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What The Room Allows

What The Room Allows

What The Room Allows

As writers and artists, we may often place a certain emphasis on the intimate caveats of our pain. Feeling as though the only way to produce valuable art is to drag ourselves through the torture of ripping open those scars again. But what does this perspective truly say about our understanding of art and what it means? Here, history has a lot to say about what art truly means to communities or populations defined by a systemic struggle. Revealing to us the contradictions in our own Western traditions.

by

Teodora Georgescu

3 min read

3 min read

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Suffering, we are told, is what makes art real. The artist who has known poverty, grief or exile is the one most experienced in feeding us truths about the world. Their pain becomes proof of sincerity, a credential the comfortable cannot forge. This is a complicated idea that turns artistic endeavour into martyrdom, and it is also largely wrong. Most of us, reading this article, are fortunate enough to live lives that are colourful and vibrantly tumultuous. We exist in societies and reside in countries that do not explicitly restrict us daily, punish us for the simple mistakes we make or kill us for curiosities we may have. We are free to take advantage of the world around us, and grab a handful of glory from it along the way. As artists, we can look at the world beyond this; examine it, peel it back and decide for ourselves what to do with it. Our inspiration is almost premeditated in that we can create, write, and produce things not from a need for survival but from a position that allows inspiration to ebb and flow slowly.



From this very position we have, rather ironically, come to try and rid ourselves of our very own comfort. The “struggling artist” was once a credential, a cultural mythology, at times attached to a community, that summoned creative power within personal suffering, it has instead become a convenient costume that people throw on to convince themselves, and others, that their creativity means much more than it does.



The very mobilisation of the struggling artist identity speaks to a larger theme of idealisation; we have reached a point where suffering, pain and misery are romanticised. We do it to our own suffering, to the suffering of others and within this, we create a myth for ourselves that our pain is inspiring, that it becomes useful once it becomes legible. As humans, we create myths and realities for ourselves all the time, yet this romantic idea of struggle and suffering is one that deeply misunderstands the very function of art within spaces and communities truly defined by struggle. For communities, say, inside a Harlem ballroom in 1987 or for audiences inside a Soviet cinema room in the 1950s, this was an epoch of struggle, and not a malleable or useable identity that could be shaped and “practised” .



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Instead, in these communities, art defined the struggle and the pain rather than the opposite. In the documentary Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s 1990 piece on New York’s Black and Latino starlets of the 80s ballroom scene. The struggle faced by this community is compounding and systemic; racism, homophobia, poverty, and family rejection compound, on the screen, into exclusion from the categories of personhood that dominant culture takes for granted. This is not the struggling artists’ chosen costume; nobody here is performing suffering for status, because the suffering here is neither chosen nor offered up as a credential. Thus, the ballroom does not represent an escape, but rather it constructs one entirely on its own. They are forced to create their own space of complete freedom where their pain becomes a signpost directly correlated to an awareness of their inherent unfreedom. What this shapes is form rather than purpose; constraint may sharpen the categories, the walks, the language of the scene, but it does not generate the freedom itself; that freedom is something the space offers, not something the pain produces. Paris is Burning makes this distinction visible because the pain does not inspire the act or the art but inspires the need for freedom, for which art is a vessel; the need for this space is inherent and follows parallel to survival.


Yet, freedom is slippery, and it is not the same for you and the person sat across from you. In certain parts of the world, freedom means simply having access to water or a roof over one’s head. In the West, our lives can sometimes feel so small in a place that appears to be the centre of the free world. Thus, in reducing ourselves to our pain, art becomes obsessed with the deep wounds and scars we have gained through our very condition of what may feel like infinite time and infinite freedom.



Russia, in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, inherited a version of this same kind of confusion on a national scale; a sudden, unfamiliar abundance of freedom with no settled sense of what to do with it. It was in this context that Sergei Selianov spoke, between October 1997 and May 1998, on the role Russian cinema would play in defining a national identity:


“Life in Russia under socialism was extremely impoverished, sanitised, and sterilised, with a great number of restrictions. Yet any kind of prohibition passionately stimulates the creative imagination – not only the imagination of directors, but of spectators, too. Our audiences were the most advanced in the world. They did not just enjoy art but drank that freedom from books and films. It was not social freedom, but a great and genuine freedom of an almost religious nature…totalitarianism assists a genius by clearing away the superfluous. The great and talented artists (from that time) were more than mere artists, they were prophets and teachers”


What his testimony determines is that whilst, yes, pressure can indulge creative endeavour, and that our inspiration can in fact confirm itself in the real world, there is a distinctive implication for us, as spectators. The second is a different claim entirely. That art confirms itself, here, in these specific spaces and pockets of freedom that it directly can inspire. This is not a claim about technique, or about the artist at all, but a claim about what watching did for the people watching. Selianov’s “genius-talk” belongs to the artist, yet his “freedom-talk” belongs to the room. Films produced under the Soviet Union were at the time, and still now, considered some of the greatest in the world. They spoke to audiences in a way that was not passive, but active in inspiring identity cohesion. Not only was their technical success celebrated, but they did exactly what Selianov outlines above; they became these gauntlets of freedom from which audiences and spectators drank.



Russia, in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, inherited a version of this same kind of confusion on a national scale; a sudden, unfamiliar abundance of freedom with no settled sense of what to do with it. It was in this context that Sergei Selianov spoke, between October 1997 and May 1998, on the role Russian cinema would play in defining a national identity:


“Life in Russia under socialism was extremely impoverished, sanitised, and sterilised, with a great number of restrictions. Yet any kind of prohibition passionately stimulates the creative imagination – not only the imagination of directors, but of spectators, too. Our audiences were the most advanced in the world. They did not just enjoy art but drank that freedom from books and films. It was not social freedom, but a great and genuine freedom of an almost religious nature…totalitarianism assists a genius by clearing away the superfluous. The great and talented artists (from that time) were more than mere artists, they were prophets and teachers”


What his testimony determines is that whilst, yes, pressure can indulge creative endeavour, and that our inspiration can in fact confirm itself in the real world, there is a distinctive implication for us, as spectators. The second is a different claim entirely. That art confirms itself, here, in these specific spaces and pockets of freedom that it directly can inspire. This is not a claim about technique, or about the artist at all, but a claim about what watching did for the people watching. Selianov’s “genius-talk” belongs to the artist, yet his “freedom-talk” belongs to the room. Films produced under the Soviet Union were at the time, and still now, considered some of the greatest in the world. They spoke to audiences in a way that was not passive, but active in inspiring identity cohesion. Not only was their technical success celebrated, but they did exactly what Selianov outlines above; they became these gauntlets of freedom from which audiences and spectators drank.



For example, in 1957, The Cranes Are Flying was released; a film so deeply moving and intricate in its display of the tumultuous difficulties of love and life under war that it created a myth entirely of its own. Gennadii Shpalikov, screenwriter himself, noted that “back in 1957, I had never seen or known anything, and moreover did not wish to see anything better”. The impact of this film was religious, and it was carved out in the most important sanctuary, the cinema hall. For a people who did not live in the same conditions that we objectively define as freedom, this film and this perspective were shiny and holy, almost too bittersweet to hold with both hands. For one of the first times since the Stalinist years, people saw a real human face on screen; they felt the subtleties of human emotion that had been taken away from them as youths. Freedom sprouted there, in that seat. And what was a feeling that for us may be ordinary, then was completely novel; to feel confirmed by the miracle you see on screen.


What both examples insist on is a distinction the struggling artist was never built to hold: that pain can shape the form art takes without ever supplying its purpose. Totalitarianism does not inspire creativity, and neither does exclusion, nor grief, nor any of the conditions this essay has called unfreedom. What they inspire is a desire for freedom and for personhood. Art becomes the vessel for that desire, not its product. The ballroom and the cinema hall are not metaphors for freedom. For the people inside them, however briefly, they were freedom. Lived rather than imagined.


@sanmarin0

@sanmarin0

@thequeerreview


For example, in 1957, The Cranes Are Flying was released; a film so deeply moving and intricate in its display of the tumultuous difficulties of love and life under war that it created a myth entirely of its own. Gennadii Shpalikov, screenwriter himself, noted that “back in 1957, I had never seen or known anything, and moreover did not wish to see anything better”. The impact of this film was religious, and it was carved out in the most important sanctuary, the cinema hall. For a people who did not live in the same conditions that we objectively define as freedom, this film and this perspective were shiny and holy, almost too bittersweet to hold with both hands. For one of the first times since the Stalinist years, people saw a real human face on screen; they felt the subtleties of human emotion that had been taken away from them as youths. Freedom sprouted there, in that seat. And what was a feeling that for us may be ordinary, then was completely novel; to feel confirmed by the miracle you see on screen.


What both examples insist on is a distinction the struggling artist was never built to hold: that pain can shape the form art takes without ever supplying its purpose. Totalitarianism does not inspire creativity, and neither does exclusion, nor grief, nor any of the conditions this essay has called unfreedom. What they inspire is a desire for freedom and for personhood. Art becomes the vessel for that desire, not its product. The ballroom and the cinema hall are not metaphors for freedom. For the people inside them, however briefly, they were freedom. Lived rather than imagined.



Instead, in these communities, art defined the struggle and the pain rather than the opposite. In the documentary Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s 1990 piece on New York’s Black and Latino starlets of the 80s ballroom scene. The struggle faced by this community is compounding and systemic; racism, homophobia, poverty, and family rejection compound, on the screen, into exclusion from the categories of personhood that dominant culture takes for granted. This is not the struggling artists’ chosen costume; nobody here is performing suffering for status, because the suffering here is neither chosen nor offered up as a credential. Thus, the ballroom does not represent an escape, but rather it constructs one entirely on its own. They are forced to create their own space of complete freedom where their pain becomes a signpost directly correlated to an awareness of their inherent unfreedom. What this shapes is form rather than purpose; constraint may sharpen the categories, the walks, the language of the scene, but it does not generate the freedom itself; that freedom is something the space offers, not something the pain produces. Paris is Burning makes this distinction visible because the pain does not inspire the act or the art but inspires the need for freedom, for which art is a vessel; the need for this space is inherent and follows parallel to survival.


Yet, freedom is slippery, and it is not the same for you and the person sat across from you. In certain parts of the world, freedom means simply having access to water or a roof over one’s head. In the West, our lives can sometimes feel so small in a place that appears to be the centre of the free world. Thus, in reducing ourselves to our pain, art becomes obsessed with the deep wounds and scars we have gained through our very condition of what may feel like infinite time and infinite freedom.


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