Text Morrigan Fogarty
Image Alžbeta Szabová
This is an article about falling into a trap and writing about nothing. I got my first acoustic guitar when I was sixteen years old, and if I were to list the number of different guitars, basses, keyboards, and synthesizers I’ve gone through from then to here, this would turn into an article about my own self masochism. There’s a notable absurdity to the many years I’ve played guitar, namely that I’ve only memorized about three songs. I’ve been obsessed with the instrument, I worked as a guitar technician briefly, I’ve memorized chord progressions, scales, and weird tunings, and I’ve played hard enough to bleed so often I think I can register some of my instruments as kin. But at the same time, the only song I can play entirely from memory is the “Whistle Theme” from the video game Deadly Premonition (a game I haven’t even played). This opens a host of questions, why do we play instruments? Why do I play instruments? What does it mean that I only make music in sporadic bursts, with no care about how it's being recorded or understood by others, what's the point of me making art purely for myself? Why keep playing the instrument, why call myself a guitarist? After all, I’m sure some wouldn’t be happy with me calling myself one. In essence, I play the guitar for the art of doing nothing, no goal, no reward, just doing nothing. Killing time, wasting time, idling, laying about, lolling about, beating time with a hammer, resting, slouching, being the idle hands of the devil you were warned about, that's what I play guitar for. Is it fun? Sometimes, but sometimes it's frustrating, most of what I mean when I say doing nothing is playing chords and scales in patterns that you could argue are actually songs if I bothered to write them down, but I don’t, I can’t be bothered, I’m just doing nothing. I want to make a clear statement about what this article is about, I’m not trying to make some grand claim about bringing back the art of doing nothing, if anything I think we do nothing a lot more than we realize, and I’m not really interested in addressing a host of different questions such as:
Are my feelings towards my own hobbies deeply affected and ruined by capitalism?
Have we become such a hyper-individualized and work-centric society that playing music, something that can do great work at bringing people together, is instead more fun for me when I’m playing alone?
Does art have to have a purpose?
I have no answers to these questions, and people more qualified than me can probably introduce a lot more nuance or critique of these ideas. However, I think there’s a fundamental concession about art, in that it seems to want to be used to communicate something, I’d argue this is close to “the point of art”, at least for me. It also means that when I spend hours playing chords and scales pointlessly, I don't think that I’m “doing art”, but if it starts to sound like the notes and chords are evoking something, a mood or a feeling, and I show this arrangement of sounds to someone else, then it's at least closer to my own definition of art. I don’t know if I fully agree with myself. I don’t think art has to do something to be art, but I still feel this urge to label what I’m doing as not art because it doesn’t feel like it. I think I've written the word art so much it doesn’t look like a word anymore. It doesn’t lack anything or feel incomplete, it just feels like nothing.
There are definitely larger systems at play in this, multiple people more equipped than me have tackled the idea of “wasting time” and come up with a host of explanations. Maybe we feel like leisure time is a waste because of the hellish conditions of late-stage neoliberal grindset capitalism. But this explanation doesn’t really change anything. I only think about the time of wasting when I’m taking time to think about it, when I’m actually doing the act of doing nothing I’m not thinking “Well shucks, looks like I’m showing late-stage capitalism who's boss!” I'm just playing an instrument pointlessly. There’s definitely a value in this process of doing nothing, it’s an outlet for emotion, it can help with anxiety, it's also just plain fun, but there’s still this strange need to explain it. To take a stand against pretentiousness by being even more pretentious and arguing that wasting time is a higher form of art, to connect my hobbies with global power structures, to write about doing nothing, all of this feels like as much of a waste of time as plucking a few notes on a string.
留言