What is art? What is an essay? How are the creation and the criticism categorized? When does analysis become an art form in itself? If you evaluate even this article right now, do I then become the creative instead of a critic, and you become the analyzer rather than the audience?
The Leftist Cooks, power couple Neil Farrell and Sarah Oeffler, attempt to answer these questions: through interviews with fellow video essayists, through the words of artistic exemplars like Orson Welles, Simone de Beauvoir and Oscar Wilde and through talking about the Muppet Gonzo singing about home. These disparate elements are organized into segments such that each addition feels fresh, but its entropy then comes to be expected — almost comfortable. This form is their first attempt to stay true to the work’s title, breaking down the video essay first in structure, then in intent. They come to the crux of the conflict between creation and criticism: how to categorize what we create.
Humans’ attempts to make the nonsense of the world make sense traps us in this issue. Does art arise from the work’s invention or interpretation? Would you say both? Can something really exist in both the giver and the receiver? These contradictions are created by our categorization, so we must be the ones to resolve them. The cons of categorization reach far beyond this artistic issue, however. Farrell stretches it into the stars, where they sing on Pluto being prohibited from the planets. The interviewees and interviewers extend it into themselves, where many of their current essayist positions arise from bodily and mental conditions that decategorize them from traditional work. Oeffler carries this categorization to the furthest possible end, discussing the creation of artificial barriers in all-too-real conflicts: race, gender, sexuality, class, disability. But of course, these essayists suffering from the crimes of categorization still encapsulate them all within art. Art still encompasses all of this.
So where do we push to and break these boundaries? How could categorization come to collapse? What could be at the basis of all that we do, all that we achieve, all that we are?
Well, maybe there’s love. There’s the connection that people make to its fullest extent, and then what isn’t love. No, there are still lines drawn there. There’s home, the spaces that love creates, the places where people feel loved — then there are the spaces they aren’t. There’s still a line there. What about existence? There is life, living, surviving, then there is not. There is death.
There is death.
Everything that art is and isn’t, everything that we can understand and cannot, everything that the world is and everything that it cannot contain — the weight of their discussion then breaks this video. As we enter Act 3, Farrell is in a forest and Oeffler is on a couch. The video switches between Oeffler’s partner and Farrell’s wife in the most indescribably vulnerable and beautiful monologues I have ever had uttered to me through a screen. I cannot describe it. I refuse to describe it, whether by my own analytical incompetence, artistic ineptitude or simply because you need to hear it for yourself. Maybe instead, I can tell you what it made me think of.
I thought of hearing about my friends’ almost and actual car accidents. I thought of seeing the grays slowly creep across my parents’ scalps. I thought of the taste of blood in my mouth, staring at the red that was spat into the sink as my heart began to pound.
What is art? What is an essay?
Is art an attempt at immortality? Do essays aim to enhance that attempt? Or is art just how we are — to create something simply because it didn’t exist yet? Are essays what expand how that art exists? Will art be what saves us? If art kills us, then will it let us live on? Maybe asking these questions isn’t the way to answer them. Maybe it’s holding your friends in your arms when you get to see them. Maybe it’s running your hands through your parents’ hair while you still can. Maybe it’s taking a swig of water to rinse your mouth and swallow your meds. Maybe it’s living a life worthy of art, made worthy by art. Maybe it’s looking the Reaper straight in his hollow eye sockets and ripping his robe to ribbons, fashioning the threads into a brush and using the inky black void as a palette. That can be art. This essay could be art. Whatever the case, know that “This is Not a Video Essay” is art, the kind that makes you feel like your life before viewing it was a different one. The Leftist Cooks have created something I will go back to someday, over and over — a work whose only flaw is that I didn’t watch it sooner. Please don’t repeat my mistake. Take part in the great art of our lives while you still can.
Digital Culture Beat Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.