I subscribe to Mason Currey’s Subtle Maneuvers. He is also the author of Daily Rituals. Subtle Maneuvers is an extension of his interest in exploring the habits, rituals, and practices of creative people. Oddly enough not one of the writers he looks at cites “scrolling through Instagram” or “staring out of the window while fantasizing about traveling back in time to humiliate the jerk who dumped you two days before prom” as any part of their “creative habits.” I’m just as shocked as you are, truly.
This week Mason highlighted Duncan Hannah, a New York City artist painting in the late-1970s and 1980s and passed away in 2022 at the age of 69. Critics scrawled various labels on Hannah’s work: “post-illustrative, Magritte and Hopper-esque;” and “[possibly] retro or post-something else.” That last one really has me convinced that art “criticism” is either completely useless or the coolest job on the planet. It is something, but it also could be some THING. Very now. Very fresh. In that case I have 200 words locked and loaded already. Please make the checks with all of the zeros out to CASH.
To be fair, Hannah’s work does invoke Edward Hopper: lone figures in sparse settings such as on a street outside of a mangy hotel or standing awkwardly in a living room. He painted a lot of female figures in scenes where they are highly posed for some onlooker, but expressing some interior drama inaccessible to the viewer. They reminded me a great deal of Cindy Sherman’s powerful and haunting photographs of herself transformed with wigs and make-up and props into characters. The effect is like looking at random film stills. Our brains want to make story out of these images, and that’s the case with Hannah’s paintings. What is she thinking? Which is maybe the most dangerous question put to a woman, narrowly surpassed by her answer.
But the real focus of Mason’s post was about Hannah’s 2018 memoir 20th Century Boy, based on the journals he kept as he was working to break through the NYC art scene in the 1970s until about 1981 when he had his first solo art show. This passage from 20th Century Boy made it from the screen into my own journal:
“Suffering is not imperative. Being cynical is a cop-out. If I feel the world is horrible, to be horrible myself would just be adding to the problem. Hip negativity is just another form of conformity. Wouldn’t the brave option to be to try to live a positive life? Wouldn’t that be the rebellion?”
First: Can we please make “Hip negativity is just another form of conformity” the official mission statement for all social media and get it printed on T-shirts, bumper stickers, hats, iPhone cases, tote bags, coffee mugs, and maybe get Billie Eilish to work it into a song or something? Great. Second: Hannah wrote those musings around 1980, but it could have easily been last Wednesday. His short paragraph should be required reading FOR HUMANITY. Maybe SCOTUS could get that locked down, do something helpful, instead of what they are currently doing, which is the opposite of helpful with 100% more awfulness.
I personally chafe at the culture of positivity as its packaged into vapid, tweet-sized aphorisms that do nothing but look good in certain cursive fonts on the side of your travel coffee mug. It’s chirpy rhetoric that blissfully obscures anything more complicated than buying the prettiest journal to write your affirmations in that will also look lovely in all your #positivevibes Instagram posts. Moreover, I’m struggling to embrace a country and its deeply flawed systems, both of which are on solid course to self-destruct. Think happy thoughts, doesn’t quite feel like it’s going to get the job done. That’s like bringing a wet wipe to a pig farm explosion. But the way Hannah phrased positivity as “the brave option” is something I can get behind.
Because it seems to me that Hannah was getting at something more than an attitude of optimism, a quasi-delusional insistence that “it’s all fine!” I think he meant to try and build a life focused around what is generative rather than what depletes, drains, or negates. That’s work. That’s commitment and focus and persistence. Elsewhere Hannah says that he views optimism as “a discipline that I practice.” It feels real, what Hannah is suggesting. Bravery is not the easy way out. It’s usually the least appealing thing on the menu, right up there with grilled and marinated monster truck tire. The only guarantee of bravery is that it will change you. Hannah’s right: choosing to move through the world creating, contributing more than you’re destroying while others tell you it’s stupid; try to tear you down for what you believe; and lecture that it’s a waste of time to subscribe to a mindset that is all effort and little reward, is radical and, it seems to me, no longer an option—it’s the key to our survival.
