By Lincoln Hancock

There’s a paradox at the heart of human understanding that makes belonging a tricky thing. 

The world before us is seductively full and present. We want this for ourselves, to manifest, to coincide, to be what we are. It seems so simple and foundational. But to apprehend a thing is to be not-it. We are a different kind of thing, a thing that apprehends the world. So we are in the world, but not of it. 

Our very awareness implies a distance or gap, an otherness. This is the necessary form of our knowledge of ourselves: our constructs of being and is-ness imply and contain a sort of emptiness, a void that serves as a constant backdrop against which we grasp the thing that is — its distance from us, and its distance from the other things in the world.    

So we know things through what they are not. Orange is not nothing, but it is also not-green, not-red, not-yellow. Yet what makes orange orange eludes us. We can go on at great length to describe visible spectrums and optical mixing and the behavior of light and the work of Matisse but to really get to orange we have to talk about what it’s not. 

This is strange but essential. It’s what makes us human. In the vast canvas of plenitude, all that is, we apprehend ourselves at a distance from the world. We can’t simply coincide, we can’t just be, like a color or a thing or even an idea of a thing. Through being aware, we sense we’re inherently other-than. We are other-than the world, other-than the people in it, other-than our very selves as we reflect on who we are. We exist as something elusive at core. In such a metaphysical lurch, how can we even begin to think about belonging?

This fraught territory is where we must begin. But for those of us who are artists and designers and musicians, the urge to define and understand ourselves against the backdrop of the world is even more intense. It’s not just a matter of ontological necessity, but a thing we desire. We must articulate our difference to ourselves, to others. The road to becoming who we are goes right through understanding what we are not. 

We reckon with the immensity of it all, feeling the weight of the things and ideas of things in the world fixed in the perilous gaze of others, who we know see us as certain types of things in a world of their own. We’re chased by those that want to name us, to pull us down into static, opaque, eminently describable thingness. Artists want nothing more than to escape such a fate.

We devise strategies to wriggle free of the traps others set for us. Italo Calvino posits lightness as an operating principle, a means of eluding “the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world” (Six Memos for the Next Millenium, 4). Against the calcifying heaviness of Medusa’s stare:

Perseus’s strength always lies in a refusal to look directly, but not in a refusal of the reality
in which he is fated to live; he carries the reality with him and accepts it as his particular burden (5). 

It is the blood of the slain Gorgon that births Pegasus and enables Perseus to take flight. The artist’s work, as a kind of jailbreak from a panopticon of prefixed meaning and moral surveillance, is not a wanton or random act. It is a meaningful and creative gesture, enabled precisely by an acknowledgement of one’s relationship to the world. As Calvino says, lightness is not denial of what is, but rather a means of seeing “from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification” (7). 

Our “particular burden” as artists is precisely this agency that springs from our difference. Calvino quotes Paul Valery: “Il faut être léger comme l’oiseau, et non comme la plume.” (One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather).
Don’t float, fly. 

A journey and practice in art, design, music is an ongoing dialogue and dance between is and is-not. It begins with an impulse, which might be spontaneous or reactive. A moment of clarity, an apprehension of oneself as a different kind of thing in the world. A glimpse of possibility there might be more to all this. Then, quickly, an awareness that there are others who see things similarly. Against the grain, a sense of belonging, a tribe.

But even here, we dance. We fit and don’t fit. We can’t live without each other, and we’re at each other’s throats. We make beautiful things. We make ugly things. 

It doesn’t matter. We make. 

The critic Calvin Tompkins described contemporary practice as “among other things, an approach to the problem of living.” I think about this a lot. In relation to belonging, it carries added resonance. The problem of living is loneliness, the problem is being lost. The problem is being misunderstood, the problem is systemic, the problem is poverty. Our approach as artists, designers, musicians, and humans is to answer the problem through the means we have. We organize, we compose, we diagram, we research, we experiment, we lobby. The problem is noise, we meditate. The problem is boredom, we make music. The problem is painting, we paint. The problem is something doesn’t work, we design something better.  

It is our situation in the world — as both part of things and part not — that is our agency. Against all that seeks to determine our station, we are free to interpret, to reconsider, to remake. Indeed, we have a responsibility to do so. But the project need not be grand. The decisions and commitments we make each day, each moment, are as critical and demand as much care and attention. This constant burden can be nerve-wracking, anxiety-inducing. Sartre and others described it as terrifying, as anguish.    

I don’t think it has to be quite so dramatic. I’m not sweating it as much as I used to, anyway. Art and design and music are psychic support structures. Projects and ideas are out there. Each one is a place to belong, even if only for a little while. They bring us together in a swirl of history, context, emotion, possibility, humanity. They make things, we make things. 

Then, soon, the space between us and the things we make reappears. This inherent restless dance of knowing and not-knowing, being and not-being, keeps us coming back to the questions at the heart of what it means to be here, to be alive, to be part of it all.