2007
I’d seen Paul Taylor once before at Jacob’s Pillow and remembered that it wasn’t so bad. Good, actually. At the Egg the dancers were beautiful, if a tad over-muscled, performing what didn’t look like extreme physical feats but would be if you tried them yourself. Throughout the first dance they twittered about on the stage—going through the motions, as it were—and it was mannered and repetitive or maybe just so hard to do that they didn’t have any emotive energy left over. To top it off the music was recorded, or to put it better, “not live”—as in “dead”. Canned Handel. During the improbable wild applause that followed, Roberto leaned over and whispered, to my great relief, “If the second act isn’t any better, we can leave.” We did, and the best part of the evening was our race to the car through a convoluted series of futuristic tunnels and empty parking lots that reminded us of Logan’s Run.
In contrast to what Roberto must've paid for our Paul Taylor tickets, at the open mic an optional donation of $5 went toward wine, cheese, and electricity. An audience of about thirty gathered, most of them people I knew or had seen around town, and about half signed up to perform poetry or music or just tell stories in organized slots of five and ten minutes, with a twenty-minute feature.
It was, to my delight, completely engaging—alternately moving and hilarious—and to discover the nuggets of talent and accomplishment that exist in the people I see every day was exhilarating. It made me think about how all great art contains the possibility of failure and how fear of failure had smoothed all the edges in the performance at the Egg. This, however, was Housatonic, and if you fall flat on your face in Housatonic, so fucking what.
The feature was a roundish guy with ponytail and walrus-like moustache who read poetry while a woman improvised on the cello and another woman “moved” to the words and music. Initially, this did not seem propitious. Last summer I went to an arty event in a shed somewhere where we were interred in the dark, forced to sit on folding chairs, longing for the sun and blue sky that could be glimpsed through the open door—while a “sound” artist did his thing and a dancer did hers for an excruciatingly long amount of time—to which my only response was GET ME OUT OF HERE! So while these people were setting up for their 20-minute set I was prepared to do my yoga eye exercises, which is what I do when I’m bored and don’t think anyone is looking at me. At least the tedium of performance art has resulted in excellent eyesight.
I needn’t have worried. The reader stumbled over his words a bit, but the music and dance (by a woman who teaches cello at the Steiner school and another whose background is in folk dancing) felt almost channeled, it was otherworldly and so deeply sensitive and inspired that you wanted it never to end. Then the one dancer was replaced by three volunteers, culled at random from the audience, and against the solemn reading of a Neruda poem, their improvised antics had us in laughing to the point of tears.
The next Sunday I went to the Dream Away Lodge, which you get to by driving on a convoluted forest road up a mountain in Becket, for what had been billed as “Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art Night.” The “door” fee was $5 if you drew and $15 if you didn’t, and consisted of “performances” by thirty-something Nathan and twenty-something Justin, two lean guys who used it as an opportunity to wear as few clothes as possible—in the living room of what is, ostensibly, a “family” restaurant. They did three “scenes,” complete with costume changes, and poses ranging, as in an art class, from five minutes to twenty. In the first scene they wore identical bowler hats, fake handlebar moustaches, black jockey shorts with white trim, thigh-high knitted black-and-white striped…stockings? socks?…and big boots. In the second they graduated to tiny gold lamé women’s “boy” shorts and the music was, if memory serves me, an instrumental version of “Sexual Healing”—with horns—all while eight silent, serious people sat in front of them, hunched over sketchpads. Although Nathan is gay, Justin, the father of two small children, has no such excuse, and no doubt had to get a baby-sitter for the evening because his wife was in the back recording the whole thing with a video camera.
The last time I saw anything like this was at the Pyramid Club in the East Village, in the olden days—the eighties—when New York was gritty and alive and people made art—get this—just for the fun of it! So now I’m wondering if this is only happening here or if it’s a trend. Let me know. I hope it’s a trend because if it is, we might just get our art world back (see The D.I.Y. artist, below) without even having to pay for it.
Tuesday was the press preview for the Richard Serra show at MoMA (up through September 10). First, of course, I had to go to the MoMA Design Store, but they were out of the key chains I wanted. Anyway, I got to the museum in time to witness Serra being introduced as one of the greatest sculptors of our time, which he undoubtedly is—if not the greatest—and I must grudgingly go along with that assessment.
I used to hate Serra’s work, finding it ego-driven and misanthropic in the extreme. He’d set up four heavy metal plates and lean them against one another so they formed a cube that looked as if it might collapse at any moment; it seemed to be all about very heavy stuff that could possibly fall on you. Then a piece did kill a rigger who was installing it--and that Serra would later make drawings entitled Dead Weight and show them in the same gallery space where that tragedy occurred seemed the height of insensitivity, not to speak of bad taste. In the Tilted Arc controversy in the eighties, I agreed with the government workers who wanted the sculpture removed from the plaza in front of the building in which they worked. Who wants to have lunch in the shadow of a big metal plate that looks if it could fall any minute? And since when does the term “site-specific” refer only the physical aspects of the place and not take into account the wellbeing of the people who use it? Art is important, but not that important.
However just as I believe it shouldn’t make any difference if an artist has Alzheimer’s (see Something to look forward to below), I also don’t think the personality of the artist—whether he’s anti-Semitic like Richard Wagner or just a hard s.o.b. like Serra--has any place in the evaluation of the work. The work is the work. So when Serra began to make pieces that really spoke to me—the Torqued Elipses in the nineties—I had to make myself forget all that other stuff. Where the earlier sculpture underscored what we already know about steel—that it’s heavy, flat, and solid and can kill you—the many-tonned Torqued Elipses work against the material’s innate qualities to become lyrical, pliable, curving, soaring and, like Gehry’s architecture, solidly grounded as much as they are unbalanced and unpredictable. When the Torqued Elipses were shown at the Dia Foundation they were a revelation. And the pieces in the sculpture garden at MoMA are wonderfully sited—the steel plays off the marble garden floor, the foliage, the sky, and the vast cityscape. However Serra’s monsters loose their vitality when they’re incarcerated in the white windowless rectangles of the interior galleries and lit with generic track lighting (really, with a gazillion dollars to play with, can’t MoMA come up with anything better?) so that they ultimately end up looking like so many caged hippos. In an effort to avoid creating a context that wouldn't compete with the sculpture, the museum setting has drained them of all life.
Like the government workers in the Federal Building, they need a place to breathe.
From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death….trying to flatten out all the rough spots into a nice, smooth ride. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake, is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to always be in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.
We want to be perfect but we keep seeing our imperfections….
Isn’t this like art? We see all the imperfections in what we’re doing, everything that doesn’t work, yet if we ever do get it together, if we finally do know what we are doing, at that moment our work dies. There’s a lot of dead art out there, a lot of dead artists walking around, and not necessarily old artists either. Sometimes art dies before it even has a chance to be born—I see this a lot in graduate schools, where everyone’s trying way too hard, and there’s an emphasis on being able to explain what we’re doing. Let’s face it, none of us can explain what we’re doing because what we’re doing is completely absurd. We’re making things that have no reason for being—unless we can imbue them with such life that they transcend reason.
I don't think art is much of a spectator sport these days. I don't know how the art world gets away with it, it's not like you hear songs on the radio that are just a mess of noise and then the d.j. says, "If you read the thesis that comes with this, it would make more sense."
Creativity and the onset of dementia have recently prompted a great deal of study and speculation. Dr. Luis Fornazzari of the Memory Clinic at the Division of Neurology, St. Michael's Hospital, University of Toronto, in a paper published on Tuesday, stated, "Art should be understood as a cognitive function with its own neural networks." His findings include the discovery that painters, musicians and writers who develop brain disorders may continue to be competent in their art for some time after losing other faculties. Our main brain, it seems, is vulnerable to attack just as a computer hard drive is to viruses, while our art brain is like an outboard memory card--somewhat protected or at least delayed in its potential corruption. The main characteristic of all artists seems to be that skills, techniques and methodologies need to be well learned or self-taught. In other words, ingrained skills persist and can be the last to go.
I knew it! I knew it! I always felt that de Kooning’s late paintings were some of his best—if not some of the best—paintings ever. But I still run into people who groan and say, “But he had Alzheimer’s….” And I think, so what! Aren’t they looking? That the knowledge of how a painting was created could affect the experience of it in otherwise intelligent people boggles my mind, and is another example of “art world inattentional blindness” (see Seeing…and not seeing below). It's also ironic that the lack of real world awareness that's so disparaged in late de Kooning, is considered valuable in Outsider artists.
I don't understand why should it make a difference that de Kooning had Alzheimer’s and not that Pollock might have been drunk when he made some of his famous paintings. And what about the garbage that clutters the minds of those of us who aren’t afflicted with Alzheimer’s or alcoholism? Am I a worse or better painter when I’m preoccupied with lost love, unpaid bills, and the leak in the basement? When I’m exhausted or well-rested? Hungry or not hungry? What about the brain cells that have been permanently damaged by conversations with Verizon DSL Customer Service?
