OTR Comment & Culture - March, 2005

The ideal place—even for a big Pollock—is in a private home. I think that’s what most modern painting, given its character, really wants. — William Rubin

The Halitosis of Art-Talk Versus The Freedom of the City

Sometimes it is nice to go and look at a thing in the freedom of an afternoon. This is one of the supreme pleasures of being alive in New York City—wandering around on subways and in neighborhoods, rambling through parks, along beaches, sidewalks and so forth. This wandering has an inadvertent aim, inadvertent in that it always comes as a surprise, aimful in that one seeks that surprise. Sometimes, through a willful inattentiveness, we encounter art. This is what it means to be civilized. How remarkable to live in a time and in a city in which it is possible, if we so choose, to spend an afternoon contemplating a 12th Century etching (of an ascetic, a maiden and a goose), a color field painting by Mark Rothko, or a single page from one of da Vinci’s notebooks. We are the fortunate ones.

There are few activities in the engagement of which human beings appear so foolish and bloated as when they are looking at a piece of art. Taking it seriously. Encountering it. It’s even worse when they open their mouths and begin to remark on it. There is a lot of bad breath in museums, galleries and at happenings. But the reason for this halitosis swirling around art is that the appreciation of it occurs in public. Aesthetic experiences, as Peter de Bolla has noted, operate at a low frequency. They are private; each one wants to produce a sacred solitude in its attendant, and the objects that provoke them would like nothing so much as to be looked at, closely, for up to an hour, through each eye.

Needless to say, it is difficult to look at objects suchwise in public, but even an oblique consideration of a sublime work on a crowded Sunday in the stuffiest of museums can, like Sylvia Plath’s black rook in rainy weather, still “seize my senses, haul my eyelids up, and grant a brief respite from fear of total neutrality.” Whatever it is in an art object that has this effect, we find it valuable because it makes us deliberately alive, and since we have to be alive anyway (being alive one condition of being human), we might as well enjoy it.

Art is selfish, it is not kind, it puts on airs. It is proud. Art hogs up space, demands attention and oozes self-importance. It needs to be displayed. There is indeed something very silly in art, and worse. As I write this there are corpses drying in the desert, families extinguished with the flick of a finger. A major power is at war; the geopolitical sphere shudders; the smallness of the globe and the pettiness of our desires are revealed. History is a bloody thing and time is traversed with gory feet. This time at least, we are dragging the rag of democracy along behind us—but in the face of our current situation art seems not much more than an indulgent and irrelevant luxury.

And yet the appreciation of art, for all its preciousness, is a human good. It is a good that transcends class, race, gender, language, wealth, religion and even time. An art encounter transcends time because the objects that spring aesthetic awareness themselves transcend time. Art is also artifact. It bestows on the present a sense that confronts the contingent, random, and meaningless nature of human existence. Simultaneously, it lends to us a comprehension of those problems and a mechanism to live with them. Art produces the only emotion truly worthy of us and the best of what we are worth. Art is the fundamental and fundamentally human expression. There is something tragic in art. Aesthetic experience, this exercise we lucky ones take on a Sunday afternoon, is tragic, too.

Memories of Notable Excursions

First Excursion. We meet outside the Guggenheim and crowd in to see Matthew Barney’s Cremaster werke. The environment feels very close but we creep into the theatre and are granted an hour of privacy with one of the films, which is about differentiation and execution, potential and realization. We like Matthew Barney in spite of ourselves, in spite of our pettiness, in spite of the fact that Barney has hit the art jackpot and seems nice about it all and is married to an Icelandic elf/pop star. We talk afterwards and we decide that we like the work: its thoroughness, its lavishness and cool precision, its patient and relentless tempo. Cremaster is weird and arresting and beautiful, pitiless and austere. Unsentimental. It is very good. But there is an uncanny noise that I hear for days afterwards, and it is not the chatter of idle criticism. It is the sound of air whistling through an empty house. I listen to it and realize that this is the effect of Barney’s work. I feel emptied out and broken down. Not drained, but empty and flat. This makes sense because Barney’s films are composed of receding and approaching planes; there is a structural flatness built into his work. It is exquisitely minimalist in this regard and even humor is squelched out of it. But there is also an emotional flatness built into it that I find bothersome. Cremaster produces a flat affect in the viewer. One feels non-human after seeing it; its perfection veers toward the cruel and away from the tragic.

Second Excursion. We meet outside the Met and crowd in to see an exhibit of da Vinci’s notebooks. After an hour of peering over shoulders and through heads, a saturation point is reached. We exchange nods and take a deep breath, pause and recollect ourselves and our purposes. There is so much to see and it is all so good. I find myself in front of a drawing that is as familiar and arresting as a dream. It is the head of a soldier and he is shouting something. The soldier is shouting as though his mouth was filling with sand and as though he could taste the present on his tongue. He is shouting to us through time. This drawing is more precise than any photograph could ever be, somehow. It is also one of the most human objects I have ever seen, and not just because it is a perfect rendering of a human head. No. It is human because it is suffused with tragedy.

Claiming that art is tragic is like levering open a tomb. It relies on a mechanism for aesthetic interpretation that is initiated with Greek stories of mythic heroes and ruined kings. It is easy to dismiss this notion, now, as a mere thought cliché, or the weak defense of cultural prigs and moral revanchists. But it seems to me that art’s effect has not changed a great deal in the 3,000 year-old phenomenon that is Western culture, even if aesthetic products have expanded beneath the human hand to a diversity that is often inconceivable, unapproachable, unfamiliar and impossibly expensive. Seneca would enjoy Richard Foreman’s plays and Robert Wilson’s operas because art’s effect was tragic in his time as it is tragic in ours. Not much has changed where aesthetic experience is concerned.

Now, to say that art is tragic is most emphatically not to say that art is important. Because it isn’t. Art doesn’t have to contain a political agenda and it doesn’t wave a moral flag. Art is artifice—feckless, fleeting and transient. It doesn’t do anything, and it doesn’t care whether you change or not—it will keep busy. As Frank Stella remarked, “No abstract image, and no idea even about an abstract image, is going to help anyone. If artists want to do something useful they can be social workers or politicians.” Art has no world-historical significance; it sneezes at the wretchedness of the human intellect. It understands that the game is rigged and we all die at the end—finis—so one can only live now, in the 50-or-so years that are one’s adult being. Art does something very small, which is to remind people that they are human and what is best in them is also human. To “get it,” to appreciate art, is to comprehend tragedy.

Of course, were one able to survey human experience as one might a landscape, the dominant topographical elements would be despair and physical pain. And cruelty. Human existence is comprised of famine, disease, war, exploitation, crime and disaster, marked (but not offset) by our advances in medicine, science, technology, forms of governance and social organization. If the tablets of evolution are a record of punctuated equilibrium, human history is a record of punctuated suffering.

But suffering is not the main point of tragedy. On the contrary, tragic awareness, as an aesthetic effect, is a repudiation of suffering. It employs many means to do so; I would point briefly to humor. Art is often amusing, if useless; tragedy is downright funny. It is almost axiomatic: if a piece of art makes you laugh, you ought to inquire into its tragic quotient. Humor lifts tragedy out of the whirlpool of suffering. Tragedy is adult entertainment; it gets the joke and passes it on. This is why the work of Matthew Barney is something of a problem. The many things to praise in the Cremaster cycle notwithstanding, about the only thing I can say against it is that it is humorless. It is weird and arresting and beautiful, pitiless and austere, but there is no humor in it. Because of that I find it cruel rather than tragic, and I don’t find cruelty nearly as compelling as tragedy. Where art is a willful and stubborn human activity, tragedy is a willful and stubborn repudiation of human suffering. It doesn’t ignore suffering, or glorify it, or offer vague promises of redemption and future happiness; tragedy is the “yes—but!” of our agon; it is the “and—yet!” to all our wretched randomness, glancing contingencies, and abject failures.

DIA: Beacon and The Third Excursion

So much money spent on architecture in the name of art, much more than goes to art, is wrong. Even if the architecture were good, but it's bad. —Donald Judd

We climb on the train and take ourselves to Dia: Beacon. Dia is my favorite museum in the world because it is not a museum at all. It is a cathedral of art. If the people who make decisions in this country were to spend one day per week in places like Dia—alone—they wouldn’t need to rely on concepts like God, and Evil, and Good, and Terror to make their decisions. They wouldn’t need to go to church and pray for guidance or forgiveness or whatever it is they are looking for with their eyes shut and their closed hands, and they wouldn’t need to send people out to torture and kill and be maimed for them and their business. They might gain some sense of the tragic, of the futile joy of mere existence as a good unto itself, and they might leave each one of us alone to enjoy whatever portion of it we can for ourselves in whatever time we have left. But their conversion will never come to pass, of course, which is why tragic art is not and cannot be political.

Dia: Beacon is structured by light and sound and space. The objects therein are about time and color, mass and memory. They seem to have an embedded awareness of their materiality; they point to their own impossibility, to the contradictions they contain, and they invite the visitor to share in that awareness. They are sublime. Transcendental. Tragic.

Walking into Dia: Beacon is like walking into Falling Water. The two places—Reggio’s gallery and Frank Lloyd Wright’s house—compel you to recalibrate your breathing. This act is initiated with a sudden intake of breath, and it is not because you need more oxygen but as a result of the surprising discovery that you need less. The experience is like finding yourself in one of those wonderful dreams in which vitality has become inversely proportional to fear. Allow yourself to drown and you will find yourself an aquatic creature. I was led through rooms whose fate it was to hold objects that swelled and shivered the walls that held them.

The last of these contain—barely—Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses. The reason for that “barely containing” is not because Serra’s sculptures overwhelm the room or dominate it but because in their presence one is assailed by the uncanny sense that the sculptures create the room, that it is the sculptures that hold the room, the sculptures that shape it. They reveal, express, and presence tragedy.

The Torqued Ellipses are massive things. There are four or five of them, each twenty feet tall and weighing ten tons. You can walk into them; you can touch them, lick them, squirm about like a worm in them. Pray, sing or think in them. They are not, however, things in which one falls asleep. They focus; they do not dissipate. Viewed from the outside, they are like ships and water: both, at the same time. They enclose and they open. They breathe. They effect an exchange.

From the inside, they rearticulate. They are double helixes. You recognize yourself within them. You appear to be standing in DNA. But something in them prevents you from resting in the merely human. Something in them renders narcissism null. These torqued ellipses, these helixes in which you are standing, are not just your own. You are also standing within elemental matter. These helixes, so foreign and strange and yet so familiar, are cross-sections of a universal DNA. That’s the thing: you are standing within the fabric of which you are composed. There is no irony or disassociation there. The Torqued Ellipses are immediate, and they are permanent. They express an eternal present. They have a temporal, elemental constitution, and that is why they are tragic. They gather within their purview as much time as they can—the artifact element in art objects, their auratic quality—and reconstitute this time as an uninterrupted experience for the viewer in the present. They remind us that our lives are all too brief, that we spend too little time in the company of transcendence, that we are like wretched and busy little chattering insects, but—! And yet!

Timothy Don works at The Nation and is an OTR Contributing Editor.