GIRL
That's so perfect. Oh my god how do you do that?
CARICATURIST
It's awful. I can't stand it.
GIRL
Are you serious? It's brilliant. It epitomizes this kind of art, the whole, kind of banality of it, but not in a bad way. It's the iconic caricature, the mean average of every one you've ever seen. And this is its transcendence.
CARICATURIST
Hence my self-disgust and self-loathing. You can imagine how I feel after a day of churning out this crap, or looking back on a life dedicated to same.
GIRL
So you consider it trash? That messes up my theory. After all, the prime characteristic, the salient feature, of such artifacts, is that at some level, at the level of the artist's skill and dedication, they take themselves seriously, perhaps even believe they're expressing some personal vision of real significance. This is what makes them sweet yet pathetic.
CARICATURIST
I see what a low opinion you have of my guild. I might confess I share it, but did you ever think that we might be self-aware hacks, scornful of our meager "talent" but willing to exploit it for what little it's worth?
GIRL
Of course I admit such men exist. But I did hold that the greater number of your "guildsmen" took pride in their humble craft and believed themselves true artists, probably making no distinction between art as such and mere craft.
Yes, I believed them naive, perhaps greedy, but genuinely respectful of their work.
CARICATURIST
Or did you never think that some there might be neither cynical nor proud, neither greedy for money nor laboring for love, but only moored to some ancient dream, reluctant to sail into murkier waters, into currents more swift yet cold and distant.
GIRL
What do you mean?
CARICATURIST
Suppose a man whose mind has conceived a future for itself, marked out all the voyages it intends, studied and planned each port where it will call. He works day and night to this end, excluding all else from his thoughts. At length he makes some improvement, and begins to be hopeful that his ship will set sail before he dies. Fine. But all along he's been getting hints of other oceans, other lands, realms undreamt of by his young self. Nor is it too late to abandon all his preparations, or redirect whatever may be useful to seeking out these grander places, whose riches seem more pure, more unalloyed, than those he did previously seek.
However, by some perverse notion he does not change course. It's not the manner of impulsive perversity that leads Poe's wife-killer to bang, in the presence of police investigators, the wall behind which he entombed his victim. It's more the perversity of a deep-seated nostalgic attachment, some unshakable respect for the child he once was. Fairy-tales did it, perhaps. The child, thinking himself anointed, chosen, will not let go his hold even when the man's superior understanding rises ascendant. The man for his part is too empty of dreams, so crammed with intellect is he, to resist this specter of his past.
Donkey-like, mulish, he employs his skill and powers for this little imp, who rides on his hairy back like a sultan, directing the course. Didn't Ulysses get stuck with such a master for a time? This is our poor hypothetical gentleman's Eudaemon. Thus he labors, enthralled to this dead dream, utterly despising his work, envious of those who took a saner course, who did not vainly hold to one the world has marked tepid, directionless, idiotic. He has a pond to play in, or better a kiddie-pool, while other men take their leisure on the high seas, rational and pragmatic.
GIRL
This totally crushes my theory. I felt sure you (you are talking about yourself, aren't you?) held your work in some esteem. How else, I reasoned, could it have this quality of such-ness, this sense of being ur-caricature, the quintessence of the art.
CARICATURIST
What you see may be the product of our hypothetical man's greatest folly. This is, that despite recognizing his own irrelevance, the contempt in which high culture holds him (or if accepted, only ironically, as you have) he nonetheless tries mightily to excel within the limits of his sphere.
To turn from nautical to aeronautical metaphors, while he has only model rockets to launch, he determines, again I say foolishly because to no real personal profit, i.e. self-respect, he determines to load them up with the best fuel, the highest octane, he can get. And, if you can stand any more folly, he even sees how he might escape entirely this junior status if he but embraced the tenets of irony, say, and sold the same work in a different context, sold it as high art through some slight manipulations of form, perhaps gave the pieces oblique and seemingly metaphysical titles, or referenced household detergents and other consumer opiates----Whatever the manipulation, he rejects them all, again out of a stupid vanity that would rather remain true to some idea that never was than humbly succumb to reality.
Worst of all he savors his obscurity, savors the irony of the lack of irony, the fact that he could but doesn't, is but isn't. What strange niche is this he occupies he asks himself, and perhaps that's his only real pleasure, a deep alienation from his own life, from all spheres of culture, high, low, mingled, whatever you've got he doesn't want it. That none see him truly, this is his secret and his consolation. The uncultured respect somewhat his ability to hold a pen, the cultured take no notice of him or consider him a fool, a pathetic nobody. If only actions matter, then both are right as far as they're concerned. But if the inner life of one lone soul has, though unrealized in the world of facticity, any weight at all, they're all befooled and he's the sovereign.
GIRL
Where are you staying?
(scene ii: A hotel room, dimly lit, blinds drawn. CARICATURIST lays on bed, hands behind head. GIRL sits cross-legged at foot of bed.)
GIRL
I was all ready to condescend to you, to love and adore you like a child. But you're more complicated than I thought. However, what guarantees do you have, for yourself or me, that this complexity isn't another illusion. You have two maps, the first of which turned out to be faulty, or at least incomplete, showing only countries of base constitution. How do you know there isn't a third map, invalidating the one you now hold to be true?
CARICATURIST
I could say that the second map is inclusive of all future maps, it provides for that contingency. After all these aren't really maps of land masses but rather of ideas. Such maps certainly could include the notion of variables, uncertainties. In fact they wouldn't be any good without them. My neurosis is that I do have a "second map," a more rational conception of the world, yet prefer to get my bearings by its infantile predecessor. And you should ask, is that brilliant irony, a self-effacing martyrdom, or merely a failure of vitality, a craven rejection of life. Is my dedication to this craft a form of spiritual transcendence, a "humble egoism" if you will, or a self-betrayal of the first order? My dedication, it must be qualified, not to excellence on the craft's own terms, on the terms of its common practitioner, but rather on the terms of one who despises it for trash yet stubbornly clings to that prepubescent notion he conceived of it as the highest expression available to man. So sentimental was he, was I, so smitten by those early encounters with the form---bound up as they no doubt are with deep Freudian links to my parents--- so awed by those charcoal or marker images, by the presence of their god-like creators, that even when those dreams turn out to be ill-founded, he still holds to them. What sickness is this? Why was I given such a mind?
GIRL
And yet do you not sometimes feel, as you said earlier, that you have them all fooled, all of them, that your great opus, your paean to everything, is this very quashing of your true powers? This secret, self-effacing martyrdom?
CARICATURIST
I do sometimes console myself by that thought. Think though how vapid that dream is too when you consider that the first pretty lips that can mouth two cogent words, I spill my guts. Poof! Opus annihilated. Thank you very much.
GIRL
Damn, I didn't notice that. You did tell me so it is a complete fraud. You really are a pathetic loser.
CARICATURIST
The only respect I can ask for is whatever you give any man who works a job he hates, only factor in my perverse self-laceration and bitter regrets and that respect might rise or fall, depending.
GIRL
I have to admit there is something attractive just in the fact that you do reveal complexity on inspection. There's beauty, if pale and sickly, in the way your slick, competent yet banal portraits hide a tortured inner life. For you, the cleaner and more "professional" the drawing, the more it pains you. This is not the pain of the romantic artist who scorns commercial work on some principle of independence or integrity. Your scorn is confounded by two unique elements: One, the sentimental reverence you developed for the craft at a young age, and; Two, an aesthetic relativism that really doesn't value the work of the culturally anointed, be he ever so brilliant, more than that of the commonest refrigerator-magnet illustrator. Not because you don't recognize a world of difference between the two, in intentions if not in quality, but because of a total rejection of mankind, at least in its present incarnation. You reject all aesthetic judgment in the context of a world that transmutes art into political oppression, that assimilates everything to its own hellacious ends. How judge between Cy Twombly and Celine Dion when both will be adapted to the same purpose, really only different sides of, appropriately enough, the same coin.
CARICATURIST
Some truth in that there may be, and those may be my unvoiced, unconscious concerns. But, obsessive as I am, could even I set such an ascetic course and stick to it my whole life? I reject mankind? I put David Hockney no higher than David Hasselhoff? Maybe on Mondays through Fridays, but there comes a time when you let your hair down. Of course I fear the incomprehensible system behind the world, the sense that no one is steering. The wind blows one way, we all paddle furiously to compensate. Yes, as you say, it assimilates us or kills us, one or the other. No matter your power, it bends you, it shapes you, it uses you. All serve its needs. No man can oppose history head-on. At best he can change course a fraction of a degree. It is a mad machine we're caught up in. Along the way we appreciate the little compensations, the artistry of a co-passenger, etc. Knowing full well that any isolated aesthetic experience is not isolated at all, but intimately bound up with larger social momentums whose direction we may question. Should this prevent us our small enjoyments?
GIRL
So you're an aesthetic relativist in theory if not in practice?
CARICATURIST
That's fair to say. "Take your pleasure while you can." The system has its own ends quite apart from those of any of its cogs. We need not suffer needlessly, deny ourselves pleasure because its source is corrupt. And it is all corrupt, because the system uses it all.
GIRL
You had better define this "system," or else satirize yourself, or I will begin to think you are becoming mystical.
CARICATURIST
You started it, you'll remember.
GIRL
I admit that, but somehow leaving it vague and implied, actually glossing over it somewhat, seemed more convincing than your repeated harping on it. If we don't say much about it we can believe it. The more we mention it, credit it with such monstrous schemes and designs, the more ignorant and paranoid we sound. Perhaps that's part of its power, whatever it is. It resists definition.
CARICATURIST
Absolutely it resists. It must be almost non-existent, in a way. It is the whole tumult of life and matter, not any central organ. We have no science to describe it. We must resort to poetical terms: protoplasmic, shape-shifting. I give up.
GIRL
We've gotten away from you and your ironically un-ironic art, or whatever it is.
CARICATURIST
We'll never pin me down because I'm in fluxus too. I pass from sainthood to serpentry from one minute to the next. Let me have that teat.