How to Turn a Temper Tantrum into a Work of Art, Part One

How to Turn a Temper Tantrum into a Work of Art, Part One

Developing an Artistic Theory of Emotional Expression

You could see it coming as soon as you told your teenage daughter she couldn’t go to the mall with her friends. First, her face frowned. She looked as though some pressure was building inside. Then she erupted. I hate you, she roared. Then she stomped to her room, slammed the door, threw herself on her bed, and sobbed for an hour. She eventually came out and gave you the silent treatment for two days. What you just witnessed was not only an emotional expression, it was the beginnings of Art. 

A small part of her emotional expression was the universal response to bad news: the frown. A frown is seen worldwide and is easily recognized as the prototypical sign of dissatisfaction. It’s so iconic it’s featured in a common emoticon. ☹ A frown is an automatic reaction to bad news. No one needs to be aware of frowning and no one can stop from doing it. A frown will slip through, even if you plaster a smile on your face. It can be caught on a couple of frames of film.

However, your daughter’s frown was far from the only expression of emotion she displayed. She made a whole Broadway production out of her outrage. Indeed, as I will argue, emotional expression is the origin of art, any art, including the theatrical arts, which is what that was. Some say emotional expression is what makes art, Art.

By the way, we’re talking about Art in all its forms, from music and dance, to film and theater, to all kinds of literature; as well as the visual arts of painting, sculpture, fashion, and architecture. The people who say emotional expression is essential to art subscribe to the Expressive Theory of Art. The Expressive Theory of Art has its critics. I could go over the controversies[1], but that’s not the point of this essay. I’m more interested in developing something like an Artistic Theory of Emotional Expression.

The Artistic Theory of Emotional Expression
When she made a major production out of not being able to go to the mall, your daughter took the raw material of her disappointment from inside her and displayed it vividly to everyone in the house. This did two things. It relieved her of the burden of carrying her emotion herself and it communicated her distress to others, so they could carry it. I wouldn’t call her performance a fully worked piece of art, but it had the beginnings of one.

There are several steps your daughter must go through before her emotion can be fully transformed into art. She’s starting from a simple, automatic expression. Her frown was no more artistic than a raised heart rate would be when a boy she likes says hi. It was instinctive and automatic. But everything she did following the frown, had some art to it. The frown was not enough for her. It failed to capture the enormity of her disappointment or the urgency she felt about seeing her friends. You would have been likely to overlook a simple frown and not think you were out of line. Therefore, she knew she needed to intensify the display of emotions.

The First Step: Acting Out
The first step towards art is to act out the emotion. The building of pressure you saw in your daughter just before she erupted was the beginning. It was a narrative prelude to her subsequent behavior, like the mounting music that precedes a crescendo. She needed to demonstrate her emotions intensifying till she couldn’t contain them anymore.

The next bit of acting out were the words, I hate you, delivered in a hateful way. This involved the labeling of a feeling and its transmission to you. With these three words, she tried to evoke feelings of shame, guilt, and fear. Stomping away and slamming the door demonstrated her ability to separate herself from you. Crying in her bed was an instinctive expression of the grief of having a parent turn mean and not being able to see her friends; but crying so much and so loudly had some art to it. It amplified that grief for you to hear. The silent treatment was the final act of her drama, where she demonstrated a coldness towards you, denying that you meant anything to her.

When I say acting out was the beginning of art, I don’t mean she was insincere about her outrage or that it was forced in any way. By art, I don’t mean artifice. Her behavior started from the natural reaction of anyone disappointed. To that she added some flourishes that amplified them. It was like watching someone burst into song. People don’t naturally burst into song, but when they do so on stage, they reshape the sentiment expressed into something significant and memorable.

I also don’t mean to imply that she made a conscious choice in any way. She could have, but she didn’t write out a script for the play she just put on. Doing art at this level doesn’t require a lot of thought. Indeed, if you have ever acted out like your daughter, as I have, you would say that something took you over. In the old days, they said it was a demon. Today most blame their emotions. I think her ego, the part of her personality that tries to manage emotions, gave them some leash. A more highly skilled ego could have used the emotions towards the creation of art.

Simple acting out is not generally recognized as art. Submit the single line, I hate you, and no poetry magazine will publish it. Stomp around on film and you might win an Oscar, but stomp around in your home, and you’re just having a temper tantrum. Acting out is neither good art, nor original; but it was the best your daughter could do at the moment with the artistic and ego skills she had. Give her time to grow up, some art lessons, lots of practice, and she’ll learn to express her emotions in more elaborate, creative ways.

The Second Step: Adoption
It takes a great deal of skill to take emotional vomit and create a work that everyone recognizes as art. When most people begin to create real art, they start by adopting the art of others. So, before she begins to write her own songs, you’ll hear those of other people blasting from her room. She’s making someone else’s art, her art. She found some music that expresses her emotions well enough that she made it her own. If she holds on to her feeling of alienation long enough, she may also adopt fashions and hairstyles that express it. She’ll rebel against you by conforming to others. None of that’s especially original, nor does it need to be. She’s adopting art, rather than devising her own.

You should not underestimate the creative skill it takes for your daughter to put a poster up on her wall or to find music that expresses some feelings she’s having. It’s not the same as making all that art herself, but she may not feel she needs to if it’s already there to use. It’s akin to picking out the perfect greeting card for an occasion. You must be able to recognize your emotion in the sentiments of another and know just how it’ll strike the recipient.

The Third Step: Copying
The third step of transforming emotion into art is copying. She’ll produce, by her own hand, art that’s similar to others’. Her music will sound like someone elses’. Her first poems will be derivative, her early fiction formulaic. Visual artists will copy their masters, dramatists will speak someone else’s lines the way the stars do it. If your daughter were to continue the theatrical interests she showed when she was acting out, she might take up more elaborate forms. She’ll use drugs and get drunk, more to piss you off, than for the effect of the chemical. She’ll swear, sneak out, have sex, and hang around with undesirables to let you know what she thinks of your values. It’s not like she invented defiance. She saw her peers do it, liked the effect it had on their parents, and copied them.

Many artists never get past the copying stage. There are very good reasons to copy someone else’s style. There’s already a market out there for it. The consumers of established artforms don’t need to learn how to understand a new form. For the artist, copying is a good way to practice skills, to develop their craft. However, the emotions expressed in copied art are not fully her own, they belong to someone else with whom the artist has identified.

Even the greatest and most innovative works of art have been, to a large degree, copied. When James Joyce wrote Ulysses, a book that pioneered the use of stream of consciousness, he copied the plot and many of the characters from Homer’s Odyssey. When Picasso found a way to depict four dimensions on a two dimensional canvas in cubism, he was still putting paint on canvas, like Rembrandt. Completely original art would be illegible. It would be so new that no one would understand a thing about it. So new, that even the artist can’t conceive it. That’s what makes the achievement of the fourth step, even more remarkable.

The Fourth Step: Invention
People who fully transform emotion into art, take it all the way to the fourth stage, invention. Rather than copying other peoples’ fashions and hairstyles, they’ll devise those of their own. In music and literature, they’re the originators of new genres. Artists who’ve achieved this most creative stage are the founders of new movements, like the early impressionists. For them, copying has been suffocating; the conventions of the old masters, limiting. They’re seeking to express something that’s all their own. The old forms don’t allow them to do it.

Invention is probably how ordinary human activities first became art. Cave men were wiping their greasy, dirty fingers on cave walls for years before one discovered he could express his feelings that way. No one called it art until he invented painting. Subsequent painters copied the idea of painting from that caveman till painting became the prototypical art. In more recent years, Ansel Adams took photography, which had been conceived as a simple record of reality, and invented it as an art by manipulating images to convey a sense of awe and wonder. Artists in the invention stage are not only creative about transforming emotions into art, they’re creative about being creative.

Turning ordinary human activities into art may be the best way untrained artists can produce works of art. The cook who can’t draw, carry a tune in a bucket, goes blank when she must write, and is too bashful to go on stage can still turn her cooking into a work of art to the degree she expresses herself in her cooking.

In part two, we’ll take a closer look at acting out and how it can be turned into art.

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[1] Perhaps the best known proponents of the Expressive Theory of Art was Leo Tolstoy, but I would add Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, as well as the philosophers Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood. They saw art as a means for the artist to communicate their emotions to others, who in turn have emotions evoked by the artwork.

The critics of the Expressive Theory of Art point out that some art has nothing to do with feelings and is more about technique or craft. Some art even tries to deaden feeling, such as Andy Warhol said he tried to do with his multiple images of Marilyn Monroe. Still more art seems to be intent on teaching, persuading, or proving something.

The adherents to the Expressive Theory of Art would say, sure, but art that doesn’t communicate the emotions of the artist is not art. They say that’s the difference between art and pedagogy, art and rhetoric, or arts and crafts. There’s nothing wrong with pedagogy, rhetoric, or craft. They’re great, but they’re not art, a term that should be reserved for that which expresses emotion.

The critics say no one elected you to tell us how to use words. Furthermore, a lot of Art demands so much skill and takes so long to produce, that it would be impossible to sustain a single emotional state throughout the production of it. Moreover, many artists are drawn to art to escape their feelings. They get so involved in the methodical intricacies of their art that they enter an altered state, akin to hypnosis.

That could be, say the adherents of the Expressive Theory of Art; but that does not mean that emotional expression is not central to art. As Wordsworth said, Poetry [Art, for our purposes] is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. Recollecting the emotion in tranquility is the basic skill of every artist, as important as a musician knowing her scales, a painter knowing how to mix paints, or a writer knowing where to put a comma. The actor who, day after day, gets up on stage to play Hamlet doesn’t need to be as indecisive as Hamlet both on and off stage. He gets himself into an indecisive state when he’s preparing to play Hamlet. He does this by remembering a time when he felt uncertain and recreates that feeling on stage.

Finally, the critics say some of the emotions associated by the artwork can be different from what the artist intended. The emotions expressed in art are not those of the artist, but of those who regard the artwork.

That may be the case, say the adherents of the Expressive Theory of Art, but that doesn’t mean the artist didn’t have her own emotions that went into the production of the artwork. The artist may seek to evoke emotions in those who regard her artwork, but she has little control over what they are. Every consumer of art brings their own history and associations to the piece.