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About Art: to Yasmina Reza, playwright
I saw Yasmina Reza's play Art, translated by Christopher Hampton, performed brilliantly at the Court Theatre, Christchurch, in August 2000. Elric Hooper was director, Martin Howells played Marc, David McPhail played Serge, and Mark Hadlow played Yvan. This article is a meditation on the play addressed to the playwright.
The more I think about Art, Yasmina, the more ambivalent I become about it. Not that I doubt its brilliance for one second, it's just my own thoughts about it that I doubt. Am I more like Serge, the fervent convert to modern art, or Marc, the critical cynical rationalist? Or do I stand revealed as an Yvan-type in my spineless equivocation? Could it be that I, like you, am a composite of all three characters? In Freudian terms, Yvan must equate to the id, the primitive instincts and energies. He's the one who is passively moulded by circumstances but whose emotions occasionally erupt when pushed too far. Serge is the ego, the conscious subject, the self-defining individual intent on fulfilling his desires and mastering his destiny, whatever the cost. Marc is the superego, the conscience and critic, attempting to exert parental control over the ego's wayward excesses. The plot, essentially, is variations on "two's company, three's a crowd". Serge wants to feel good about his extravagant purchase of a minimalist white painting for 200,000 francs, so he needs the validation of his friends. Yvan, as befits the id, is happy to acquiesce. But Marc, as conscience, is impelled to cut Serge down to size, and he too can only achieve this with Yvan's backup. So Yvan is pulled in both directions simultaneously, a lose-lose situation which blows up in his face when Serge and Marc catch on and gang up on him instead. The standard critical line about Art is that it's really about friendship, the art bit being little more than a pretext. I suspect, Yasmina, that friendship may be a pretext too, because let's face it those characters are rather predictable, more than a little one-dimensional. What it's most deeply about is the psyche itself, particularly the battles that can rage within sensitive artistic souls like yourself. To put it another way, there are several levels of meaning in Art: on one level art, on another friendship, on another the psyche. On yet another level it's about the creative process, where the act of creation or bringing forth is accompanied by the ever-present voice of the self-critic, editor and censor: the urge to reveal is reigned in by the need to conceal, the desire to be free balanced by caution and restraint. For me, the most telling line of the entire play is uttered by Yvan at the end: "Nothing beautiful was ever created through rational argument." I can hear your voice particularly in that, Yasmina. I agree that rationality can only take you so far, at least if art is what you have in mind. Beyond that, it's necessary to jump into the deep waters of the irrational and follow your intuition. Of course you know this already: you write, you've said, "from my intuition, my sense of freedom, my feeling of words and rhythm." What you write mirrors your nature, your plays are essentially autobiographical. As one self-perceived outsider to another, I can relate to that. Such is my conceit that I feel I know you, a kindred spirit, very well. I have a friend who argues with me relentlessly about the meanings of art. She is well-armed and defended with many in-the-air theories, inculcated at art school. If I try telling her that I create intuitively, from my sense of freedom, she dismisses that as merely subjectivist. She has learned from bitter experience, from weekly crit-sessions with her tutors, that no position is entirely defensible: it's best to remain chameleon-like, never allowing oneself to be pinned down, never staking one's flag on clearly-identifiable turf. Our diametrically-opposed situations generate passionate debate, the same sort with which Art is imbued, only without the rancour. Perhaps this sort of friendship, the sort between Serge and Marc, or between you and the real Serge you based the character on, thrives on one-upmanship. Examples generate counter-examples, and more counter-examples in turn, in the vain hope that one's own insight will prevail. But it never does: you can only hope to clarify your own thinking in the process of trying to clarify your friend's. It can be a rewarding form of social interaction, using continual disagreement to stimulate and refine your own thought processes. Creative energy is what all this disagreement reduces to. It has to go somewhere, so one points it in this direction rather than that. Sometimes what results is art, such as the play you so aptly entitled Art. The audience stands in relation to the play as the characters stand in relation to the white painting. Each of these art objects is a kind of tabula rasa, a clean slate or empty construct over which people do battle to ascribe their own interpretations. You've set us up to argue over whether the play is about art or friendship, Yasmina, just as the characters argue over the painting's value or lack of it. There is never any final answer to these questions, or to the internal ones which characterise the id, ego, and superego. If any position carries the day, it is Yvan's ambivalence: and that only seems to defer eventual compliance with either Serge's or Marc's position. At play's end, however, there is a resolution of sorts. Marc accepts Serge's invitation to draw on the painting, albeit with an erasable marker-pen, and depicts a man skiing downhill which is later rubbed out. Marc is thus able to ascribe a meaning of his own, that of a man moving across a space then disappearing. This illustrates how, for Marc, a meaningless and valueless art object is transformed into one which has both meaning and value. He has, ostensibly, made the work his own through creatively engaging with it though personally I find that scenario less than convincing. In reality the "double answer", the quandary, remains, because that is the way the world (and the creative psyche) works. The art-lover or artist (Serge) vies with the critic (Marc) for the support of the public (Yvan), and it is a rare situation when all three are in complete accord. And while it bothers you, Yasmina, that you are probably not seen through your plays as "the summit of intelligence and intellectuality. . . on the other hand, deep down you don't give a damn. You know what you do, you know what you want, you know what you want to say." I concur with that wholeheartedly. So do Serge, Marc, and Yvan, collectively-speaking. Quotations from Yasmina Reza taken from the following sources: "Yasmina Reza and the anatomy of a play" by Mary Blume, International Herald Tribune. www.iht.com/IHT/MB/98/mb032898.html "High flyer with a fear of aging" by Pearl Sheffy Gefen,
The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, Thursday, October 7, 1999. This article originally appeared in *spark-online issue 13.0,
Oct. 2000, at: |