Deborah Fisher

Strong Like Water: Before

Deborah Fisher, Strong Like Water, 2008, discarded tires and drywall screws holding structural lumber, 9'6"x24'x8'3"

Such a perfect and placid site....

It was fun while it lasted.

Public art is all about context, and contexts create complications. And so, a silly situation developed over the weekend on the waterfront in Peekskill that continues to unfold as we speak.

It seems the city of Peekskill decided Friday night to drill a hole right where Strong Like Water is in these photographs. The city doesn't own a crane, and the hole was obviously super-important. So, to make a long story short, both floppy tons got shoved about ten feet to the south with a front-end loader yesterday.

Nothing broke. I have post-shove pictures that, by tomorrow, I will probably find hilarious. There will be no hemming and hawing about posting them because they are really relevant to the larger discussion. This is the interesting thing about public art. It's not precious. If it's in the way, then it's in the way.

My blood pressure is basically back to normal. And, knock wood, the aesthetic angle will, knock wood, be resolved sooner than later. Hopefully by Friday, the city will get a crane, and the sculpture will be picked up and removed from the ten-foot skidmark and scrunched up piles of turf and re-sited so that it doesn't look like a trainwreck.

Stay tuned...

Last Modern Campaign?

I wasn't just being clever about McCain running on the Gertrude Stein platform. I do honestly think that modernism is the best way to look at McCain's decisions.

McCain's campaign, including his choice of Palin, is more than reckless or absurd. It's pushing modernist thinking to the absolute limit. McCain wants to be president for totally self-interested reasons--he's admitted so himself. So in every single thing he does, his vector, is moving from the inside of his body or mind to the world.

When you're looking at the world in this way, it's hard to see the rest of the world as anything but a function of your will. You tend to overestimate your ability to make everything work out great! And because you have the will to change what great means, you tend to substitute faking it for truly making it.

This is an art blog, so I am assuming that you have a solid feel for what modernism has done for us culturally, and how the avant garde has a tendency to eat itself, as signifier of counterculture becomes trend becomes status quo. I'm pushing that cultural idea into individuals. I am thinking about you, the individual late modernist.

What I want to keep thinking about is how deeply ingrained that modernist mindset is in our everyday lives--the choices that we make. When I get up every single morning, what I am struggling with is the fact that I cannot create my own reality, but I live in a culture that keeps telling me that I can. I honestly think that every single person in America is struggling with the fact this perversion of can-doitude doesn't really work. Everyone can go to college, but anyone who's taught college lately knows that most of the people in your average Crummy Little U probably shouldn't be there. Anyone can get credit, but that doesn't make everyone financially okay--it only enslaves people to creditors. And so it goes.

Palin makes sense through that lens (Anyone, obviously, can be Vice President, but of course not everyone can answer straightforward questions about policy), and so do all the rest of the antics. And as someone who decided rather late in life that there is such a thing as external reality, there is nothing more interesting than watching the floor come up to meet the McCain campaign again and again.

In related news, after years, really, of trying I have finally gotten a letter to the editor published in the Times. It's about this topic, kind of.

Lax About Self-Promotion

Crimey, Sharon Butler wrote published this in June and I am just getting around to mentioning it now!

It's a thoughtful article that, instead of talking about post-studio art, reflects on artists who are making studios in funny ways and places. Like in public parks. I am mentioned. It ages nicely, you won't feel dumb and un-current reading it.

In other news, it looks like Strong Like Water is moving to a less-perfect and beautiful location in the next two weeks. It will still be on the waterfront, but it won't have quite the same almost-perfect relationship to its site.

I'll post pictures of it on Tuesday or so. But in the meantime... if you were planning to schlep up to Peekskill, now's the time!

The Avant Garde Campaign

Ezra Klein correctly calls (a specific snippet) of the Couric interview a "Dadaist trainwreck."

It's worth remembering, since Klein set art history on the table, how upset folks were at the turn of the last century when painters of pictures stepped away from coherent representation of things and people and into the wilds of Cubism, Impressionism and Pointilism.

If the modernist avant garde has swept through our culture over the last 100 years or so, replacing that which we consider universally true or correct with infinite versions of individualized new vanguards

(the move from "this is what the world looks like" to "this is what the world means to me")

then perhaps the McCain campaign is more courant than we would like to concede.

It's easy to delcare the McCain campaign dead and/or insane. And it's of course preferable to choose this November to move past the sillybusiness of modernist individualism and vote Obama. But is it really our decision to make? Do we get to skip a step in our cultural development?

Is the McCain campaign presidential, sane or at this point successful? Hell, no! But is that the real point? Is the campaign about defeating modernism or modernism's last gasp? You must admit that they are successfully running an avant garde campaign, distorting reality creatively, by individualist fiat, thereby exposing as untrue that which we previously considered collectively true.

Alice

I'm working toward a longer set of thoughts about empathy, and I had to throw this out there:

Is anyone else starting to feel bad for Sarah Palin?

I am. She looks increasingly like McCain's daughter, playing grownup and failing miserably. The way they guard her is an offensive tell--she really is about the photo op, the crowd, the short-term. There is no other possible explanation. They don't want her to talk.

I can see why. Her Couric interview is even worse than her experience with Gibson. She is not even very good at spewing the talking points in a succinct way. It's as if she's speaking a language she doesn't quite understand.

I know she brought it on herself, what with the not blinking and all. But man, I can also see how the bottle said "drink me" right on it.

Pulling The Camera

Okay, it's time for me to come clean about my own motivations, and turn an eye toward the difference between being interested in something and being able to produce insight about it.

To my eye, this climate-cum-energy crisis; this broken Middle East; this Alice In Wonderland election that really can't get any curiouser and yet still does, every single day, complete with references to the Queen of Hearts; this crisis that is not hyperbole, that really is a crisis...

...this is all just sides of one coin. It's all Modernist Endgame. What do you expect a world in which the dominant culture has privileged the individual and the inside over the collective and the outside for the last five hundred years to look like?

But I have been writing and deleting a lot lately, and that's because I've been trying to get that geologic, climatic, colony-view sense of Sarah Palin, and that strategy is gassy. Formulaic.

Untrue.

Because while it is just fucking fascinating that Sarah Palin's grand photo-op at the UN has been nakedly called out as such by her own campaign as the press threatens to pull their cameras,

(pictures of Palin next to world leaders are just as much about foreign-policy experience, after all, as Alaska's proximity to Russia)

for some reason it's a lot harder for me to write about that huge systemic lie than it is for me to write about the huge systemic lies we tell ourselves about, say, New Orleans.

This could be a matter of empathy. There is deep and legitimate sorrow in the way we refuse to kill or save New Orleans, adamantly refusing to admit that it will never quite live again, even though whole neighborhoods remain bulldozed--in an endless limbo. I don't pretend to think that I could yank the plug on a whole city--a whole culture. But at the risk of sounding like a Monday Morning Quarterback, I do think that I could have run Wall Street better than it has been. And while I think of the McCain-Palin ticket as a uniquely sorry choice, I don't see or comprehend any sorrow or otherwise empathize with anyone who would be fucking retarded enough not to see that it's not just four more years--it's worse.

I can see and connect with how hard it is to understand one small self in terms of a melting glacier or an orange frog's habitat or more hurricanes or whether or not a city continues to exist. There's a tenderness in that disconnect between us and the rest of the world. Isn't there?

But I don't understand and find no tenderness in the way our individual heads have gotten shoved so far up our asses that we cannot connect our actions as voters to the actions of our government. I don't judge someone who continues to drive a car, but I do judge the uberleveraging motherfuckers who trashed our economy. And I judge anyone who votes for Sarah Palin (and that old guy she's running with) because they like her or identify with her, without noticing that her pants are totally on fire.

The trick seems to be finding a place beyond morality and judgment. That place, where it's no longer about wagging fingers or otherwise submitting to one's cultural elite-ness, is where insight and innovation occurs. It's the place where you can get over your problem and see a whole situation. There's strength in that place beyond judgment.

I don't know where to look for it off the top of my head. It certainly isn't here, here, here or here.

But I have to start working to figure this out.

Strange Land

Want some perspective on the crisis? Get a little empathy for what conservatives think of McCain? Lend eloquence and a bipartisan spirit to your own fears about a McCain presidency?

Read this. It's not just soothingly cogent. It's almost an endorsement of Obama by someone I have always thought of as your basic right-wing demagogue.

The Crisis

I've been spending the last few days trying to get my head around the crisis, and trying to describe why it's important to non-econ majors, and this has been hard work that has borne very little fruit.

It's hard to come in at the climax of the story, when you're not quite sure who the players are, and expect to understand the significance of what folks are saying. I am still confused, as are many journalists, about what is exactly going on and why it matters and what the consequences will be. If you're still reading, consider this your Cliff's Notes. It leans "conservative," but in a world where the Republican party is moving rapidly to socialize the American banking system, what does that word even mean anymore?

Besides... Robert Reich is reaching from the other side of the ideological aisle to pan the bailout-of-all-bailouts too.

I think this is interesting because we walk around with a little bit of the larger world inside of us all the time. We are what we see and what we submit to and what we do. And this situation is no less than a fucking cancer of greed and indulgence, in which we are all implicated. No presidential candidate has responded to this by leveling with the American people about the fact that this means increased taxes. Nobody's suggesting victory gardens.

There are practical explanations of why

(Jimmy Carter Malaise Speech)

And there is also an impressively indulgent gestalt that is worth paying attention to. Even though it's obviously in everybody's best interests, how do you even imagine how to sell a country like this one less stuff and more work?

I'm serious. This is an art blog. Anyone care to pick their jaw up off the ground and imagine a way out?

Flagging Molecules

Finally, a slow day with few obligations!

There will be pictures from the Peekskill Project. And there will be dense prose that stabs at the bailout-to-end-all-bailouts, and that invokes Bacevich, and that will probably lapse into questions about how the only sane people these days seem to be relatively conservative--even as the republican administration and ticket has cranked the indulgence knob all the way to 11.

But for the time being, this attempt to reconcile Palin's professed energy expertise with reality is frightening!

It's True, I Haven't Been Writing

This blog is an exercise in optimism, and I haven't been optimistic recently.

I thought I was too busy to write, but honestly I don't have that much going on. Really, I am just terrifically frightened. I am afraid of Palin-as-Neocon-Project. I am afraid of Lehman. I am afraid of the ease with which we torture people, and I am afraid because it is so surreal--so downright Alice In Wonderland--that the Torture Party is represented by an old tortured guy who is running mostly on the fact that he was once tortured.

I can't get over the way that kicks reality in the teeth.

I am frightened because I grew up in a world that was similarly, um, fantastical. I know how easy it is to convolute the world with your mind, and come up with crazy constructions like this one.

And I am frightened because there is real work to do, and no time to waste on making shit up!

The problem is that this kind of fear is indulgent, and creates its own distortions. It's indulgent to move between TPM, Politico, The Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan all day. It's indulgent to assume, because it's getting Bushlike and Rovian in here, that the world itself has gone mad, and that the McCain-Palin All-Lies-All-The-Time ticket is going to work.

Indulging in these fears is about the only thing I personally can do to make them become reality.

I got so discouraged that I had what I consider to be the lamest conversation one could have right now--the one in which you divulge where you will emigrate to when McCain and his hot sidekick are elected.

Well, I am not doing that again, and I am not doing it because it's not reality--because there is nowhere to go. McCain has clearly showcased his total lack of integrity, and his running mate does not believe that global warming is caused by humans. So it's likely that we are going to bake the entire planet to a crisp if they get elected.

This is not a time for indulging in fear.

From this day forward, I'm setting a timer before I visit political blogs.

And instead of wasting my days shuffling from one blog to the next, last night I started making phonecalls for Obama and Biden. I recommend it. It feels a lot better than poring over how evil Sarah Palin is.

I am also giving every single dollar I can spare.

And if I can sink into the blogosphere for a whole day, then surely I can take a few days to go to Pennsylvania and volunteer as a canvasser.

I know I am not the only one standing around staring dumbly at this slow-motion trainwreck.

Let's all stop. Let's figure out what to do instead. What are you doing to manage your fears?