Experimental Art, Beans, Parenting

by Jefferson Hansen

"Some people never work a day in their life, don't know what work really means."  —Bob Dylan


This essay is not a put-down. I am merely asking us to look around more carefully.

Experimental art sometimes seems allergic to "soul." It deems it "sentimental," "overly simple," a "manipulation of feeling."

What is "soul"? When I, personally, think of the word, it has to do with a relationship between work and beans.

I know a fine person who once went to a farm to pick beans and develop his spirit. He walked around naked in the dirt, got muddy, thought about natural processes and probably became a better person in some ways.

There is nothing wrong with doing this. But it's not work. It's playing at work. And it's not "soul"; it's developing spirit.

When I think of "soul," I think of the following: wondering where the beans will come from for your baby's next meal, and working for them.

Deep country music, not the Nashville variety, often has soul. Think of how many deep country songs are, on the surface, about a lover, but underneath, about getting the beans for a child. And that's where soul resides. That's the magnetism we hear, if we choose to hear. The magnetism of food and the pull of parenting.

While cultural differences need to be respected, similar things can be said about blues and even soul music. I know that when I see Otis Redding on his knees screaming, "Good God almighty I LOVE you baby," I'm hearing, in addition, "Good God almighty where are the BEANS coming from."

I probably do not detect some artists—experimental or not—who, on one level or another, worried about the beans. I read or listen or watch and that aspect of their life may slip by me. But when I do think I detect one, I have never been wrong.

Some of these artists have been experimental, some not. As far as the non-experimental ones go,
I have often heard "complex" artists sneer at these people, dismissing them as "street," "sentimental," "bad."

As far as I recall, I have never heard an experimentalist who once worried about beans say such a thing—with the exception of people who may have been covering for the past shame of poverty.

Experimental art, as a variety of cultural dynamics, is often not deaf to soul, but, as already stated, allergic to it. It takes too much notice and tries to force it out, as if it is a contaminate.

This is a problem. Certain pieces of experimental art—and certain figures—get passed over. Examples? I hesitate to name them. It could be a little like outing someone.

How about we go at it more generally. In poetry, for example? Certain types of lyricism are deeply suspect in experimental circles. And I'm not talking about ridiculous confessional poetry—that movement was more bourgeois than the bourgeois. I am talking about a tough, sinewy, fleshy lyricism.

One that both reaches out to pull the contradictory vagaries of attention and awareness into some form of steady state, anchored by a hand that can bring in the beans when the chips are down. Or once did.

If this sounds gendered, it isn't meant to be. Who more than anyone knows how to get the beans in the kids' mouths when the chips are down—single mothers.

My point is not about art that addresses parenting and beans. My concern is with the short schrift given art that emerges in part from a consciousness formed, also in part, by worrying about beans. Soulfulness is sometimes too much for us experimentalists to bear.

A lot more needs to be said. Many experimentalists suffered and do suffer from poverty in part because of their choice of art. How much great art was funded on next month's rent, or next month's mortgage statement?

But this is another issue.

I am not pointing fingers. I only suggest that, before categorizing and dismissing too quickly, we look and listen and pay a little more attention. Why waste the riches?