What is Transformative Art?

I don't make a regular habit of reading scientific journals but today, after doing a bit of web sleuthing, I came across an incredibly provocative article in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience about the meaning and practice of Transformative Art.  It’s by an Israeli neuroscientist named Son Preminger and I can’t recommend the article highly enough, particularly if you’re open to the possibility of transforming the way you think about artistic experience. (You can find it here.) The article is not overly technical and it is remarkably well written, given the conceptual complexity and difficulty of discussing the meaning and value of art in terms of neuroscience.

What drew me to read Preminger’s article was my experience listening to the Apology Line program tapes made by Allan Bridge from 1983 through 1995.  (If you're not familiar with Allan's work, you can learn more about it here.) I’ve been trying to better understand Allan’s artistic legacy, having spent the last 6 months listening to hundreds of hours of his audio recordings, in preparation for our work on the upcoming ApologyLine podcast.  It’s more than 40 years since Allan first set up his answering machine, and more than 25 years since his death, when the Apology Line fell silent, and yet the Apology recordings have lost none of their power or fascination and, if anything, they have only grown richer in meaning over the intervening years.  How many works of art can claim that sort of enduring power?

It struck me that one key to Allan’s artistic triumph is that the Apology Line exercises a transformational power on its audience.  That, quite literally, was Allan’s stated intention in undertaking the project – to help callers to the Line turn over a new leaf.  How that worked in practice is a fascinating subject, which we will explore in detail in our podcast.  But as a general matter, how does Art come to possess such a transformational power?  Is there, in fact, such a thing as Transformational Art?  Not that I had ever heard the term used before, but I felt certain this concept must have been previously explored, either in the realm of art criticism or aesthetic theory.  Thanks to a little bit of Google searching, that’s how I came across Preminger’s article in a neuroscience journal.

This brief blogpost is not the place for me to summarize the full range of Preminger’s thoughts on the subject. Besides, as I said above, her article is really worth reading for yourself.  Instead, what I simply want to do here is highlight a few ways in which the Apology project can be perhaps best understood as an exemplary work of Transformational Art.

·      Art as an engineered experience.  Preminger as a neuroscientist has a somewhat unique way of describing and thinking about an artist’s work.  In her words, “artists can be viewed as experts in controlling and manipulating humans' perceptions as well as the emotional and cognitive experience that they induce.”  This seems true of painters, writers and moviemakers alike.  And it seems particularly apt when it comes to a conceptual artist such as Allan Bridge, who very deliberately crafted the Apology Line as a means to foster anonymous confessions that would lead to personal insight and growth, both for the callers and listeners to the Line.

·      Art May be Deliberately Constructed to Promote Transformational Experience.  Once we recognize that a work of art is specifically designed in order to control and manipulate human perceptions as well as the emotional and cognitive experiences that accompany them, it follows that certain artistic experiences may be created with express intention of fostering human transformation.  Or as the neuroscientist Preminger more precisely puts it: “Given that brain and cognition have the capacity to be molded by artistic experiences, art can be created in a way that takes this knowledge into account and utilizes it to generate transformative experiences with particular artistic or rehabilitational goals in mind.”  This describes the workings of the Apology Line quite precisely.  The original inspiration for creating Apology stemmed from Allan’s earlier experience building a sculptural machine called Crime Time which directly served a rehabilitational purpose for Allan himself, as it proved instrumental in helping him stop shoplifting.  From the outset, he conceived of the Apology Line as a way to serve a similar purpose for a more general audience of callers and listeners.

  

·      Transformational Art may be most effective when designed as a repeatable experience.  Preminger notes that the viewer’s experience of art is most typically part of a singular encounter rather than repeated. Of course, if there’s a painting you particularly love or a favorite movie, you may go back to see it many times.  But when the artist or moviemaker creates the work in the first instance, they will usually craft it to be self-sufficient on a single viewing.  Preminger, on the other hand, suggests that one of the hallmarks of Transformational Art is that it is deliberately designed to be repeated in order to achieve its desired transformational effect.  In her words, it is “art could be viewed as a medium that by instigating repeated experiences may induce long-term changes and serve as means for modification, improvement, and rehabilitation of various cognitive functions.”    One of the truly remarkable aspects of the Apology Line is how it exercised a continuing hold on both callers and listeners, many of whom were repeat callers and actively participated in the Apology community for most if not all of its 15-year duration.

 One more point I want to make about how Apology fits so aptly within the category of Transformative Art.  This isn’t something derived from Preminger’s article but something I realized myself as I have continued to contemplate the nature of Allan’s work.  When he first set out to create the Apology Line, Allan approached it very much in the framework of the traditional art world.  He collected recordings on his answering machine and then played them back in a series of gallery and museum exhibits.  This was avant garde conceptual art but nonetheless it was work that he managed to present through the art world’s established gatekeepers. But gradually, by producing his program tapes and playing them back over his answering machine, Allan weaned himself away from the art world and found a way to reach his audience directly.  As a result, Allan’s connection to the established art world became tenuous and the Apology Line’s classification as a work of art became increasingly problematic. Was it art, online therapy or a sociology experiment? -- even today it’s not easy to say.  And that is one more bit of evidence of the Apology Line’s transformative power – it was a transformative work of art that managed to transform itself along the way, breaking outside our conventional categories and providing us with an utterly singular transformative experience.

We hope to share this transformative experience with a new audience of listeners when our podcast launches later this year.  Click here to join our mailing list.

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My cousin Susan emailed me after reading this blogpost and pointed out that I failed to mention musicians in the discussion above, specifically in the paragraph where I discuss how writers, painters and moviemakers all demonstrate the various ways in which artists become adept in controlling and manipulating human perception, emotion and cognitive experience.  Of course, Susan is absolutely right; this is an obvious omission, inasmuch as music is paradigmatic of how effective art can be in shaping all three -- perception, emotion and cognition.  If I recollect correctly, Preminger specifically notes that music's transformative potential is significantly enhanced since we are much more likely to listen again and again to a favorite song or sonata compared to how often we are inclined to reread a favorite novel.

It's also worth noting that Susan's deep appreciation for music's transformative power is very much shaped by her practice as a music therapist.  All art therapists (whether musicians, painters, actors, etc.) are on the front lines in creating and performing transformational art, inasmuch as their art practice is done with a very clear and specific rehabilitational purpose in mind. 

There is this difference, though, between Allan's work on the Apology Line and the work of an art or music therapist.  In a hospital, school or rehab setting, an art therapist directs his or her practice towards the benefit of a specific student or patient population.  Allan's art practice was much more of a free form operation, in which he served as a general and wandering practitioner of transformative art.  His efforts were directed towards anyone who took the time and trouble to drop a dime and call the Line.  And in some respects, the transformative effects of Allan's work extended equally well to those who left messages as well as those who just listened to the program tapes, as I hope you'll have a chance to hear for yourself once the Apology podcast goes on air.     

      

The Apology Podcast Coming in 2020

Apology Line on Exhibit at the New Museum in 1983

October 2020 will be the 40^th anniversary of the inception of the Apology Line, the ground breaking conceptual artwork created and operated by Allan Bridge for 15 years, until his untimely death in August 1995. So next year is a double anniversary of sorts – a chance for us to acknowledge the birth of Apology and the death of Mr. Apology in the very same breath.

Having been out of operation for almost 25 years now, the Apology Line nonetheless remains a work of art that feels very much of the present moment.  It is one of those artworks that will never lose its hold on our imagination.  Which is funny because inside the art world Allan Bridge and the Apology Line are still virtually unknown – a strange fate for an artist of such extraordinary vision and talent.  Even more remarkable when you consider that Allan is one of a small handful of modern artists whose work, over the years, has been the subject of enormous media coverage, including hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, countless radio interviews, and an HBO movie.  In fact, Allan Bridge is right up there along with Vincent Van Gogh and Jackson Pollack in terms of the level of interest that Hollywood has shown in his career, and yet to date, Allan’s work has never amounted to more than a footnote, if that, in the vast body of criticism and history that’s been written about  20^th century art. Allan’s diverse body of painting, sculpture and conceptual work has not been displayed in a gallery or museum show in more than 35 years.  For now Allan remains something of a prophet without honor in his own land – a modern artist whose work may be more familiar to viewers of late night television than to the patrons of fine art museums and galleries.

One reason Allan’s work remains undiscovered and unknown by the art world is that he more or less turned his back on the art world, at least when it came to the Apology Line.  When he started the project in 1980, he was still thinking and working in the framework of a traditional artist, looking for opportunities to display his work to the public in a museum show. He began the Apology project by setting up an answering machine attached to a dedicated telephone line in his loft. Then, he put up posters throughout New York City, inviting criminals and wrongdoers to call and apologize for their misdeeds.  It is to the people you must apologize, the posters proclaimed, not to the state, not to God.  Almost immediately the phone began ringing and Allan spent the next 18 months recording hundreds of apologies which constituted the raw material for his new work. In order to exhibit the work, he devised an installation piece, which consisted of four telephone booths, set up as listening stations, so the calls could be played on a loop and heard by visitors.  The first exhibit of Apology was held at the New Museum in New York City in 1981, followed by four more museum and gallery shows over the next two years.  But then Allan had another breakthrough idea about how to make use of the evolving answering machine technology in order to share his work more directly with the public, outside the confines of the art world.  His answering machine could serve as a means both to record and play back calls to anyone who wanted to listen.  So in October 1983, Allan prepared the first in what would turn out to be a long series of program tapes, in which he compiled a selection of the most interesting calls he had recorded in the preceding weeks, and then played them back for callers to hear as the outgoing message on his answering machine.  In this way, Allan found a way to share his work directly with the community of callers, which effectively freed him from the constraints of the art world.  Allan felt this means of sharing the recordings was far preferable to a museum show.  After all, it was to the people to whom an apology was owed, not to God, not to the state, nor to the museum-going public.  It was the callers themselves with whom Allan most wanted to share the fruits of his labor.

To say that the Apology Line outgrew its origins in the art world is by no means to suggest that the project altogether lost its relevance or significance as a work of art.  Far from it, in fact.  Looking at the project with the benefit of more than twenty-five years hindsight, it’s possible to see how Apology expressed and reflected some of the most important trends of late 20^th century art.  The Apology Line is a signature work of conceptual art, inasmuch as the concept of apology and its importance in human experience lies at the very center of the entire work.  Every one of the more than 200 program tapes that Allan produced over the course of 15 years is an elaboration on this underlying theme.  The Apology Line can also be understood as an extended piece of performance art – a communal performance piece carried out by Allan and the callers to the Line over its 15-year live span. To think of the Apology Line in these terms is not to diminish the gripping emotional intensity of many of the calls.  But when you listen to the incredible range of voices Allan captured over the years, even including those filled with desperation and great pathos, there is a performative element to virtually all of them.

But while Allan’s work retained a deep connection to various artistic movements of the late 20^th century, the Apology Line developed profound significance beyond the aesthetic realm.  Among other things, the Line can be appreciated as an extended psychology experiment, in which Allan plumbed the depths of criminal and deviant behavior, and also devised a means to provide help to those in emotional extremis through an utterly novel form of group therapy.  At the same time, the Apology Line is distinguished as a deeply spiritual exercise – an anonymous, secular telephone confessional that provided a well-spring of renewal for many of its callers.  “Forgiveness is an art form,” as the writer Richard Smoley has observed. “Like all arts, it requires a subtle discrimination, a precise understanding of one’s material, and a light touch that strikes the balance between inadequacy and excess.” The Apology Line provided a vehicle for practicing the art of forgiveness, for those who called and left apologies, made comments and even for those who merely listened. Allan saw Apology as a grass roots movement that in many ways could serve as a substitute for conventional forms of religious practice in a more secular age, a mechanism for developing our capacity for empathy and compassion.  Beyond the spiritual dimension, Allan’s achievements also extend to the realm of technology inasmuch as the Apology Line came to function as the world’s very first virtual community; using nothing more than an answering machine connected to the public telephone network, Allan built a community of callers who engaged in a continuous (albeit asynchronous) dialog for a dozen years.  And finally, the program tapes he compiled are also remarkable to the extent they represent the very first instance of podcasting – a short format audio program distributed over a public network, in this case it just so happened to be the Bell telephone network Allan used, which enabled him to pioneer this concept a decade before the world wide web came into existence.

For all these reasons, Marissa and I are tremendously excited that we are going to have the opportunity to reintroduce Allan’s work to an entirely new audience in the coming year.  And what better way to do it than by means of a podcast – a medium that Allan himself pioneered.  We’re working with the podcasting network Wondery to develop a multi-part series that should be ready for release in commemoration of the Apology Line’s 40^th anniversary next October.  I think it’s going to be a very unique and powerful series.  For the last several months, I’ve had a chance to take a deep dive into the Apology archive; listening to the original program tapes that Allan produced, I've been stunned by the collection of stories and human truths stored in the calls he captured on tape.  It’s a remarkable journey, an incredibly well-preserved time capsule of American life from the 1980’s and 1990’s; but the Apology Line is of far more than historical interest.  It is truly a celebration of the human voice and its capacity to express the deepest emotional and spiritual truths.  I hope you will join us on the journey so you can experience the rebirth of the Apology Line when it is brought back online next year.  

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