Are You an Artist? | The New Yorker

Louise Bourgeois loved to work, and she loved to talk. She especially loved to talk about her work. In the 2008 documentary “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine,” directed by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach—you can watch the whole thing on YouTube, isn’t that great?—she answers questions as she chisels and draws and violently wrings scraps of material as a butcher might wring a chicken’s neck. “It is really the anger that makes me work,” she says. She has just been discussing her governess, the despised Sadie, an Englishwoman who carried on an affair with Bourgeois’s father for ten years while she lived in the family home. “All my work of the last fifty years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood,” Bourgeois adds. She is an old woman when she says this—wrinkled, commanding, vital—and also, it seems, forever a little girl peeping through the keyhole at Sadie and Papa, shocked and betrayed. In another video, one that has found new life bopping around TikTok and Instagram, Bourgeois sits at a small table in her Chelsea town house before a blank piece of paper. “This drawing that I am going to do now obviously stems from a fear,” she says. Anger, fear—these are the powerful horses that Bourgeois harnessed to make her art, and she rode them until she died, in 2010, at the age of ninety-eight.

How do artists sustain themselves year after year, through good times and bad? What special fuel do they use to stoke their inner hearths? This is the subject of “The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry” (Graywolf), a new book by the writer Stacey D’Erasmo. Originally, D’Erasmo tells us, her approach to the project was detached, “a little academic.” She was getting older (she is now sixty-two) and thought that she would publish an anthology of interviews with veteran artists who could give a view of the road ahead. Then she had a crisis, or a series of them, both personal and professional. “Relationships broke, friendships broke, promises broke,” she writes. “Many facets of my identity shattered.” She was denied tenure at Columbia, where she had taught for a decade, and suddenly found herself out of a job. After a lifetime spent loving women and joyously enrolled in the queer world, she coupled off with a man. Worst of all, she found that, for the first time in her working life, she was totally unable to write. “How do we keep doing this—making art?” she asks in her book’s first sentence. She really wants to know.

Well, define your “we.” The one that D’Erasmo has gathered here is a cohort of eight artists who have little in common aside from living long, creatively productive lives. There is the dancer Valda Setterfield, who performed with Merce Cunningham and went on to enjoy a decades-long collaboration with her husband, the choreographer David Gordon; the writer Samuel R. Delany, who has published more than forty books and seems to write as he breathes; and also the pioneering landscape architect Darrel Morrison, who takes the natural world for his material. The actress Blair Brown has struggled, as many actresses do, with an industry that tends to see young women as the sum of their bodies’ parts and to stop seeing older ones at all, while the abstract painter Amy Sillman experienced a creative breakthrough in her late fifties. The composer and conductor Tania Léon was born in Cuba but made her career in exile, while the musician Steve Earle, a veteran of drugs, divorce, and death, seems to be on his fourth or fifth life, trucking on with his guitar.

So D’Erasmo was gutsy. She hopped among genres; she didn’t stick to what she knew, and she is up front about that. When, for example, she feels intimidated by Léon’s music, she comes right out and says so. “I am not a gardener,” she confesses in her chapter on Morrison—but, in a way, she is. Like Morrison, who pioneered the concept of “sweeps,” in which a variety of native plants are grouped “in swaths and clusters and handfuls” to create something at once organic and spectacular, D’Erasmo plants her subjects together in unexpected arrangements, throwing in some favorite seeds of her own—a reference to Colette or Roberto Bolaño here, a look at Ruth Asawa’s sculptures there—and then steps back to see what patterns emerge.

One big thing that D’Erasmo discovers her subjects have in common is their flexibility, the ability to change along with circumstances. “A vibrant long run might be sustained not by armoring oneself inside an even bigger and more expensive fixed narrative, but by morphing through a varied series of them over many years,” she writes in her chapter on Brown. “Against the monument, the mobile. Against the hammer, the leap.” She means that it’s O.K. that Brown has never become a megastar in the Marvel universe or whatever—that, although she has played many wonderful, meaty roles over the course of her career, sometimes her phone just doesn’t ring. Acting is different from painting or writing or composing. You can’t do it alone; you have to work with what you’re given. Brown is now seventy-eight, and hasn’t had a television or film role since a four-season arc on “Orange Is the New Black” ended, in 2019. Still, she seems happy. Not long ago, she turned down a yes-dear role as someone’s wife on an HBO show because it felt too limiting. She has, D’Erasmo thinks admiringly, an “inner freedom.”

In her chapter on Sillman, D’Erasmo doubles down on the flexibility point. Artistic survival, she says, is fundamentally Darwinian; long-term success requires adapting to the environment at hand. For D’Erasmo, that means the American university, where so many artists and writers today make their living. D’Erasmo reserves a righteous anger for the precarity of academia, which she experienced firsthand, and for its increasingly corporate, donor-flattering imperatives. But she also seems to genuinely like her students, as do many of her subjects. Delany, who projects a prickly, detached persona when asked to discuss his own work, tears up while speaking about teaching. Sillman does him one better; when she was on the faculty at Bard, she says, she considered not only her teaching work but indeed her job as a department co-chair as part of her actual art practice. This sounds both noble and nuts—did Wallace Stevens think of insurance law as part of his poetry? But it makes a kind of sense. You’re gonna have to serve somebody, Bob Dylan sang, and that is what D’Erasmo thinks, too. “Michelangelo had to be able to deal with the pope (which often did not go well),” she writes. “Artists and writers working now have to be able to deal with the dean (which also often does not go well).” Michelangelo may have had it worse. Imagine the dean telling you that you have to paint the ceiling.

At the same time, artists need steel at their core, some essential private self to return to after the department meetings are over and class has let out. You make your living where you can, while, in D’Erasmo’s phrase, cultivating “the deep stamina of the double agent,” working, first and last, for yourself. Doubleness intrigues her. Two of her subjects, Morrison and Delany, came out as gay after marriages to women (Delany’s wife, the wonderful poet Marilyn Hacker, came out, too), and D’Erasmo thinks that this personal liberation also liberated their work. Morrison began thinking in terms of music and color: “It was as if, freed from a certain vector of secrecy, his capacity for synesthesia opened up.” This is a Romantic idea—art as a kind of triumph of the true self over the homogenizing pressures of social convention—and it is as appealing now as it was two hundred years ago.

But what if the self doesn’t just burst shining through the clouds—what if it actually changes? When D’Erasmo was in her forties, she discovered that she was attracted to men. This led to the paradoxical shock of finding herself once again closeted, afraid that admitting her private feelings would constitute a “betrayal” of the community that had meant so much to her. But the self may be more malleable than we think, and so is community. For years, D’Erasmo belonged to a chosen family of mostly queer New York writers and performers. When she describes this time in her life, the page glows. Its dissolution was like a weather event, not attributable to any single cause, and it left a lonely void. There is a lot of writing here about breakups, both platonic and romantic. You get the sense that D’Erasmo hopes art itself can be a kind of lover to her, one that never has to leave.

The question of stamina comes up in another recent book on artists, “The Work of Art,” by Adam Moss. Like D’Erasmo, Moss wants to understand what makes artists tick, and he goes about it in a pragmatic, proudly anti-Romantic way. “My curiosity is earthbound,” he tells us. “No meaning, no magic.” His subtitle, “How Something Comes from Nothing,” announces where his emphasis is. He treats art works as a mechanically minded kid might treat a dismantled tape deck, poking and prodding at their insides to figure out how all those jangled parts make a whole.

D’Erasmo’s book is a companionable hundred and fifty-seven pages; it’s best read in a sitting or two. Moss’s runs to more than four hundred pages and is designed to be absorbed in bursts of pleasure. His sample size is bigger, too. The substance of his book is forty-three richly illustrated interviews—case studies, he calls them—that he conducted with artists of all kinds, among them the architect Elizabeth Diller, the dancer Twyla Tharp, the writers Sheila Heti, Tony Kushner, and Gay Talese, the poets Louise Glück and Marie Howe, the filmmaker Sofia Coppola, the showrunners David Mandel and David Simon, and the artists Susan Meiselas, Cheryl Pope, Kara Walker, and Amy Sillman (the only overlap with D’Erasmo), in which they each describe how a single work of theirs came to be. Moss has fun stretching his definition of art as far as it can go. A piece of meat, he thinks, can be one, when it is the centerpiece of a dish cooked by the chefs Jody Williams and Rita Sodi at their Manhattan restaurant Via Carota. So can a newspaper’s front page, like the one that the Times ran, in May, 2020, to commemorate those who died from COVID.

Moss is not known as an artist but as an editor, most recently of New York magazine. But, he admits at the start of his book, he is an artist—a painter. “I feel ridiculous saying that,” he says, and you can understand why. He has not been painting for a long time—only since leaving New York, which he did in 2019. “I got frustrated easily and gave up easily,” he tells us, of his early attempts. Nevertheless, he persisted, and it is that quality that earns him the right to the title. Of all the traits that he came to see as uniting the artists he spoke with—discipline, focus, curiosity, patience—the most important, he says, is endurance. “Each of the subjects was a dog with a bone,” he writes. Beneath that relentlessness, he sees something else: faith, “the bedrock confidence that you can actually do what you are trying to do.”

It is faith, in fact, that may be the irreducible unit of creation, the atom of the artistic self. D’Erasmo writes that when Sillman was in her thirties, her mother suggested she go to law school. “What’s the worst case scenario?” Sillman thought. “I’m not a famous artist. So what? Does that mean that they can tell me I’m not an artist? No, they cannot tell me that.” Louise Bourgeois made work for years without showing it. My favorite formulation of the condition comes from Saul Bellow, in a metaphor of profane audacity: “You pour the oil on your own head.” And then you keep pouring it, over and over again. You shampoo.

Maybe the practical and the mystical sides of art-making aren’t at such odds. I was amazed to learn, in “The Work of Art,” that Kara Walker’s astonishing sculpture “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” a massive sphinx figure that was installed, in 2014, at the old Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, had its origins in a PowerPoint presentation that Walker made to the arts organization that was sponsoring the work. It’s hard to get less Romantic than Microsoft Office. (Meanwhile, the revelation that the sculpture should be made from sugar came to Walker not in some quiet moment of private contemplation but while reading on the Q train.) And it is comforting to hear the poet Louise Glück tell Moss that she regularly gets frustrated “when I have no idea what to do next.” “What do you do in that moment to help yourself?” Moss asks. “I just wait,” Glück says. At the end of the waiting, something happens. Working prepares these artists for the discovery, and discovery sustains their work.

When D’Erasmo was going through her big midlife sexuality crisis, she realized that she had a choice. She could try to stay the same for the sake of her sense of herself—not unimportant—or she could follow her “desire path,” a term in landscape architecture that describes an unplanned route that people make for themselves to take them where they want to go. That is what she ended up doing, because that is what artists do. “In the lives of the people I interviewed, and in my own life, will is certainly a factor,” she writes. “However, of equal if not greater importance is willingness.” Moss says that he wanted to examine moments of creation in order to render them “less and yet more miraculous at the same time.” Talk about contradiction. When you read these books, you may feel that the art you are confronting becomes at once more and less knowable. It’s a good, life-giving feeling—that you can look as long and hard as you want, and still some mystery remains. ♦