Gillian Welch and Auguste Rodin
On Artists and Critics
For any artist, critics are hard to handle. For artists, there are two classes of art one can create. The first is a detached exploration or experimentation piece. These are pieces that the artist invests time in, but not themselves. They are important to build skill and to also find the right approach or voice in a medium. Critiques of that sort of art don’t matter much at all. They don’t resonate very negatively, because artistic experimentation is not typically one’s self invested within the work.
However, once you start to build a skill set in a particular art form, you invest not just your time, but yourself into a piece. It becomes a part of you while you create it. You have an attachment to it, a relationship. At times these pieces are just immediate expressions and they can be quickly made, or they require hours of reworking at different angles and with different ideas. The critique of this type of art is the hardest to handle. These can be critiques of yourself as a person, but instead of a light social level, these are on the deeper existential level.
“Queen of Fakes and Imitators”
Gillian Welch sings a blend of American folk, roots, and country music. Her music possesses rural qualities and embodies her attempt to capture a very genuine sound, a very American one. She had spoken of discovery as an artist in an article in SFGate:
Gillian Welch, a third-time festival performer, was raised in Los Angeles on Velvet Underground and punk records, but later had an epiphany: “I was at college and had just moved in with a DJ who had an old-time-bluegrass show. One Sunday morning I was in the bathroom, on my knees, cleaning the bathtub, and he put on “The Legendary Stanley Brothers Vol. 1.” The first song came on and I just stood up and I kind of walked into the other room as if I was in a tractor beam and stood there in front of the stereo. It was just as powerful as the electric stuff, and it was songs I’d grown up singing. All of a sudden I’d found my music.” -(Article by Sylvie Simmons) Source: http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/HILLBILLY-MILLIONAIRE-2606558.php
When she started singing her music, critics attacked her for not being genuine. This is mostly because she was born in New York, raising in California, and went to school in Boston. Critics thought she was not from the right part of America to play American roots music. However, she is also adopted and her birth parents were possibly from North Carolina. The critics just didn’t seem to have a formula to figure her authenticity out.
Her response to the critics was a song called Time the Revelator. It begins with the verse:
Darling remember when you come to me
I’m the pretender, I’m not what I’m supposed to be
But who could know if I’m a traitor?
Time’s the revelator, the revelator
She uses the song as a confession, as a symbol of her feelings of loss towards her own identity as an artist. She also addresses a feeling that some artists experience, that of feeling fake. She follows it with one of the wisest of her lyrics, framing the concept of Time as the Revelator.
Her critics are represented as a fortune lady later in the song:
The fortune lady came along, she walked beside
But every word seemed to date her
In representing her critics as fortune tellers, she acknowledges that there are those that will accept their critiques as truth. However, both fortune telling and art critique become foolish endeavors. For fortune telling, Time reveals perfectly and predictions are almost always wrong. For art, Time reveals how history, and those who treasure art, will value a particular piece. Critique becomes as accurate as fortune telling.
In a single song, she closed the dialogue on being called a fake. Perhaps she is the “Queen of fakes and imitators”, but it is Time, not her critics, that will reveal her as such.
Six Foot Seven
Rodin experienced a similar critique, when in 1877, he exhibited a piece called The Age of Bronze. It was a life-size male nude and it was extraordinarily realistic. The realism was unusual at the time, so critics accused him of not modeling the sculpture, but simply casting it from a live person. The french word for this is surmoulage, it translates roughly as copying or casting from a mold. This, at the time, was scandalous. Rodin, like Ms. Welch, had been called a fake.
Rodin’s response was another work of art. Perhaps great artists have a talent for responding to critique in the non-verbal, through song or sculpture or other mediums. It takes skill to argue with someone until they give up, but without using words at all? Perhaps we should refer to a work of art that silences critics simply as a pièce de silence.
Rodin’s piece for this purpose was Saint John the Baptist or Saint John the Baptist Preaching. This sculpture differs in one profound way from The Age of Bronze. The Age of Bronze is a 6 foot tall sculpture, a realistic height for European males at that time. Saint John the Baptist stands about 6 foot 7 inches tall. His critics casting accusations of surmoulage likely just sulked away when they saw it first unveiled. This sculpture and Auguste Rodin himself, had achieved a reputation of being larger than life.
I supposed the lessons to learn as an artist are to either ignore the critics, or create art in response. The critics never matter in time, what matters is the audience. The viewer, the listener, the reader, the end-user. What matters are all the individual personal meanings imparted, that an artist does not intend for, but that exist nonetheless. In these new meanings, intended and unintended, art transcends the need of critique.
Maybe Gillian Welch is right, maybe she is fake. Maybe the art itself is fake. What comes from experiencing it, however, is beautifully real. The experience lends the realness, in return, back to the art. Perhaps it is Time the Revelator, Time the Artist.
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