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Rule #3: Proper Construction of Figures, Thought and Speech
Rule #4: Nobility of Language
"...the choice of the right word and the fine word has a marvelously moving and seductive effect upon an audience...for this gives to the style grandeur, beauty, old-world charm, weight, force, strength and a sort of luster - like the bloom on the surface of the most beautiful bronzes - and endows the facts as if it were with a living voice. Truly, beautiful words are the very light of thought - but their majesty is not for common use..."
-Longinus
I put these two together because unless we have hours to go into the nuances of each it is hard to understand the differences. The body in question, the one we are teaching to speak, is the work you are creating.
These two rules concern the execution and communication of the first (the grand conception). One must make sure that the integrity of the vehicle of your purpose matches the purpose itself. Do not choose words or symbols or images or phrases because they are what first pops into mind; consider them in relation to the grand concept of the whole.
While the majority of my language and samples addresses writing, remember that words are no more than visual symbols. You only have to substitute the emphasis on written language for one on visual or sound language to apply this course to the visual or sound arts.
Choose a Language
Typically we speak, even internally, in a kind of emotional short hand using symbols that pop up in our "moments of inspiration." These are common phrases that we understand the meaning of without having to explain them with full sentences.
When you then use this shorthand in your work, you must be aware of how it can be interpreted. Some of our shorthand is universal and is easy to understand. A common symbol will quickly communicate an idea or situation. An easily understood and common symbol, word or phrase can add a vividness and immediacy to your piece. However, it can also trivialize the importance of the meaning of your work. For instance, if you are trying to convey a sense of powerful loss you will want your audience to be able to quickly relate to the loss, but not so quickly and easily that they do so without forming an emotional connection - beware the potential shallowness of empathy, you want a sympathetic audience.
Common and Universal
Let's take the example of your wanting to convey to your audience that they should find time to slow down and pay attention to the subtle details of life; for time can never be turned back. The common term, or cliché for this is to "stop and smell the roses." This cliché, however, is from the 19th and 20th centuries and lacks a kind of universal and timeless power.
If you are wanting to communicate this message quickly you may very well want to use such an easily recognized cliché. You can then focus on what it means to move forward in life with that memory, because your audience has already accessed the beginnings of your more complicated idea.
However, if what you are presenting is a "moment in the life" of someone who is recognizing the power and necessity of being present in that moment; using that cliché will prevent your audience from connecting to the depth of the experience you are sharing. Your meaning will never touch the history we share through the Universal Unconscious.
Exploring the Common
A cliché exists not just in phrases, but in image, plot, sound and arrangement as well.
- The flower breaking through the concrete
- The color red to indicate fear, horror or other "dangerous" emotions
- The greedy executive
- The ne'r do well thrown into a heroic moment
- The sound of rolling thunder to create foreboding
- The young person overcoming adversity
- The older person who is wise
- The circle to represent wholeness
- The storm that echoes the madness of the world
- Startled baby anything
- Sunsets
- The graphic image of the heart to mean love
- Beaches
- The student who surpasses the teacher
- The poor person who gives more than they can spare
These are all clichés. Like white for weddings and black for funerals (in western culture), color can be both clichéd and carry meaning as well. The subtlety and the support of the framework you place around your common images or phrases will determine if they are understood for their superficial meaning, dismissed as "window dressing" or, create a point of access to be used by you to introduce your audience to a more complex understanding of your grand conception.
The viewer understands that the cliché is common. They do not let the common symbol hold much significance. They do not linger over its meaning because it has the communication of a street sign and not a vision. Common symbols are noticed, but do not tell a viewer to stop and connect. They do not foreshadow importance but tell the viewer, 'this is something we all know already and we need spend little time on it.'
What is tricky about using clichéd imagery (in word, picture or sound) is that while it allows for you to tap into universal and native understanding, it can also lead to your grand conception being missed because it never gets below the surface of the audience's consciousness.
But clichés also come from archetypes. Stories, symbols and imagery that transcend cultural boundaries and can open the door to a hidden, subconscious understanding. Here it is important to note that a "common" image is one specific to a culture or sub-culture in a given generation. A "universal" image tends to be more of a archetype that transcends culture and generation. A universal archetype will effect your viewer much more strongly then a cultural cliché.
One of the best tests for imagery is to show it to others and listen carefully to what has to be explained to them in order for them to connect to your piece. This is not to say that art must be easily understood, but if your purpose is to raise a certain direction of response from your audience (to leave them with a question), your goal is not achieved if the direction is entirely dependent on the audience. If they receive no guidance from you when experiencing your piece, then your work need not even be there. You could show them a blank cocktail napkin and have equal chance for your intended direction of thought or emotion arising in your audience. Sublime art communicates with direction, it does not leave all the doors open for the viewer to walk through, but chooses to close some to focus the communication.
Art lives because it influences and interacts. It is a life separate from yours and the audience must be able to enter into a relationship with it. Sublime work fills a relational space to the audience. It is not an optional accessory.
A good way to understand this is to think of it in terms of "friends." A good friend is someone who helps you to understand yourself. An acquaintance is someone whose presence is not necessary to your growing understanding of yourself; nor do you experience any kind of interaction with them other then a passing form of entertainment. An acquaintence may, in the moment, be someone who is part of your understanding, but in the end, you would have gotten there without their presence. A friend helps you find bridges inside of yourself that you may not be able to see.
Sublime work can become a person's friend. Each time they view it, they will find more of themselves revealed. Work that can be understood completely when seen once, or is so obtuse is can not be understood at all, is an acquaintance. The person does not interact with the life of the art. It remains a passive object.
Any explanation necessary to the understanding of your piece should come from the audience's willingness to investigate its meaning. That willingness comes because they are already connected to the life in the piece. Like forming friendships, the process of getting to know someone evolves over time and through interaction. You do not make close friends in an instant, but you return to the person because you already have an intuitive understanding of them and desire to learn more, and to be learned by them.
Exercise
Write down a list of the clichés that you have used in your work.
Write down a list of clichés that you have noticed used in other's work.
When do you think the cliché was the correct choice to use, and when did it lessen the impact of the piece?
What would you change, in someone else's work, to keep the cliché but strengthen its position within the relationship between the viewer and the piece?
What would you change in the clichés you have used in your own work?
Personal and Grand
Other choices for phrasing and imagery include either the Personal (imagery that has a defined meaning only to yourself), or the Grand (the imagery is complex and contains meaning that is personal but also cultural and/or universal). Both of these can be appropriate when used within the right context. Both can also serve to confuse your audience's understanding of your work and create a distance that cannot be bridged.
Something that should be put simply (for instance, you are willing to work hard) can also be said grandly (You hold that hard work is a guide to pleasure), or personally (your effort unravels my hours).
Each form of phrase can be appropriate when used in a place that helps to support the imagery around it and is in service to that portion of your grand conception presented in your piece.
Grand phrases can underscore the importance of a section of the work, or be used to highlight the ridiculousness of it.
Personal phrases can be used to create a tremendous bond with the audience by showing them something that is personal to you. Back to the concept of Sublime Art becoming a friend, it is a revelation about you that can create intimacy. Such imagery can also make a work so personal it should never leave your bedroom because it is about you (glorious you). There is not much of a point in other people seeing it ,except to go "ahhhhhhh...nicely done," and walk away. That type of piece is seeking an external validation of yourself and has little that an audience will want to engage with because they recognize its about you, and not you and them.
If you want your audience to identify and understand very personal imagery (and by understand I mean simply to intuit its emotional meaning; they don't have to "get it" exactly), you must lead the audience to it. Surround it with things they will understand, like placing a frame around it, so that the piece of yourself that you have exposed becomes accessible to them.
Accessible is not the same as understandable. To create work that is accessible means you create work that participates in the conversation between the work and the audience when you are not there. Understandable work is less conversation and more monologue from the Artist. Work that is so personal as to neither be understandable or accessible is the equivalent of having a person in the room who is muttering aloud to themselves about their own special world. The other people in the room understand that they are not needed (or wanted) at all.
Too much of any one kind of phrase will make your work confusing. Whether it be because of a monotony set up by the rhythm of the syllables (which lulls the audience to numbness); a sense of being disingenuous that comes from having used too fancy a phrase for too simple a concept (this can be read as a kind of "showing off," which can quickly disintegrate into poking at class difference - another topic all together) or, too simple a phrasing for the depth of your concept can be interpreted as either patronizing or that the concept isn't even that important to you - so why should the audience bother?
Think of your work as your child. We hear that phrase often enough: "my work is my baby." You do not teach a child only one way of doing things or one word or set of words with which to try and communicate their entire experience. You teach them to discern what is right in the moment according to an overall sense of ethics and morality you have instilled, and by selecting communication skills that are appropriate to that moment.
Exercise
Select three samples of your own work, work of someone you admire, and work of someone who historically "stood the test of time" (it does not matter if you like their work or aspire to it, and time should be more then 100 years).
Examine each and identify where common, universal, personal and grand imagery have been used.
In your own pieces, count the instances of each - per piece. Ideally you should have a noticeable balance or variation within each piece of two or more types. Mentally note what imagery you have more typically used.
Experiment with ideas on how you would use different kinds of imagery in all of these pieces.
Integrity
You must be dead sure that the integrity of your imagery, symbols, or words matches your ideas at all times.
Then you have to make sure that each individual idea presented in the poem, image, or object contributes to the integrity of the grand conception that is fueling the work.
Integrity is a word that has become confused over the past century to mean a variety of political, emotional, social and religious things.
To have integrity simply means to be integrated. All of the pieces come together to form a whole. There is not one photo collaged onto a page that does not need to be there.
The Test
The test for artistic integrity is two fold.
One
If you remove the object, word, or idea from the overall piece is the overall piece as understandable as it was before? If yes, then that portion is not integral to the piece. Remove it - DO NOT THROW IT AWAY - recognize that it has been suggested by the piece as something to be pursued later by itself.
Many artists fail to realize that most of their "flashes of inspiration," so to speak, occur when they are working on something. They throw away non-integral pieces to the current work and do not recognize those pieces as seeds for new work.
Keep a file of rough drafts, keep a box of half made things, keep pictures on your cell phone of images you have eliminated from your canvass because these are your creative ideas. They are your new ideas that will keep you working and will never let you stop. Unless you choose to stop by invalidating their worth and throwing them away.
Having said that, here is a small note, think of this as the fine print in the integrity contract. Some ideas will not fit - ever. They may be beyond you or, they may be so malformed that you cannot really do anything with them. However, all ideas lead someplace. Your worst idea, while it may never turn into something on its own, will always lead to an idea that will when it is examined.
Two
Think of your entire piece of work as music. If each color, object or word was assigned a sound - does it work as a song? Or are there jarring notes or phrases that do not add to the whole but interrupt? If you have a problem thinking in terms of music, think in terms of color or, of people. For once you are free to create a clique of people (in your mind) and figure out which one of the "people" in the group doesn't belong.
Now, we all know what it feels like to be the odd man out in a group. Imagine each element of your work as a different person - with likes and dislikes, personality and their own style; and see what the rest of the group would think of them. This is like an exercise in group dynamics. A group of people come together typically around the pursuit of one idea. They begin to form their identity around the group to the point that the survival of the group becomes more important then their individual identities.
Get rid of your dead weight.
Max, Jim, Carol and Bob
Max, Jim, and Carol are friends. Max, Jim, and Carol belong to the same gym and they also all work in the same department of Acme Light Bulbs.
When Max, Jim, and Carol talk about the gym, they say they are members. When they talk about work, they call themselves employees. While both those terms are technically plural terms, the individual terms (member and employee) remove Max, Jim ,and Carol's individual identity and define their identity by the group (the gym or Acme Light). Their group identity becomes a more important part of their perceived presence.
Along comes Bob.
Bob likes to run marathons.
Bob is self employed.
Bob meets Max, Jim, and Carol at the soccer field where all their children play on the same team. All of them share the same experience and idea when they are on the soccer field. They have integrity in their experience there as a group. You could write about them, make a scrapbook page about a game or paint a portrait of the four sitting in chairs under the sun watching a game and it would have perfect integrity.
But, if you tried to do something that focused on what it meant to be an employee or a member and put Bob in the picture - Bob's presence would be the piece of the puzzle that lacked integrity.
The same as if you tried to describe the loneliness of the long distance runner and had an image of the threesome trotting along behind Bob. They would not fit, they would be jarring because they would find comfort and unity in their shared identity as members and employees. If the three can run just as far as Bob, then you set up a conflict to the premise of the loneliness of the long distance runner. You don't want conflict in your work, you want tension (there is a way to find tension in this scenario, but that comes later).
Now, problem #42 in trying to create work with integrity is in mistaking something that is jarring and lacks integrity within the conception, for something that creates tension.
Tension, as Eleonora Duse says, is the greatest integrity because it creates not only balance, but uses the contrast between opposing elements or forces to showcase emotions or to further explain the strengths in each (or give them the opportunity to be seen).
Tension is not conflict. Conflict occurs when two things are not opposite, but so different as to be unrelated. Opposing elements are not jarring because they are balanced in a subtle way. The way that the color black will balance white. Conflicting objects are unbalanced - the way that a block of stripes conflicts with a bucket of water.
A city opposes a town.
But the sea is in conflict to the city.
Only use items that are in primary conflict if you can create a conception for them to exist in that identifies what, in each of them, opposes the other and creates tension.
A sea is of nature, in conflict with the man-made construction of the city. But they can be opposing forces when you look at the fact that they both contain communities of life.
To just use conflict as a means for underscoring or revealing a conception is a surefire way to make a confusing mess. The focus will be on the conflicting elements and not the whole.
Use tension to increase the undestanding of the integrity present in your work.
Ambrose
Here is something for you to read at your leisure. It is a very short book and it is written for writers. However, if you are a visual or sound artist you should read it too because it contains a series of examples, using the English language, to explain the nature of integrity in choice; all you have to do is imagine outward from his examples to find related ones for image, color and sound.
There is a version for the Mobipocket ebook reader (which you can use on the PC and many cell phones) or you can select a plain text version for Mac and Linux users.
(make sure you select the version you need in the download box on the right side of the page before clicking on "download")
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