Spalding Gray: Tell Stories, Listen — Make Art

In an interview in 1991, Spalding Gray said:

“Personal storytelling is very important to me because we’ve become so media-ized that we begin to think the stories the stars tell on Johnny Carson are more important than ours. And whenever I interview people, interview the audience onstage, and I draw their stories out, the audience begins to realize it is a radical move. That everyone has interesting stories if they can learn how to shape them. If I am a preacher, or a proselytizer at all, it’s to say, ‘Get together with friends, tell stories, listen. Turn off the TV, put down the book, listen to a story.’ Because the more we are fragmented and the more people are moved around and are in motion and the bigger this country gets and the more media-ized it gets, tied together only through television, the more healing it is to tell personal stories about your day. It gives you a personal history, and it gives you a sense of existence and place.”

(Jeffrey Goldman, “Dancing with the Audience: A Conversation with Spalding Gray, Actor, Writer, Monologist, and Connoiseur of Neuroses,” Dramatics 63 (November 1991), pp 24 – 29)

If we are in need of testimony as to the importance of participation in the arts, Gray’s words provide it. What he refers to as being “media-ized” is actually the process that turns art into a commodity and the public into passive consumers who buy their creativity instead of doing it themselves.

Study after study shows that after a certain income level (a few thousand dollars over the poverty line), happiness flattens out — no matter how much money you have, no matter how much you can buy, happiness doesn’t increase. By turning the arts into something that is done by a specialized “creative class” and that is sold to a passive audience, we have removed one way to actually increase personal happiness.

Sharing your story, molding your life experience into narrative and sharing it with people,  as Gray notes, “gives you a personal history, and …gives you a sense of existence and place.” When we substitute corporate-created mass art for the stories of our own lives, our own experiences we lose a sense of history and of place. We end up living in some abstract sphere of imagination that has nothing to do with the details of our day to day lives.

When I started on the journey of this project, I was totally committed to finding a way for artists to create their art in a local setting. Now that is secondary. Yes, I think artists creating art is important, but I also think artists need to facilitate the creation of others. They need to inspire people to “Get together with friends, tell stories, listen. Turn off the TV, put down the book, listen to a story.” Or sing a song, or paint a picture, or create a quilt. Within in context, the art that artists create can serve as object lessons, as something that others can learn from and aspire to — not simply something they can buy or consume.