Shit, I have to hurry up and dig some holes for my tarragon, which has grown out of its pots and needs to be planted today or else, but this is important. Take a moment to remember a great man, if only for his patience.
Mr. Johnston did indeed fall dead on the racquetball court. It would have been a great loss regardless of venue: he had his Moment.
He gave up the idea of teaching me science at Square One, but shared my love of Impressionism and especially Debussy's "Images". I remember one day in my starched shirt, off in the corner of his oversized classroom, from behind a labyrinth of glassware, I walked as calmly and quickly as I could right up to him while he taught class:
"We have to get out of here. I'll help you open the windows".
How many great minds continue to waste time, sending their best to "The New Yorker"? Stop. Send it instead to "The National Lampoon". Do you like peacocks? Please, read more
One reason I like zapping through artist's pages instead of always looking carefuly at their artist's statements and curator's notes is that I don't need to undo the damage of their own thoughts about their work. The latter often makes the experience of the work dull, as if our aesthetic wings were cut by the discursive blade. It is not that it isn't informative, which it often is. It's that it is rarely inspiring. (Then again, this very blog may also be seen at such an angle).
Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.
The picture - entitled (...) - is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)
11 min, 16 mm film, B/W, no sound Camera: Bill Rowley Edit: Elaine Summers Dir: Elaine Summers Prod: Hans Breder, Iowa University
There are two things about this short fragment I love. The first is the choreography of joy. The slow-motion allows us to better appreciate the flow of the common movement, the combining of the bodies, the contrast between them and everything that happens around them. But there is something else. The dance becomes obvious at the end, when the movement continues beyond what we expected. Yet there is one earlier moment, one step of the girl coming from "our" side, which makes that clear. At a very precise point, she deviates from the way she has been running, her body bends like a bow and then moves sideways. That is when the simple vectors of meeting become something else - something more complex, less obvious. The bodies, now, create a space for our meeting to go beyond the embrace.
It is the pleasure of imagining a performance - or rather, of imagining a universe. A narrative, an aesthetics, an experience, a unity. It is the pleasure of imagining a liveness, a directness, a presence. The pleasure of experiencing the echo, the recording, the extract, the fragment of a copy of a copy. The pleasure Plato was so afraid of. It is the joy of watching something on a small pixellated video image and imagining it live and juicily 3D. It is the ecstatic moderato of my computer screen, of yours, which acts out the world that supposedly tastes better off-screen (heck, it tastes). Yet it is not off-screen, not in the performance space, but here, at this very desk, dressed in dark-green boxers, brown socks and a t-shirt, among the hills of papers and books and accompanied by the delicate sound of the washing machine and an occasional sms, that I experience it. The pleasure of absence. The ecstatic moderato.
Fischli and Weiss, Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go), video, 30', 1987
Honda Ad, 2003
OK Go - This Too Shall Pass, 2009
I remember the choreographer João Fiadeiro once showing Fischli & Weiss's work during some seminar or workshop and talking about what in his mind made it so impressive: necessity. Although it might seem like anything can happen, what happens is exactly what needs to happen. A tautology that evolves in time? But isn't any proof precisely that - a dynamic tautology? So is it because it's a proof that it's so appealing? A proof of what? Of how things go, we are tempted to say. Which, of course, is just silly talk. It's precisely because things don't go this way that we enjoy it so much. It's because the unexpected becomes necessary.
What about this "evolution"? The work of art turned into a commercial turned into a music video. Don't expect any moral judgement on that. Actually, I enjoyed all three videos. We could discuss the question of authorship. But we won't. (Fischli & Weiss threatened to sue Honda). Here's what I've been pondering on: what exactly are the differences? Because, once you've accepted that they're all in the same category (actually, this type of inventions is called either Heath Robinson contraptions (UK), or (more commonly) Rube Goldberg Machines (US) and have been in popular culture at least since the beginning of the 20th century), you can see into how very different they are. So what makes it an art project, a commercial, a music video? If we turn the volume off, what changes? If we put music, or switch it from one video to another? The timing, the materials, the way things go and pass. What sort of universe appears in each of them? Yes, that's precious: they each have their own universe. They are entities. You can easily find yourself around them, with their texture, their dynamics, their smell... One more thing: aren't they each hiding in their specific ways this very basic urge for things to make sense? If that is so, it's beyond necessity or discovery. It's the comfort of order. The sense that somewhere beyond the frame, things are just waiting to come into action, to move into view. And their potential is already in perfect harmony with the moment when they will become what they are meant to be. The best of possible worlds. It shouldn't come as a surprize that these delicately balancing certainties remind us of childhood.
