Difficulty: Part One of ???

I privilege difficulty. My job is easiest when I have a lot of resistance. I am inspired most by impossibility and improbability. It's why I live in a big hostile city and it's why I am always attempting to make enormous things here. It's why I write a lot about what I do, even though writing about sculpture is a uniquely frustrating task of reconciling a nonverbal, rangy and spatial drive to a tight, linear format. It's why I really like thinking about public art. Public art is inherently conflict-ful, inherently problematic. Every single stakeholder is going to approach public art with a nasty bias. It's not just that artists and arts supporters are always going to collapse into thinking about art as good for people. Non-arts supporters are always going to think of art as a stupid frivolity. Cities are always going to think of the art as a chore.

Every single time I have gone to visit Strong Like Water there has been someone standing near it saying that it's stupid, that anyone could do it. Resenting it. What I am trying to say is that I relish that. I need the struggle. I think a lot of artists do.

But I don't think it's important to make other people do difficult things. Or to put it another way, I feel that I do difficult things so that my audience doesn't have to.

I am running out of time and thought this would be a relatively simple idea to lay out, but it turns out this is a big can of worms, and that I have been writing and deleting for awhile now. There will have to be more posts later. But to start, I think it's important to notice that art has been putting the difficulty on the viewer since Cezanne. No, since impressionism. And that I share your antipathy toward art that has no difficulty or resistance whatsoever.

But then I start to wonder if the right word to organize around is difficulty. And whether working to create difficulty for the viewer (Chris Burden's Shot, Yoko Ono and Magdalena Abramovic daring the audience to hurt them, Bas Jean Ader's suicide or accident and its pathetic context, and yes, again with the Tilted Arc) is a strategy that makes sense right now.

What pleases me most is difficulty that yields a precious fruit, like the fairy tale in which the wife is pregnant and desperately craves the persimmons that belong to the witch or old Queen, and so her husband dutifully goes and steals the persimmons by scaling a high wall, and in the telling of the story it is clear that the persimmons taste good because they were stolen--that the impossibility and subsequent subterfuge is what activated and seasoned them.

I know that young father-to-be in the fairy tale (can anyone name it?) is a loser and is getting played by his pregnant bride, and I know that the point of the tale is that there is subsequent (unrecallable) hell to pay for the theft. But there's this urgency and bald desire to please and tenderness wrapped in onus that is not quite humility in his gesture that I fall for.

But then again, to frame this relationship between audience and artist in terms of a fairy tale dupe and some pregnant persimmon-wanter is too romantic and therefore misses the point. The artist need not be a tragic figure in order to lay one's self out completely. There should be difficulty, and the point of the difficulty should yield fruit for the viewer. There should be gift-giving involved. But the rest of the fairy tale implications, with stealing and getting in trouble and morality are unnecessarily obfuscating.

The persimmons are a good place to start, but not a good place to end.

So stay tuned!

Comments

[Michael Konrad]

You know what's difficult?
Tolerating the "anyone can do that" argument against public art. It's certainly interesting to hear what people think about a public project, but that particular argument doesn't even make the slightest effort towards thinking.

I don't understand it. Does the "anyone can do it" complaint actually voice an objection to a non-elite or art or a perceived lack of craft? In other words, these critics think art should be difficult to do, but they perceive the artwork to somehow be easy? Maybe they feel like the artist is pulling a fast one: using common materials or garbage and making money off of it. If it was that simple, then why don't they try it themselves? Easy way to get rich, right? And I suppose these critics also think the art should only be difficult for the artist, but easy for the audience.

[21st Century Plowshare]

Hey Michael,

This is where you and I diverge. I totally tolerate the "anyone can do that" argument. I feel like I have to, first of all, because it's there, and not tolerating it gets me nowhere.

And when I do tolerate it and use it, then whole new worlds open up, new opportunities, new ways of looking at the problem.

You are right to see it as a lame argument. But it's part of an impulse that actually makes some sense. Art does often pull a fast one, and is often wrong, and is often too challenging to enjoy. The idea that Chris Burden got himself shot and became an art star is legitimately offensive, and that offense is why it worked. Minimalism was a lot of really good writing attached to some of the most boring-looking and impenetrable art ever made.

We all studied a lot of art that worked to offend and upset and challenge and put us all through the wringer to varying degrees. And we who went to art school fell in love with the way this art fucked with us because it was always worth it. Subjecting yourself to Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman is worth it. You feel confused and manipulated, but you also feel poetry happen to you at the same time. There is payoff.

But you and I can both admit, right, that when this kind of challenge turns into a manner, the result is a bunch of art that is obtuse for the sake of being obtuse, or that is shocking merely because shock is what you do.

There's often no quid pro quo, no payoff. And when there's often no payoff, viewers have every reason to be distrustful, and to see nothing but a scam.

I think that you are placing art's problem (it's mannerist reliance on difficulty) at the feet of the viewer. I think that art does this a lot. And because of this refusal to admit that the viewer is not stupid if the viewer doesn't get the inside joke, it is not surprising that art is increasingly talking to itself, refusing to even engage a dialogue beyond it's own inside-jokiness.

This closed, inside-joky insulated circle of the art world is physical as well as mental. Putting art in a contextless vast white-box type space that by its very blankness has the power to transform a bag of doritos into a serious visual experience makes art more important than sometimes it deserves to be. Galleries are cold, foreign constructions of mind, and they are destinations that are only about art.

Public art has the potential to be a powerful tonic in this closed situation, but only if we see what is actually going on. The people who throw out the "anyone can do that" argument must be tolerated, because that's who the public often is.

You're forgetting that this person who is spitting out the "anyone can do that" argument today is probably going to walk past that sculpture thirty or forty more times in the course of their everyday business. That the most powerful thing about Strong Like Water is that for many people right now it is not a destination--it's more like an obstacle. Opinions change over time. And when you can actually live with art (when it's truly public) you see it regularly, and are much less likely to expend the energy that it takes to keep hating it or assuming it's a scam.