Deborah Fisher

Shock Cul-De-Sac

Bad behavior as a cultural production strategy has officially jumped the shark.

Hat tip: AFC

If An Art Form Is Marginalized It's Because It's Not Speaking To People

This statement above and two tons more truth via an interview with David Foster Wallace in the late nineties. He waxes eloquent about the existential imperative of art and how that imperative is different than that of popular culture. And how possible it is to rise to the challenge of making art in a world awash in popular culture. And how contempt for a reader/viewer creates bad art.

I have been devouring Wallace's book of essays, Consider The Lobster, and I have to admit that this is the first time I have ever considered Wallace. I threw down Infinite Jest in a fit of impatience-with-fiction after only a few pages many years ago, and now that I have read these essays about porn, dictionaries and Kafka, and found myself not reflecting on them or enjoying them but impacted by them, as if Wallace was not delivering prose but something more like satori...

(And no. I don't use that word lightly at all. Reality itself and my perception and use of it has changed for the better.)

...that initial dismissal feels like a profoundly ignorant gesture on my part.

Optimism Misdefined By Conservative Blogger--Fundamental Truths Revealed Anyway

Daniel Larison's treatise on what he's calling "optimism" as the greatest roadblock to personal happiness in America has a huge interest in revealing truth. It's a great essay that I think people who are not self-labeling conservatives (like myself) should take the time to read, especially in the last few days of the endless presidential campaign, in which every single candidate has been pandering to your own sense of American Exceptionalism. His thesis is simple:

When we, as a people, assume we are exceptional, that we can fix every problem, that things should be better than they were yesterday, we create high expectations, deferred debts (not just to banks but to the earth, global diplomacy, etc.) and these shattered expectations are the very stuff of which unhappiness is made. There is ample evidence in both western and eastern philosophy to back up this assertion.

He's right, but he's got a serious semantic problem, and it starts when he labels this state of reality-denial "optimism," and goes all the way to the crazy place when he concludes that "pessimism" is the antidote. In fact, he seems to equate "pessimism" with the buddhist notion of "detachment," and that is a good place to start picking my bone. If you've spent even fifteen minutes of your life trying to meditate, then you know that detachment is a profoundly optimistic thing to strive for, and that Larison obviously needs another word on which to balance this argument. As currently structured he is avoiding the intense discipline and joy and detachment of optimism by assuming that all optimism is blind. And he is ascribing nobility to pessimism that is undeserved, because pessimism is the same kind of mind-lie that blind optimism is.

I don't think Larison is talking about optimism and pessimism. He is talking about negative capacity, which I would define as the ability to see and accept a bad situation. Remove every instance of the word "optimism" in his essay and substitute a brief description of Americans' stunning lack of negative capacity, and the whole argument comes into focus. More important, in this mental rewrite, the pessimism-is-detachment conclusion is no longer inevitable. And that's great, because it's totally, 100% wrong.

Pessimism is not detachment. It's clinging to a predicted negative outcome in order to avoid disappointment and instead enjoy a pleasant surprise when you're wrong. It's just as blind as blind faith in a predicted positive outcome. The trick is to predict neither good nor bad, and work toward good anyway. That's optimism. It's much more than the absence of negative capacity. Optimism refers to what one does with one's negative capacity. Real optimists can look long and hard at how fucked up the world is and not collapse into pessimism. Real optimists can roll up their sleeves in the face of insurmountable odds and get busy on the problem at hand.

That kind of optimism--optimism paired with boundless negative capacity--is, I think, the action that defines detachment. To be detached is to see that bad outcomes are possible, and work, using that knowledge, toward the best possible outcome. To rely on your own compass instead of react to the constantly changing situation. That kind of optimism produces the kind of honest, peaceful happiness Larison wrongly ascribes to pessimism.

Trust As Barometer, Trust As Lever

I find that in my own microcosm, folks are reacting to the crisis with, I guess, a perversion of empathy, assuming that because we are living in a world surrounded by broken, that we are broken too. Me and my friends and family are all slightly despondent, even listless, except when we are peevish and flailing and hollow-boned. There is crabbiness and unreturned phonecalls, and a lot of hiding out indoors, refusing to enjoy the perfect sunny crispness of last nice fall days before winter and excuse-making. The gestalt is one of weakness in the face of a larger weakness. It's like our skeletons have gone the way of interbank lending, and this is true even though we are all doing okay. This is true even though nothing concrete has changed for us yet. It is true that my dayjob is already heavily impacted by the psychological and tangible effects of this crisis, and so I spend three days a week in a frightened, agitated place. But all that agitation is peripheral. My job is okay. I'm okay.

Hell, I am better than okay. I am a part of generation X! I was fumbling my way in and out of college during the last truly horrid recession, and i was doing it in a place with an already-awful economy. So I already know how to be desperately poor! I don't even surround myself, with the exception of my dayjob, with people who care about money. And yet everyone's got the Crisis Flu.

What's that about?

The crisis is fundamentally a crisis of trust, I wrote that last week. And living without trust is existentially difficult. It's a withdrawn state of mind that extends across the nuts and bolts of the crisis itself into the rest of life, and therefore provides a greater understanding of what trust is. What it's for.

When I trust, I discriminate. I make a value judgement about something that's external to me. My actions flow outward from that discrimination, and I literally become bigger. When I trust that I can drive, I become the exact size and shape of my truck, and the same thing happens with any other tool or piece of equipment. When I trust that my job is safe, I take risks with money and time, and become bigger. When I trust my marriage, it becomes a strong and elegant shape, like Chartres Cathedral, really. I know that sounds corny, but it's true. It is this vaulted space that opens up to the sky and is massive and at the same time very light.

Trust, therefore, is fundamentally expansive and fundamentally powerful. It is better to trust than not to trust. In the case of the economy or the government or religion, trust is a collective idea that has the power to create actual structure. In a world that is experiencing a larger crisis of trust and a structural meltdown, it is probably only natural to retract into oneself. To negate one's own power to trust. After all, it's trust that got us all into this set of messes, right?

If Gore hadn't decided to be big about it and (misplace?) his trust in a structure of government that was full-on misbehaving, we could have just had our coup d' etat in 2000 and gotten all of this over with years ago.

I have felt smallish for months now--I don't feel like trusting anybody or anything. The evidence from the outside world is that there is nothing trustworthy as far as the eye can see. All I see is past trust that was badly misplaced. You don't have to be out of a job or $20million down in the stock market to feel like a jilted lover right now.

But all that evidence of an untrustworthy world doesn't mean that it isn't important to go find some trust somewhere and cling ferociously to it. The first lesson I ever had in the transformative power of trust was from my friend Joe Boehm. We would go hiking and scrambling together in the Dragoon mountain range in southcentral-eastish Arizona, and he is a particularly gentle soul so I trusted him long before I ever trusted anyone else. Cochise Stronghold consists of these huge boulders everywhere that are relatively easy to climb not just up, but around. Instead of linear, up-a-specific-face climbs with gear, you could just find yourself climbing in the Dragoons, knowing that it was kind of okay that you had no harness, because there were so many options, or because you weren't that high.

We would often wind up tackling something challenging without any gear, just kind of exploring, knowing we could always find a way out of it. And when I was afraid that I was in over my head, I would, uncharacteristically, say so, and he would say that you just kind of have to trust that it will work and then it will. And this was always true. I never got hurt in Cochise Stronghold because of my own skill level.

It's interesting to think about those hiking trips now, because I was charged with trusting something that just didn't seem trustable. For the first time in my life I was deploying trust--using it as a lever, instead of viewing it as a passive barometer. I was using trust to change something--to test my assumptions. I grew up thinking of myself as being totally uncoordinated, in very little control over my own body. And in fact, I had just never tested my body before. There was the self that I brought to those trips that I created in my mind, and the self that I discovered externally, as a function of trust out on the rocks. And the self that I discovered was not only braver and more interesting--she was a product of external reality and not my own mind. She was more true.

By trusting I found a truth about myself that I never would have found any other way. This was a very different kind of trust than the brutal, tyrannical blind trust of the Bush administration that never looks to reality. And it's really different than the easy barometer-style trust that everyone can have when everything is working okay. And I feel like the only thing that's going to help me in this last longest week of the longest most important election cycle ever, with the stock market crashing and layoffs being discussed all around me, is to find something that I can trust like I trusted myself to jump across that first three-foot span between two rocks that I was sure I would fall into, by channeling Joe, who would tell me to channel Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

David Foster Wallace Posthumously Presents: A Potentially Interesting Lens Through Which To View The Daily Show Lately

So I was reading this David Foster Wallace essay about Kafka's sense of humor yesterday, and have been watching The Daily Show get more and more savage and terrified, and noticing the way Jon Stewart and fils wear this fear and rage almost gracefully, and noticing at the same time that I have lost entirely my appetite for escapism in art, and how intense and nasty but also deeply correct that shift in appetite has made me feel. I go walk around the galleries, but the only thing that really engages me is how good it feels to walk, and the way that chest-opening goodness of taking in a street with your feet slowly devolves into bone-crunching peevishness as the day wears on.

It's right to think in terms of Kafka right now, but I'd prefer to do that thinking in an optimistic, American way.

I am sure that there is good, non-Kafkaesque art out there. I remember thinking that I should really think more about that eye-popping Cecily Brown show at Gagosian, and almost pinching myself awake so that I could have some fun with what Louise Bourgeois is doing with sweaters and vaginas these days. I liked the stuff that just came down at Derek Eller--the racey, politicky sculptures. But my heart's so not in it. I don't like movies anymore, either--I can't sit still for two hours unless I can check the internet. And I have never been a real lover of literature, but I can't even bring myself to read the short story in the New Yorker.

The only cultural product that's got my undivided attention right now is The Daily Show. And that twenty minutes of my life four days a week is not about escaping the bad situation we all find ourselves in. Since it's a comedy show about current events, it is perhaps obvious that I am not looking to The Daily Show to relieve myself of the burdens we all face: the war, the climate, this new global economic crisis (which is already a key player at my current dayjob), the election that I can't pry my fucking eyes off of.

It doesn't even feel good to watch The Daily Show. I didn't feel vindicated or triumphant when Jason Jones interviewed the current mayor of Wasilla this week. I felt instead as if I had passed through this scrim of information that I had been parsing all day about the presidential decision we are about to make, and wound up staring headlong at an indictment of our collective arrogance that is as true and as massive and as immovable and as plain and as literal as an actual mountain. A mountain of arrogance and willful ignorance that is ours, that we all created and nourished. And all I could do is nod my head in understanding of this indictment, and pray that we could find a way around it.

It's worth noting here that Kafka would not pray that we could find a way around it. To him, being faced with the horror is the point--it's the funny part. And Wallace's essay, Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed, actively takes on how unAmerican that kind of humor in which you are just faced with the horror is. We are all still actively mourning the fact that Wallace was too personally familiar with why Kafka is funny, and the goal of this essay is to definitely move through that blank wall of acceptance to the kind of American Exceptionalism you bet you can really get behind!

(wink)

Wallace writes that it's not just impossible to teach Kafka because Kafka is funny and explaining jokes ruins them, but because of the kind of relentless, un-reassuring funniness Kafka deploys, in which the punchline is the literal horror and filth of existence. In arguing this, he makes a fundamental distinction about American humor that should be really important to any culture worker that can't seem to get any culture work done right now. He says that his students often don't get that Kafka is funny because American art and culture is based so deeply in escapism: fantasy, action, spectacle and romance. I don't have to believe or prove that this is true--it's so axiomatic that I feel I can just know it. I can know that the Great Depression and Busby Berkeley are like chocolate and peanut butter, and that this current cascade of crises bodes well for the narcisso-fascistic uberstyle of Matthew Barney, as well as the sheer idiocy of Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

But for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and I see real movement away from escapism and toward productive realism. One of the reasons I haven't been able to go to the movies lately is because I can't stomach paying another $12 for some documentary that tells me a bunch of scary shit I already know. You know what I am talking about if you've tried to go to an art house in the past five months. I'm done with the obsessive urge to watch documentaries! They are obviously problematic as art. They tell you a bunch of things that you can go find out for free, and they tell you in such a way that is mostly just panic-inducing, and they largely preach to the choir.

I mean, did anyone who truly welcomes global warming as a sign of the coming rapture sit through An Inconvenient Truth?

But the neverending stream of documentaries does open the door to a world of art that actively asks questions of the fucked up world we all share in a way that reaches beyond didactic. They open the door to work that manipulates the facts in order to get at larger truth. The Daily Show is doing that right now. It's looking at the Mayor of Wasilla flatly state that she is of course qualified to be Vice President and looking so hard at that statement that it stops being about the Mayor of Wasilla and starts being about a very nasty existential, kafka-esque truth about the way we all create reality so that we are important.

(I couldn't help but extrapolate from the Mayor's arrogance all the other things she, and we, are equally deluded about)

But it doesn't just stop there like Kafka would, and this makes The Daily Show less funny than a Kafka story. All the fuck yous to Sarah Palin and open displays of fearful actors don't help the comedic timing of The Daily Show, and it's not enough to bring you, the viewer, back into anything like a safety zone. But all of this rending of garments and pulling of hair, paired with this transcendent looking-and-poking does manage to create a cautious sense of optimism. It makes you see that even though it's truly bad and surreal, you do not live Kafka's world, where "There is hope, but not for us." You see that there is enough indignation and fear and self-awareness there to propel us into a better place.

Trust Is Great And Everything, But...

It's no substitute for doing every single thing in our collective power to make sure this woman does not become Vice President.

The vice president is in charge of the senate? Let's take a look at the owner's manual:

Article I: The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.

This terrifies me. I am going to Pennsylvania to knock on doors this weekend, and I am donating another $50 I don't really even have to the Obama campaign.

Trust

The credit crisis is a crisis of trust. Banks won't lend to banks, credit card companies are reducing limits, everyone in the game is selling their stocks and mattresses all over the globe are feeling stuffed.

At the same time, democrats are being warned not to get cocky and everyone is yelling the words, "voter fraud!" as tires are being slashed outside Obama rallies. As early voters are being harassed like women walking into a Planned Parenthood.

It's a good time to think about trust. It's good for me, personally, to think about how little I have been doing except following the madness. No matter how I promise myself I will stop, I can't keep myself away from the news. I don't trust that i am not missing anything, and I don't trust that I would be able to catch up if I did go do something else for an entire day. It's not just Andrew Sullivan and the Huffington Post. I am reading the business section. I check the TED spread, which is doing better lately, but is still scarily high.

I think maybe I am doing this because otherwise my butt is hanging out. I have a substantial mortgage, and we are a family of freelancers here.

Or perhaps I am lazy. There's nothing as lazy as sitting on the sofa and hitting the T for TPM, the H for Huffington Post, the A for Sullivan, the P for Planet Money and the N for New York Times, over and over again, with an occasional F for fivethirtyeight and EU for Daniel Larison.

Maybe I do this because I am, in reality, a deep pessimist with an optimistic candy coating. Maybe I really do think that we are watching history, the fall of our civilization, and that the only appropriate thing for a thinker to do when confronted with that kind of opportunity is to grab a front-row seat.

Hell. Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe I am so optimistic that we can dig our way out that I feel compelled to study the hows and whys of everything that's happened so far. After all, you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you are, and we are certainly in the muck right now.

But back to trust. This is a post about trust, not a post about my bad internet habits. Trust is a factor in every single thing I read:

If banks don't trust banks to repay loans, then nobody lends to anyone and then your company can't meet payroll, and then you get laid off and are a hobo on the rails with your belongings in a kerchief tied to a stick.

If voters don't trust that their votes will be counted, then they don't vote, and when very few people vote we wind up with situations like the last eight years.

If the public doesn't trust racist Palin supporters not to do something even more drastic than, oh, kill a baby bear and dump it on a university campus draped with Obama signs, or hang an Obama ghost that is actually swinging from a tree in their front yard, well then that stifles what should be a rich public discourse, doesn't it?

And if I don't trust that I don't need to know every single fucking thing that happens as it happens, then I am never going to be able to do anything interesting or contemplative with all this information I am getting.

Trust is about believing in a structure. When shit gets all structureless, as it is now, with Palin deciding that SNL is somehow going to make her look presidential, and David Letterman turning into a pundit with a serious anti-McCain agenda, and all the conservative papers backing the democrat, and with all the racists deciding that they can come out of the closet and spew their filth, and municipalities not being able to pay the new very high rates on their bonds, well three questions present themselves:

1. What comes first, the structure or the trust? Can we trust ourselves out of this mess? Respond with new structures? Or is the appropriate response really just to let it all hang out?

2. And what went away, the structure or the trust? Are the structures even there anymore? Do we have an economy and no trust, or when we stop trusting does the economy itself vanish? When our political discourse devolves into violent incivility, does the structure that allows us to non-violently disagree evaporate?

3. Where are these structures of mind? Are they outside us or inside us? Is the economy somewhere, like Wall Street, or is it more like God? Is representative democracy inside the minds of some voters (the ones standing around waiting to vote) and not others (the people who are harassing the voters)?

Stay tuned... this looks like it's going to unfold over time.

Spread The Word

SELLOUT is back!

It's Not About You

The best part of living in a big, inconvenient city is how regularly it checks you. When the L train refuses to materialize for an hour, you are standing there with like a hundred other folks who are equally put out. So if you curse or sigh or roll your eyes about it, you don't look busy or important, or like an employee who cares about getting to work on time. You just look like a selfish asshole.

It's an interesting paradox: New York is full of people with enormous egos, but the primary lessons it has to give are about self-control, understanding that you are one of many and allowing yourself to surf the chaotic organism of the city and its people.

I was walking around with my friend Adam last week, and we were talking about a lot of things. Por ejemplo: pretend you are on a date and walking down the street, presumably on the way to the sexy part of the date, and you come across a puddle of vomit on the street, and your date wilfully stomps in it, like stomping in a puddle of water.

Dealbreaker or deal-sealer?

The theme seemed to be how attractive losing control can be. Adam found a number of plausible vomitstomping-leads-to-sex scenarios, and I found very few, and then later in the day he asked me if I wasn't perhaps too interested in civility.

Actually, I think that civility and discipline are the most underused and underrated strategies in visual art right now. I think that it's way too easy to make something that's got boobies or drops f-bombs or trades in unmadeness, childish drawing, too much paint or just general jankiness, and thereby simulates the taking of a position. Because the cup runneth over with bad boys and girls, the most effective way to ensure that you, as an artist, are truly rolling with force is probably to be unfailingly polite, consider your viewer's experience, and never, ever resort to t-and-a or shock tactics.

I don't say this because civility is inherently greater than incivility. There are artists who have worked with incivility to such forceful poetic effect that I believe that they have every right to do totally fucked up things to other people. Chris Burden could have allowed some innocent driver to kill him when he performed Deadman, and that driver would have carried the tremendous guilt of killing a man around for the rest of his life for the sake of someone's art. And that threat, the implication of previously innocent people, is what drove Burden's performance work. And I will argue until the day I die that Burden made a rich, convincing case for allowing it.

I think civility is a smart tactic right now because too many people think that they are as good as Chris Burden just because they can be mean like Chris Burden. Too many artists are collapsing into bad behavior reflexively when they could be strongly reaching into something that hasn't been exhaustively explored. In this situation, clinging to civility merely allows an artist to avoid an exhaustively-worn path.

This is easier to say than it is to practice. I loves me some pokey screws and broken shards of wood and, in general, the quality of sharpness. Sharpness makes everything look more thoughtful, less safe. But I am working on this. I am driven to civility in my own art, well, first because uncivil art has become predictable and boring, and art should be unpredictable and exciting. But I am also driven by the same reason I work to have the patience not to sigh or stomp around when the train is late. The city consistently delivers outrageous bounty to anyone who manages to stop thinking in terms of themselves, and consistently punishes anyone who's too driven by an inflexible, selfish agenda. Similarly, every time I have glimpsed or grasped at a larger bounty--an unknown world that I am actually discovering instead of illustrating--in my studio, it's been the direct result of momentarily shutting up my own ego and considering the much larger world that surrounds me.

Be Controversial

I have been getting some prodding lately to be "more controversial" in my writing.

I've been giving this prodding serious consideration, and find myself in a strange new cul-de-sac of mind. If the art market doesn't just relish but demands: bad behavior, saucy details, entendre-on-your-entendre, f-bombs, cute pop-culture references and insider "angles" like top-ten lists and who's whos that make writing about art about belonging to a club and not about a marketplace of ideas...

...well then the single most controversial thing I could do would be to channel Hilton Kramer or Roger Kimball.