if it's good enough for Zwirner, it's good enough for me!


om namah shivaya
I bow to my inner Self, the Divine in me and Others

So good it deserves quoting verbatim:


Frieze
October 2009
Value Added
State of the Art
The myriad uses of art and artists
Dominic Eichler
(contributing editor of frieze)

"I have an artist-friend who enjoys a healthy sense of personal satisfaction and an externally verified, peer-assessed sense of worth. In the last few years he has had a steady run of success with galleries, critics, curators and collectors, although he has not yet become a household name, nor made enough money to live lavishly. He recently told me an anecdote which drove home, once again, the otherworldliness of contemporary art. His story is ostensibly about money, but my point is not to dwell on that, but rather on those moments when ‘art people’ realize that the only ones who really understand them are other art people.
Facing his own cash-flow crunch, my artist-friend had to go begging for patience at the tax office, where he explained that the cultural capital he had painstakingly accrued over the past decade hadn’t granted him much leeway with regards to revenue collection. At around the same time, he had also to go explaining his sorry financial situation to his local bank branch in Berlin – a city that contains more art and more artists than almost anywhere else in the world. There, after looking through his financial affairs – the fiscal equivalent of an intimate medical examination – the nice enough woman sitting behind her plastic desk at the bank confessed to him in a solemn whisper: ‘I could never live like you do.’ The first thing that entered his head, and remained there, was, ‘And I could never live like you do, either.’
What her statement implied was that she would never want to be an artist because: a) you don’t get paid regularly, if at all; b) she couldn’t see the real-world value of the profession; and c) she feels quite comfortable with maintaining her opinion because everything she knows about the expansive and difficult subject of art has confirmed to her that it is close to the bottom of her ‘relevant’ pile and can stay there. There are myriad variations on this story: the protagonist might be a young intern, an impassioned student of art history, a writer, almost any freelance curator, even a brave-faced gallerist. The scene could take place somewhere else: at a parent’s kitchen table, at a yawnsome school reunion or in an out-of-the-blue email. But the leading question will always be: ‘What are you doing now?’ To many civilians, art people are still suspicious aliens. Money might talk in shrill tones, but the same widespread incomprehension can greet even extremely well-heeled members of the art world. In other words, the suspicion with which art is generally
regarded does not stem from the fact that only a few can live well from it.
Even with things being a bit economically wobbly recently, those involved in the art world are unlikely to win much sympathy, since they are still thought of as a bunch of snobby and spoilt purveyors of highly specialized luxury goods which may or may not be a splendid investment or look half-pleasant hanging on the wall. So why on earth do we in the art world continue to do what we do? Is it possible to mount a reasonable defence, which might make sense to the sceptical bank clerk or lay person, or even just to comfort ourselves in dark moments of existential doubt?
Ranging from the serious and seductive whisper to the arms-waving, tearfully impassioned plea (OK, just drunk and exasperated), all of the following points are ones I have tried in conversation, to mixed results:
art is the only place left that still allows a relatively autonomous, wild and profound discussion on just about anything that matters to anyone and everyone; art is just as pointless, useless and necessary as any other activity in the world; while there has arguably never been a truly adequate depiction of art in film or on television, no good film or television programme could have been conceived without lessons learnt from art; whether justified or not, contemporary art has symbolic power in Western culture, and this power gives art context, responsibility and agency; art can transform images, things and situations into more than they would be if art didn’t exist; art is the sibling of language, and sometimes they have good fights; art embraces the absurd, irrational and irreverent; art people often abandon conservative notions of family; art has a wayward conscience in an unconscionable world; there are gender issues and all kinds of racial and sexual discrimination in art, but at least they are being discussed as problems; art is preferable to religion because it’s not about finding a ‘one size fits all’ resolution; some experiences of art can be better than the best love affairs; history shows that art is what remains; art is an alternative value system; art is in everything people do, so someone needs to address that; there are hierarchies within art, but they are volcanically volatile – bursts of energy can come from nowhere and change the landscape overnight; the idea of art is nimble enough to defy definition; art loves problems, misfits, hermits and the reckless; art challenges death and despair; art may be full of contradictions, but at its core lies the idea of championing freedom."

There was a squirrel chasing the cat across the garden the other day. Then today a squirrel came into the lounge and buried a gigantic nut in one of my pot plants. “You should write children’s stories,” one of my friends said. But it was true. I’m not good at making stuff up.

And I cooked a cake. My first ever cake. It didn’t rise in the middle. My friend who I was bridesmaid for was visiting from Hong Kong. What more do you want from a trip to Blighty than a flat Victoria Sponge lovingly made in Ladbroke Grove? How very English. In fact - my friend’s husband generously offered - there’d have been no problem with the cake at all if the words Victoria Sponge hadn’t been mooted. Ah, labels, labels, labels… “dirt is just matter in the wrong place.”

My grandmother used to cook cakes. Not that successfully if lightness is valued above stability. Tedious conventionality - means nothing. Knowles folklore tells of one occasion when she tripped whilst carrying one of the finer of her fruit genus. Allegedly it bounced off the floor and not a crumb was lost. There’s always more than one definition of success. It was the war. How’s one to create lightness on rations?

And I met two pet piggies: Salt and Pepper, who were divine. And I met a yogi called Godfrey who believed in the divine, a quality I admired very much – but not in wearing clothes overly - interrupts the flow of chi apparently.

I slept in an eco-dome under the stars and went to the loo out of doors. It was heaven. Although I didn’t recognise it as such at the time. But then I had Proust to remind me of the profound odiousness of human nature. You don’t read Proust to restore your faith in humanity. And you definitely don’t read Proust in A&E if you’re looking for reassurances whilst your world’s slowly crumbling. Rather like A&E, not a lot happens. Or not a lot is perceived to be happening, which may or may not be the same thing, but probably isn’t, although it could be. Nonetheless, if you like a book wherein not a lot happens this might be the puppy for you. The plot began to thicken last night when our hero / anti-hero depending on your perspective, left his bedroom to go and visit the neighbours. I still probably wouldn’t call it a page turner quite but there’s truth there. Underweight plot, overweight truth. And let’s face it nobody wants too much of that. It gets a bit much to stomach after a while. Too much truth doesn’t sit that well on top of the fried plantain and okra.

Meanwhile Jill Magid’s telling me: ‘I can burn your face’ and then, more alarmingly… ‘the secret itself is much more beautiful than its revelation.’

Is it ‘real’ or isn’t it? A question only Jeff Koons can truly put a bullet through. After two visits to the Serpentine this summer – that’d be two visits too many - it wasn’t long before I could no longer give a monkey’s uncle whether anything is ‘real’ or not. To quote the awesome Scotsman Momus: “Every lie creates a parallel world. The world in which it is true.” Whilst Koons speaks like someone who’s learned the twelve steps parrot fashion and not very well.

A much more subtle and engaging enquiry into the blurring of the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the imagined is Authority to Remove (Tate Modern, Level 2, until 3 January 2010). I really don’t care that somebody can make a piece of aluminium look like an inflatable and then make it two dimensional and then paint boobs on it. And then strut about like a peacock playing with smoke and mirrors. I care so little it makes me cross. It makes me very cross. The profound pretending to be banal? Or the banal pretending to be profound? If I were one of those crashing bores who go on about such things I might care to mention tax payer’s money. But I’m not, so forget I mentioned it. Except if it were so banal I suppose I wouldn’t be so cross… but I’m in no mood to investigate that right now so I’ll gloss over it and get back to the surreal and the hyperreal, wherein I’m far happier this particular evening.

I’m not sure if this Jill Magid exhibition is real or isn’t real. At first I thought it was real and then I realised it wasn’t real, but then I wasn’t sure again. And now I’ve no idea. Can she burn my face? Can she burn anyone’s face?

Answer me that Popeye or the squirrel gets it.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye

What’s needed now is a toy boy. My friend’s got one. Hers is great. So now I want one. She kept telling me hers was twenty-eight, but eventually it popped out he’s not twenty-eight until next birthday.
“And when’s his birthday?”
“December”
So that’ll be twenty-seven then. Any discernible twist of bitterness in my voice is exclusively down to the fact that I am green with envy. And I’ve noticed lately that getting older doesn’t necessarily mean getting smarter. Was it Tom Stoppard who said “wisdom is a high price to pay for getting old”? And let’s face it, not everybody’s in on the kickback. So why bother? Well ones got to of course. And that’s ok. I don’t think I mind that so much. Well actually that’s nonsense. I mind terribly. Who wants to get old and saggy? And who wants to die? Be honest. Nobody. But there’s no getting out of it, and I’m certainly not about to have an industrial strength hoover attached to the back of my head to suck the skin out of my eyes and take my brain with it. So I’ll just have to learn to live with it. Aging that is. And in that light, a toy boy will do nicely. It’ll be liberating; moving away from the drab idea of getting married that everyone seems to be so sold on. Even the nicest, apparently brightest people seem eventually to succumb to this bizarre eccentricity, this anomaly of the twenty-first century. Do I sound like some sort of hairy arm pitted bra burning lesbian? Probably. Oh well. My meditation teacher told me on Sunday (the new one, the old one’s Benny Hill moments were starting to get up my nose) that the point of meditation is not so much to make yourself a better person but to make yourself more accepting of the person you are. So sometimes I run the risk of sounding like a hairy arm pitted lesbian. So what?

And whilst I’ve already dug that particular social grave for myself I might as well crack on and tell you that I went to an exceptionally brilliant evening at the ‘Tate Moderna’ the other week-end – Once More with Feeling – an abbreviated history of feminist performance art curated by visual artist Oriana Fox, supported by The Women’s Art Library and Goldsmiths’. I could wax on for hours about this. It’s so my bag. But I’m vaguely aware that boring an audience rigid with tales of what fun something was is not the way to their hearts, so I’ll keep it brief. If I may I’ll just impose upon you one tiny art historical aside for the benefit of those who may be interested but not especially au fait with performance art, and that is that performance art at its inception, ie around the 60s, was lassoed by women artists, mainly, or rather partly, because performance as a medium was young enough to avoid carrying much of the baggage of historical male colonisation that say painting and sculpture unavoidably came and continue to come with.


The first thing I saw at this extravaganza of feminist performance art history, besides a sea of eccentric looking women of all ages, was two women in wedding dresses, one strapped to a cardboard model of a nuclear missile holding up a placard reading: ‘This demonstration is the happiest day of my life.’ I knew immediately I was at home. Entitled ‘Brides Against the Bomb’ this was first performed by Shirley Cameron and Evelyn Silver at Greenham Common and this re-enactment at Tate was the first time it had been seen inside a gallery. Without wishing to sound ungenerous (although if I do, so what!??) the fact is, if you don’t get this then nothing I can say will help. So I’ll leave it with you.

The rest of the evening was a series of updated honorific references to performance work by a huge range of women artists from Orlan to Yayoi Kusama to Yoko Ono to the brilliant Cunt Cheerleaders, whose performance at Fresno State College in 1970 involved the four artists donning satin cheerleader costumes adorned variously with the letters C U N and T and chanting light-hearted transgressive cheers to women – an attempted re-appropriation of a slang term for a fairly harmless and thoroughly indispensable part of the human anatomy that has somehow found itself the most offensive word in the English language. I’m not sure whether or not it worked but the performance was hilarious and very cheering.




Another high point was an homage to Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh who bound themselves together by way of an eight foot rope for one full year in 1983/4. Oriana Fox added an interesting twist to the reproduction in asking her divorced parents to play the protagonists – although for one evening only this time, not one year. Over from stateside for the week the estranged old pair seemed a little baffled but game enough to have a go. Towards the end of the evening I spotted Mr Fox standing on a chair trying to get a better view of a particularly gripping performance piece, whilst the much shorter erstwhile Mrs Fox was left standing on the floor looking at the back of the tall fellow in front. One began to see why divorce might have found itself on the cards for that particular famille.

Or perhaps we girlies have brought it on ourselves have we? Perhaps, as we’re often told by people who apparently know about these things, perhaps chivalry and feminism don’t make particularly compatible bedfellows. I rather disagree. I think feminism and chivalry have a lot in common. Both have much to do with respect and generosity towards oneself and other. Or perhaps it’s me who doesn’t get it is it? Perhaps. But then… so what?!

nuff said!

St Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell