From the Dramatic Object to the Traumatic Object
February 2015
Can you kill art by thinking about it? Castrate it? The beauty of formalist criticism was its ignorance, its acceptance of the language being spoken, and the limits of that language: where art ends life begins, the unfinished New Jersey turnpike couldn’t have possibly been art, there’s an onstage and an offstage. What if all that could be wrong with your art was within your control? What if your art could only have visual problems within an ocular-centric society of viewers? Then perhaps you would need to invent drama, maybe you’d need – maybe we’d all need – to tell stories about how you drink and fuck and paint, and we could all be unenlightened, sophisticatedly ignorant, free, and forgotten. Is there anything wrong with not wanting to be remembered, with doing what has been done before, with lacking aspirations, with complacency, with contentedness? What if you’re happy doing what someone else did then dying, like someone else did, like we all do? In the midst of all our pushing, our striving, we mustn’t forget the pull, the attraction to our craft, to our objects, to each other. Maybe how to balance the two is what we need to learn. Maybe what we need to do is bring that Pollockian trauma – searing car crash with mistress and co. – into the object, imbed it, make it crouched, make it poised, make it full of potential energy, make it dangerous. Maybe what we need is to bring life to the object, something that bows the walls, implodes the room, burns the gallery, something that will fall, as all things fall, but something that knows it will, art that accepts responsibility for its demise, that dies with dignity, that wilts like no flower ever painted. And maybe these objects can teach us how to die, how to leave, how to go, how to end. Teach us what peace is.
February 2015
Can you kill art by thinking about it? Castrate it? The beauty of formalist criticism was its ignorance, its acceptance of the language being spoken, and the limits of that language: where art ends life begins, the unfinished New Jersey turnpike couldn’t have possibly been art, there’s an onstage and an offstage. What if all that could be wrong with your art was within your control? What if your art could only have visual problems within an ocular-centric society of viewers? Then perhaps you would need to invent drama, maybe you’d need – maybe we’d all need – to tell stories about how you drink and fuck and paint, and we could all be unenlightened, sophisticatedly ignorant, free, and forgotten. Is there anything wrong with not wanting to be remembered, with doing what has been done before, with lacking aspirations, with complacency, with contentedness? What if you’re happy doing what someone else did then dying, like someone else did, like we all do? In the midst of all our pushing, our striving, we mustn’t forget the pull, the attraction to our craft, to our objects, to each other. Maybe how to balance the two is what we need to learn. Maybe what we need to do is bring that Pollockian trauma – searing car crash with mistress and co. – into the object, imbed it, make it crouched, make it poised, make it full of potential energy, make it dangerous. Maybe what we need is to bring life to the object, something that bows the walls, implodes the room, burns the gallery, something that will fall, as all things fall, but something that knows it will, art that accepts responsibility for its demise, that dies with dignity, that wilts like no flower ever painted. And maybe these objects can teach us how to die, how to leave, how to go, how to end. Teach us what peace is.