Awol – as you gentle readers may not have noticed – was a little more awol than usual the last week or so.  Once upon a time that might have implied too many bars or after-hours clubs.  Or piles of actual paid work (remember salaried employment?—once almost as familiar as sex??).  Now it’s more likely to mean a hospital emergency room.  Sometimes the world is just too much for us.  We feel as if just being here is sort of ‘awol,’ ‘de trop,’ demasiado, or however we put it here in L.A. 

James Garner, the actor and movie star (gee do I really need to even qualify that name?) slipped away from us so quietly – modest and graceful to the end.  It was as if 30 or 40 years, really the last three decades of his career, simply elided to the last horizon line.  (In my imagination, he is never older than 46.)  It was simply time to leave the room. 

With Elaine Stritch, we sort of watched it happening – in her club act, her last stage appearances, her diabetes, her last documentary appearance.  And the depression never helps, you know—both the personal emotional one and the global Depression we’re all living through.  (Annoying that we have to listen to both government and media lies about it, no?)  We were watching Joanne unravel with all those bottles of scotch and little gestes.  ‘I don’t think you’ll ever be a kid again, kiddo.’  Is that it?  Just—as Daniel Patrick Moynihan assured Mary McGrory after the Kennedy assassination (when she said, “We’ll never laugh again.”)—“We’ll laugh again; we’ll just never be young again.”

Well the world is no longer young; but I wonder lately if it will ever ‘laugh’ again.   [Insert screed here about planetary eco-collapse, and international sideshows whipped up by megalomania, xenophobia, sheer greed, and petty thuggery—and do we really need to hear Marco Rubio pontificating about anything?] 

The art just doesn’t have room to breathe; even music – which is all about breathing.  Which may be one reason so much art I’m exposed to lately seems to concern itself to one degree or another with mood, atmospherics, effects.  Aesthetics are important (everything is); I’m as susceptible to mood (as an earlier blog post may have alluded to), and certainly beauty, as anyone else.  And by all means bring on the decorative.  But it’s really not enough.  It’s not even pathetic; it’s anemic; and I find it exasperating. 

Nor is it a question of subject, content, concept, or simply armature.  I’m not looking for a particular level of political engagement (which may be latent regardless of design or intent); and most overtly political art fails on every level anyway (even a film as ‘successful’ as, say, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, which is really a species of porn when you get right down to it—and not even very good porn).  But the sense of urgency is lacking, a specific claim on our attention or engagement. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean a connection with the viewer’s world.  We’ve already stepped outside it and into the artist’s; we don’t have to stay.  No – it’s more about the artist’s own connection with and commitment to that (re-)constructed world.  And I’m not necessarily concerned with a purported ‘awareness’ or ‘self-awareness’ in that world or ironic relationship to one or another aspect of the work.  And I swear if I see another gratuitous reference to ‘self-reflexivity’ in another gallery hand-out or press release, I may consider staging a rehab-style ‘intervention.’  (I actually saw something in an e-mail or announcement this past week referring to an artist’s “self-reflective” qualities.  You can’t make this stuff up.  ‘Gee I hope so,’ I thought, and quickly clicked the delete tab.) 

What can really be ironic is when, notwithstanding political, or lack of political, aspects of an artist’s work, there’s a perceptible straining at political ‘correctness.’  (Though, again, this can be something manufactured by a gallery or publicist – as if hedging their ‘bets’ with respect to where they intend to ‘position’ the artist.)  It’s all quite cynical, and sometimes inadvertently hilarious.  This is no time for political correctness.     

And then there’s the philosophical fetishizing that just drives me wild (in both art and commentaries; artists alone aren’t completely on the hook for this).  I’m not in this to review my Kant, Kierkegaard or college art history (or neuro/optical/psychological) texts.  (I mean – the texts?  Not even the actual art?)  If I need a fresh gloss on this theory or that philosophy, I know where to get it.  And the same goes for criticism and reviews that seem to give art a pass for subtly (or more often not-so-subtly) referencing various art historical or high (or low) cultural motives and milestones.   

It sounds funny, I know—when the times of ‘less’ are right around the corner, if not here already—but I want something more from my local (and global) art industry.  More direct and impactful; more visceral and cerebral at the same time.  We got “more culture,” as Iggy Pop might put it.  (I don’t need any didacticism to go with it.)  And certainly, “more venom, dynamite and disaster.”  I’m not through with this; but for the moment I think Iggy sums it up as well as I ever could:  I need more.