clear violation of the laws of physics) throws them into orbit. If comic books were more important, this imaginary artist would have to destroy the world more careful, with discretion and with consideration of the Earth’s physical laws. If a comic book artist were as important as, say, a psychotherapist or sociologist, he or she could not destroy the world at all, because professional considerations would militate against such a violent, adolescent project. Even a novelist, relatively unimportant, but higher up the hierarchy of the arts than a comic book artist—even a novelist could only destroy a world in a very plausible way, and to be respectful to the material and the concept would have to make a thousand-page emotional epic about 3 families out of it. What I’m trying to get at is that importance and boredom are intimately connected. Boredom, plausibility, and adult caution are ingredients of importantness.
[continues in TrenchArt: Parapet]
God's Livestock Policy by Stan Apps was published by Les Figues Press