“Hey, Gerrit, you’re a knob!”
I’m in high school. The person calling me a knob is Mark. We’re friends. He’s walking to class. I feign indignation and decide to retaliate. I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that I need to make my retort larger than life. In a 100th of a second I go through my vocabulary of profanities. I have some truly awful things I can say, but I decide I have to go bigger. What is bigger than calling him a ‘Charlie Uniform November Tango’?
I look around. We’re around the side of the boarding house. I’m standing in the middle of an unkept field. I find my answer. There’s a broken dining room chair, once used as a goalpost, but now discarded in the overgrown and patchy grass. A second later the chair tumbles through the air. It’s headed for Mark’s head. He looks confused, slightly stunned, but only for a moment. He gathers himself and steps to one side as the chair clatters on the cement path he was walking on.
Mark looks at the chair, back at me. “You’re a fucking psycho, you know that?”
An hour later I’m sitting in a doctor’s surgery. I hadn’t noticed the screw sticking out of the stile that I used to pick up the chair. The screw had gouged a chunk out of one of my fingers in my right hand. Twelve stitches and two hours later I was back at the boarding house dining room, gingerly maneuvering my knife as I cut through a slice of greenish meatloaf. Mark walks past me, sees the bandage on my hand. He laughs and shakes his head.
“You’re a fucking psycho.”
What’s the point, other than don’t throw chairs?
I find it astonishing how many moments in my life resemble that afternoon. How often the decision to play by the rules, or to redefine the rules presents itself. In almost every moment there’s an opportunity to drastically escalate a response or exaggerate a gesture which will allow you to reframe a situation or a discussion.
I call it escalation; the act of looking beyond the expected and significantly uping the stakes in order to change the nature of a conversation or garner a reaction. It is one of my favourite creative tools. Identifying a moment where you abandon convention and go to a space where few allow themselves to go. And since the day I tore a star-shaped wedge out of my finger, I’ve seen artists use escalation everywhere.
Picasso’s Guernica is an ‘escalated’ antiwar statement:
Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child (Divided) is an escalated commentary on understanding the living, questioning perspective, and religious imagery.
And then there’s Cormac McCarthy’s book, The Road. An escalation of the relationship between a father and child.
Why escalation is important?
Escalation doesn’t only lead to good art.
A man who’s thinking and writing I’ve admired since I was very young, Noam Chomsky once said:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
Once you give it some thought, it is breathtaking to consider how few topics we’re actually willing to discuss. And the topics vary depending on the setting. Think about what how narrow the scope of subjects are that are deemed appropriate to raise in a meeting or with your boss. Or take a moment to realise just how easy it would be for you to get fired if you raised that one thing that people only ever whisper about at the office party, or acknowledged that elephant that’s been standing in the corner for the past decade. Every business has its unique taboos.
That’s what Chomsky was talking about.
And then think about our social system. What don’t we talk about? What topics would we fear to raise because we’d be labeled crazy, insensitive, radical, weird, unhinged? I’ll give you an example, I’m vegan. I have very strong feelings about eating animals, and yet I haven’t discussed any of them here, on this site, mostly out of fear. Eating animals is something that we don’t discuss openly. It’s a trivial and unnecessary discussion. And those who wish to have the discussion are labeled sanctimonious hippies. I haven’t had the courage or the desire to escalate that conversation – yet.
It is escalation that allows us to break free of the limited spectrum of acceptable opinion. It’s through stating the objectionable, being uncouth, or doing the unacceptable that we get to shift the paradigm – albeit, in the beginning, briefly.
It takes courage to open a valuable window through which we can explore the outer reaches of what we allow ourselves to think and say. And the more we go to those outer limits the more acceptable they become. And, eventually, a once taboo topic is normalised and our dissident views deliver change.
Queen Victoria said;
Beware of artists. They mix with all classes of society and are therefore most dangerous.
The artist is the one who allows herself to see the broader picture, to walk outside the norms and demand we have the debates that makes us all feel uncomfortable. Escalation isn’t a weapon. Instead, it’s a crowbar that wrenches open minds and allows people to explore beyond the edges of the map of civility. And it is used predominantly by artists. It’s how they shout the truth and get our attention.
But escalation isn’t exclusive to artists
Escalation can be a destructive force. In a war if you are willing to do what your enemy won’t ever consider you have an advantage. So, if you escalate a conflict to the point where your opponent believes you’re willing to commit acts of unspeakable cruelty, acts that stand in opposition to their norms and values, you have an upper hand.
Likewise, I wasn’t an artist when I threw a chair at Mark. I was a kid looking for attention, trying to understand what it feels like to do crazy shit. I was experimenting with escalation without really understanding it.
Why we should experiment with escalation and try to be artists
Escalation is the process that allows us to break free from social centrifugal forces. It takes being strange, unpopular, and sometimes vulgar. And we are all capable of it. By pushing ourselves to find the madness in us we can explore larger ideas and maybe elicit change. And we sorely need more escalations, more vulgarity, more madness and more people willing to call themselves artists. Because that is the only way we can hope to address much of the stupidity plaguing our world.