Deborah Fisher

Darger, Some History and Bias

I've been reading about Henry Darger, and getting over the holiday.

Henry Darger is what he is from, and this is a beautiful and painful project. I'm glad it's not my project.

When I was a child, one of my parents was kind of cold and empty, and lived to hurt and ruin the other. The other parent was terminally angry and addicted to martyrdom. Even after a brutal divorce and a decades-long "cooling off" period in which horrors surfaced that are too nasty to discuss in this relatively polite company we keep, these people are still going at it. My brother and I were sometimes busy parenting the parents, but were more often used as weapons. When we were not of utilitarian value, we were largely ignored. I was a semi-feral child, highly attuned to the adult action and constantly seeking fixes and approval, but from a fairly distant orbit that my parents kept, roaming pretty much independently. I am still trying to truly understand that just because these people used me, that doesn't mean they needed me, or that I should seek a closer orbit to either of them. I don't pretend to know what that means in terms of basic expectations of parent-child love, except that I am careful.

I started making art for Darger-esque reasons--to describe and make sense of this world that I endured. But I quickly developed biases against the forms that would help me do that project, and became attracted to all the forms that would push me away from it. I developed an irrational hatred of narrative in art, and despised art that was about psychology or getting to know the artist as a person. Kiki Smith, Darger and Louise Bourgeois were the enemy, and I tried in vain to say that Matthew Barney's narratives are irrelevant! I fell headlong into worshipping Richard Serra, Rachel Whiteread, Charles Ray, Chris Burden. I wanted art to extract me from this painful cesspool-of-mind I grew up in and tell me what was real on a phenomenological level that, if not objective, at least clearly lived outside my head.

I am grateful for these strong biases, even though they hobbled my ability to appreciate art for a period of time. These are the biases that delivered me from having to make art at all, you know. And now that they have run their course,

(and with the exception of Kiki Smith)

I am finding that I am relieved of them. My project is to see clearly, and to do that, I need to see more.

I can clearly see that my parents still have the energy to do that voodoo that they do so well, and that in some very small ways I am still the cleanup crew. I can sit here with a Darger monograph on my lap and accept this, and use this circumstance to help me sink into this Glandolinian Child Slave Rebellion, and let it soothe instead of panic me.

Not Getting It At The Whitney

A Paul Thek installation detail that is so not currently on view at the Whitney

I have this new role as Art Ambassador. Yesterday wandered Paul Thek: Diver at the Whitney defending the museum-ey elevation of quick sketches on sheets of newspaper and sketchbooks and garbagey pink and blue paintings that don't move me either.

I don't disagree with my guests' point of view, which was basically that the show was inscrutable and looked like shit. Thek was an early hit and has one profound innovation under his belt

(the meat sculptures still amaze and installation art is all Thek's fault)

but he left very little behind and so became a set of ideas: his love affair with Peter Hujar; how he acted as connective tissue between distinct contemporary art narratives and the particularly pathetic quality of his career's death as well as his own propelled others to do creative work using him as material--the best example of this that I can think of is Chris Kraus' Aliens and Anorexia. The only other artist I can think of who more neatly fits this You Mean More To Us Dead Than Alive profile is Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared at sea while committing an act of performance art in 1975.

It's a lot of wearing another person's pain like a suit of clothes, but there is something legitimately interesting and beautiful about what Thek became--a kind of ghost who infected multiple consciousnesses by so nastily and slavishly representing his own. His installations were material manifestations of consciousness at its finest and most effusive--baroque Jungian feasts that explored and shared what it felt like to be Paul Thek so intensely that they are both a literal and figurative invitation to climb inside the artist's skin.

The conceit of the Whitney show is that those installations were as ephemeral as the consciousness they represented. There is poetry to this point, and to make it, they wound up with a show of physical artifacts. The early meat sculptures hold up, but the rest of Thek's career is reduced to dilapidated latex bodycasts and other skeletal remains of installations, and a lot of sketches and fast paintings that stuck around because they aren't very interesting.

It is as poignant as it is lame that most of the show is uninteresting because it has nothing to do with that intensely visceral, archetypal experience of self that Thek gave us. What physically survived is reams of representations of all the boring internal dialogue that fills most of our consciousness on most days:

Fragment of a sinking ship, fragment of a banner, fragment of a moon pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink this still sucks, it needs something, put dots on it!!!! A number of pithy phrases that all basically say that life is unfair Get Over Yourself! Get Over Yourself! Get Over Yourself!

It's as if the point of Diver is the fact that we have martyred this person who is just like us. Thek momentarily overcame his consciousness from time to time, but he didn't master it. When left to his own devices he mostly filled the page with anxiety about what other people think and atavistic repetition of the stupidest formal cues. He was casting about. Most of the fragments don't gel into anything.

I love this point. I think it's a brilliant show. But I was with someone who wants art to elevate, to transcend. To be viscerally interesting. And the funny thing is that I brought her to see Paul Thek because he does that. But he doesn't do it here. If I had understood the show the first time I went through, I would have chosen something else. But when I walked through Diver the first time, my eyes were so full of what I wanted to see that I didn't even see how shitty and dead it all was. Or how lame seventy five percent of the subject matter was. I don't know how to make this show anything but an insider-only affair. I can't straightforwardly explain that the show actually did made sense without telling hours and hours of stories.

Trust, Emptiness

My job is evolving into something that more resembles a career. I am grateful for this, and I've been explaining my background to other people lately, distilling the two years of blind fumbling this blog represents into a comfortable elevator pitch about why I am not an artist anymore. And you know, the more I reduce the more I see that the fundamental answer to this question is irreducible.

I stopped making art because the freedom to do whatever I want makes me less creative, not more. I need to submit to something larger than myself. I chose to make sculpture because it was the kind of art that had all these external rules in the form of Newtonian physics that I simply could not ignore. The sculpture I made was organized around losing control over form and content--I was working as an artist to give the art back to the materials and process themselves. I wanted to stay out of it and watch. I wanted to enable the possibility that something creative would happen in front of me, but that was not of me. Screwing tires together just wound up being the hardest possible way to get what I am actually after.

This is going to sound like I am changing the subject, but I'm not, I swear. Yesterday I went to take Hal Lehrman Sensei's class, which I try to do every Friday at lunch because he's teaching emptiness. As a relative beginner, I positioned myself to train with a very senior student. This is critical when it comes to Hal's classes because, well, because Hal's teaching emptiness. But you know, aikido is a social experiment as much as it is anything else, and I wound up getting paired with someone who had been training less than a month.

This meant that I was in charge, and the subject of the lesson for that hour was emptiness. I was so screwed!

There were a lot of things going on in that hour that are only interesting if you do aikido. Hal is so good at what he's doing that it often looks like he's doing it wrong, and I am definitely not an expert, and the cool thing about Hal's classes is the way senior students flock to it because he's such a poet. Trying to bridge that gap as a novice was, on a strict Martial Arts Nerd level, exhausting. But you don't want to hear about it.

Two things happened in that hour though that I think translate outside the dojo. First, it became immediately clear the minute I stood with this beginner and had to explain why what he was doing wasn't working that I know much less about aikido than I thought I did. I've been training a lot, and thinking about aikido outside of class, and feeling like a bit of a hotshot. But all this knowledge I thought I possessed clearly lives in other people's bodies. They loan it to me on the mat so that I can generate just a little bit of my own to keep. I can't think of any time when it's not helpful to assume that this is the case.

The second lesson is weirder. See, it is not necessarily clear to a beginner that a dojo is a collaborative environment, and my partner was, I think, full of doubt about the way this all works, and might have also been coming in with a specific idea of what it's like to be martial. So he was rigid and testy, and didn't understand that I was trying really hard to work at his level, and that I had to do this because I didn't want to hurt him. He was refusing to get thrown.

You can't learn aikido without giving it the benefit of the doubt. One mentor who watched some of this hour and soothed me afterward put it this way:

You have to give your balance in order to learn how to take balance.

And I have never heard the word trust defined so usefully, or experienced a trust relationship unfolding in such a hamfistedly literal way. My partner didn't trust me, I am not sure he trusted Hal because a lot of what Hal does looks like magic, and for that matter I didn't exactly trust me either because I was wrapped up in lesson number one and trying to interpret Hal. This trustlessness proliferated, built on itself. At one point we were doing a technique that calls for taking someone's balance by, basically, striking their face. I'm not going to do that to a beginner. So I put my hand near his face.

On his face.

And then said, "Listen, ideally you don't want me to touch your face. Pretend I am hitting you right now and move your head back, OK?"

And he said in an agitated voice, "But you are not hitting me!"

And I thought about my options, and we went again, and I hit him in the face. His balance was taken and he narrowly avoided the smack, and he fell hard. The technique worked. But this did not increase his confidence or trust in me as much as it increased his fear. He doubled down on his initial strategy of martial-feeling rigidity, the hour slogged on, and the only tool I really had was explaining over and over again that he was putting himself into a bad position:

"It's true that you don't have to go onto the floor right now. But I have your arm and could break it if I wanted to. Getting on the floor signals to me that you don't want me to break your arm. "

There's got to be a more elegant way to say that. Don't you think?

Emptiness was nowhere to be found. By the end of class Hal was speaking the typical magic about not fighting, and were were focusing on basic interpretations of techniques instead, and we were fighting our way through them in this very basic and literal way that I cannot summarize, and need to hold onto and learn from.