Extract: Secret Art Powers, by Jo Randerson

What is the mysterious power of art to excite, confound, challenge and transform us? While artists themselves often struggle to articulate the value of their work, this volume describes artistic thinking as a mindset, a collection of secret powers that we all have access to. Identifying six areas of creative expertise - lies, multiplicity, fluidity, failure, live body, and imagination - Secret Art Powers shows how thinking like an artist can increase personal resilience, unleash innovation, dissolve unhealthy power relationships, and help us describe and navigate the complex situations we find ourselves in.

Extracted with kind permission from Secret Art Powers, by Jo Randerson, published by Barbarian Press. $35.00

From the chapter ‘The Power of Wrong’

FAILURE vs. SUCCESS

Try saying the word ‘failure’ out loud. For me it comes out as a sigh. But when I say the word ‘success’, my voice does a small air punch. Success has an upward aural lilt, like an Apple Mac starting up. It’s the sound of a ball going through a hoop, a skewer coming clean out of a cake, a tree dropping ripe fruit into your hand.

Failure, however, is the sound of your elbow knocking your grandmother’s coffee cup off the table, the cup you drink out of every morning to remember her. It’s the sound of smashing ceramic and the sight of coffee stains on your trousers; failure is a grainy, bitter smell that lingers through your day. If you were a drama teacher, a parent of two kids, like me, you might find yourself grappling with this sense of failure, standing there in your dirty pair of pants, reflecting on your life choices as your students stare back at the strange, fatigued human in front of them. And then you might take a breath and take a risk and say, ‘I’m not having a great day.’ And the students might stare for a while, and you might think, ‘Whoops, I probably shouldn’t have opened up there, that was unprofessional.’ And then Shanaea, one of the quiet ones, might start telling you about their bad day. And then everyone might join in and suddenly the whole class is improvising amazing scenes based on ‘bad days’, it might be one of the best classes of the year, and when you go home that night, you might remember how your grandmother used to laugh whenever something went wrong, and you might glue the broken coffee cup back together and put a plant in it, so you can keep remembering her. (Some of this actually happened.)

Right from the start, we separate 'winners' from 'losers' and are fixated with who is going to come first. We even like to bet on it. We shout ourselves hoarse watching two players duke it out on a tennis court or on a patch of grass trying to get an oval ball over a post. (By the way, is an oval a failed circle?)

We glorify undefeated sports teams. We place victors at the top of the pyramid. They are awarded medals, prizes, cash stacks; the media pursue them for interviews. No one is interested in the losers. The losers retreat quietly to nurse their wounds; they resolve to try harder next time.

Meanwhile the winners puff themselves up, strut around and occupy more space. A psychology experiment using a deliberately stacked game of Monopoly showed that those who were winning physically spread out more, spoke more loudly and also ate more from the snack bowl on the table. ‘Winners’ absolutely dominate the airtime.

And why wouldn’t you want to come first? Why would the Australian poet Michael Leunig write:

Give us a stray dog when we expect congratulations.

Michael, get away with your mangy animal. We are winning here.

As a twelve-year-old, I remember seeing these words in a Whitcoulls bookshop:

If you’re not failing then you're not trying hard enough.

It was written on a fridge magnet (with a picture of a goofy lizard), and the sentence went deep into my pre-teen heart, while I stood in that stationery store, looking for an A4 refill pad. ‘I have to get better at failing,’ that young version of me thought, ‘contrary to what the education system is teaching me’. Then I bought four blocks of fudge and caught the bus home to watch The A-Team.

Failure is often embraced theoretically. Entrepreneurs love it. Shiny young guys, with a takeaway latte in hand, call out from the window of their hybrid SUV that we should fail our way to success; that’s how they got to be king of their world. But it’s easy to talk about failure once you have overcome it. Despite the breezy rhetoric of fridge magnets and Clip Art, it’s a real challenge to stand in the losing moment and not feel shame, humiliation, and embarrassment—or rather, to feel those emotions and to be okay with it.

The Western world is not resilient to failure, not bodily practiced with this outcome, no matter how many fridge magnets we acquire. A business magazine I browsed recently featured ‘Ten Reasons Why Businesses Fail’ alongside an article ‘Why

Embracing Failure is Good for Business’. There’s clearly some cognitive dissonance here. We buy the theory but struggle with the actuality, in the same way that people support wind farms but don’t want them near their houses.

Failure is normal and it’s healthy. Everyone on this planet fluffs the goal, forgets vital information, breaks objects or relationships. We also all have wins; we hit the target sometimes in some ways, but this can never be constant. This is helpful to remember as a parent - I was deeply calmed by a therapist who told me, ‘If you’re a good parent 30% of the time, that’s enough to establish solid relationships with your child.’ Forget the 100% goal.

Our lives are a dynamic cocktail of ‘winning’ and ‘losing’. Failure and success both grow together and are in vital relationship with each other, just as the underground roots of a tree grow equally and as expansively as the above-ground leaves and branches. One direction strengthens the other.

But in the stories we tell, we focus on our success. We are comfortable when we have done well, when our achievements are on display—most Westerners sit contentedly in this position. We brush quickly over the difficulties, the pain, the

losses, yet it’s this part of the story where the most learning is, as most of us know from experience. There are many good reasons why we keep failure hidden, and some are important for survival. But hiding the uncomfortable parts of our existence makes them more eager for attention. They grow stronger and exert a greater hold on our psyches. It’s healthy to practice being genuinely cool about losing, and then the word ‘loser’ won’t sting us. Because failure is very useful; it’s the way that we grow.

As Nelson Mandela said:

I either win, or I learn.

My mother would always lead with failure.

scene

At JO’s home, dinner time. The family are present plus a guest, JO’s friend.

MUM pulls a hot dish out of the oven and places it on the dinner table.

MUM: It’s a lamb roast, it’s burned, it’ll be horrible.

FRIEND: Oh, it looks great, not burnt at all.

MUM: No, see these bits on the side? They’re completely overdone (pointing emphatically at a few slightly brown spots).

FRIEND: Well, I think it looks amazing. I’m just very grateful to be fed. Thank you.

MUM: Honestly, I may as well throw the whole thing in the rubbish. Still, I guess it’s better than nothing. Oh well, blessings on the food.

Short silence. FRIEND looks a little confused but starts eating, unsure whether to praise the meal or agree with MUM that it’s burnt. Like, what is the correct protocol here? MUM looks comfortable, relaxed. JO laughs erratically.

end scene

I’m still not exactly sure what Mum was trying for here, but this is a pretty deep practice in my family-of-origin. I could say that she intellectually embraces the concept of failure and takes as many opportunities as she can to act it out in real time, so that her body can accept the action at a cellular level. But there’s other dynamics in there too; like a lack of self- esteem which many women of her generation have. It could also be a strategic manoeuvre, a kind of ‘fishing’ perhaps; if you make the stakes low at the start then everyone might be more effusive with their praise.

Generally though, it’s not easy to make mistakes and be ok with it. Pushing the boat out is a big challenge not only for creatives but for all humans, yet this is the only way we will reach our potential. Venturing bravely away from the shore is the way that Aotearoa was discovered by Polynesian navigators, and this courageous energy runs deep in this country. We just need to tune in to it. Artists practice this daily, heading into the unknown, and being ready to embrace whatever comes over the horizon. Secret Art Powers is available in bookstores now.