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Dancing over the Abyss

The courage to fail

‘Creativity takes courage’ Henri Matisse

THERE IS ART and there is artistry, and they are not the same.

Artistry is raising an act to a level of proficiency and clarity that allows it to shine with a brilliance that others performing the same act seldom achieve. It is seeing through to the heart of an activity and performing it with mindfulness and excellence. The artistry of the surgeon, the artistry of the homemaker, the artistry of the mechanic and the machinist are all expressions of this urge toward excellence.

Art is something different. It is creating something unique, never before seen or heard; a child, freshly born, adding a new voice to the chorus of creation. It is fragile and moves on unsteady legs, uncertain of its place, or even if it has a place at all. It differs from artistry in that artistry is an elevation, a consecration of the ordinary. It can lose its balance, fall back and take its place among the everyday, and both the creator and the world may be lesser for its falling, but there is no loss, no death, only the dimming of the light of excellence.

But a work of art, if it fails, is a death. It is a failure of the pieces to coalesce in that incandescent alchemy that turns a stone to gold. You are left holding failure in your hands. It is a lonely and painful experience.

The willingness to take this risk is the great unseen courage of the artist. When people on the outside see an artist’s nervousness, or curtness, or quirky behaviour, they often write it off as neurosis or self-absorption. What they are really seeing is the external expression of the artist’s struggle to walk that knife-edge of risk to arrive at that perfect creative pitch that will give their creation life. They don’t understand that they are seeing a struggle between artistic life and death.

Stories abound of performers who would vomit before going onstage, or, finding something amiss in their performance, quit in mid-sentence or mid-note and walk off, not to return to performing for years or perhaps for the remainder of their lives. This sort of anxiety is but the overflow of the creative tension that attends an attempt to create something where failure is a kind of death.

Every artist knows this feeling in some degree. Whether a painter in the studio or a dancer preparing to go onstage, you whipsaw between boundless hopes and utter dejection because you have known the magic of the inspiration that gave birth to your work and you know the death that will take place if you fail to give it adequate voice.

When a performer walks off stage in mid-performance, a painter slashes a canvas, or an author tears up a manuscript, it is just the action of a person who is facing the sudden awareness that their work has no life and is spiralling into despondency because something that had so much promise and in which they had so much faith suddenly lies dead in their hands.

There is nothing you can do to chase this terror away, but there is much you can do to reduce it to a fine-tuned vigilance and a harp-string readiness. It has to do with self-mastery and faith.

You would not be where you are and your creation would not have reached the point where it had potential for life had there not been a core of artistry that gave it birth. Your fear is that the artistry that informed it is not enough; that there is only the abyss of artistic death on the other side of failure.

But you must keep in mind that where there is artistry, failure will never be absolute. Our artistry is alive, even if in imperfect form, every time we create. We may despair at the imperfection of our creation, or sink into a depression at its failure to adequately reflect our vision, but these are responses only to perceived mediocrity, not to total failure.

Your work, even at its weakest, contains within it the kernel of life. When you allow your fear or your insecurity or your unrealistic belief in perfection to control you, you are betraying that possibility of life. You are saying that you do not have faith in the artistic child born of the union between your imagination and your talent. You are measuring your art by your own standards of excellence rather than trusting your art and letting it make its way into the hearts of others by its own devices.

I once had a professor who took me aside after listening to me lament about the deficiencies in my work. ‘It’s time for you to put those thoughts away,’ he said. ‘Treat your art like a friend. Focus on its strengths, not its weaknesses.’ This is worthy counsel, and, hard though it is to do, I try to live by it every time I set my hand to some new act of creation.

I cannot tell you that the fear ever goes away, or that the precipice over which you stand ever disappears. And I don’t pretend that you can ignore that precipice any more than you could ignore a canyon beneath you as you try to make your way across a narrow bridge spanning its chasm.

But you need to trust that your art, once created, has a value apart from you, just as a child, come into the world, has a value separate from the parents who gave it life. When you give in to self-loathing, insecurity, or stage fright, you are looking at your work from the outside, and the outside is a shapeless darkness that contains all your self-doubt and fears.

The ideal is a concept. Perfection is for angels. Failure is absolute only if you deny the fundamental artistry that lies at the heart of your art. People will often comment on mistakes and missteps because they are easier to see and articulate than abstractions like quality and excellence. But, at heart, most people sense your courage and want you to succeed. Only the small-minded among them will focus on your weaknesses to the exclusion of the overall sense of respect they feel in the presence of something they, themselves, would not dare attempt.

When the demons of fear and insecurity beset you, and they will, do not focus on the fumblings and missteps of your art but on the spirit that gave it birth. The artistry at the heart of your creation will always raise your work above the ordinary affairs of the day. And it is not for you to say whether or not your work has life: that is between your work – the child of your creation now living a life of its own – and those who encounter it.

Remember, you believed in the spirit of your work when you first brought it to life. There is no reason to doubt it now. Even if you did not give it a form as fully realised as you had hoped, or stumbled in its voicing, you must trust that some of that spirit is still there to be found.

It is, by and large, a trust that will prove to be well placed.