I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
In Daughters Who Will Never Be Mothers, Susan Pickard, who has no children (and never will) writes:
Sheila Heti has another, kinder, way of thinking about this. Recognizing that her primary female identification is as a daughter, not a mother, she says this: “Art is written for one’s ancestors … Children are eternity forwards. My sense of eternity is backwards through time.” I do not know how we can go from being a society of daughters to one in which women choose to see themselves as mothers, too. But on my good days, I think that finding eternity backwards through time may itself be something good and true.
Is art created for for one’s ancestors? I don’t think so, not necessarily, not any more than it is made for one’s children. Or someone else’s children. Or someone else’s ancestors.
My maternal grandmother was an artist, and she gave away her art as gifts. She didn’t ever seek to sell a piece, to my knowledge. Upon her passing, there was some shuffling around of her paintings so that each of her children (two daughters, my mother and my aunt) and each of her grandchildren (two boys and three girls) would have at least one painting special to them.
Later, it was discovered that my oldest cousin, let’s call him J, had a tremendous stash of grandma’s paintings somehow. It wasn’t clear how he came to have so many more than everyone else, but it seemed to be related to my aunt’s hoarding of my grandmother’s things as she (my aunt) became slowly demented. Aunt Betty passed away in her early seventies of Alzheimer’s, and then J took over the collection.
J then offered the paintings to farflung family members, some of whom my sisters and I did not know. This felt wrong. I told him the paintings should first be offered to my mother, me, and my sisters, and only if we refused them could they be gifted to people who didn’t even know my grandmother, or that she was an artist.
In The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes of gift exchange in the anthropological literature. He cites ideas from Marcel Mauss’s “Essai sur le don,” published in France in 1924:
Mauss noticed, for one thing, that gift economies tend to be marked by three related obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate. He also pointed out that we should understand gift exchange to be a “total social phenomenon”—one whose transactions are at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythological, and whose meaning cannot, therefore, be adequately described from the point of view of any single discipline.
Hyde further notes:
The primary work on gift exchange has been done in anthropology not, it seems to me, because gifts are a primitive or aboriginal form of property—they aren’t—but because gift exchange tends to be an economy of small groups, of extended families, small villages, close-knit communities, brotherhoods and, of course, of tribles.
The situation with my cousin and his stash of Grandma’s paintings was not exactly a gift economy, but perhaps in a way it was? And he stepped outside the bounds of what was acceptable by offering paintings that weren’t truly his to people outside of the group in which the paintings should have been circulating.
For years I was estranged from my cousin and only recently started communicating with him again, so great was my upset over this.
At the same time, this conflict led to my own artistic flowering, as it was at the point it happened that I decided that my grandmother’s true gift to me was not any one of her paintings but rather the example of her life and her ongoing art practice. It was right at that time that I began to devote myself seriously to a regular painting practice, including laboriously developing skills by following tutorials and, eventually, developing my own artistic point of view.
So now my paintings hang all over my house, my skill and perspective having reached a level that, at least to me, results in art worthy of exhibiting in this very limited venue. When I moved into this house I had all the interior walls painted Sherwin Williams alabaster white, a warm white that I thought would provide a neutral and complementary background for my art.
My older daughter has told me more than once that she finds my house inspiring, showing, as it does, the result of my years of work in painting; showing, as it does, what a life of creativity produces.
That is a gift to my children — the example of how to live a creative life. And it is a gift I am passing down from my grandmother to them. She gave it to me. Now I am giving it to them.
Sheila Heti famously doesn’t have children. Her autofictional work Motherhood has as its protagonist a woman in her late thirties also named Sheila, who is torn over whether to have children or not. Ultimately, she decides not to.
So to me, this idea that art is made for your ancestors is something of a delusion meant to justify a life focused on art (in Heti’s case, writing) rather than on having children.
But I am not going to say art is made only for one’s children or grandchildren. No, art is made for some part of the world, that part of the world that will come across it, be touched by it. Perhaps that might be your ancestors? But it seems more likely to be people of your own generation or later.
I’m sure there is much more to say about this, about art as a gift to some part of the world, and maybe I will have more to say once I get further in Hyde’s seminal work The Gift.