Quodlibetica

On being duped

Written By: Emily Atchison Constellation 07 4.1.10

This text will betray what I do not know. I wish only to be forgiven the error of not yet knowing everything that I will, and never quite knowing everything that I can. Let this be a gesture of good faith towards the activity of slaloming generously and stupidly through the terror of the suspicious unknown work.

“Those who embarrass themselves by blathering that art must not forget humanity, or when — in the face of bewildering works — they ask where the message is, will be reluctantly compelled, perhaps even without genuine conviction, to sacrifice cherished habits; shame can, however, inaugurate a process in which the external pervades the inner, a process that makes it impossible for the terrorized to go on bleating with the others” (Adorno 272).

I made a step in The Quick and the Dead, which changed, as I passed over the threshold, out of what was my understood position. Before this step I was self-located. I generally feel at ease in spacial, intellectual and emotional proximity to works in a place designated for contemporary art because I know myself here as a viewer, and a student, and a maker. I am acquainted with the social stipulations, institutional regulations, and art historical frames for viewing which place a work comfortably in the crosshairs of my consideration. While it is useful to [and I do] critique these signals as well as work through them as modes of artistic production, because they are familiar, I feel as if I am able to identify myself in their presence with ease. While this reveals what might be a weakness for certainty of self-immediacy or transparent meaning, what I am describing is knowing a language and thus, being able to participate in receiving as well as sharing information. Familiarity with traditional tools of self-articulation in a specialized context is similar to how the recognition of a landmark is reassurance that one is traveling in one’s intended direction. Presentational conventions are as much landmarks as a riff on art history or even literally, the architecture of the Walker Art Center.

In the presence of art, I am still in the process of unlearning to conduct myself as I would in a church or a tomb. I am learning to speak at whatever volume is required by a work. I am learning to forget my body and not cross my arms; forget my face and let it twist and drop, forget reserved intellectual contemplation, forget the demonstration of taste. I am trying more often to cry out in distress, Where am I, when I feel it, or to shriek with pleasure when a piece is titillating or horrific.

To say that I am working on learning this means a constant effort at concentration in the presence of work. In The Quick and the Dead, I could feel the edges of art history curling as in a fire but I recognized this curling of history, identified it with slideshows and print that I had encountered in the classes and library of my college. But, as I crossed into this particular gallery my step was taken out of time, and I was misplaced by two near-identical sculptures of a sphinx suffocating under a nautical beacon strapped to a pillow over its face. A paradox of senses: to be suffocated and blinded by one’s own searchlight. The first sphinx lay outside of the room alongside the wall facing my approach. The other rested inside at the center with its beam aimed out so that, together, their lights made a perpendicular intersection right before the doorway. I could not find a name for the artist, or the sphinxes. How could I have a hope of finding footing if I could not find a name? Nameless, faceless beings…and now, I am imagining that “the ontological substance of a community of ghosts” (Steinweg) could be something like this undetermined intersection of light.

An incident exacted in a cavity of duration on twin models of an enigmatic monument by an unknown perpetrator. An incident that has neither begun, nor passes, nor has conclusion with a handful of objects – a small frame-less image attached to the wall, two sculptures, light, straps, pillows-which can be witnessed but, when born to testimony, arrive as aggravating half-morsels. Nevertheless they persist, the most persistent hole being the whole of oneself.

There the gagged monsters sat silently, and I made my way quickly around, embarrassed to be lost inside a tiny room, stupidly trying to keep cool by ducking in and out, only just glimpsing the small picture taped or tacked up on the wall. In my memory, the image is of a pyramid. It is the sort of picture that is every picture of a pyramid. It is the sign of a pyramid, made particularly for a postcard by way of which a traveling friend might show that they remember someone who is absent. Perhaps it is nothing like a pyramid, but it is the pyramid that I think I know: remote, a sometimes suspect of alien origins, magnificent.

The sparse room, the absence of titles, the silent sphinxes, the simplicity of this work made it no-less difficult. It struck me with openness and I was offended and had to be reoriented, had to reorient myself. Not only embarrassed by lack of understanding, but the inability to pinpoint what I was missing and the quality of my not-understanding. With relief, I found the other works in the show to be fairly reliable. I could trust the didactics, I could read and find certainty. I could mark down any responsible parties and pursue them, their information, their justification, on the internet, in a library, in the Walker catalog.

My instinct was to reject the sphinxes and their room because they greeted me with what I thought was meaning held over my head. The objects seemed to be clues to a secret shared by a privileged circle (or perhaps just between the artist and themselves) who had read specific smart texts OR only pretended to have, resulting in pieces slapped together for the visual bare, found, minor-key of something missing that they collectively released. Pretense is contingent on a concept of ‘truth’ as a singular essence — that it exists somewhere and can be covered up or imitated. In order to be able to hide or mask a feeling (or a mask of a feeling), an idea, a persuasion, it must be relatively locatable. It must exist in a position that can be isolated. Or, the location must always be reinvented or, better yet, reinvent itself. This sounds like pretense without a responsible party (without an artist or a viewer in our case), as if pretense is in its own charge and cannot be handled or initiated but materializes of its own accord like a spirit. This is not what I mean.

The decision-making role, the responsibility of the artist(s) and viewer(s) for and to pretense, should not be confused with a concept of truth as complete or issued from a singular origin or source. Pretense should be considered in terms of its generative potential and less as an edict opposite or in imitation of ‘truth’; less as a negative value and more as a productive activity. While it is often recognized as a fraudulent display of superior intelligence (for example) at someone’s expense (their disempowerment), pretense may be applied to undermine social supports (pride for one), and emphasize inconsistency. Further, pretense has the ability to found and confound, or at least facilitate, imaginary ambitions as possibilities. The sphinxes and the pyramid picture brought me to their emotionally not-belonging or left-out plateau which they themselves did not, nor the space they occupied, directly define but instead gently and longingly implied what had just passed or had still not arrived. I struggled then to get deeper in through self-reproach to my cockiness in the context of an art center as a ’specialized viewer’. I was made to reevaluate ‘ability’ and ‘training’ and consider how anyone, training aside, who might approach this piece must be struck out of their bounds of comfort, and examine how one ‘belongs’ somewhere, a kind of camaraderie in confoundedness. Affinity through absence. I met myself in this work as a stranger, as the person absent from the traveler before the pyramid, deep in a quiet, empty space penetrated by two underwater searchlights shining out (in vain) in hope of defined space and company. Forever looking out for the one that is similar, each pining for their twin monstrosity, crossing their beams but never meeting.

I first took this cool emptiness as lack of caring – for me or any viewer. I felt that there was no meat  to the sphinxes, that they were indifferent and effortless, by way of coincidence and accidence, as I first felt with Wade Guyton’s X’s, and Michael Krebber’s cold-cut surfboards. I wanted affirmation, a mutual stake. It took time to recognize that the sensation of not being cared for was not the work, it was acting as a mirror, a release, or lever, or a rip-cord (in Donnelly’s case). The sphinxes, in solitude together, begged generosity, but not outright. They begged a risk of suffering, pride, mockery, and the worst fear: abandonment; I feared that they would not return my love, that they were set in coldness. Of its own accord, the work mingled with a text by Jacques Derrida called The Politics of Friendship, which I am coincidentally reading. Being-with this work asserted itself specifically where Derrida writes that, “[l]oving will always be preferable to being-loved, as acting is preferable to suffering, act to potentiality, essence to accident, knowledge to non-knowledge” (11). The risk (of rejection, of heartbreak) of giving, whether the benefit of the doubt, or of your heart, to something or someone and pushing it to remain open, untied, neither affirmed nor fully unrequited, is preferable to all easy and passively received affection.

I ‘blather’, in the face of the terrific recognition, which occurs over and over as if for the first time and echoes on in me now, long after the work has been replaced by another show, that I mistake myself for whole, as self-knowing. Where in medicine, a mirror box contraption is used to erase the nerve and neural sensations of a phantom limb by showing the brain that the limb is no longer there, Trisha Donnelly’s near-bare room introduced me to my phantom, which I have met before but often forget. My world folds in on itself, even now in recollection, the “external pervades the inner” (Adorno 272).

What ‘meat’ was I scanning for? I am ashamed by my defensive hunger for an origin and a clear direction. My desire for certain clarity exposes lingering principles of ‘inner truth’ and pure, unadulterated meaning. As much as I work to knead these values out of my vocabulary of viewing and producing, the search for identifiable emotions, an obvious output, and an isolated source that moves in order with predetermination, clings to my process of interpretation. To shake this desire for transparency and passive access, the hole, the emptiness, the unlocatability of the subject of the piece must be flipped and folded so that the search for an input is turned on myself.

Cross the wires of machinery and mastery. Apply rules to production until the aperture of expression is reduced to nothing and exercise only the slightest generative activity. Leave out the names. The negotiation of the hole is on me, though I can never own the meaning and never call myself a ‘master’. This makes me as responsible for the work in front of me as it is for itself, as Donnelly is for it. It takes me and I am humbly lost.

The maintenance of a veil of distance between name(s) and work(s) can confuse artist-cowardice with viewer-accountability. A name or title commands something of its object. The target of this command, whether inanimate object or person, suffers under the sheer futility of fulfilling the demands of a name. An over-present, over-determined artist identity can loop an artistic practice. It can determine a street execution in full daylight of responsibility at the hands of explanation. What Helmut Draxler calls an “information death”, in the name of an impression of security (10).

To be difficult, to not explain, but rather be direct as a knife, is to entrust the rest — whomever might see or hear — with the opening through which to risk themselves on the work, to chance their failure, to step off into something gone, arrive in a poof, or trip on a peeling. To be difficult in art is to drive a stranger mad out of love for them. Difficulty of Donnelly’s caliber signs confidence in any stranger that, if so inclined (if so self-motivated), could come to some understanding or at least, greet their own self-as-phantom. By leaving out didactics and framing, and with the proximity of the arrangement of the work (such as the questionably passable space between the sphinx placed outside of the room and the wall to it’s left, and the confusing contingency of one sphinx out, and one in, their light beams crossed and a duplicitous presence but otherwise out of touch with each other), the viewer is challenged to make a blind and generous self-insertion from which they may not return.

A perplex is something complicated and unaccountable. Not as in a lack of responsibility, but rather as incalculability. It cannot be processed mathematically to form a result or an answer. It cannot be proved. If the work appears as unaccountable for itself, or the artist, then to be a viewer is to be entangled in accountability. Accountability in this work must come through taking account of oneself.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. New York: Continuum, 1997.

Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. New York: Verso, 1997.

Draxler, Helmut. “Or: The Last Bourgeois” Michael Krebber. Secession, 2005.

Steinweg, Marcus. “Marcus Steinweg on Duras the Philosopher.” The Walker Arts Center. Minneapolis, MN, 7 Feb. 2010.

Images:

1) Trisha Donnelly, Untitled, Mixed Media.

2) Wade Guyton, Painting, 2006 Ultrachrome on Linen.

3-5) Michael Krebber, Surfboards.