By Alex Rake (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 18, 2015
In the middle of shooting a dream sequence for an Allman Brothers biopic last year involving a bed on train tracks, camera assistant Sarah Jones was killed when an actual train came unexpectedly down the line. I have no idea what Jones’ attitude towards the particular movie and her role in its creation was, but I doubt it was something she would deem worth dying for.
I do wonder, however, if there is any work worth dying for, and what it means to die in the process of creation. While artists do die, and indeed sometimes die in the process of creating art, it is never the death that they’re aiming for if it is the art they care about. Truly dying for art’s sake means art comes first and death is just a consequence, not the other way around.
In Franz Kafka’s The Hunger Artist, the titular artist’s starvation becomes a spectacle for which audiences go wild, for a while. As it turns out, the artist’s fasting reflects not so much his desire to perform but his inability to find something in the world worth eating. As he dies, he says, “Because I couldn’t find the food I liked [I did not eat]. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” This artist’s eventual death in the process of creating art really had nothing to do with a love for art and everything to do with dissatisfaction with life.
A lot of art comes from this conflict between the parts of life the artist finds beautiful and the parts they find unbearable. Many artists, such as Virginia Woolf and Kurt Cobain, for example, eventually find that the unbearable parts override the beautiful, and end their own lives. This is not death for art’s sake because it is not death in the process of artistic creation. Art is in these cases irrelevant, because art is fundamentally a confrontation of life as opposed to a rejection of it. Life has to continue in order for an artist to confront it continuously.
So, when somebody does die accidentally in the process of creating art, or pushes themselves to the point of death in an attempt to produce something, it is never the dying that’s important — it’s the art, the confrontation of life. The death of an artist and the narrative it creates should not therefore be as central as the work they produced in their lifetime.
