Once more, with feeling
Imagine the evening news meets Flight of the Conchords in a project mapping an effusion of feeling onto the flattened affect of reporters and politicians. YouTube video art sensation “Auto-Tune the News” moves an irrepressible infectious sincerity through the surface screens of propaganda and irony which are so often proper to politics. Let’s feel it.
Auto-Tune the News #2: Pirates, Drugs and Gay Marriage
Auto-Tune the News #1: Pentagon Budget Cuts, Economic Woes, March Madness
Flight of the Conchords consider the issues in Episode 2, “Think About It”
The Power of Now: Adrian Piper’s Indexical Present
Adrian Piper, "Mythic Being Doing Yoga," 1975
Everyone has heard about the value of “being in the moment,” letting thoughts of the past and worries about the future drip away while focusing on the here and now. There are some tried and tested techniques for reaching this state, some of which are easier to engage in than others: practicing yoga, meditating, taking drugs such as Ecstasy that emphasize the sensory and empathic over and against the cognitive, having really good sex, eating a piece of chocolate so amazing you can’t possibly think about anything else. Jon Kabat-Zinn has secularized and popularized meditation techniques of being aware of one’s sensations, feelings and perceptions in the present moment, and the use of these mindfulness techniques in medical care. Mindfulness is now credited with a host of mental health benefits including anxiety relief, soothing the cravings of addiction, curbing depressive ruminations, treating eating disorders, and reducing self-harming behaviors; it also has applications in education, sports, and corporate environments. New York Times #1 bestseller The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle has brought mindfulness to prominence within the popular project of self-improvement, albeit peppered with promises of enlightenment that probably won’t be delivered.
Art is occasionally called upon in guided mindfulness meditation exercises, which sound something like this: “Look at the painting in front of you. Notice the colors, the interplay of light and shadow. Let your eyes rest on a particular detail; notice everything you can about it. If you find yourself thinking about anything, don’t judge your thoughts: just notice them and let them go, over and over again. Look at the thickness of the paint. Can you see the brushstrokes? Notice how the painting makes you feel. Sit with that feeling,” etc. Although this might be a pretty good way to look at a Rothko, one might wonder whether mindfulness has a place in art that works in a different way.
Mark Rothko, "Four Darks in Red," 1958
If we think art in terms of mindfulness, perhaps part of art’s value is its capacity to direct our attention to a particular object, image, sound, environment, or situation. While most practices of mindfulness limit their focus to shifts in the consciousness of the individual; some artworks demand consideration of interpersonal mindfulness, the value of an attentional focus on the here and now of the social. While artist Adrian Piper is well known for having been a practitioner of yoga since the 1970s, mindfulness is deployed in her work in a way that expands beyond individual practice and moves to the interpersonal, making certain moments of social engagement very present. Piper describes the “indexical present” as a directed attentional focus on the immediate here and now; basically mindfulness that is pointed to a particular moment, a moment of contact.
In perhaps her most famous piece, Cornered (1988), Piper creates a situation in which the gallery-goer is confronted with the fact of the artist’s blackness, and the possibility of the viewer’s own unknown latent blackness. Indexical language such as “I, you, we, let’s, here, now” is used to implicate the viewer in an engagement with the here-and-now.
Expressing the ways in which her interest in the personal, particular interaction between ethnic or cultural others marks her prolonged fascination with the indexical present, Piper writes, my work springs from a belief that we are transformed—and occasionally reformed—by immediate experience, independently of our abstract evaluation of it and despite our attempts to resist it.” She frames this work specifically in terms of the capacity for art to act as a catalyst, which is to say that “it promotes a change in another entity (the viewer) without undergoing any permanent change itself…the work as such is nonexistent except when it functions as a medium of change between the artist and the viewer.
Catching Feelings
I’ve been trying to ignore all of the panic and mania surrounding swine flu, since as far as I know anxiety has not yet been proven to afford protection against infection and death. An article in yesterday’s New York Times, however, caught my attention, noting the ways in which Mexicans have become particularly marked by the stigma of the flu even though cases have appeared throughout North America and Europe. Apparently healthy Mexican travelers were placed under quarantine in China; several Latin American countries suspended flights from Mexico; groups seeking to limit Mexican immigration to the U.S. have been referring to the virus as “Mexican Flu” in the media.
What struck me about all of this is that it is nothing new. Remember the Gay Plague, anyone? What is important here is not the transmission of disease, but rather the transmission of affect: anxiety, fear, disgust. I drudged up NBC’s very first coverage of the “gay cancer” (1982), which had not yet been identified or named as HIV/AIDS. Right from the start “lifestyle” was named as the cause of the illness, a way of life as disease vector.
In contrast, a 1976 public service announcement from the CDC about swine flu emphasizes the ways in which anyone can catch it, and anyone can transmit it. We should all be scared into vigilance and personal responsibility.
All of this brings me around to thinking about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose artworks involving stacks of posters or pieces of candy free for the taking enact the spread of a virus from a single source. His 1991 work Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) perhaps most directly links the transmission of infection to the transmission of affect. As viewers take a piece of candy from the 175 pound pile (the weight of the artist’s lover Ross in health), they symbolically take a piece of the lost lover’s body as it wastes away at the hands of AIDS. They also take a bit of melancholy-tinged shiny sweetness, a communion with the beloved in joy and death.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)," 1991
This morning I found my piece of gold-wrapped candy from an installation of this work. I still can’t bring myself to eat it. Maybe I can’t make the move from melancholia to mourning? I seem to be resisting the work’s designed disappearance. But then again, the work is also designed for constant renewal; the pile of candy is replenished to its original weight each morning. Perhaps if the work were permanently installed around the corner with its promise of a breath of life each day, I could take that sweetness and loss into my mouth.
My shiny piece of "Portrait of Ross" in LA
The Simpsons Family (Art) Values
"Mom and Pop Art," The Simpsons, Season 10 Episode 19
It seems The Simpsons has something to say about everything, including the value of art. In “Mom and Pop Art,” a treasure of an episode from 1999, Homer is discovered as an “outsider artist” after a home improvement mishap. As the value of Homer’s work on rises and falls on Springfield’s art market, Marge becomes increasingly disappointed that no one seems to appreciate the worth of her representational paintings. The whole family takes an outing to the Springsonian museum, and Marge explains the art historical significance of her favorite works to Homer and the kids. Homer is then besieged by nightmares of being attacked by Andy Warhol throwing giant soup cans. Lisa tells Homer about Christo, and he finally gets some inspiration for a new work. Homer’s final artwork is vastly public; he snorkels all the zoo animals and floods the streets to turn Springfield into a nouveau Venice. If it weren’t a cartoon, the destruction that would ensue after this rogue act wouldn’t be at all light or funny (images of New Orleans post-Katrina can’t help but come to mind) but as a fiction Homer shows us some of art’s worldmaking potential, the ways in which it helps us imagine fantastical possibilities.
A cameo by Jasper Johns makes this all the more delightful.
Thanks to Marc Mayer for leading me on a dig for this little gem. Watch the full episode here.
Feline Theatricality
Tony Smith, "Die," 1962
I stumbled on this YouTube video today, and immediately stopped to think about how much Michael Fried has given me. Sometimes a critic’s description of a phenomenon can be truly apt even if the values attributed to that same phenomenon are less than agreeable. Encountering Tony Smith’s Die as a teenage college student was a key moment that led me to my lifelong obsession with performance. I’m delighted by the theatrical relation between a viewer and an object, the mental play of its potentially endless repetition, the movement necessitated to experience the work from all sides.
In an earlier post Jennifer Doyle discussed the difficulty of a work like Die; it can be hard to engage with unless you have some information about its context and place in the history of ideas about art. I do think this little video might help for imagining a particularly playful minimalist engagement…
For the Love of God: The Artist as Capitalist
Damien Hirst, "For the Love of God," 2007. Platinum, diamonds, and human teeth.
In 2007, artist Damien Hirst exhibited a work at the White Cube gallery in London which is reputed to be the most expensive contemporary artwork ever made. Entitled For the Love of God, apparently in response to a question posed by the artist’s mother (“For the love of God, what are you going to do next?”), the work consists of 8,601 of the world’s finest diamonds encrusting the platinum cast of a human skull from the mid-1800s, complete with the skull’s original real human teeth. Financed by means of an investment of $28 million of the artist’s own money the work is reputed to have sold for $100 million, paid in cash. The artist contracted with Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner in order to acquire the collection of fine diamonds on the international market, which steadily pushed up the precious commodity’s price globally over the months of acquisition.
Inspired by Aztec turquoise mosaic skulls held in the collection of the British Museum, Hirst thought it would be great to create a diamond version, but was originally deterred by the prohibitive cost. Upon further consideration, he decided that the ludicrous expense could actually be the work’s rationale: “maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.” This idea of laughing in the face of death resonates with the artist’s belief in the value of art collecting as something that can confer a certain kind of immortality: “I don’t see what else you can spend your money on. If you want to own things, art is a pretty good bet. Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That’s as close as you can get to immortality.” When asked to think about the work in relationship to the current controversy over African blood diamonds, Hirst declined, but did comment on the deadly potential of the object as an extreme luxury item: “That’s when you stop laughing. You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”
Apart from the obvious gossipy interest that this work inspires, For the Love of God provides an illustrative case study for thinking about art and value. While Hirst suggests that a certain kind of immortality may be attained by the art collector who acquires unique commodities and pulls them permanently out of circulation or makes them available for public use, Karl Marx suggests that the only immortality is held by the ways in which capital is endlessly transforming money into commodities (in this case, artworks) and back again. In For the Love of God, we can see capital’s maintenance of itself in the artwork’s surrender to circulation and indifference to form when it comes to its place in the market. Almost by a certain alchemy, formaldehyde soaked sharks and dead butterflies are transformed into expertly cut diamonds. For the Love of God has the simultaneous status of money itself (diamonds being one of the objects that expresses exchange value more perfectly than others), and of a product which is constituted by objectified labor in the form of raw material and labor as an instrument of the artist’s goals. Inasmuch as living labor is used as both a raw material and an instrument of labor in the mining of diamonds, this action works as evidence, to quote Marx, “that the capitalist desires nothing more than that the worker should expend his dosages of life power as much as possible without interruption.” Human life is a raw material in the construction of this artwork, not only in the form of the actual skull which provides its mold, but more importantly in the expenditure of life power in the often deadly process of mine working and in death resulting from armed conflict financed by the diamond trade.
Santiago Sierra, "250cm Line Tattooed on Six Paid People," 1999. Black and white photograph.
If Damien Hirst’s work incidentally acts to show us the machinations of capital in the interest of giving us an extreme example of the product of objectified labor, the work of artist Santiago Sierra intentionally uses the power of capital to harness living labor. While Hirst’s work makes no pretension of acting as a form of institutional critique, Sierra’s purports to reframe capitalist activity within the symbolic confines of the gallery in order to offer it up for analysis and criticism. One of Sierra’s most well known works is a performance project from 1999 entitled 250cm Line Tattooed on Six Paid People. Each of the unemployed men who participated was paid $30 to have a line permanently tattooed on his back. Sierra’s work presents us with the live act of the transformation of the worker’s living labor, or bodily and energetic potential capacity to work, into use value for capital. In this case, the use value of the worker is set in motion by capital in the specific scene of the art gallery—the worker mobilized as a raw material, as labor in the moment of objectifying transformation, and in that action as the art object itself. What is most striking is perhaps the worker’s absolute indifference to the specificity of his labor, which is in fact what separates and distinguishes the worker from the capitalist (or in this case, the artist). This is not the transformative decision-making process of the capitalist, nor the interested craft of the artistan or jeweler or even tattoo artist, but the bare exchange of time, energy and bodily integrity for a wage.
