Deborah Fisher

I Want You To Feel Good!

Janis Joplin really did want me to feel good, and not because she was a considerate person but because she was actively being choked to death with her own empathy. Her music is rich because she's struggling, but also because of the kind of struggle she's engaged in.

It hurts to feel other people like that. To give yourself away to every single one of them.

The pain of empathy is not exactly what empathy is for--that suffering artist shit belongs to Janis. But that sense of deep empathy drives much of the art I really remember--that really changes me. I don't really like the sterility of video art as a genre, but watching a Paul Chan is not tedious because Chan consistently brings serious empathy. That amazing Altmejd show that's up right now is a series of monuments to empathy. A good Tara Donovan is not about cubes or cute tricks of material, but about empathy, and when I say empathy I mean a strong, recognizable urge to thrust the artist into the viewer's or art's or material's shoes and not vice-versa.

The Final Environmental Solution

There's something facist about environmentalism as it's being spun.

The World Without Us is an interesting thought experiment, and has a lot of really interesting imagery. But the gestalt is basically anti-human. The idea is purity.

Slate's daily podcast a few days ago (I can't figure out how to get a link to a podcast here...) was about environmentalist novels that imagine a postapocalyptic world with fewer people, so that we can all go back to this one essential, true way of being. With women cooking and men hunting or whatever. Everybody's on horseback. Sweet!

It's that romance--that clinging to the idea that there is a correct way to do things and that we have been wrong--that's the problem with the way we look at environmentalism. It's comforting, but it's not true. Native Americans wrought environmental devastation. They threw their garbage off cliffs, too. Civilizations have been going extinct for environmental reasons for a long time.

We are not especially bad.

Environmentalism is a matter of necessity, not virtue. And so we need not imagine a cleansing apocalypse--a Final Environmental Solution--as much as we need to harness the human tendencies that wrought all this mess in a different direction.

Love buildings. Love cities. Love your garbage and love your computer and all the other people around you. Love plastic. Love everything that got us here, every mistake. Love the industrial revolution and the green revolution and the revolutions of your tires because these things actually make the earth something we can grasp as a whole entity.

This morning I feel certain that every mistake we have made brings us closer to something better. And I believe that all the power we have created over the earth--our ability to move over it quickly; build perpendicular to it; shelter ourselves and find and use all the things inside the earth that we can't see--this is what it means to be human.

We are explorer-builders. And we have something new--a grand environmental resistance--to explore and build against.

Altmejd At Rosen Kicks Serious Ass

David Altmejd is in no way facile.

There's an immediate stupidness to what he does, and a laboriousness to the way he overcomes that initial stupidness. He's the anti-Sibony. He not only refuses to cling to what is sculpturally correct, he addresses and overcomes each Sculpture I cliche. That Liz Craft-style fight against tradition is what makes his work complex and tender. The latest effort at Rosen is no exception--it is simultaneously grand and humble. Laugh-out-loud funny because it is as serious as a heart attack.

If only I had a camera, I could have taken good closeups of the huge man made almost entirely out of crystal-clutching plaster hands! If you've ever taught sculpture, you've seen whole shops full of them! The way he dives into hammy tropes like this--The Giant Everyman, the Alginate Project, the Smithson Crystal, the Broken Mirror--and then actively wrestles each of these groaners into meaningfulness using diligence and sensitivity! This is an appropriate response to a world in which you are small and everything's been done before!

No, She Didn't...

But her Chief Strategist did.

Now that we have all admitted, even to the Superdelegates, that "electable" is code for "white," now maybe we can get working on the general election! The Clinton campaign's willingness to apply racism is disgraceful. Geoff Garin's logic is more than merely illogical--it's hateful. Divisive.

Thank god Garin's spin is, at least, so absurd, so naked and so deeply wrong that it will surely be met with head-scratching, polite coughs, blank stares and cocked heads. Right?

Nodding My Head In Agreement With David Brooks?

Today it's aBrooks column that is not just insightful, but slightly inspiring. But what's next? A monsoon of frogs? Cease fires in Africa?

Another Pleasant Day In Soho

Yesterday I passed by Team on my way to see Standard Operating Procedure. So today, even though I don't really like McGinley's work, and even though I expected much more from Morris on this one, I can't get the way these images work together out of my head:

I don't know what to conclude, except that this is what it looks like when you put naked people in novel situations and make them do things so that you can take pictures.