Is the art world shuttered? Taking a break? Is the Paris post-Brexit post-Covid boom already bust, or do I always feel this way in January? A popular artist, not a friend but a party acquaintance, told me in 2023: “This won’t last, the excitement will fade and Paris will go back to its old ways.” Enthusiasm is so often short-lived, especially in the arts. Everything feels so inconsistent! I’m into giving up what is melodramatic in art making, but aren’t things really bad—stalled, inoperative, mean? My friends reflect all this to me: it's so hard to get by and no one even bothers to answer emails. Kasper König was said to be fond of a quote by Robert Filliou: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” In König’s Artnews obituary the quote is paraphrased as: “Art is too important to take too seriously.” Some folksy encouragement, but I guess that’s what I’m after. Feeling a bit dejected, I'm going to rehang my show—to make it open at its closing.
The title of the show is taken from two titles, Novembre and Bouvard et Pécuchet, Flaubert’s first and last books. B et P is famous in the art world as a metaphor used by Douglas Crimp to parody how we organize meaning. He injects, via the two foolish protagonists’ amateur anthropology, a postmodern skepticism into the coherence of museological processes—institutional meaning production. Monika, a mentor, would probably feel that a rehanging undermines the choices in the work. She once criticized a video I made because it opens with the line, “I don’t know how to turn all this into art.” She said that’s fine in literature, but you can't say that in your artwork. I’m sure she's right in a way because art is a spell too, and you must have faith to cast it into the world. But which of these works has successfully fixed itself in time, and is this the goal of art things—to become history? Am I just being impatient, and is impatience pertinent? In another window I'm writing a piece on temporary art, bouquets of Delphiniums and castles made of sand. These works seem more like gifts, gifts because of their lilting ephemerality, focused on bequeathing or inaugurating only a moment. Something honest there too, about art that dies and is washed away; it keeps truck with reality––nothing lasts.
I screenshotted a quote from David’s instagram. In it, Cage is describing Robert Rauschenberg’s work; “how it is a gift.” A wonderful sentence, with that nice German-in-English backwards structure. I opened Silence just now looking for the quote and landed instead on Cage’s lecture/score: “Where are we going? And what are we doing?” That’s what bumming me out and keeping me up. In the preamble Cage explains how the text (actually four texts) in print is made “legible—a dubious advantage, for I had wanted to say that our experiences, gotten as they are all at once, pass beyond our understanding.” Sometimes when I think about illegibility I nervously think of Jerry Saltz’s “zombie abstraction,” a label he applied to the hordes of process-based painting he was seeing in the mid-2010s. It was an apt description of work whose formal protest, abstraction, an emptying of content, had been emptied of its critical urgency. Urgency is what I’m aspiring to because if it's not urgent, it's not political. Is politics the care for what's appropriate? And by appropriate I mean helpful. “Fill what is empty. Empty what is full. Fill what is empty. Empty what is full,” joyfully, John rants.
I’m pushing back against the encouragement to have confidence, or I’m just wanting to live in the question and choosing indeterminacy. That sounded like a question actually. I can see in my mentors the possession of a certain confidence from a young age. I think maybe in Germany in the 1980s (or New York––the two poles of my art heritage) it was more natural to feel assured that your art had an unshakeable import. This is not a critique, the circumstances just feel so dramatically different––the scale of the community, its support, the shape and directionality of history. There is always this kind of (useless?) question about comparing one's time with another’s, figuring out what is extra-ordinary. Is this disorganized moment harder or worse than another? Politically, ecologically? Specificity is complicated because it trivializes what is relative. To me all the real things: genocide, fire, right-wing nationalism, feel almost beyond the scope of integration. Someone has the urge to write at the end of an otherwise differently interested press release: “No War.” Talk about alienation. Do I always confuse the political with the personal, yes. Is this melodrama?
My struggle with painting is that it proceeds with confidence away from reality. As a way to encounter it again maybe, but I can't make the jump. It feels politically negative to turn away from reality, but don’t I? The nature of painting feels like the opposite of (and so kind of dialectically the same as) Christ's directive to Christians: “be in the world but not of it.” It's an order to give up your subjectivity (and your body), your timeliness––your command over time. Painting feels “of the world but not in it,” selfishly hoarding time unto itself and lording it over all those precarious, fragile things with its unshakeable vitality.
I had misremembered the Filliou above, as a quote by André Malraux, maybe the simplicity of Filliou’s declaration makes it elusive bibliographically. The equivalent Malraux quote I found nested in Deleuze’s 1987 lecture, “What is the creative act?”:
Malraux says a very simple thing about art: “It is the only thing that resists death”… and what is the relationship between the struggle of men and the work of art? The closest and most mysterious relationship. Exactly what Paul Klee meant when he said: “You know, the people are missing.” There is no work of art that does not appeal to a people that does not yet exist.
Watching the lecture on Youtube, I see that Deleuze opens by saying: “ I would like to ask some questions of myself.” Maybe for me right now this is the most important thing. When everything feels so concretized, blocked, I’ll try to enact a phenomenological reduction to parts. Since I’ve got the time, I'll undermine sureness and give myself the gift of rethinking again what I want to share with you.
