ARTIST MYTHS AND BEYOND

Kara Hartzler

Quick, name five full-time artists (people who wake up and go to a studio, piano, or laptop and spend the bulk of their day producing art as a chosen vocation) who are also practicing members of a religious community. How many did you get? Could you hit double digits if you tried?

Having spent the last three years in the secular art world, I’m beginning to realize how extremely rare it is to see an artist—particularly from the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition—who has not bundled his or her artistic talent together with a “helping” profession. Our painters do art therapy, our writers teach ESL classes, our musicians direct children’s choirs, our actors do role-playing/conflict mediation work, and so on. Why are so many artists feeling it necessary to justify their work through a service application?

“Well, duh,” you say. “It’s nearly impossible to make a living as a full-time artist. Of course people will combine their interests with a paying career—it’s called health insurance.”

Certainly this is true. But if the reasons are purely economic, this would imply that the percentage of full-time artists in the religious world is equal to the percentage of full-time artists in the general population. Hmm, maybe not as true.

On a personal level, I have to confess I’ve spent most of my adult life juggling a love for theater with a commitment to social justice, yet I’ve never found a way to combine the two that didn’t make one of them feel watered down.

I’ve spent years bopping back and forth between the two worlds—a year of voluntary service followed by a year of theater work; two years of teaching followed by three years of writing; graduating this spring with an MFA in Playwriting followed by my entry into law school this fall. Every time I temporarily leave one for the other, I question my motives. Is the social justice thing simply a byproduct of religious guilt? Is the theater thing just a selfish desire for exhibitionism? And how did growing up in a religious community skew my view of it all?

So I think it’s important to periodically reexamine our attitudes toward art and figure out why we can be so apologetic and sheepish and guilty about the whole professional artist thing. After all, when I bring up the can-I-do-art-while-the-world-is-starving issue with my grad school friends, I get a lot of blank stares. And I can’t go on indefinitely pretending it’s everyone else who’s out of step.

Let’s look at some of the buried attitudes about artists a religious upbringing may have dropped in our psyches along the way:

Artists Are
Narcissistic and Self-Absorbed

I vividly (oh, so vividly) remember telling my mother about a friend who was going to pursue a graduate degree in violin performance. My mother responded by wrinkling her nose slightly and saying, “Isn’t that kind of selfish?” (In all fairness to the dear woman who bore me, she now recants this statement and supports my playwriting wholeheartedly, claiming I remember far more things than I should.)

But my mother’s faux pas was probably more blunt than inaccurate in terms of representing the prevailing attitude. For Mennonites of my generation, our grandparents were farmers, our parents did 1-W (alternative service as opposed to going to war) and MCC (service with Mennonite Central Committee), and we traveled abroad as missionary kids or college students, witnessing poverty and extreme need.

Our religious culture was based upon hurricane relief, postwar service, flood mop-up, “helping out.” How does an artist sitting alone in a room every day fit into this picture? Out of 12 people in my playwriting program, I’ve become known as the “socially conscious” one—would this still be the case if I hadn’t been raised a Mennonite?

Artists Are Morally Suspect

To have the freedom to create, it’s often necessary to suspend one’s morality to dig at the root of truth and human nature. This can be scary territory for religious communities—particularly when talk of sexuality, hatred, addiction, lying, and stealing isn’t capped with a reassuring “Don’t do that!”

Artists tell stories, and stories aren’t sermons. Stories are the dark secrets, the painful moments, the wine that gets stashed in the top cupboard when relatives come over. The process of thinking about and creating these stories has “slippery slope” written all over it.

Artists Are Impractical

And how are you planning to support yourself? Nice sculpture, did you pick up the groceries? We are nothing if not a people brimming with pragmatism and fiscal responsibility

In contrast, art by definition defies the notion of utilitarianism. Here’s this guy who’s getting paid little or nothing to create something with little or no use; is it any wonder he’s getting odd looks on Sunday morning from the lady at the end of the pew?

Artists Are Just Plain Weird

I’ll be first to admit this. Artists have messy hair, keep odd hours, and talk to themselves. They either stare at you for too long or don’t make eye contact at all. They use words like “timbre” and “perception shift.” When I visit relatives, there’s no better way to bring dinner conversation to a screeching halt than to raise the issue of my struggles with the Act II subplot construction of my latest play. A large number of artists also tend to be introverts, which adds a whole new level of social awkwardness to the issue.

Sure, our openness and respect for the arts has come a long way in the last three or four decades. Theater is no longer evil, we can say the word dance, and acappella is a choice. But much like racism or sexism, just because the pressure is subtle doesn’t mean it’s not endemic. My mother’s slip that a violin performance degree was “selfish” made me wince only because it confirmed what I had always suspected—that pursuing a career as a professional artist would somehow drive a wedge between me and my community.

I’ve thought to myself, Okay, so what if a few artists don’t devote their full vocational energy to their creative pursuits, what would be the big loss? Would Shakespeare not have written Hamlet if he was teaching at Oxford? Would Picasso not have painted Guernica if he was doing art therapy in Spanish prisons? Would Mozart have ditched a few operas if he was tired from his day job?

Difficult to say, but let’s turn it around—what if the composer who’s also a high-school music teacher said, “Okay, this week I’ve got to spend 50-plus hours writing music, so any classes, rehearsals, lessons, paperwork, grading, and meetings will have to be done in my spare time after that. But don’t worry, I’ll still be a great teacher!”

We tend to appreciate the arts in retrospect, not remembering that a subtle hostility in our culture may right now be preventing the emergence of such future Mennonite-related artists as the next Julia Kasdorf or Rudy Wiebe or Mary Oyer. How are the messages we inadvertently send to our young artists withering their creative potential or causing them to seek refuge in a more understanding secular world?

As long as professional artists are not cultivated and encouraged within our religious traditions, we’re sentencing ourselves to a practical, efficient, and well-meaning cultural stagnation.

By the way, I only came up with four.

—Kara Hartzler lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and is completing a Masters of Fine Arts in Playwriting.