The artist as destroyer and corrupter

I recently saw Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at the Pearl Theater in the Village.

Above all else, for a "problem play" I was stunned at the extent to which the playwright questions the issue of agency and power in relation to both life and art. Of course, there are the overriding themes of morality, love, justice and ultimately mortality but there is also a deep undercurrent of choice, and human agency throughout the work. Combined with this there is also this element of chaos, election and self-deceit as to one's own power.

Personally, I wondered to what extent Angelo's consternation at being infatuated with Isabella is the existential crises for all artists. We are drawn to, even capturde by beauty and its virtue but with the hope of destroying and owning it. The image here is artist as destroyer and corrupter. Paradox of course in this thinking. Sin that raises one up and virtue that is downfall (I paraphrase). And throughout Angelo's agony, he is a slave, dissociated and unable to control himself. Picasso before Marie Teresse. Humbert before Lolita. The sexual metaphor is apt.

There is of course also a subsumed materialist critique here, actually both overt and hidden. Angelo is torn, schitzophrenic in his desire and the power of that desire over himself. Marx and Freud theorized that what passes for reality is in fact shaped and driven by forces of which we are aware only indirectly. This is apt. In measure for measure, the play within a play that is justice, life and love are just a theater of ideas, a blink and wash of the pen over paper, made real only before an audience. Why else does the Duke hide his intention for justice if only to make it the drama, the performance it is in the public sphere?

But overwhelmingly I felt drawn to that character, Angelo, as one that cannot but can only exist in that state of infatuation and fetishization. There is a constant pressure for the artist to define the constants and stakes of their own art; to objectify beauty, vision, warping the very mirror until the lense creates nothing but distortion... the trap is created for us all and we are setup to fail for a hungry public of kings and rulers unwilling or unable to define the absolutes, only able to dole out irony as judgment and mercy as compromise. Man bound on all sides of context, internal and external. Beauty herself is caught; Isabella is spun to the Duke for property, power or passivity.

I want an art without other. An art of beyond context, not pure sense, pure structure nor pure form but rather pure relation in which the art is Dionysian in its puruit. Let us drink with our gods and sleep with our playwrights. In that moment, we shall dance upon our canvases. Free at last.