Ernesto Pujol (Photo: FIAF)
Vulnerability, a meme that previously had little traction outside the world of self-help literature and 12 step programs, has gone mainstream. Brene Brown came at it straight on in a Tedx talk back in 2010. That speech went viral immediately and she became the “vulnerability expert” almost overnight.
Brown’s contention is that vulnerability, a dirty word in a culture that worships invincibility, is the key to so much that really matters. According to her research, vulnerability is the “birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”
Until I encountered Brown’s work, I never used that V Word in a personal way. I treated it like a malaise rather than the source bed of creativity Brown claims it to be. For those of us who fashioned lives that have relied on a fierce defiance and an inviolate defense system, it wasn’t part of the working lexicon. Brown’s work helped me dismantle my resistance and see its importance to me as a human and as an artist.
But it is so personal, this concept, and not easily applied across the broad spectrum. So of course I was very curious when culture critic Thyrza Nichols Goodeve chose to explore how it plays in that larger domain of art. As guest art editor for the Brooklyn Rail, Goodeve queried artists and writers about their views on vulnerability. She asked her colleagues about experiences with art that have “made you fragile, made you question fundamental beliefs about your self, the world, or art in general; moments when the art before you made you question the very discourse you have learned in order to evaluate art in the first place…Are there experiences you have had with art that have broken through moments of cynicism, despair, intellectual exhaustion, especially when the kind of art that provokes this may surprise you?”
As part of this project, Vulnerability and its Vicissitudes, Goodeve interviewed Ernesto Pujol, a performance artist who describes his performance practice as “vulnerability as methodology.” Part of their conversation surfaced some important distinctions:
Goodeve: I love this idea of vulnerability as a methodology, as a kind of work or strategy. But before we go on, what is vulnerability? The etymology of the word is derived from the late Latin vulnerābilis, wounding, vulnerāre, to wound, vulnus, vulner-, wound.
Pujol: There is a difference between being fragile and being vulnerable. Being fragile is being insubstantial, easily damaged, or completely broken, sometimes permanently. Vulnerability consists of a critical self-knowledge, which acts as the solid ground for generous listening toward a compassionate creativity. Vulnerability is part of true intelligence.
That is a brave assertion, that “vulnerability is part of true intelligence.” Goodeve also includes a quote by Gregory Whitehead from Display Wounds, Ruminations of a Vulnerologist that resonated for me as well:
No wound ever speaks for itself. The only thing that you will find emerging spontaneously from a wound is blood. If you’re interested in the deeper significance, then wounds have to be read. They have to be interpreted and deciphered. Vulnerology, or the science of wounds, is the activity of this interpretation.
Several colleagues responded to Goodeve with essays including Jerry Saltz, Ann McCoy and Mark Dery. Saltz and McCoy both wrote in a very direct manner, sharing their deep dive into a personal and vulnerable space: Saltz addresses the “radical vulnerability” he experienced in reading Richard Ellmann‘s account of Oscar Wilde‘s painful ordeal in jail, and McCoy takes us deeper into the disturbing reality of Colony Collapse Disorder among bees. She quotes Rudolph Steiner, “the sage of biodiversity,” who predicted this condition nearly one hundred years ago: “This germinating love that is spread out over the flowers is also contained in the honey they make.”
But not all take the invitation into the vulnerable quite so openheartedly. Dery’s approach is very different. “I abhor the sanctification of vulnerability, especially in the aesthetic realm, and have never, to the best of my knowledge, been made to feel fragile or vulnerable by a work of art,” he wrote.
Chacun à son goût. And perhaps as a sign of how things open when you step away from certainty, I do find a connection with all these points of view. But my favorite passage of all is at the end of Goodeve’s introductory essay where she recapitulates so many of my mixed feelings on this subject:
When it comes down to it, vulnerability is not all that productive a category for consideration of “art” in the grand sense. It’s too personal and context-specific. Too mushy and in a way, brings us back to the irritating side of the “what is art” question. But where it is important is in relation to the “us”—the bodies and the selves we drag around to museums, galleries, art fairs, and artists’ studios. For, as the essays published in this section reveal, it is the vicissitudes of vulnerability that take on importance, the “endless interpretability” of both art as Carter Ratcliff put it and of our experience as human animals living in a time of climate change and storms like Sandy. Perhaps it is here where we link up with the sacred as Avital Ronell suggests, not as piety or even some kind of sappy honesty but as insight driven by our openness to what David Ross calls “the power of the poetic,” what Hoderlin called “poet’s courage” —or what David Wojnarowicz names “the bottom line” in “Postcards from America: X-Rays From Hell”:
“Bottom line, this is my own feeling of urgency and need; bottom line, emotionally, even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture to mark a person’s response to this epidemic means whole worlds to me if it is hung in public; bottom line, each and every gesture carries a reverberation that is meaningful in diversity; bottom line. We have to find our own forms of gesture and communication… bottom line, with enough gestures we can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room.”
as always – so much to ponder -assimilate- Deborah – you are one of my Muses!
Marcia! So good to see a comment from you. I hope you are well, thriving and feeling very full as this fall begins. Thanks for your words, we are mutually supportive to each other.
This is filled with insight and richness, and I’ll read it again, as with the rereading wounds. I have enjoyed the thought of paintings as scars, irregular experiential marks, that require the willingness of both artist and viewer to stay open, and to stay present to feeling. Vulnerability toward a thin skin,..towards an uncalloused courage, fragile and strong at once, and still present to perceive.
There are so many layers to this concept, and I feel as if I am just beginning to map it. So many permutations. That’s why I liked the range of responses Goodeve elicited. Thanks for your comment Rachael. I feel as if we are both drinking at the same stream.
Grateful for your wonderful posts always, and grateful, as I paint today with these layers of thought sinking through.
Thank you Rachael. Cotravelers we are.
this is so raw- to me that I couldn’t finish reading it- but am reacting with tears of grief. Each piece of artwork I do is a place of pain and breakage. I cannot even work outside my home or show people my work at this point in my life after a lifetime of perceived failure. Since I was a child I was criticized and abandoned and had to hide everything about myself never knowing I was an artist. My art at it’s core is my vulnerability crying out. I have no way to look at it in the “outside world” without deep fear and pain of rejection that I can’t bear. My first paintings I did in kindergarten my hellish mother took and hung in a frames in my room without my knowledge- one of them was upside down- my whole childhood I stared at those kindergarten easel paintings of swirling alive flowers and felt like I didn’t even do them and felt disconnected to myself. 45 years later I still can barely look at my own art.
Carole, This is so profoundly touching. Thank you for sharing it here, I am honored by your demonstration of “radical vulnerability.” You have given me a lot to think about.
I have been thinking of vulnerability a lot, what we allow ourselves to feel, what we wall off for self-protection, how allowing feeling (and I do think we can be very conscious about what we sense) is critical to being able to feel and perhaps forgive without necessarily having to forget. I do think art can be crafted out of vulnerability as a means to making sense of experience that otherwise threatens ability to go on. For me, one illustration of this is the work in Rwanda of Lily Yeh’s ‘Barefoot Artists’.
for me acknowledging my vulnerability, is the process that I begin to allow the wound to heal. It honors the imperfection of my humanness and accepts my innate desire for completeness that I can never achieve through self will. It emphasizes the commonality I have with all humans, that makes me one with mankind. How we are all striving for fulfillment. It places me in the same boat. I am not alone. Without vulnerability we cut off our capacity to love beyond the conditional. It is through storytelling that we share our experiences of vulnerability. The brush stroke, the poem, the carving, the spoken word, all of these stories of the condition of being human.
Hello,
So………….considering the “cave artists” of ancient creation…….or the modern-day graffiti by artists who will have their art on display – conventional display or convenient display – which has paint companies pleased. They can provide the spray paints used by the artists, AND the concrete-colored paints to “fix” that art.
Deborah, you already know my feelings and theory about the “arts package”. dpittsburgh, you have touched on what I perceive to be a truth…..I love looking for truth….and you are stating it in your note: the commonality to which you refer…..the thread that is woven through any creation…..trying to communicate to others the feelings of a soul……….visceral to the core…….and then throwing it tentatively up on the treacherous and terrifying canvas of public exposure…..
At that point, have we accomplished what was desired? to the artist, whether a visual, tactile, verbal, or a combination of several of the arts…..is the fullness of creative satisfaction found when we have simply expressed the thing which was trying so hard to make it’s way out of our souls and into the fresh vision of community …..and do we await validation by someone else’s appreciation? can we bear the critic’s jibes? must we have an affirmation from others? Is that vulnerability?
vulnerability is an ageless condition where the artist is concerned…..whether stated by Hamlet in his fear of “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune……”, or in the New Testament in Matthew, (the Beatitudes) and nearly every single adjective contains an element of vulnerability. i.e.: “poor in spirit”, “they that mourn”, “the meek”, “the merciful”, “pure in heart”, “peacemakers”, those who are “persecuted”, even the “hunger and thirst after righteousness” has place in the vulnerability mode of a soul.
I am not deeply familiar with tenets or beliefs different from my own. That is a function of my egocentric and insular life. So I marginally understand my own vulnerability, but to me, it has a very spiritual nature. Vulnerability in others, I am certain, is as different from mine as there are people to be different.
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We may say that we do not care what others think or feel about our creations, but by the very nature of creating and making the creation public, we expose our vulnerablity. We really do care. Our souls have a tenderness; and that tenderness is sometimes more clearly expressed by those who must create, but then cannot bear to publicize their creations. It is so painful to just throw one’s creation to the four winds, and wonder whether good or ill will return….and will it come from the West on the soft and gentle Zephyr……or on the rude and relentless raking of the East Wind?
Who of us did not at some time or other, run to someone with our newest creation; whether pictures with artists’s brush or written word or latest musical composition,.and then await approval? And the rejection letter………Oh, heart!…..I exposed you to criticism, and they have not only rejected you, but tried to rework you into something that is not at all us!
Carole, each of us vulnerable. Thank Heaven for a forum such as this one to share perceptions and feelings. Ask Deborah about her first painting which I brought into my home …..and proceeded to hang upside down! You are NOT alone!
How gauche! …….yup, that’s me!…….and how loooooooooooong!
Thank you Ann for your inimitable wisdom and wit. This is a great comment.
Deb,
Thanks for the validation!