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Byline: Zak Smith
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DECODER
That Thing-centric LoveI hope you’ve had this problem: You like some art somewhere but you hate the social machinery around it.
You know something is good, but the discourse, the nepotism, the snobs, the takes, the informative six-page features, the art history teachers, the leachers, the exiguous creatures in the bleachers, and the limited-edition sneakers: they make you despair.
You love a thing—a thing, an object, not even a person. And to find that love or articulate it, or to acknowledge how much your love of actual people comes down to being able to share that thing-centric love with them, requires intercourse with harsh processes where the sausage of that love is extruded from the great and squealing hog of life in a society.
Loving art in a way that brings it close to your life sounds like something that happens to a maiden aunt in a novel about finding romance on a trip to rural Italy, but it also just sucks—like loving a cat with three legs but no bladder control.
If we can stop being ironic about our relationship to the apparatus of art, so much of what we worry about is the line where the art ends and the bullshit begins.
Thirty-one minutes and 59 seconds into Tár—a film about the downfall of a celebrated fictional contemporary conductor—the titular Lydia sits at a piano and plays a Bach prelude to a skeptical student, monologuing as she plays: “…you hear what it really is, it’s a question,” (as she plays an up-talking musical phrase) “and an answer,” (and a subtly different phrase) “which begs another question,” (a phrase again). “There’s a humility in Bach, he’s not pretending he’s certain about anything because he knows that its always the question that involves the listener—it’s never the answer”.
I like this prelude. I think it is Good Art. I like how Lydia/Cate Blanchett plays. Good Art, too. The skeptical music student agrees (and when rivals agree it is the closest thing we have to truth in the arts) that Lydia plays well. I would even venture so far as to say that despite me knowing fuck-all about classical music that Lydia’s analysis of Bach is persuasive, and maybe I even learned something. Which is good because I know so fuck-all about classical music I had to Google to find out it was a prelude.
And despite there being two hours left to go in the movie that’s all I know for sure about the art-to-bullshit quotient inhabiting Lydia Tár.
This is a pivotal moment in Tár because it is the only time we are assured that Lydia is actually good at anything. Every other second of the film has the same humility its protagonist ascribes to Bach: it just asks questions.
Lydia Tár (born Linda Tarr) at the piano is a pinprick of authenticity in a bloodbath of pose and unproved assertion. She is fawningly interviewed (her answers are rehearsed), she models for album covers (she art-directs them), she dresses carefully (even when not modelling), she offers advice to inferiors (and she is sure they’re that), adoring fans approach her, assistants handle her logistics, she writes something called Tár on Tár, she controls a fellowship and a major orchestra, her relationships with colleagues are lurid and questionable. She is above all high-handed and for an audience that wants to see her with hands held high. In other words: the art and life of Lydia Tár are attended by a tremendous amount of bullshit. And her downfall via social media is due to not doing the bullshit well enough. Because the artist’s enmeshment with bullshit is inextricable.
And at no point are we sure (or unsure) she’s worth all this attention. I’m still not 100% sure what a conductor even does. Don’t all these musicians have sheet music?
To see the film’s achievement here we have to remember what films about artists are usually like. Either the moment of making is undergirded by an advancing swell of inspirational music—and then we know the art’s supposed to be good, like in Basquiat, Pollock or Oliver Stone’s The Doors—or the art is introduced in a deadpan shot with someone in a failed experiment of an outfit ultra syllabically swooning over it—in which case we know the art’s supposed to be silly, like in Velvet Buzzsaw or Ruben Östlund’s The Square.
Portraits of artists are usually either heroic legend or satire, but the problem with real artists is they come unlabeled. Tár lets us sit with that problem. I’m going to say that makes it good.
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A Bold Statement
DecoderI have a friend who, for the most part, paints abstract paintings. We were talking on the couch the other week about this period where she had started making not-abstract paintings. She had painted paintings with images of recognizable things, with words, with clear references to the issues of the day. “I wanted to do what I wasn’t supposed to do,” she said.
This struck me as new and odd—or, at least, counter to my experience and understanding. The contemporary art world I knew—the one I’d been told about since at least high school—very much craved messages and clear references to the issues of the day. Not only do artists whose work refers to topical lefty issues occupy an esteemed position in the layer cake of art-critical discourse, but even artists whose work’s connection to topical lefty issues are less than obvious, are obscure, or are arguably nonexistent, are described and promoted using the language of topical lefty discourse. If you believe what you read, contemporary sculptors, painters, video artists and installation installers are forever shaking up status quos, forcing us to question received ideas, critiquing commercial culture, and promoting diversities and alternatives.
At least within the relatively cloistered hothouse of the contemporary art world, my understanding is that what we were all casually expected to do is (while steering clear of becoming the kind of confrontational career-suicide who forces art-support institutions to confront the not-lefty-friendly parts of their power base) pretty much constantly tackle topical lefty topics in a way that would align us with the New Yorker or NPR view of the world, thus making it all the easier to get written up in the New Yorker or interviewed on NPR and so remain relevant. That’s what every single well-known artist in living memory had done before.
However, my friend reminded me that this top layer of the art cake—occupied by artists who casually say things like “my next retrospective”—is not the only layer with enough icing on it to put your kids through college. Many mind-bendingly good artists occupy a low or mid-tier strata where the job is less about the art speaking to writers who in turn speak to potential customers, but more just the art dealer talking straight to the customers. And sometimes what these absolutely commercially necessary customers want is: to put the painting in a bank, or a hotel, or some other place where a Republican, a small child, or an unusually Catholic person might see it.
These may seem like strange places to put contemporary art, but there are a lot of them.
In many ways it is not even a question of offense. There’s a certain quality to images that make their plays for your attention on very specific terms—on my way to the drugstore I will notice images asking me to buy a beer, to watch a television show, to support a candidate and/or a cause, to change lanes, to beware of dogs, to use the other door, to press the button to call the clerk. None of these are bold creative or social statements but they all ask something super-specific of me, and they all dissolve into visual noise once the asking has been addressed: I already watch that show, I did change lanes, I voted for the other guy. Art with this quality—the quality of asking, by implication, for a judgment or a take on some other thing in the real world, the quality that nearly any representational image has—there’s always a risk that it annoys someone, that it’s a little louder on the wall than a big lavender lozenge, no matter how lovely. This can make it harder to sell.
What emerges is a bizarre class system of expression: artists who have a bulletproof sniper’s nest (like having escaped a prison camp or having gotten famous in the ’90s) out of which to spray their bullets have the ability to make art full of statements and can be sure this statement-making is received as heroic, and they can sell work off that reputation so long as it can be distinguished from those lower down in the pecking order who—while having views that are nearly identical—are less phenomena of the media than of the luxury goods business. These artists must ride to work on the same squeamish tides of commercial demand as any other product in the market and might be punished not so much for rocking the boat as for reminding the sailors the sea has waves.
Sometimes they want you to say something and sometimes they don’t, but the boldest statement—the one that involves risking something real that you might not get back—is not caring
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The Lobby, In Context
DecoderFrom the outside, the hotel lobby appeared to have (or be?) a gift shop—and an audaciously hip one. It said “porn” in awfully big letters, especially for a hotel lobby. I investigated.
It didn’t have a gift shop, it was just a lobby, but it was a very fancy lobby. Think now of what a splendid and splendidly expensive hotel lobby might imply: a dazzling beaux-arts concatenation of marble and arch? A playground of modernist geometry with manta-ray wing chairs and space-age lamps? Grand hotel lobbies always distill some version of their era’s taste down to occupiable form.
This particular lobby was a verdict on the Art of Context, the art historical movement that began with Duchamp, went mainstream in the ’60s, peaked in the ’90s and… is still around. It tells us what the business of figuring out where the modern upscale traveler would like to wait for their aunt has decided is desirable and sexy about the world of putting a museum label on a toy duck.
The first thing you notice is a sculpture which is a familiar parody of a popular Pop-art sculpture. Or a reproduction of the parody—was there ever an original? I don’t know. There are painted skateboard decks flanked by rows of photogenic books, a bunch of little keychains with a little guy on them like the kind you might see in a junk drawer with forgotten stuff in a house anyone might have, except they’re isolated in vitrines like jewelry, typewriters wall-mounted as if on display in the MoMA design department, jerseys of important local sports guys stretched like canvases, some fine art that was treated like fine art (with a wall label and everything) commissioned or just acquired by the hotel. Then there were framed Polaroids of some people, kitschy little animal sculptures—lots of the same one—presented on plinths and other tactics of display meant to contrast their kitschiness with the pale severity of said display tactic, Andy Warhol wallpaper (of course), paintings up-and-down the taken-seriously scale placed cheek-by-jowl, neon art, plants, mismatched vases, all flanking relatively stylish tables, chairs and chandeliers.
Visually, if you wanted to be generous, you might say it operates according to a system combining density, clarity and democratization to allow every mismatched thing, no matter how humble, to present itself as a dramatic actor in an infinite game of juxtaposition. (This may just be a crappy papier-mache leopard, but I bet you didn’t expect it to be next to taxidermy!) If you wanted to be ungenerous you might say it looks like a store.
The lobby also decisively asserts that several things the fine art world has traditionally thought of as different aren’t. The curator—whose job it is to decide which objects are worth looking at—isn’t much different than the interior designer—whose job is to make a space seem worth hanging out in. Neither are very much different than the appropriation artist—whose job is to assert one object they didn’t make is more worth looking at than all the others they didn’t make. The commercial designer—whose job is to decide on the visual specifics of the next commercial tchotchke to get sold—is not different than the artist—whose job is, well, much debated. The boardwalk painter, the skateboard painter, and the much-celebrated painter are likewise all equal, along with the typewriter-designer. And the typographer. The collectible, the historical artifact, and the image-made-for-image’s sake are all the same.
The public doesn’t care about the philosophical heft of transporting all these objects from one Sphere of Discourse to the next. In the end, it’s a lobby competing with other lobbies. You can hang out in the Parisi Udvar’s lobby or you can hang out here. Both
present visions of excess, but in different ways:While the classically gorgeous European hotel might present the visitor with an image of conspicuous consumption represented by paying some Milanese stone mason to chisel away at an angel’s wing on top of a column for half a year, this lobby presents an image of conspicuous consumption represented by spending an equivalent amount to pay for a glass box, a white pedestal and several square feet of now-unusable floor space in a major metropolitan area to display a soup ladle. While Renaissance art patrons wanted to overwhelm us with the variety of craftsmen their money could muster and master, these new overlords want to impress us with the spare money they’ve got to waste on the space needed to display the ladle, the spare time and brain cells they have to waste on dreaming up why they’d want to, and the spare drugs they have to waste on making that seem fun.
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13 Ways of Looking at Kayla
DecoderIt can be a disservice to describe an artist whose art describes a constantly changing self.
1. Kayla Tange looking platonically calm, platonically Asian, platonically a performance artist, dressed in an all-white so crisp it might be paper, in a great glass box surrounded by a respectfully quiet audience, surrounded by an unobtrusive low-noise soundtrack, surrounded by an art gallery, painting with a pale wooden-handled brush. Slowly she’s painting the inside of the glass box white.
2. “I’ve straight-up given lap dances on a La-Z-Boy boy that was duct-taped or like they’d say ‘People were murdered outside yesterday’ and you’re just like ‘…cool?’ Back in the day there was a place in the valley called Bob’s Classy Lady. I mean come on, the name alone—so bad but so great! Sometimes I’m like I think I just worked at these places because—well, besides needing the money there was something relatable for me about it. I was equally attracted and appalled by seedy clubs.”
3. Something indescribable. A sculpture, something like a volcano of nail polish and something like a universe forming, impossibly glossy, oozing, unformed, fountaining, very red over a dry white base. Barigongju Entry Ritual, 2021, unfired clay, acrylic. About the size of a saucepan.
4. I’m in the back of the Uber, heading up Vermont, watching her 2017 piece Dear Mother, which is a video-letter to the birth-mother who she never met. Who refused to meet her. I’m crying. Because of a goddamn piece of performance art. On a phone.
5. “I did a show that Luka Fisher and Tristine Roman curated called ‘A Golden Fool’—the cops came, and everyone ran out. I was naked, running across the street, robe barely hanging. It was so fun—‘Remember that time that we were in this warehouse—there were people covered in glitter and jewels jacking off in the rafters, it was wild.’”
6. Children and old people using sticks to draw in the sand filling a white frame on a gallery floor. Each drawn line revealing a glow from underneath because the sandbox conceals a lightbox below. On YouTube, we see Kayla in a could-be-couture arrangement of translucent and artful black-and-white fabric kneeling over, and writing in, her own box; then, in another stylishly asymmetrical outfit, talking about healing. Cello music.
7. Kayla in nothing but a blonde wig and white underwear, winking over an asymmetrically dropped shoulder back at the audience, in a cellphone photo I’ll draw a picture of. That picture will be published in an art book.
8. Kayla in a sky-blue-and-white hanbok framed in front of a window which itself frames a daylist section of a Los Angeles street. Lifting colors from bright upright bottles of yellow, red, purple, etc she smears them on plexiglas while the art audience watches her and also the projection to her left, showing an abstract film of the painting she paints in real time.
9. Kayla as a sex-nun in latex, crawling, collecting anonymous confessions on scraps of paper, which become the raw materials for the next piece.
10. “I have like thousands of confessions,
boxes of them. Like, they’re horrible, I mean like people are talking about like murdering people. Like why do I need that in my house? Do you know what I mean? But it was like I wanted to collect the most I possibly could to develop some understanding of humanity …I don’t know that I could do these pieces again.”11. Something alien and elegant, a figure in a glittering gown, far too tall with a glowing bluish-pale sphere beneath a veil for a head, holding feather fans. There is music from one kind of club, and then a different kind. Before it’s over the creature will reveal itself to be Kayla, again, basically naked. Kayla calls the version of herself who does this “Coco Ono.”
12. “I was like how am I supposed to make objects? I have nowhere to put them, I don’t have space to make them …I found my way into performance from like stripping and stuff because like I just needed a bag of clothes.”
13. “I just feel like: maybe I want to seduce. So why not say something also?”
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DECODER: Back at the Museums
Pictures of Sailing Ships or the People that Owned themMonths back, when the pandemic was still running strong, I wrote about how much I wanted to go to a museum—even a mediocre one. Well, now I can and I did and I remembered that most things are bad. We can do whatever we want again, including wonder why we choose to do it.
Though sometimes art is good, it usually isn’t. This has been true throughout history but, also throughout history, the edge has traditionally been taken off this state of affairs by art exhibitions having some kind of social purpose. “It may just be another bull running from a guy shooting arrows,” the paleolithic critics used to say between sips of stale yak milk “but at least it gives us all an opportunity to get out to the cave.”
For a long time this social purpose was frankly religious or statist—there was a statue of a great man or an archangel. Even if it sucked, it was still George Washington and you were supposed to know what he looked like and that he could be impressive—and on a horse. Eventually a further purpose developed—social and commercial business was increasingly going down in larger and larger rooms and art was needed to decorate them. Parlors, salons and chambers of all kinds were expected to have pictures of sailing ships, dogs or the people who owned them—paintings filled the walls, statues gathered in the corners, and these announced that the spaces they occupied were both safe and spoken for. In this way, art was a force for civilization in the most crass and middle-class terms: it announced these spaces were attempting to be civil. You didn’t have to look at the art, just being around it was enough to establish your status as a non-ruffian.
While modernity brought with it forces that would bring these assumptions into doubt, the forces themselves settled, often unconsciously, on a new answer to the question of the purpose of exhibiting art. The self-consciously bohemian classes realized that they couldn’t talk about revolution at work, that they shouldn’t talk at all during Godard movies, that they couldn’t hear each other at Pink Floyd concerts, and that when they were home watching TV there was no one listening, so they needed to find entertainments that were neither loud, nor immersive, nor convenient. Art shows filled the bill. For approximately 100 years they became an extension of cafe society, a place to broadly advance the project of being well-educated with a funny haircut while hating (or at least hating-on) capitalism, and the art increasingly reflected that stance in form and content. Often the art was much more fun to talk about than look at, but the people who liked it were okay with that. Insofar as art sat like a mute centerpiece at the table of the chattering classes’ social and intellectual ambitions, it was doing a job they needed done.
Nowadays, however, when you can not only talk to all your friends and thousands of strangers about defunding the police, organizing your mutual aid society and planning your performance/rave/happening while watching TV but you can see every piece in every art show in full color without leaving your couch, it seems like the social role of shows is due for another revision. One of the many questions NFTs raise is, really, what counts as “looking” at a piece of art and how much do you really have to do it to receive what it has to give?
When I’m out at a show I am definitely looking at the thing and I am—if the people around me are ones I trust very much with absolutely no social connection to the artists—going to tell them what I think about it but …we could be doing that at my place. About not just what we saw that day but about anything ever made. “Do you know Chavelet? Well let me google him.” I am not saying there’s no reason to go to a show—I am simply saying there are fewer and fewer unique ones.
Maybe art shows won’t have a social role anymore—maybe they should cultivate an anti-social role. Maybe we need art to lean into its ability to disconnect us from what everyone else wants us to care about: No longer the twice-life-size marble Virgin at the far end of the block-long museum queue, but unknown shrines off unmarked dirt roads, dedicated to gods unknown.
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The Art of Cruelty — 10 Years Later
DecoderA lot has changed since 2011, when Maggie Nelson first published The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, her critically acclaimed collection of essays addressing violence and transgression in avant-garde art.
One thing that’s changed is the word “trigger”—now much more widely used to indicate a word or image that a traumatized individual might find so upsetting that it threatens their mental health. This seven-letter word’s second life is a surprisingly useful piece of linguistic technology, as it cleanly separates (and assumes a separation between) the possibility of inadvertently causing pain to an individual from social harm. I know someone triggered by spiders, I know someone triggered by buses, neither see a need to excoriate the continued existence of public transport or class Arachnida.
Nelson writes too early to rely on “trigger,” but she might’ve saved herself a few paragraphs if she could have: The strength of her book is that it frames the “reckoning” in the title as personal—she frames the confrontations of confrontational art as with individuals, she frames her reactions as her own. Like David Hockney’s book, That’s The Way I See It; it doesn’t demand you agree with it for it to be interesting.
Nelson starts from neither end of the nihilist-libertine-to-moral-scold spectrum; she’s a person who once called someone to register her outrage about a billboard advertising a horror movie and a person who read and enjoyed the Marquis De Sade and then did the only interesting thing someone like that can do: ask why? Artist-by-artist, piece-by-piece, movement-by-movement, Nelson bangs her head against her own reactions. She does what so many critics fail to: she feels, but then does something else afterward. This requires acknowledging that the difference she sees begins in her own history and nervous system, rather than in a measurable world of cultural certainties. She takes the pre-eminent activist-critic John Berger to task for his attack on Francis Bacon’s blood-soaked pessimism as the work of a “conformist” trying to “persuade the viewer to accept what is”:
The problem here, it seems to me, lies in Berger’s willingness to give Bacon’s proposition such overarching power. For while the paintings may indeed propose that there is nothing else, their proposition remains just that—a momentary proffering. As one beholds them (at, say, Bacon’s 2009 centenary retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), there is wall space between each canvas, there is space to walk around the room. One can come and go, look closely, then look away, stay for a long time or simply walk on by, en route to the bathroom or gift shop. Their depiction of belatedness or mindlessness—however claustrophobic—does not necessitate our acquiescence. They are paintings; our job is to behold them. There is no need, or even invitation, to submit to their terms.
This decade-old observation about a painter 30 years gone hits today with such force because of another thing that’s happened since Nelson published this study of a handful of works she rubricked together under the Art of Cruelty umbrella: All art is cruel now. Or rather examining art for its cruelty-quotient is the pre-eminent critical tool. There are a great many advantages to this approach—if a piece you never liked anyway can be proven to be cruel, the more difficult, nuanced and queasily subjective work of arguing why you never liked it can be skipped. It’s hurting people get rid of it. Conversely, if a work you like can be pronounced (as if it were lip-gloss) cruelty-free then anyone arguing merely that it might not be enjoyable or interesting can be consigned to the pale Hell of the cruelty-apologist. The languid vagaries of aesthetic judgments can be abandoned for the undeniable urgency of moral ones.
Nelson refuses to take that bait, acknowledging the difficulty of disentangling the two in, for example, her take on avant-horror author Brian Evenson:
…his writing doesn’t just evoke the precision of slicing or cutting; his characters actually perform the deeds. When this literalness works, the work carries both visceral punch and intellectual heft. When it falls short, either the violence or the concept behind it seems suddenly naked, paltry, wrong. It is, in short, a gamble.
Granting the artist the right to gamble is a powerful act of critical humility, saying: you can try, you can fail, and if you do, you’ve failed only Maggie Nelson, not the whole of humanity. We need a world less willing to hide behind a crowd.
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Responsible and Irresponsible Art
DecoderThe art-bureaucrat class is currently in a state of great anxiety over the differences between responsible and irresponsible art. The artists aren’t, but these categories aren’t up to them.
Whether she wants to be or not, Kara Walker will—for the foreseeable future—be packaged and promoted as a Responsible Artist, and regardless of any articulate interviews the directors give about the philosophical or cathartic power of catharsis, pain and gore, the Saw movies will continue to be viewed as Irresponsible Art. Away from these polar extremes, the rest of the artists await the Great Dividing. Who is Enlightening? Who appeals to our Lower Instincts? Who will get to do what? With whose money?
Responsible Art includes all art where it’s clear to an uninformed viewer why someone might think it would be morally improving to look at it. Irresponsible Art is everything else.
Ways of being Responsible can conflict: An in-all-ways-pious Reformation crucifixion is Responsible Art and so is Soviet-era state-sponsored satire at the expense of organized religion—they’re both clearly getting something across about right and wrong.
Big cultural conflicts always manifest themselves in attitudes toward Responsible and Irresponsible Art:
Adolf Hitler hated jazz of course. His pilots didn’t, though—they’d fly around and pick up jazz on their radios and he couldn’t stop them—it was a problem. Their duties to drop bombs in the name of racial disharmony did not align with their taste.
The Soviet Union had notoriously strong views on the need for art to be Responsible, and—after a brief flirtation—decided abstraction wasn’t. The CIA saw and then seized the opportunity to fund this Irresponsibility. It was a way to make American life seem open and cool without having to give money to someone who might a paint a landlord getting lynched. Now there’s an AbEx painting in every bank, hair salon and seaside motel.
A decade later the Cold War took another turn. Americans began complaining not only that their sons and brothers were being recruited into a war against a Communism, but that the books they were reading, the music they were hearing, and the films they were watching were, too. So, the ’60s happened. Mainstream culture had been religious, anti-communist, pro-family, and—crucially—comprehensible. So, the counterculture went about being all the other things. Yes, John Lennon sang about giving peace a chance—which is very Responsible—but he also sang about newspaper taxis appearing on the shore—which isn’t.
We all strive, now and then, to be Responsible—and we should—right and wrong are a big deal. But in the great pick-up game of life, Team Irresponsible gets not only abstraction but drugs, dreams, sex, dream-logic, and most of the better jokes.
The control of Responsible Art is important—most of our major cultural institutions are scrambling as we speak to lay claim to it—but as these examples prove, whoever controls Irresponsible Art will win in the end. People can agree on The Beatles.
But, but… what about the Trump Question? Well, in this light you can see it’s more of a Trump Answer.
Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to openly espouse Irresponsibility, which had, until then, been a preserve of youth and, therefore, the left. JFK cheated on his wife with Marilyn Monroe? Bill Clinton smoked dope and got blowjobs? Well look at me, I fuck porn stars and my toilet is solid gold.
Trump’s masterstroke was to take what had always been a subtext of the GOP project—that if you just distribute money and power unevenly enough then some of us will get to spend all day laying by the pool doing ketamine off strippers’ butts—and made it text.
His 2016 opponent was, like him, rich, white and talked funny, but was his opposite in that she radiated Responsibleness. She could only express the Democratic Party’s promise (that if you distribute money and power evenly enough then we’ll all be able to eat and then send our children to art school where they can do ketamine off each others’ butts) as subtext.
It was still a close race—we all know that—but Trump had revealed to his friends that you could lean all the way in on Irresponsible and the church people and rear admirals would still vote for you. We may have only got our country back from him on account of the great tsunami of collective Responsibility demanded by Covid.
But don’t let them have Irresponsible—it may not look so great right now, but we’ll need it later.
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The Truth Is Out There, Somewhere
DecoderWho doesn’t like a bit of mystery? But where are they keeping it these days?
There are certainly unknowns—when will this pandemic really end? Did they really do that? But mystery is not the same as a mystery. True crime, for example, isn’t mysterious. In the end either one kind of crime was committed or another was. If the killer is eventually revealed, it’s extremely satisfying… and far less mysterious. A true mystery feels mysterious every time you see it.
True mystery gathers around something unknowable but compelling: fields of humanoid fossils in the Rift Valley, incunabula deep in the Bodleian or Vatican libraries, the heart of the sun.
Any art old enough to also be an artifact can feel mysterious just by dint of having been made by long-vanished minds we’ll never have a chance to know—but newer art summoning mystery is a neat trick. Francis Bacon did it, after so many surrealists failed, perhaps because his distortions seemed so necessarily to connect to pain (so less playful), Lee Bontecou did it (she made the biotechnohorrorvoid as abstraction before Alien made it literal), Mark Tobey was mysterious on a good day. But, aside from a few aggressive antifashionables like Jeronimo Elespe and Danny McCaw, “summoning mystery” tends not to be on the contemporary artist’s list of ambitions. Why?
For one thing, we live in an age of explication. Seconds after hearing about a thing for the first time, we are googling up a gloss on it. The truth is out there, or at least several plausibly mundane competing theories. We use explication in so many ways: explication-as-advertising (for the explicator or the explicated), explication-as-entertainment (What happened at Chernobyl? Who is this Tiger King?), explication-as-critique (or, more commonly, backdoor insult).
For another thing, it’s really hard to be both mysterious and funny—and since at least Warhol, it’s been hard to accuse anyone of genius unless they have “wit.” Giving up on wit looks like giving up on self-awareness, and in an age of social media that’s the only defense most of us have.
Illustration by Zak Smith Science and the fictions science engenders seem less mysterious every day: our current style of public speculation tends to be less in the direction of what? and why? and more in the direction of how soon will we solve it? and how horrible will we be about it when we do? Science seems increasingly about us. About what kind of bad will we be with our new machines and new genes? Nothing could be less mysterious.
Is our music mysterious? Hip hop is the least mysterious form: the thrill has always been in how blatant it is. The orchestration and collage required of electronic music, on the other hand, can be mysterious, but it always seems to need help: a dancehall, a drug, a movie—it needs to be part of a larger dream.
Dreams will never go anywhere: that’s a good sign, for mystery. But are we putting any stock in dreams these days?
Religion is dream-adjacent, but lately we understand religion primarily as a social divider or a form of self-help—which makes it eager to explicate itself. Faith behaves now as if its survival depends on being de-mystified. Artists in Western Europe stopped asking Why the Crucifixion? and Why the Resurrection? in the middle of the last century and the rest of the world is far too practical to spend any time wrestling with such things. Maybe in Latin America? But there the low-hanging peach flesh of infinitely discussable topics like gender, sexuality and colonialism are always close at hand. Issues are not mysteries—issues are vital, urgent, they have right and wrong answers, they can get you killed. It’s not safe to get caught messing with the ineffable when there are issues afoot.
This points to the absence of the most mysterious thing: god. Which I’m fine with, really, but you can see why people try to find substitutes in star charts or tarot cards: there is a dark and luxurious sense of privacy, intimacy and infinity that takes over when you become convinced that something really depends on how you handle being alone in a room with a metaphor.
To be pressed to puzzle out the truth from inert and inarticulate matter in a way no expert or psychiatrist could know better than you—that’s tremendously exciting. I would like more artists to try it.
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Things Art Should Be Doing
DecoderMaggie West took over a large, dark space somewhere north of Frogtown last week and filled it with massive images of flowers, pulsating time-lapse photographed in UV light. The colors have weird harmonies: bad-acid Disney-villain purples and magentas, alien and dreamy but it is all more precise than any dream should be. In a word: it works, this immersive video installation.
No part of it is an accident. “Eternal Garden” is not the kind of art where you lay out the canvas and make a move, then make another based on what you now see, then improvise the next and then the next. Maggie had to sit in her studio with plants, lights and cameras and know that eventually the pictures she was making would be on this particular screen in this specific big black room—it doesn’t work any other way: the piece relies on its precision—and seeing that precision at scale—for its effect. That’s what makes it more than decorative. The art would not only not work without the large and expensive machinery provided by the large company that owns it and the space, it could not even have been thought up without it: the piece is not itself otherwise. Before making the piece, Maggie made a deal. She told the company she would make an installation and it would show off the quality of the technology. She’s good at this sort of thing—and not ashamed.
Simultaneously, on the other end of the country, the Instituto de Subcultura in San Juan, Puerto Rico is presenting “No Moral or Legal Authority,” woodcuts from John Mejias’ Puerto Rican War book. It is everything “Eternal Garden” is not: direct, low-tech, blatantly political, black and white, small. And wholly independently produced: the project began during the Obama administration, with no publisher, no gallery and no plan. Pieces of wood were going to get cut, over a span of years, into an intricate, jostling, chaotic and mutli-patterned re-telling of the story of an obscure conflict that even the visitors in San Juan weren’t taught about in school. And if nobody cared at the end? Oh well, John has been self-publishing for years. It turns out this time that they do care—post-colonial problems are on even collectors’ minds these days. But that is an accident. This piece didn’t expect the audience it got.
John Mejias, “No Moral or Legal Authority” woodcut Both of these very different works deserve to exist and do things art should be doing: it is good to be reminded of the strangeness behind the beautiful growing world all around us, and it is good to find out about a real-but-failed revolution in our country from someone with noir-caper storytelling instincts and an eye for the off-beat—but they also both involve their artists in different gambles.
It is a gamble for John to sit down and make art unsure if anyone cares, and it is a gamble for Maggie to decide to make art that won’t exist unless you first make someone care. The first gamble is earnest, unassuming, self-sufficient, it doesn’t care what you think; the second gamble is clever, charming, sociable, shrewd—it will be loved or it will not exist. Neither artist is rich, and neither was sure that any of this would be worth it.
They are different in other ways: John’s piece is a book: something that sits quietly in private spaces and only is fully what it is meant to be when you pick it up in a quiet moment and decide, on a random day, to meet it more than halfway. Maggie’s piece makes a party: one night only, you could go see it without seeing all the people who want to see it, silhouetted also. You have to get into a car and out again, and then decide how long to linger, drinking, in the dark to make your trip worthwhile.
This art and these artists both knock on our door, but they’re applying for different jobs—they are different, but not competing. Everyone needs the truth, well told, and everyone loves dazzle with something worth dwelling on at the center.
There’s a lie in the middle of how we’re taught about art—that this or that captures the spirit of the age, and that the last thing is the throwback and the next thing is progress. Are we, any of us, a homogeny? We are not. Does any one of us need only one thing? No. Does art have something better to do than give us—humans—the various things we need? It doesn’t.
There’s a fear of scarcity somewhere at the bottom somewhere—that more of this means less of that. In reality, we all need everything.
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Prayer Against Turbulence
DecoderYou know when an airplane goes from just rattling back and forth to when it feels like the engines stopped and you drop, like, 20, 50, who knows how many feet and then picks up rattling again? I hate that. I don’t want to die.
The nice thing about turbulence is it usually happens way after take-off and way before landing, so your tray tables do not have to be in the upright and locked position. Which makes it easier to draw.
I don’t know anymore how many times I’ve done this. I hold it together through bad weather that feels like it’s trying to kill me by taking a pen and drawing a thing. Wait, no, that’s inaccurate—it’s never a thing, it’s always some ragged half-made sketchy shape. The resulting drawing will inevitably be: spidery, black-and-white, unnameable, fragmented, not describable. It won’t be the most popular thing I make, but it will be real. It’s a prayer is what it is. I don’t want to die, I am going to make something so I don’t think about death. I draw until the rattling stops.
With this kind of drawing, you don’t plan. You don’t do what you are taught to do in art school: lay out every idea you’ve ever had and every tool you can master or imagine using, and curate from there some way of saying something about something.
This is the opposite kind of work: you start in a small arbitrary place on the paper and give yourself a small task: fill this in black. Left and right and left and right with the pigma .005 until just filling it in black doesn’t seem right any more, and then just move on intuition. Start not with an overview like a grand master at a chessboard, but start like a man in a tunnel, seeing by matchlight. Start with just one thing—anything—you know is real, like the left-right that makes the box black. And then look as close to you as you can for the next thing, and the next thing—just do the next thing you can do. And pray the plane stops moving.
It would be an exaggeration to say this is art that’s getting made because it has to, but it is art being made in the classic devotional mode, like Virgin Marys and wooden idols of fire gods: If I just do this, we will all get through. The crops will grow, the plague will end, 280,000 lbs of thrust pouring from the Pratt and Whitney will continue to overcome 577 tonnes sacrificed to the gods of mass and motion.
I don’t believe a word of it, and I can’t think of anything else to do.
Making a little black line is not a good idea. Making it thicker and thicker by turns is not a good idea. Making a picture because you’re worried you might die is not a good idea. It’s even worse because I definitely am not going to die in a plane crash—this rattling and drop-down broken coaster feeling is so common and survivable I can make it the lede for this piece and all of you recognize it and you only recognize that you recognize it because you’re still alive—because a bumpy flight is very easy to survive.
I’ve done so many of these drawings, though. I could find all of them, every bad flight for how many years, put them together on a white wall. You might not know this fear, but you know fear. You’re afraid of something—so you could see the lines of fear knowingly. You would know they are real and something human, and emanating from a human consciousness outside yourself. You couldn’t say very much constructive had been accomplished—you couldn’t say fear had been defeated or prevented or even that we’d learned much about fear—but in some small way some part of fear had become something else. Something you could look at, take in, and then live in, as part of your mental furniture. This other life feels fear as I do, as deeply, as undeniably. We are connected.
That’s all we ever do. Find a small thing that is definitely real and bang on it and bang on it again until it is not just what it is.
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Decoder: What The People Want
Interview with an anonymous member of the publicKacie is The Public. More specifically, she said it would be fair to describe her as “A woman who doesn’t closely follow the contemporary art scene but might go to a show this summer”.
ARTILLERY: Are you excited about going to see art now that the lockdown has ended?
KACIE: Uh, I don’t know—I wanted to show you this, though…“Some Were Quite Blind” Gainesville, Florida, four metal statues of massive animal penises stand outside the University Animal Sciences Building.
Do you feel like this is art that you can relate to?
Yeah.
Do you know which penis belongs to which animal?
It says “The ones represented are a boar, a cat, a bull, and a ram.”
That’s great…Is this an arrangement of sculptures that you’d like to go see or are you just glad to know that it’s there?
Um—I think it’d be funny to take a picture in front of it.
Okay, I’m to go through some museum shows that are going on in LA right now and see what looks good.
Sure!
So according to the website, this show will address… (museum-speak about a lot of social issues)… apparently a very heavy show?
Yeah!
Tackling a lot of issues. So would you ever be like “You know what I would like to do this summer is enter into dialogue on issues of offering space to contemplate a better society?
I do that already.
You mean without an art show? But how?
I don’t know, I just…
I mean it just seems really hard. They have paintings.
I know but I don’t need to look at art to have those discussions.
I think the museum is proposing it might help. Wouldn’t you feel like discussing a better world if this (pointing) was there and there was a bench?
Mmm…I don’t know.
There’s a gift shop.
I feel like whoever designed the show didn’t understand the assignment.
(The discussion is now briefly derailed by Kacie telling me that there was a guy who wouldn’t stop following her and she went with him to the Getty because she “didn’t have anything else to do” but she didn’t fuck him.)
“Silk and Swan Feathers: A Luxurious 18th-Century Armchair.” Anyway there appears to be a whole exhibit about one chair. Would you go to the museum just to see this chair?
I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem like anything real special. And I don’t see swans. I feel misled.
You feel misled.
Maybe if the chair was shaped like a swan.
“Power, Justice and Tyranny in the Middle Ages”
(Raised eyebrow)
So there’s some Middle Ages art. This guy has funny hands. Would you go see this show with your stalker?
I mean are there more like violent pictures? That’s what I was hoping for.
Heads cut off and stuff?
Yeah.
Well: “Assyria, Palace Art of Ancient Iraq”. He’s got a bull head, these guys are shooting arrows, “The Humiliation of the Elamite Kings”. Would you be like “Hey guys I want to see the Humiliation of the Elamite Kings, are you guys coming?”
I mean of everything they’re offering this is the most appealing to me.
Because it has the most violence?
It has the most lions!
Okay, Larry Bell “Bill and Coo at MOCA’s Next.” “He extends his decades of experimentation with glass…”.
It’s glass not like acrylic or whatever?
Yeah he made some cubes, they’re glass.
I mean, they’re pink?
I think they’re translucent red-ish so they look pink there.
I like them if they’re pink.
What if they’re the color they appear to be over here in this photo?
Then it’s less exciting.
What if it was lions?
Even better if it was lions in there.
Pink lions?
Any lions.
Any lions?
Yeah, in the glass.
So you like things that are pink, you like lions, but making lions pink doesn’t make it better?
I guess I just never considered it.
Okay but imagine, close your eyes. Close your eyes! Pink lion. Lion…Now it’s pink! Is it better?
Yeah.
What if you went to the zoo and there was a lion in a cage but instead of the normal cage it was inside this?
Yeah, it’d be dope. They need to make more fashion at zoos.
The zoos should be more stylish. The animals should have cooler enclosures?
Yeah.
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Decoder
Owning ArtSince the theme for this issue is “Private Property,” I assume someone besides me will be tackling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their sudden rise to collectibility—I’ll leave that to someone who can talk about them in some sort of intelligent, technical way and instead just talk about what NFTs are like.
Depending how you look at it, they either smoothly continue (or emphasize the absurdity) of a practice that has been normal for half a century: buying entirely conceptual art—in particular, buying works of conceptual art that could be reproduced by any reasonably functional adult being paid minimum wage.
I once heard a story on NPR about a middle-class collector who’d acquired an early Sol LeWitt for a few hundred dollars. The stunned host responded by saying he would kill (or was it die?) for that opportunity, which immediately begs the question: Why? Unless the plan is to sell it (in which case, why not just kill or die for the money it would bring instead?), you can have all there is to an early LeWitt wall drawing by googling “Sol LeWitt wall drawing,” picking your favorite set of 55-word instructions and pressing “print.” What did the host want exactly? Whatever it is, approximately the same thing is in an NFT.
Now, one aspect of this kind of acquisition is it can claim to be a species of philanthropy: you’re not only supporting the artist to the tune of X dollars, you are, for the sake of their future, supporting the idea that they should be getting X dollars every time they do what they’re doing. On the flipside there is some form of bragging right—just as the Carnegies and the Mellons can say “As in Carnegie Mellon?” you can say you’re the one who bought the thing, and there are allegedly circles where this improves the quality of the parties you get invited to.
These ways of owning have their uses, but not for me.
My favorite piece of mine that I still have around the house is a mug. I didn’t make the mug—I didn’t even design it. It took very little thinking, really, in the ordinary sense, to get this mug to be. Some friends in the art business called me up and wanted a picture to use for their kid’s bar mitzvah, and they were very precise: We want blue and green and balloons; there has to be a breakdancer and everyone has to be cheering them on, in a video arcade. Since I liked them and their kid and I was not a smouldering psychopathic egotist from the 1960s, I passed up the opportunity to send back a long and scathing letter saying that this bar mitzvah frippery was beneath me—a true artist—and they should’ve known it, and that I was therefore severing all commercial ties. I drew it, liked drawing it, and promptly forgot I drew it. A month later I got a package with a mug with the bar mitzvah picture on it.
A week or two after I put it on the shelf, a strange thing happened. I was drinking (as I so often do when in possession of a mug) and I looked down and realized this was a great mug. Really first-rate. Some excellent curatorial choices had been made: The outside, where my picture was printed, was white, like the paper, but the inside was that wonderful glossy dark blue you sometimes get in the tiles around the edge of swimming pools. It worked very well with all that blue and green I’d magic-markered on there. And the little figures standing on video game cabinets, forever at their party, and all so small and irregular (almost unreadable in industrial design terms—if you had proper Mickeys and Minnies on a mug, they’d be at least twice the size, parading properly around the cup). It was a nice, weird fun thing to drink from and I drank and I washed it, and forgot I had it, and a few days later remembered all over again.
Since then I’ve gone through dozens of cycles of not remembering the mug and then being ambushed by its existence all over again “Oh yeah, the bar mitzvah—look at all those happy little guys.” That, as far as I’m concerned, is how owning art should work.
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Eccentricity Isn’t Diversity
DecoderSo I was making the usual—you know: one part cherry juice, one part club soda, two parts peach juice—and thinking about how artists are eccentric. Balzac supposedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day, Grant Wood replaced his door with a coffin lid, and Paolo Uccello would jabber on about perspective when his wife told him to come to bed.
Artists’ assistants, art dealers and nieces who move in after strokes and ladder accidents all report that artists are weird and ask them to do weird things. This is true: I know multiple people who kept fat rabbits and they were all artists.
But y’know what? If someone asks me about my cherry-peach homemade soda I tell them how I spent two weeks vomiting because of whatever I was eating or drinking and then so my friend was like “Here, look, you need to be drinking more cherry juice and peach juice because of your blood type” and I don’t know but, importantly, this friend was hot. And also she was one of the only people I knew who’d got consistently hotter over the decade I’d known her—so I was inclined to take her dietary advice. And now I make this three-bottle drink and I vomit much less. You tell someone that and they don’t shake their head and go “Oh man, you artists!” they go “Oh, shit, that makes sense.” And, really: who doesn’t want to look at a fat rabbit?
You know who else is notoriously eccentric? Rich people. Also children. I don’t actually think the popular theory is true: that rich people are all pretentious and think they’re artists and artists are immature and act like children and children are too stupid to act normal—I think there’s a simpler reason we’re all eccentric: we don’t have day jobs.
None of us have to get used to Quizno’s because it’s the only thing to eat that’s walking distance from the office, none of us have to not wear things with Spider-Man on them, none of us come home every night at six far too destroyed to even consider building a birdhouse out of books we already read and didn’t like.
People would like to be eccentric and don’t, by and large, begrudge artists the right to be just that (unless they’re related to us). They would like to have the time and, especially, the freedom—or, freedoms, rather. Children have to beg their parents for so many things but have the freedom of having no responsibility; the rich have the freedom of having no morality; the artists have the freedom of not having to be reliable or productive—at least the way capitalism usually defines these things. Eccentricity does not reveal the eccentric person: it reveals the extent to which everyone is kept in line by their obligations. We all begin multifarious and then are narrowed.
Eccentricity isn’t diversity. Diversity is: everyone belongs! Eccentricity is: No one does! You can’t campaign on eccentricity. Non-cooperation hasn’t got much of a ground game. Yet everyone dreams of not cooperating. That’s why even people who aren’t eccentric like art: it shows them what things would be like if they didn’t have to make sense to other people. Diversity, which capitalism is learning to get along with, is: I belong here in Los Angeles, but also to the hidden and discontinuous community of the Jewish Diaspora. Eccentricity is: I belong here in Los Angeles, but also to the hidden and discontinuous community of people who love the tiny miniature-glass fronted worlds of Joseph Cornell. I have more to talk about with the other citizens of this invisible and polyglot empire than with any other group I might more easily name. We Cornell-ists love small secrets, and the spider-magic of tiny spaces.
Just as every zoo is nothing more than a catalog of ways to survive, the museum is a catalog of ways to be human—of what we’re like when we aren’t obligated to be something for someone. This antelope thing with a butt like a zebra? It had to be that way. This iron disk, tilted at an angle, with the details in copper wire? That is someone’s heart’s desire. This is what’s suppressed by all our surface similarity.
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Decoder
Just Give Me the MinimumI don’t want to paint anymore.
I want to go to a big gallery or a museum. It doesn’t even need a roof anymore—I would go to a courtyard at this point.
Not a nice one, necessarily; it can have one end open to a field of that grass that precedes that kind of boring line of trees that screens an exurban stretch of one-car-per-three-minutes interstate.
It can have the interstate, even, if it’s just not too many cars too often.
I just need weather warm enough that I don’t have to move around to keep warm. It can be gray, I’m alright with that and even alright with the other three sides of the courtyard having institutional baked-brick facades, like a junior high.
I won’t need a bench and I don’t even mind the courtyard having other visitors, as long as they didn’t ask why I was laying on my back in my fall coat on concrete flagstones that have that awful sesame-candy texture and the big gaps between. Just as long as they walked at a respectful distance and assumed I was eccentric. It would be nice if there weren’t ants.
I’m okay with the courtyard having one of those metal sculptures, like the frame inside a globe finished wrong or not finished, with some of the welds sanded down into silver all scrabbly. Where just by looking at the texture of the steel you can hear the iron squawk of someone installing it who doesn’t care.
I’d also let there be one of those late-Surrealist things that’s like a little over man-height with a man-face implied or half-carved at the top like a humorless chess piece, with those lidded deathmask-eyes.
Even one of those mosaics where everyone looks like earthenware and has robes—yes I am saying I would even look at Byzantine art at this point.
I don’t want to be presumptuous, in these desperate days, where push and shove have come together. When people are dying. When all-else did fail.
But… if I am allowed requests:
Something all-yellow would be nice. Like a nice Yayoi-Kusama-yellow. To put that cartoon-light up against the paleness of the real sun and sunlight. A lemony-candy-colored thing to see would be nice. If you could.
A St. George painting from the Middle Ages or northern Renaissance, with a real slippery-looking dragon, darker and more detailed than the rest of the picture. I like to look at St. George’s face as he slays it, and contemplate his expression. I’ve always liked that. Princess optional.
Something very mechanical, where I can see the little parts. They don’t have to move.
Something involving lots of details or angles from which to view it—where you have to look at it for a long time to feel sure you took it all in.
If possible I would like to avoid anything that looked or felt chalky or featured a newspaper photo with some clear or blurry newsprint text. I think each newspapery or chalky thing would count as an anti-thing which needed a new extra good thing to counterbalance it.
But I’m not entirely sure, at this point, that I’d need to see anything good there at all. Just: a lot. Or, okay, even, just five things. Five things in a bad courtyard would be okay.
I just want to lie there, somewhere, listening to the sky noise in a forgettable mid-day (maybe hear the overhead crackle of a passenger jet once in a while), someplace that might tolerably be described as “far away” from familiar places, feeling my nerves un-knot and open out into awareness of the knowledge that I am surrounded by persistent, physical human endeavors, undertaken by other, now-absent lone consciousnesses who had the intent of inventing for the world something not broadcasting 24-7 that I needed them or they needed me.
I wouldn’t need more than half an hour, I don’t think. Just to bathe in the luxury of being not-quite-alone but still not messaged-at.
I’m afraid liking art is a little selfish: to want to be in the presence of the content of the human without the pressing need and mutual obligation the presence of the real human must imply. Just for a bit. It’s been so long.
Just give me the minimum. A cafeteria roll, an overpriced flask of vitamin water, some other distant and ostensible art lover with a leather bracelet going “Hmm!” and nodding at their partner or spouse. A guard or dealer who can only look as if they are stoically suppressing physical pain at the sight of having to allow non-collectors near the work. A bored desk assistant in a custom-built pressure-treated wood cubicle whose surveilling head conceals plans about after-work drinking, lazily generous takes on this month’s Things, or both.
Just one more time before I die I want to just be near something that was arguably trying, near objects unnecessary and at least semi-mysterious.
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Joanna Beray Ingco
Swallowed and SurroundedWe’ll be hearing for years and maybe decades about how the pandemic affected the lives of all the artists we’re used to hearing about but the crisis is going to have far deeper and more far-ranging effects on the art world than what we’ll be able to read on the scrubbed surfaces of monographs and profiles. To help with the effort to take stock of the wider picture, I talked to an emerging artist, Joanna Beray Ingco, about how things have been going with her:
ZAK: So… let’s start with the worst of it. For you.
JOANNA: At this point it seems as each day passes, more people are over it and are growing pretty lax in interacting with others or precautionary measures, but I personally can’t forget how tough and traumatic those first few months were for me—not just as an artist, but as a single woman living alone and a new transplant: About 10 days into the lockdown, fixated on the news with dread and doom, I came down with a mild fever, all the symptoms of coronavirus, and being in bed sick with all the familiarities of the flu but also something I’ve never felt in my life. There was a deep immediacy and hold on my body and mind, it’s very strange to describe but I felt like something was very wrong. I had chills, a fever, very weak, seeing things—basically hallucinating, a deep rattling in my lungs, often gasping to breathe. I would get better and then get five times worse, in intervals, for months. In those early moments, when top medical experts were trying to pinpoint true identifiers of coronavirus, I was living this pure nightmare. The news would then confirm things I had endured with a two-week lag. And in all this, at the very worst, with 800 dying in the city each day, we’ve found ourselves in what was an indefinite, never-ending, self-quarantine… detached… all the time in the world—all the time, that honestly, most creatives thirst for, but not at this cost. Not this way.
Digital drafts composed in late March 2020. Are you or anyone doing anything special to keep productive or show things during the emergency or are you just waiting it out?
In survival mode, when I was most sick, I’ve magically been able to make some of the most personally exciting and forward work. I felt compelled to still feel and make. I was able to be productive from bed, on my laptop, and keep my ideas going, even if physically I was less capable. I mainly did digital blueprints for new work, new paintings—pre-production.
Do you think the work was directly affected by what you were thinking?
The work was directly affected by how I felt. Lost. And reaching. And physically weak. Trapped in my body but overactive mentally. And overflowing with ideas.
I think the viewer won’t see loss at all, more like visual abundance. It is really happy-looking work—more than usual even, probably because I naturally was drawn to images that were cute and cheerful in reaction to all the loss, to escape the pain and suffering my body was feeling. And the crying.
Beray Ingco’s New York studio, Oct. 2020, photos by SiiGiil, courtesy of the artist. I think we’ve all had a lot of time to read and watch movies and stuff, what was the most intense or exciting or interesting experience you’ve had looking at art during the pandemic?
Early on, I was immediately into watching Contagion, Outbreak, World War Z, Train to Busan, 28 Days Later, I Am Legend and then just overt scary films like The Shining, all the Hostel series, Cabin In The Woods. I think I had to work through understanding all the new despair. Then, it made me feel better watching worlds that were worse than ours, but that says a lot that they had to be true horror to feel worse.
I feel like sometimes horror movies feel like swimming—like you’re allowed to sort of move around in the fear, go deep, go shallow, splash around? Get used to it?
I fell deep in it—to the point of being desensitized—one movie after another, just swallowed up and surrounded. It’s not like we all had lunch to get to or anything. In this weird time I’ve bounced from “nothing matters” to “everything matters,” back and forth. And in extremes. Of all feelings. You get used to the feeling of uncertainty, or accepting that a base level of great uncertainty is commonplace now.
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The Role of Bad Art in a Democratic Society
DecoderAn inevitable consequence of democracy, of equality, of freedom; of systems and technologies that more evenly distribute the power to influence the world; is the production and distribution of a tremendous amount of bad art. More of us learning means more of us know art is an option, a free press means we have more to say, widespread access to paint, to press, to camera, to rentable rooms and to unsurveilled wallspace gives us more ways to say it, lack of censorship gives us a bigger potential audience, and progressive wealth distribution gives more of that audience the ability to support the art they (rightly or wrongly) love. We are and always have been, by the numbers, drowning in bad art.
Tyrannies also produce a lot of bad art, but they at least have the option of declaring it an enemy of the state. Despite this rare opportunity for tyranny to score a point in its favor, we’d also have to admit they’ve consistently flubbed it: Vladimir Putin’s favorite band is Thin Lizzy. Curation, along with military conquest, is one of the few venues for achievement open to tyrannies—but they never take the bait. What’s even the point of censorship if you’re going to inflict “Boys Are Back in Town” on an entire Moscow festival audience three decades after Phil Lynott’s dead?
In the context of democracy-type conversations, we’re much more eager to discuss the effect of good art than the bad—we save discussing the bad art for our capitalism conversations. The cruel fact is, however, that even wholly divested of greed, we are dedicated to bad art, and we, the people, will not be diverted from making it. Bad art is as often a product of people as systems. We will always have buildings where form has shuffled dutifully after function only to realize a function ably served by 90 degree walls, whitewashed siding and what’s usually there. We will always have acid trip assemblages that never rise past quirky, we will always have high school poems that remind us how genuine and universal emotions can be very boring when they’re someone else’s, we will always have landscapes that say only that the landscape depicted would be preferable to the depiction, we will always be vulnerable to bold statements held as worthy, and paradoxically, because they contain theses it would never occur to anyone in their audience to doubt. And we will always have portraits which evoke the feeling that yep there’s a guy.
Thin Lizzy. We will never utopianize past the possibility, indeed the necessity, of humans trying to do something worth doing and failing and then failing to notice they failed. We probably will never even utopianize past the possibility of these humans having fans. Art will be bad—let’s just accept it and study it—like bugs or the ocean.
There are more popular options for how to deal with the prevalence of the bad. Aside from seeing art as downstream of, well, everything else that could ever be wrong in the world, there’s the option to pretend the bad art has no effect, or that ignoring that effect is a good idea. (“I prefer to focus on the positive!”) If there’s one thing we keep having to be taught over and over, it’s that ignoring the effect of anything is a bad idea. Moreover: if we’re really going to keep saying the good has an effect, can we realistically say this without weighing it against the so-much-more-numerous bad?
Another option is to see the bad as simply the foot soldier of the good: good art is original, and bad art is just a harmless and less-effective echo of the good. Carrying the same insight and/or thrill… just not as much. Maybe yes but also, no: there is a particular quality to interacting with badness. A shriveling away, a disappointment with the possible—or at least with how it advertises itself. The bad sculpture doesn’t do what the good one does but less, it does the opposite: what’s expressed isn’t less expressed, it just seems less worth expressing.
We want art to touch us because there are so many petty barriers to being touched by the rich reality of whole and alien lives. When the parade of other’s loved images becomes needless and numbing to us, all other distance from humanity does as well, the death statistics and unread obituaries become as normal as anything else you scroll past. Overcoming that distance requires acknowledging all the forces that create it, including the ones that will always be there.
