It's Hard to be Scared When You're Being Amused
Before I studied art therapy I dabbled in various forms of creativity and never gave too much thought as to what I was doing. I was simply enjoying myself. Yet when I started to make collages a couple of years ago, I noticed the process as being particularly stress relieving. I wasn’t going through acute pressures at the time, so this sense of relief was surprising. I decided to pay more attention to what I was doing.
I knew I was drawn to collage because the art form often contains a cluster of order and chaos. As I paid more attention, I noticed I was cutting out images that were apparently unrelated to each other. On a fresh piece of paper I would then pair images by laying one thing on top of the other, seeing what felt “right” which at times took quite a while. This part of the process was frustrating. At some point during the rearrangements of elements I started to laugh and then I knew my image was complete. I had no idea if anyone else would find amusement or meaning in the images but I shared them anyway. They made me feel lighter, happier. Were they great art? Well… That question did not matter to me as I was enjoying myself and I certainly wasn’t charging anyone to look at them.
As I considered what I was doing, I noticed something about placing unrelated objects together to create a new image reminded me of the awkward and obscure disorderedness of my previous life experience. And yet, here on the page, everything in my picture-worlds were interrelated by the fact I had placed them together in time and space. Here on the page there was order and chaos and observing these tensions between things made me laugh.
So, I began to research humour.
According to the German philosopher Schopenhauer (in The World as Will and Representation, p.56, 1818), humour depends on the realisation of paradoxical incongruence between ideas and factual objects (puns, for example). Others point out that humour serves as a survival function; through humour we laugh as a physical release of tension, and are afforded “an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds”, according to Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) . Pete McGraw who is a leading researcher at the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado maintains in his TED talk that humour is predicated on violations, so we will laugh after a threat has turned out to be a benign threat (like a happy surprise). Our common lived experience also tells us that laughing plays an essential social role as it alerts others that everything in a situation is OK after a moment of tension. Laughing can be seen as a non-verbal invitation for others to join in on the communal stress-relief and experience a communal reassurance of well-being. That’s why laughing is contagious.
When I reflect on my collage making, I believe I was giving voice to incongruent experiences (in other words, pain) that had left me with a sense of confusion, disempowerment and fear. The meanings I had made about these ambiguities were sitting just below the surface of my immediate awareness, but as I played began to emerge as vague feelings of being ill-at-ease and frustration. My laughter as I “completed” these collages was a very pleasant surprise. As I played with the art form, my non-conscious desire to re-create incongruence and chaos via a benign form (on an A4 page), gave me the space to find my own sense of control and humorous pleasure in creating new personal meanings which restructured and continues to reform my experience of disorder and subsequent pain. My images make little rational sense, but the juxtapositions returned to me a sense of delight in the irrationality of life and my participation in it. My curiosity and willingness towards this form of creative expression brought a profound awareness in regards to my ability to be resilient when faced with the unavoidable and uncontrollable aspects of existence.
When I consider what I learnt in my art making in the light of thinkers much greater than myself, I am reminded of Schopenhauer, whose philosophy of pessimism and suffering has no doubt informed many a nihilistic Doomer. He was convinced that life was inherently riddled with inevitable pain, meaninglessness, chaos and ambiguity and human suffering is a direct result from our desire for more. Perhaps what we can all learn, pessimistic nihilist or not, is that meaningful art and our absorption in the creative process can help us get up and out of the sticky stuck-ness of past pain that lives on in the present. Schopenhauer believed (1818), as do I, that creative expression provides essential knowledge of (and relief from) the pressures of a disordered and unsatisfying world and in an age of increasing cynicism and material acquisition now seen as an acceptable life goal, this is a alternative viewpoint we need to hear.
A final thought: It’s been said that a way to disarm an autocrat is to laugh at jokes that aren’t theirs as it will subtly communicate to the power-hungry that they are not in total control of your emotional reality. My lived experience of negotiating with those who seek to control is that if we are in charge of our emotional reality, we are free from this externalised tyranny and harder to manipulate. When we laugh on our own terms, we are toppling inherent disempowering social power structures, redistributing emotional voices and giving space for meaningful inter-personal responses. This guardianship of our present emotional responding replaces blind obedience born out of fear.
If my collages taught me anything: it’s hard to be scared when you’re being amused.