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I have been battling the urge to write a windy post about the campaign soap-opera... and it turns out that I don't have to. Andrew Sullivan has made more sense of this madness than I ever could.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming--this is an art blog, right?
Big elephant-sized thanks to Timothy Buckwalter for letting me be part of his series on process today! Go check it out!
As regular readers of this blog know, I have been working to place bronze-and-steel monuments in a number of cities that will either vanish or face radical geographical change because of rising sea levels, hurricanes and other complications arising out of civilization. The first of these monuments, New Orleans Elegy, will be at Socrates Sculpture Park until the middle of May, and then must find a (relatively) permanent home in New Orleans.
In addition to placing Elegy in New Orleans, I am working on getting new, larger bronze monuments to loss placed in Galveston, Miami, Brooklyn, Venice and Amsterdam. In the present, these self-destructing maps are a potent reminder of our own fragility and the dynamic relationship between the earth and the built world. Over eons, they will become archival bronze artifacts--as permanent a record as possible of what each city once was.
To track the progress of this project, I have created a page on this blog called Monuments To Vanishing Cities. If you know any city planners, mayors or percent-for-art administrators to pass the URL along to, I would be much obliged.
I got a lot of good advice in graduate school. But the critique with the longest shelf life came from Steve Fagin, who watched about a third of a videotape of me doing bad performance art and, visibly agitated, kinda shouted that I should stop the tape. That he had watched enough. That "people have better things to do than deal with people like you on the street!"
That was it.
More useful words have never been spoken to me in a one-on-one context by anyone. Ever. I refer to this critique all the time. It reveals so much truth about how context works, and how arrogant artists are being when they think they can pole-vault over context. I don't just mean artists like you and me. I mean everybody. Serra is a god, but that doesn't change the fact that people had better things to do than deal with Tilted Arc.
I am interested in public art because this criticism infected me--because it is more deeply true than anything anyone else has ever said to me about public art. It wastes no effort on the idea that everyone should want art or that art is inherently good. It firmly declares that the artist hasn't any business acting like a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness.
An artist in public, then, is an artist that engages the street on the street's terms--or the campus on the terms of the campus itself, or the sculpture park as a park and not as a grassy gallery. The best public artists understand and trade on this relationship and actively deploy context.
Of course a painting goes unappreciated on a street
! A painting on the street is an obstacle!
Kim Dorland, from North at Freight+Volume
And I got a chance to walk through Chelsea yesterday. In a t-shirt, with an iced drink in my hand!
Would that the art was as spectacular as the weather, or even the volume of new construction taking place in Chelsea. I liked the grace of Bryan Savitz at RARE. And Kim Dorland at Freight+Volume needs to be seen in person--this is not jpeg work.
But most of what I saw fell into that same worn groove that Peter Coffin is shuffling balloons around. That Tamy Ben-Tor is still nattering herself into. When will art stop being so small? When will we stop settling?
Last night was weird. I knew Obama would lose, and I knew there would be no news about this until this morning, but I couldn't keep myself from tuning the AM radio to constant coverage and pressing the reload button on the Caucus blog. All night. Like a meditation. Even though there was no news. Even though many of the commenters on the Caucus blog are, I think, mildly retarded.
It's a scary time. I have never seen a presidential race mean so much and be so unreal at the same time.
As a strong woman myself, I have to admit that watching the larger tide turn against Clinton makes my teeth gnash together. I hate being on the subway and hearing hipster kids calling her a "Ho" while they make gestures that allude to doing her from behind. It makes me feel bad for their sex lives that they have to think about power in such a strange, indirect way.
I hate the way she's getting labelled "emotional."
I hate that Camille Paglia has weighed in about what a bad feminist Clinton is. Even though she's co-opted this one, I hate that we have to keep calling her Hillary. While I would love it if she dropped out of the race, I do think that she has a (very slight) chance of winning, and that it is therefore ludicrous to ask her to quit for the sake of the party.
But I really really really reallyreallyreally wanted Obama to win.
I'd rather live in an issue-based world, in which Clinton was judged on her merits, or lack thereof. Her campaign is largely Rovian, and her personal style is increasingly Bushian. That presents a real credibility problem. She doesn't have enough money to pay her debtors. I don't like her healthcare plan because it forces too much and achieves too little at the same time. This Iran talk is...
...well, that part actually sounded shrill and emotional to me. And Bill needs to be muzzled.
I like Obama's strategy moving forward, which seems to be Focus on McCain. I hope it works, because he's right. McCain is going to keep us in Iraq forever and bring on another Great Depression in the process if he manages to win. That actual problem needs to be defined--the circus shit is making me feel like a lobster in the pot.
If the art we are looking at right now is a function of an epistemology that we have mistaken for an actual philosophical lever, and if that faux lever winds up propelling everyone into the same Anything Goes stew, then what is art going to look like once we all realize the fad is over?
At the risk of exposing myself as someone with an attention span, I want to tell you that I've been following Stanley Fish's head-scratching perambulation around postmodern theory in America.
It's interesting, because of course Americans like myself have a hard time understanding how French people manage to get out of bed in the morning, and so I have hated postmodernism for my entire adult life, and have a new appreciation for it now that I understand my own limitations. Deconstruction is fundamentally about describing a state of irresolvable implication that cannot be resolved. Fish focuses on how impossible the point of postmodern theory is, but I think it's more interesting to think of it as dirty. Isn't the whole point that you cannot close your personal distance from truth? That you cannot help but use your knowledge that power is a construction to go create a powerful construction of our own?
Our American attempts to resolve that implication--to use postmodern theory to make us clean instead of dirty--are farcical. Fish is right about this. And he is also right to say that this is a farce with consequences. I have written at length that deconstruction is a useless parlor game that dooms its players to powerlessness, but after reading these articles, I no longer think that's true. I think that postmodernism becomes a diabolical tool when it's paired with the American drive to personal purity. It's an inside-outside problem.
Perhaps Americanized postmodern theory suffered the same fate as Americanized yoga.
I've been bad about going out and seeing art lately. I've had other deadlines and have not been prioritizing fun and The Outside World the way I should.
But I was watching the Colbert Report last night, and it helped me put words to the quality I love most in art. Good art asks relentlessly and obnoxiously for things it can't have, and then it either goes and gets those things despite everyone and everything saying No! or it dies trying in a delightfully dramatic way.
This obnoxiousness, this constant asking, is the only thing that makes any one piece of art relevant beyond itself and its narrow little sphere. And just as Stephen Colbert is at his best when he is saying it to the President's face, or better yet, running for president himself, the further an artist can push that artistic license without collapsing into self-congratulation, the more ecstatic I am going to be as a viewer.
Drama and legal trouble are inevitable side effects (see: Buchel, Christoph; see: The Yes Men). And abuses of artistic license are legion (see: Tiravanija, Rirkrit). But doesn't it make you feel good to live in a world where you, as an artist, can literally do anything and pretty much get away with it?
Or does it make you wonder why people aren't fucking more shit up?
...I think elitism is something we need more of.
Not only do I want a president who is a proud elitist, I want our sanitation workers, farmers, and fabricators to all achieve elite status as well. The cynical cry of elitist! is the single most corrosive element in our political and intellectual lives today. There is simply too much to do, and the stakes are too high, for any one of us to luxuriate in feeling good about our mediocrity.
