primalmommy on fri 27 dec 02
I have thought hard about this one; compared to some of today's
navel-gazing, self involved college art, this one seemed so...
relevant... had a poetry to it...
But the materials used in this art project were: several black boxes, a
writing implement, and a large number of human beings who had not given
permission to be used in this particular project. What if I want to make
a statement about the pointlessness of pursuing the corporate paycheck,
by building a giant hamster wheel, and abducting a few random executives
to run on the wheel, tethered by their neckties? Of course that would be
ethically unsupportable -- holding human beings hostage against their
will to make my artistic statement.
We no longer throw human beings to the lions just to watch the fun... so
we need to consider what it means to be emotionally torn to shreds, as
well. Some people choose to watch the most gut-wrenching, tear-jerking
or nerve wracking movies: I don't get it, but since they choose it,
there is no foul. Nobody has the right to choose what kind of emotional
trauma others should be able to handle -- or, James, Ditmar, at what
point we should all just "get over it" and let go of fear. That's the
kind of wisdom we hear about how everyone should just quit smoking, or
lose weight, or "snap out of" depression.... usually dished out by
people who have never battled any of those problems.
I consider myself one tough cookie, able to out-shoot, out-spit,
out-rope and out-ride the best of them. But since September 11, I have
found myself afraid of my mail, (when it arrived looking white and
dusty)... afraid of cropdusters, (in the wake of a report about thefts
and the possibility of bio/germ dispersal)... Afraid of the nearby nuke
plant, afraid of fast food restaurants, stuff I never would have dreamed
worrying about. Guarding the Canadian border? Imagine that...
You can't tell a woman who has been raped to just buck up and go out in
the dark and have no fear... you can't adopt a dog that has been beaten
and expect it to suddenly stand tall and trust humans. Not just because
you say so.
Yes, fear has power, and we shouldn't let it rule our lives if we can
help it. I remember a group of handsome young north african thugs in
Paris who used to amuse themselves all summer by leaving the occasional
stolen backpack in a public square and then calling the police, laughing
while the bomb squad showed up -- again and again-- to fish it up with a
long pole and check it for explosives. I never understood it, even when
a cafe blew up a hundred yards from where I was standing, I never really
understood it until it was my OWN back yard. Even in the relative
distance between Ohio and DC and NYC, local discussions of nuclear plant
sabotage and great lakes ecoterrorism and poisoning of public food,
etc,... are no longer just academic to me. Maybe it's because i have
small children and can't afford to be fatalistic.
I know fear is a weapon... but I have fear. Fear is also a tool. Fear of
predators kept early humans alert, armed, alive. Fear of hard winters
meant making big woodpiles and storing lots of food. I still have a bit
of primal instinct operating and can/dry/preserve food with a frenzy in
summer and fall... grandma just calls it being a good farmer but the
root of it is fear.
There is nothing new about it; my dad was never having kids because the
world was going to end in an atom bomb war. My mom -- a child terrified
of the dark -- took a flashlight into her closet for blackout drills.
Any human being who is completely without fear is an anomaly, and
possibly dangerous. Even James fears for our seriously-in-trouble
society.
Children make crank phone calls because they think it's funny, and can't
yet fully understand that they might be scaring the bejeezus out of some
old lady living alone... When a person -- or a culture -- has been
through an horrific loss, trauma, or ordeal, nobody else can decide when
they should be done healing, or how soon they should be able to move on.
If you are strong and secure and take it all in stride, bully for you.
Others are wounded more deeply, heal more slowly, or have less strength.
No artist -- however "right" his point -- can ethically terrify people
just to make his point.
Yours, Kelly in Ohio... happy to discover that my current computer is so
old and crappy that folks were leaving better models on the CURB after
christmas... no, I didn't trash-pick a computer, but I got a great deal
from the local used computer shop, and will be setting it up sunday!
woohoo!
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Jeanie on sun 29 dec 02
Thankyou. Lilly, Bob, Stephani, Mel. Thanks for your closely
reasonedand humane responses to the 'black box' flap. Ihave been trying
to identify the most important aspects of this experience-important to
the student , to the academic institution,to other artists, to the
city,and to the country[and to other countries in so far as they are
impacted by our situation}-at this point I was going to make a terse
list of what I thought were the underlying concepts. But we all know
them.The 'Liberty-Licence continuum. The autonymy/Authority conundrum.
The idea thatany act that involves more than one person is a political
act. We can see all these concepts engaged here, and the emotional
reactions to the student's act are just an indication of how deeply
these concepts have embedded themselves in our experience of being alive
in this time and place.
Having said that, it still seems to me that the most meaningfulfacet of
the student's act was that he acted as if he had the freedom to ignore
the context in which he acted. No one, not teacher, not cop, not
institutuon has that right. Certaninly not artist. In this case, not
only was it misthought action, it was Bad Art Why? Because the
statement he was purportedly making was all ABOUT the context in which
his boxes were placed-a crowded public space in a city horribly
traumatized by terror, and not yet numbed, as some parts of the world
have become, by repeated terror. Yet he ignored the reality of that
context by trivializing the experience of the commutors seeing those
boxes. By, in effect chiding them because they could not seperate
themselves from their own experience, because they could not 'get' his
oh- so - charmingly enigmatic statement. He was trying to make a
statement about how his boxes should change people's perception of the
context of their daily lives, but he was acting with purile disregard
of the actual context in which they had their lives. This is a whole
lot like choreagraphing a piece about dancing on air by first creating a
vacum. There is no next step. This student does not deserve our
defense. By claiming special privelege as an artist he has already
removed himself from the context in which his fellow citizens live
without ex pecting special privelege. And even if the rest of society
granted special privelige to him as an artist, I believe that we, as
artists should deny it to him by our hoots of dirision, which hopefully
would be heard by everyone in Union Station. How can we so flacidly
allow such Bad Art to speak for all artists in the public discourse? In
exactly the same way hate-mongering religeous Fundamentalists make it
difficult to identify oneself as a Christian, these ill-concieved and
self-indulgently egotistical acts by 'artists' make it difficult to say
"I am an artist.' Except that, as artists, our work speaks for us.
What we say matters. What we Make, as artists matters more. Now more
than ever...
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