Art and the Ultimate Question

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CRISIS is a time for contemplation. During a year were I have dropped in and out of my theatre group, written very little, read but a little, and stared into the wall a lot, there has been much time spent thinking �Why?�, �How?�, �Who?�. The centre of this attention has often been what I call Art, Entertainment, and Confrontation, though some would want to give it all the name of Art.

THE human organism is built around one fundamental question: "How shall I relate to my existence?" All human activity may be interpreted as either a search for answers to this question, or the application and testing out of the answers that are found.

Some find their answers rather easily. The solutions that are given them through genes and upbringing give them satisfactory lives; the need for great adjustment is absent.

Others struggle more. They cannot make their lives work; numerous failed attempts force them to dig deeper into how they and their surroundings function. The question becomes a necessary obsession: "How shall I relate to my existence? Why does my life not work?"

The artists are those who have made their search into their craft, who tries to share, or - if you will - live of, their search through giving it form. The necessity of examining existence never disappeared. Perhaps the search itself was the best answer they found to the fundamental question.

The work of the artist, be it the creation of a theatre performance, a novel, a painting, or music, is an attempt at sharing insight into what it is to be a human being. The artwork is a window meant to give strangers access to the experiences and conclusions of the practitioner.

The dream of the artist is that their examinations should be of use to other searchers; that their work, at least to some, may function as a mirror were they can study themselves and win insight into their own situation.

At the same time, the artistic work is the private investigation of the practitioner. Often artists prefer to work with themes they wish to understand, instead of such they have already contemplated.

THE goal and approach of the entertainer is different. Entertainers do not want to find answers, but to be one. They want the spectator to forget time and place while they are part of their lives; their goal is to destroy the troubles of existence for that little stretch of time.

The entertainer and the artist share media and materials, but were the attention of the artist is fixed on truth, the entertainer has his fixed on the immediate reactions of the audience.

On closer examination this difference is often smaller than one may think at first. Recognition on the part of the spectator is just as important for comedy or suspense, as it is in an analysis of existence.

Entertainment may be art, and art may well be entertaining. Many acknowledged masters has had it as their ideal that their works should succed in both disciplines simultaneously.

THE third group, the ones I have chosen to label Confronters, represent yet another approach in art. Their aim is not to offer an escape from the troubles of reality. Neither is it to present the audience with an analysis of existence. Instead they want to �wake the audience up�. To thought, or to their own search.

They want to force people who think they already know how to relate to existence, to reconsider. Through their work they introduce to the spectator something they are unable to relate to by habitual reaction patterns alone.

Sometimes the confronter wants to wake the audience up to a specific idea, like in political activist theatre. At other times they just want to wake them up to a search in a more general sense, perhaps thinking that the kind of awareness that accompanies such search has value in itself.

LIKE entertainment, confrontation may well be art, especially in the experimental sense. The experiment does not explore human nature through content, but through form. It is meant to uncover the dynamics which rules the relation between spectator and the artistic medium�to widen our understanding both about the psychology of the specator, and the expressive possibilites of the medium.

An experiment may only be art, once, though. After that it becomes craft, and can only be considered art through what it expresses, its content. In my terminology, a work is art only if it tells humanity something new about itself.

More surprisingly, confrontation as entertainment is neither as large a contradiction as one first might believe. Many people like puzzles, and are intrigued by things they don�t immediately understand. And even the most extraordinarily terrible experiences seem to have their hardened fans.