“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!”
These famous opening lines of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri set the stage for what is an allegorical journey through life and salvation. The middle point of a life in the Middle Ages was 35 years of age- the half point for a life as established by the Bible.
It is significant that Dante picks the half point of life as the moment where the great human reckoning about sin and salvation would take place in a soul: theoretically one has lived enough so that one may have taken a particular direction in life, but it is not too late to change course if this direction is one that is deemed sinful or wrongheaded. This mid-point can feel stressful.
A similar reckoning takes place when you are a mid-career artist.
“Being a mid-career artist is like being an awkward teenager, except that you are old”, an artist friend told me once. It is a phrase that illustrates the odd in-between state of mind that sometimes those of us who have landed in that point in life feel: a moment where, in its worst version, we have the energy of old age and the wisdom of youth. An art career starts in possibility, when one typically as loads of energy and doesn’t worry too much about the long term. There is time for making major mistakes, for experimenting, for trying things out. Artistic youth is a time for thirst and hunger— for absorbing information, for being socially aggressive, incessantly creative, and omnipresent. I personally experienced it throughout my 20s: I was propelled by a sense of urgency—the feeling that time was running out, that I needed to make a mark soon.
It is also a time of the initial breakthroughs— the small successes, the first inclusions into important exhibitions, awards, and other, similar career ego-boosters.
Then, before you know it, one arrives to that middle point.
The irony about the mid-career stage for artists in the context of the 21st Century is that while the middle class is shrinking, the mid-point amongst artists appears to be expanding. This means that the phasing out of the emerging artist phase is happening earlier, as recently emerged artists are displaced, faster than ever, by younger artists in the vertiginously mediatized art world. I believe it could be argued, for example (but I will not try to argue it here), that the emerging period of, say, Pop artists, lasted longer than the emerging period of artists of my generation. And the mid-career condition also now lasts longer: we do not become revered elders until much later, as a result perhaps of natural longevity and dominance of those who are indeed older who fulfill that role.
As a result, the artist’s mid-career is often talked about as a period of stagnation, without the excitement and discovery of the new voice nor the reverence and admiration to the more senior artists. Which brings me back to Dante: while he places himself as a 35 year-old in The Divine Comedy, he in fact wrote the work at age 56 —an old age for the 1300s.
Art historically, the biographical narratives of the middle period are usually not that compelling either. We don’t see the drama of bright stars that left us early like Basquiat, nor the magnificence of a late career achievement like Matisse’s cutouts. Instead what seems to characterize middle age is less the drama and more the sluggish development of aesthetic arguments and opening salvos that initiated the career of an artist, sometimes taken to commercially (but not necessarily critically) successful levels. There are the examples of artists like de Chirico, who after a spectacular first artistic chapter that included the invention of Metaphysical Painting, changed abruptly to a Neo-classic style in the 1920s that resulted in much less compelling and memorable works, and then bringing him into a middle period of neo-Baroque aesthetics and conservative politics that gained very few fans.
Thus the ghosts of the mid-career haunt us. But in contrast to Dante, who first enters the Inferno, the mid-career fate feels rather like some kind of living purgatory, an existential limbo where the work remains in a kind of waiting room, no longer celebrated as a newcomer or hailed for its historic importance. Instead we become a middle-aged ugly duckling, lacking the cuteness of babyhood and the gravitas of the elder, thrown in some kind of forgetfulness with the fear that it might be permanent.
Except that this perception is a mistaken cliché.
This topic was explored by curators Paulina Pobocha and Cara Manes in a 2017 exhibition titled “The Long Run”, at MoMA. It explored the middle period of major artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Fischli/Weiss, Isa Genzken, Philip Guston, David Hammons, Joan Jonas, On Kawara, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, and Gerhard Richter.
When I asked Pobocha and Manes if they had gained any particular insight about that period in an artist career as a result of working in that project, their reflection was that “there is not one path, or one model, but many--each sufficiently distinct that together they are difficult to categorize. On the one end of the spectrum, some artists double down and continue to explore the ideas that motivated them early in their careers; on the opposite end, there are artists that are like chameleons, reinventing themselves by changing their modes of working to correspond to their changing interests, and so many options in between (and beyond).”
I also asked them to address the question of stagnation: is it a real thing?
“We never linked stagnation to middle-period work, that seems like something which can occur throughout an artist's career, depending on the artist.”
Their responses made me think of many artists who bravely took completely new directions during their middle period. This was the case of Vito Acconci, who in his 40s altogether abandoned performance art and made an incursion into architecture and design. In spite of the fact that his performance (and even some of his early poetry) work were routinely celebrated throughout his life ( I remember him saying: “every decade or so I get called to do a retrospective!”) he remained steadfast with his dedication to architecture, albeit with mixed critical results. The remarkable aspect of Acconci’s case, aside from his resolve to never perform again, was that he approached his own performance work as something frozen in amber— always showing the same exact slides (yes, old-fashioned slides) of his performance work, reciting the narrative of his work in the same exact format. It was as if he were speaking about the work of another artist. It would have appeared that he had skipped the mid-career point in order to start a new career.
Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once made the perhaps obvious (but important) argument that when one is young one might have the energy but not the experience, when one is old one has the experience but not the energy, and thus the key moment is the middle point, when the artist already has full control of their technique, enough experience, and still the energy to carry the work through.
Related to that argument, it might be important to remember that Picasso completed Guernica at 56 — the exact same age that Dante had when he wrote the Divine Comedy. It truly was a middle point in Picasso’s life, given that he continued living and working up to the ripe old age of 91.
So how to best see amidst the dark forest of the mid-career? One thing feels certain: we are not best served by odious comparisons to others. It is perhaps best to take art making outside the self-consciousness caused by the arch of time, continue making, and stop counting.
Wonderful read, thank you.
I needed this. Thank you.