The Pretenses of Failure

Pablo Helguera

January 1, 2021

Failure is overrated, and for the wrong reasons. The platitudes around this term and its opposite, include emphasizing failing as part of the long road of success: phrases like “failing better”, “failure is part of success”, “a first attempt at learning”.  Celebrating amateurism to the detriment of expertise is not a wise philosophy. But this is no reason for pessimism: rather, it is an opportunity to think of our lifelong endeavors as something that can supersede the expectations or rewards associated with hard work.

The vague nature of the terms “success” and “failure” and the impossibility to determine an objective way to establish the applicability of these into our specific circumstances often lead the way to empty self-help phrases that have the effect of justifying mediocrity.  “Just be yourself”, a phrase that supposedly denotes the idea that sincerity is already a virtue, rather feels like justification for feeling comfortable with one’s lack of ambition to accomplish anything in life, using your own subjective value system to congratulate yourself for your achievements (the advice, as it is applied to artists, also fails to convey to young artists that art is not about simply telling others about your problems, as if having a problem in it of itself was the actual artwork).

Further, and this perhaps should go without saying, the idea that “success” can be translated into a formula is the ultimate fraud around which there is a giant, and very profitable market that makes us empty our pockets to congratulate ourselves for our achievements, as small as they might be (in criticizing that fashion, my late brother, the writer Luis Ignacio Helguera, once wrote: “if I ever wrote a book about being successful and it became successful, I would feel like a failure.”)

But while we are familiar with the empty extoling and false selling of success (never more so than this time of year when we think about making new year’s resolutions), we are less perhaps inclined in considering the advantages of assuming that we will never enter into a zero-sum competition and how, in its own mysterious way, this can offer us a path of liberation.

I often think of two people at the opposite poles of this continent that represent contrasting ideas of art making and success.

One in the north: a friend of mine was dead set on becoming the next Orson Welles, creating a film masterpiece/ opera prima at 26. Due to that reason and with that single objective in mind, while we were in art school, he refused to do most of the work that film students go through — doing internships, working menial jobs in production studios, slowly climbing up the ranks in the film industry. As a result, he became isolated, depriving himself of a crucial benefit that being in community with other fellow artist provides: the ability to share and exchange ideas and partake in the process of productive tension that influence and inspires each other. He now lives in relative seclusion, continuing to enter in film competitions. Socially awkward and not a natural talent for acting or directing, he became obsessed with the conventional structures of accolades and awards that are common in the industry— many of which clearly are vanity services where you pay high fees to enter and then receive some kind of certificate that looks like an accolade that you can frame and hang at home. A quarter century after graduating from film school he is yet to produce his first feature film.

The other one is in the south: an artist that I barely crossed paths for a few minutes while doing research for a biennial in Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. I was in the town of Pelotas —all the way in the southern tip of Brazil, and a periphery of the periphery if there is one. He was a printmaker. We had a brief visit.  His studio was open to the street, that he worked assiduously in that place, and that he exuded happiness and satisfaction.

What makes these two individuals different in my view is not necessarily their dedication to their craft, nor their talent or abilities, but the expected reward in or from it: whether seeing their practice as an end in itself, as the printmaker from the south appeared to do, or desperately depending on institutional validation (as the filmmaker from the north always did) that might or might not come. In the case of the printmaker at the end of the world, as many other people who make art, what struck me was that the art world, with all of its hierarchies and value systems, was such a remote place that he had no use for it.  It just didn’t exist. He was probably happier making art than someone like me, forever entwined in the New York-centric art world and its validation filters, will ever be.

These geographical and temperamental poles of art making are what comes to mind when I think of the rather fictional terms of failure and success, and particularly, the false pretenses that they both embody.

As the eminent cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner often argued, the concept of possibility is central to any intellectual inquiry. Being before a young artist — and any young person for that matter— is inspiring because it is a sight into endless possible paths into a life.

As we grow older, those possibilities start narrowing. I now know, for example, that I will never be a professional opera singer or an olympic athlete (although that option was probably never a possibility in my case anyway).

As an art student, I was always in a hurry. At 17 I felt I was already behind precocious artists. I would read Ilya Ehrenburg’s memories with fascination, where he recounted how he got involved in the Bolshevik Movement prior to the Russian Revolution when he was 16. 

Many years later, when I arrived in New York City the urgency to produce significant work that would get attention increased. I was surrounded by artists roughly of my age (late 20s, early 30s) who were busy building networks and creating ambitious projects.

Over the course of the years, the windows of possibility begin to close.  Waiting for that big break does not necessarily pan out. Or the supposed big break (a significant grant, the inclusion in an important biennial) does not necessarily translate into a shooting trajectory toward permanent stardom. Or, at least — we might want to think — our trajectory might not be rewarded until much later in our careers, which is why arriving to old age as an artist is recommended.

The problem, of course, lies in establishing a set of expectations for things that will never come to pass.

My point in this reflection is that renouncing to that set or imagined path is, ironically, the key to a liberation that can become the true reward.  I often think of the case of Marcel Broodthaers, who engaged in abandoning poetry and entering into the visual arts by producing “insincere” gestures, — things that were not meant to follow the expected paradigms, thus producing a new and influential body of work. I also recall the artist Gabriel Orozco once mentioning how, in retrospect and in his view, his true career started when he resigned from being an artist. He felt too constrained and uninterested in the kinds of work and aesthetics that his school were too conservative of him, and he then decided to leave to do his own thing. 

In the art world we are fascinated by the Bartleby-like refusal by an artist to conform to the social script of art assigned to artists. The trick of escaping that conformity is that the act of rebellion is part of the script. You might think you are escaping it, but before you know it, you have turned into an academic.

The act of refusal comes naturally to some, and it is hard to induce it artificially. But I firmly believe it is inherent in all of us, if and when we are able to recognize that which we don’t identify as part of our nature and instead embrace our own path in earnest ( Broodthaers, it seems to me, was successful precisely because he sincerely embraced his insincerity).   This is the reason why I am interested in eccentrics and believe there is something to be learned from them (and also why, over the course of this year, this column will focus on eccentric topics). Often dismissed as crazy or mentally unbalanced, scholars who have studied the phenomenon argue that the eccentric is an individual who is freed of the need of external validation and who sincerely and fully engage in their particular activities as something that they see rewarding in its own  (This is the case made by Dr. David Weeks and Jamie James, authors of “Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness”).  The focus for the eccentric is the activity itself, and this focus does not have to be exempt of rigor and discipline in the pursuit and performance of the activity. Rather, it is a practice that pursues Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s term) where self-expression becomes the goal.

Which is something that can perhaps help us rethink the notions of success and failure in terms of art making. Perhaps in this political moment, more than ever, when we have suffered, and have perhaps been already, insidiously and subconsciously influenced by, the stupidity of a tyrannical president who sees the world in terms of “winners” and “losers” we might be unable to fully understand that those terms mean nothing in terms of art making. Even those artists who are considered successful by most objective measurements (accolades, public acclaim, financial rewards), when asked to reflect on their careers, they seldom feel satisfied: there is always a further place they would like to be at. I remember being surprised at hearing Jim Dine (at a lecture I organized) speaking on how he is not more recognized than other artists of his generation (like Rauschenberg or Johns). For an artist who had so much recognition in his life, he appeared, to me,  bitter and depressed, insatiable for attention.

Thus, we may want to explore the role of that kind of eccentricity as a practice of liberation. Not as a way to isolate us with one another but as a method to connect us again in a joint exploration, rich in heterogeneity and in generosity of exchange. This is the message often expressed by many artists who have engaged in collective practices, articulated by artists like Marc Fischer in his 2006 essay “Against Competition”, and put in to practice by socially engaged artists like Caroline Woolard. I believe in that eccentric path while fully assuming the rigor, criticality and discipline that one as student of their field need to incorporate into their practice. And like that printmaker in Pelotas immersed in his old-fashioned dedication to making, making our pursuits a happy obsession unburdened from anxiety and the fear of inadequacy.  Making us, as XVIth Century poet Fray Luis de León once wrote:

libre de amor, de celo,

de odio, de esperanzas, de recelo.

Free of love, of jealousy,

Of hatred, of hope, of suspicion.