This treatise comes to me in the midst of a personally prolonged reflection on the relationship between artistry and “intended audience.”
To create because one must is to be unnamed and untitled until the created examples are claimed by the dominant culture(s) in which they find themselves. This is so, because to create because one must does not carry with it an expectation of audience beyond the creator’s self.
I wonder at how Bill Traylor and Purvis Young titled themselves and categorized their creations to themselves. Or, the women whose creations are lost in a void borne of misogyny. They, and those like them, are very different than is this playwright in the American journey toward a universal embrace of artistry.
That SLAVE PLAY exists may have moved through my consciousness at some
unremembered moment when it emerged in 2018. It is a play in which I have no interest. I am not its intended audience, for I do not seek an interaction with “subconscious trauma [rendered] into provocative theatrical expression,” as described by the New York Times. And as such, I feel confirmed in ignoring this play (much as I ignore all “entertainment” about slavery, for what has today’s contemporary art to present about SLAVERY that could possibly be of value to me? Or, to you?
There is a reality of collective subconscious trauma that you have described here. It lives in us all, we descendants of slavery’s heritage. Reading your descriptions was accompanied by a simultaneous act of removing my own desire to screech and rage, as if I was standing right next to you, in that moment.
Manufactured resurgences of such extreme violence appeal only to the collective subconscious of the sadomasochistic. They are the intended audience, whether this playwright perceives as much or not.
I am reminded of the book, THIS NON-VIOLENCE STUFF WILL GET YOU KILLED…Intellectualism has an equivalent danger, for in examining that which has absolutely no value, and was not meant for you, but which contains the very essence of violence, the healthy growth of one’s humanity is endangered. Beware.
This treatise comes to me in the midst of a personally prolonged reflection on the relationship between artistry and “intended audience.”
To create because one must is to be unnamed and untitled until the created examples are claimed by the dominant culture(s) in which they find themselves. This is so, because to create because one must does not carry with it an expectation of audience beyond the creator’s self.
I wonder at how Bill Traylor and Purvis Young titled themselves and categorized their creations to themselves. Or, the women whose creations are lost in a void borne of misogyny. They, and those like them, are very different than is this playwright in the American journey toward a universal embrace of artistry.
That SLAVE PLAY exists may have moved through my consciousness at some
unremembered moment when it emerged in 2018. It is a play in which I have no interest. I am not its intended audience, for I do not seek an interaction with “subconscious trauma [rendered] into provocative theatrical expression,” as described by the New York Times. And as such, I feel confirmed in ignoring this play (much as I ignore all “entertainment” about slavery, for what has today’s contemporary art to present about SLAVERY that could possibly be of value to me? Or, to you?
There is a reality of collective subconscious trauma that you have described here. It lives in us all, we descendants of slavery’s heritage. Reading your descriptions was accompanied by a simultaneous act of removing my own desire to screech and rage, as if I was standing right next to you, in that moment.
Manufactured resurgences of such extreme violence appeal only to the collective subconscious of the sadomasochistic. They are the intended audience, whether this playwright perceives as much or not.
I am reminded of the book, THIS NON-VIOLENCE STUFF WILL GET YOU KILLED…Intellectualism has an equivalent danger, for in examining that which has absolutely no value, and was not meant for you, but which contains the very essence of violence, the healthy growth of one’s humanity is endangered. Beware.