Is it illegal to take a picture of a cop?
It’s a silly question to ask. We know. We weren’t truly concerned about the legality of the act, but more bothered by the fact that the nonsense question (or versions of it) came to mind at all and stopped us from doing something we wanted to do.
See, we pass by a series of cops (What’s the collective noun for a cops? A terrorism? A nightmare?) who manually operate the traffic lights during rush hour on Sherbrooke near Parc La Fontaine. There are maybe half a dozen of them, standing on corners. They mostly cover their faces which - we imagine - has as much to do with standing outside in inclement weather as it does with the manifest shame of being reduced to a creature who makes green lights red and red lights green for hours on end. They always seem to be staring off into the middle distance, listlessly waiting to perform their small job. It’s rare to see malaise embodied in public and rarer still to see a police rendered pathetic in the full sense of that word. We wanted to capture a cop visibly seized by tedium and maybe slightly cowed by despair. We recognized that tedium and despair. We’ve known a version of it.
The silly question, though, of whether we could or should take the picture hemmed us in. There was a tension between a vague, internalized normative demand (e.g. one ought to respect the police or at least avoid disrespecting them noticeably) and our own beliefs (e.g. ACAB, fuck ‘em (not like that, never like that), etc.). This scene from our lives was, in a weird and fraught way, somewhat inspiring. But the imposition of a silly question stopped us from acting on that inspiration. The way an unstated, unsituatable norm imposed itself on us by way of a silly question wasn’t, we noticed, exclusive to this situation - but kind of common.
Can we go to the nice grocery store even if we’re in stained pyjamas and look like aggressive trash? The internalized norm to be presentable, appear passingly well put together, in public is in conflict with our own belief that we don’t care what these strangers think and also we resent the idea that we might have to shower etc. to go buy bread or whatever.
Should we take the paved walking path through the park even though it is much slower than just cutting across the grass? The internalized norm to obey a landscape architect’s mandate, minimize damage to flora, is at odds with our own desire to use public space as we see fit and get places with minimal circuitous turns.
Ought we buy something from this nice little store we’ve been browsing in for forty five minutes even though we don’t really want to purchase anything at all right now? The internalized norm of executing commercial transactions, using stores as stores rather than bad museums, is in conflict with our own sense that browsing (like foreplay) entails no guarantees of further action regardless of expectations or hopes and, more importantly, spending money on undesired objects only to potentially please others is messed up.
These are all, in a manner of speaking, silly questions - but we’d be lying if we said we didn’t really feel the tension underlying them and, moreover, the low-key embarrassment that follows from articulating these questions to you now. They all should and often do lead to easy actual answers - but those answers are never quite final. The normative pressure that does not belong to us (but is nonetheless alive and well within us) pushes hard constantly and, more often than we’d like, guides our actions.
Freud and friends would say this is the superego doing its thing, but the superego typically insists on explicitly moral behavior and none of these normative demands are moral exactly. Looking presentable, walking on designated paths, or engaging in commerce are not moral requirements - but they do carry the weight of something like morality. These are all practical affairs with ostensibly right or wrong answers derived from a set of social or personal values. We might not be in the classical remit of morality, but we feel like we’re somewhere in the neighborhood. Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault, and certainly others would say that this kind of internalized confusion about moral and non-moral stuff is a consequence of structural social fuckery having to do with religion, politics, or both.
That last example - of feeling obligated to buy something prior to exiting a store - is especially frequent with us. In many cases, we avoid entering shops to avoid worrying about the question altogether. Sometimes, as if to torture ourselves, we get stuck on this question repeatedly as we enter a shop intending to buy a specific object, decide against buying that specific object, worry about exiting, eventually exit objectless, then - a couple days or weeks later - enter the same shop, paw at the same object, etc. etc. It’s an awful loop. We don’t recommend it.
Arizona O’Neill’s Est-ce qu’un artiste peut être heureux? [Can an artist be happy?] had us stuck in one such loop since it appeared on shelves in late November. It’s a book of illustrated interviews with twelve artists from Quebec centered on, well, the question posed by the title. This question is what simultaneously drove us to seek out the book, but also what pushed us to put it back unbought. The titular question seemed silly, seemed like it barely merited asking. It’s like asking whether a cop can be pitiable or a blogger embarassed. Of course. Of course. Or at least theoretically. And who cares about happiness anyways? Haven’t we cynically written happiness off as a pipedream engineered by Disney imagineers and other questionable agents as a means of extracting money and labor from us? Isn’t the promise of happiness the carrot dangled at the end of the stick that we, asses all, should wise up and ignore already? More importantly, who or what was an artist? And why wouldn’t they be as capable of or culpable for the same feelings as everyone else?
We walked away from the book more than once, but the question and it parts nagged at us. We kept returning to bookstores. We kept looking at the genuinely beautiful illustrations of people talking, walking, worrying, and daydreaming over this (seemingly) easily resolved concern. Until, finally compelled, we bought the book.
Across a series of small, casual conversations, the titular question slips almost immediately and totally into the background. Art and something like happiness or fullfilment animate the dialogues, but only lightly. When the question or variations on it are posed explicitly, the answers aren’t revelatory. But, it seems, they truly aren’t meant to be. The silly largesse of the question is met with and balanced out almost uniformly by idiosyncratic, quaint, and small answers. This isn’t to say that the question or its answers aren’t taken seriously, but rather than they both come across as provisional and transitory. The question is a cause to experiment with differing answers. The answers an impetus to pose differing questions. There isn’t a resolution on offer here, but a new way of considering the inevitable absence of resolution that follows from BIG questions.
Each of the twelve brief conversations - with writers, musicians, performance and visual artists - roam around mundane and high-flying topics and locales as they dance around the question of art, happiness, and all the stuff of life that goes into making art or happiness. Just as the specifics of each conversations - ranging from sainthood and sex to indigeneity and kombucha - shift, so too do the settings of those conversations. The way that form and content, words and image, inform and play off each other calls Waking Life (2001) to mind - but, importantly, these conversations rarely come across as overly ponderous or self-serious. The book is carried along less by a set of topics and more by the collaborative imaginings of O’Neill and her interlocutors. Together, in pairs, they explore and co-create little worlds to occupy with big ideas for a short while.
While no two conversations cover the same literal or figurative ground, certain features recur across the conversations. The complications of identity, belonging, inspiration, and expectation crop up consistently. Everyone seems similarly prodded by certain social or cultural imperatives that are hard or tricky to reconcile with personal hopes, desires, and practices. What is - to us anyways - remarkable is that no one questions whether or how they will continue to make art or engage in some kind of artistic practice. There is no hand-wringing or brow-furrowing over IS IT ALL WORTH IT??? Unlike almost every other topic, the value of art is taken as self-evident even if that value is shifty, hard to articulate, open to revision, or only ever quite personal.
In Est-ce qu’un artiste peut être heureux?, O’Neill makes a serious case for posing silly questions. Or, better, a case for not taking silly questions seriously enough that they impede you from trying to live out an answer. For all the questions born from normative demands - to achieve happiness, to leave a meaningful mark on the world, to live a genuine and full life - there is always some way to artfully escape, out-maneuver, and work through or around them. So better just get to it already.
This essay would run way, way too long if we discussed each of the artists who show up in O’Neill’s book, so here are some links:
paw at the same object, etc. etc.