New Pleasure Principle and the Value of Serious Fun?

Highlights from dinner conversation last night:

Manet was having a good time. That's part of what makes his painting so freaking fun to look at--there is this infectious quality to it. Duchamp was having a good time fucking with the viewer. This quality of mischef is exactly what makes his work so engaging. It's more than smart--it's also impish and serious about manipulation.

Contemporary art does often lack these pleasurable extra qualities like infectiousness or impishness or absurdity, and it seems to lack these lingering notes by design. The point seems to be mental, but also seems to be extremely direct. The point seems to be to make sense. The results are easily explained and tailor-made for grants and the rest of the meta-money machine that supports artists. The Chelsea walk becomes ever more excruciating.

What happened to having a good time?

At the same time, nothing is being taken seriously. Compromise with the state of things and all that. On one hand, as Kat has pointed out to me with devastating effect, this makes sense because everything is fundamentally a bullshit illusion that separates us from the interconnected nature of everything and is therefore the root cause of all suffering. Good buddhist. Why take anything seriously when everything, even June Carter, is bullshit?

Why not just wallow in the mudpit of mediocrity if nothing matters? It's certainly easier to take the most direct and flattening route to utter disrespect of self (evident everywhere, not just in art: corn syrup, the exurban sitting-down lifestyle, global warming, reality TV...)

Artists are mirroring the culture they live in, and that culture is increasingly brittle, increasingly unpleasant and unpleasurable. Fear Factor, Survivor, processed food, driving long distances alone, following every move of Jennifer, Brad and Angelina...these are consumer choices based on a denial of pleasure and substituting something else, something that stands in for pleasure.

And Baudrillard has already written about how this creates an echo chamber of banality.

Back to dinner conversation. Yes, the good buddhist asserts with all her might that this echo chamber of banality and everything else around it is an illusion that only creates suffering. But the good buddhist cares mightily about that suffering. And also has an ego huge enough to assert itself and ask (well, beg really) to be released. Enlightenment may be characterized as a deep, bodily understanding that this is all bullshit, but actually acting like it's truly bullshit and mucking around in it without any respect for the fact that we are all still here is ugly, disrespectful.

There is no fun in it.

So fuck it, I am going to have a good time. Not in spite of the fact that art sucks, the polar ice cap is melting, the US is really fucking up the middle east, etc. But because I am alive in all of this madness. If all the enlightened people are telling us the truth, none of this evil can really hurt me, because it doesn't exactly exist (although the suffering it produces does). So it doesn't make any sense to collapse into any of it. The only way I can think of not to collapse is to remain joyous.

More dinners!
(thanks Kat for a great dinner conversation)

This is interesting:

http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/lotringer.htm

Sylvere Lotringer essay about Baudrillard's Conspiracy of Art. Published in 1996, declares art dead-ish:

"Most contemporary art is engaged in just this: appropriating banality, the throwaway, mediocrity as value and as ideology. In these innumerable installations and performances, what is going on is merely a compromise with the state of things – and simultaneously with all the past forms of the history of art. An admission of unoriginality, banality, and worthlessness, elevated into a perverse aesthetic value, if not indeed a perverse aesthetic pleasure. …it is mediocrity raised to the second power."

I never read this--I am not sure why. I got into grad school just as the Matrix was at the end of its arc--there was a sense that Baudrillard wasn't very cool or only for the digital crowd...

Anyone read the original Baudrillard essay? SL's analysis is pretty potent today:

"Going nowhere art came to nothing – and everything – simply staying there, grinding its teeth, losing its bite, then losing the point of it all. It is now floating in some kind of vapid, all consuming euphoria traversed by painful spurts of lucidity, sleep-walking in its sleep, not yet dead, hardly alive, but still thriving."

Is Reality a Handicap?
This is just a thought to throw out there. Fisher6000 and I talk about this all the time, but it should be put in writing so it can be unpacked. I've seen a lot of art now and I've seen a lot of art that leans on reality too much, and I'm not talking about realism. I really don't like John Curin's work, but not because of its illusion's. I'm talking about art that relies on its ties back to reality to substantiate its worth as vision.
There's a strain of documentation's in art and this actually relates to MKCronin's post. Piccinini is making two bodies of work. One is clearly a leap of imagination. It opens the doors to meditations on bioengineering, the nature of humanity, the nature of being a creation, the question of moral obligation and terror. The other pretends to document a reality. How much other art do we see that says "I am valid because I am well researched?" I look at Janine Gordon and I see (despite curitorial protestations to the contrary) a documentation of a subculture. I am looking at the Whitney Biennial catalog for 2002 right now, and it says that she goes beyond documentation into her personal interactions with her subject. I don't see it, and even if I did, how is that more than documentation? Does it create? Is it imaginative? Does it go beyond the obvious to create new questions? I have no doubt that Bank Violette's installation at the Whitney was well researched. Burnt churches, oppositional culture - natch. Anyone who went to a public high school is very familiar with all of this, and they didn't have to pay $12 dollars to find out. No, they were trapped with it, (or in it) for 4 years. This is only research. It is simply, metaphorically, tracing reality and saying "look, if you didn't go to public high school in the past 30 years, i bet this is new to you." It is no more revelatory or creative than if I traced a photo.
At Socrates Sculpture Park right now there are bird traps created from drawings of bird traps. If you read the plaques you find out what these things are. Is there anything in making facsimiles of old traps that couldn't be done just as effectively by having people look at the original wood cuts? They are all grouped together in a sculpture park, effectively removing them from their effect, but reframing them doesn't make them more meaningful. They are artifacts. They document that a few hundred years ago people devised these ways to trap birds. These objects would be at home in the American Natural History Museum, and they would lead to the same imaginings.
I think there is a huge difference between presenting people with raw material that leads them to think in new ways, as Piccinini's sculpture does, and presenting people with evidence. The evidence is independent of its circumstances in the way it provokes thought. You see a model of a bird trap at ANHM and you might buy a nice replica and take it home and muse about trapping birds. You see a model of a bird trap at SSP and you take a picture and you muse about trapping birds. If you're given to it, you might think about deception and safety and trapping, but you're given to that kind of thinking you don't need a sculpture park to trigger it.
My friend Chris Verene, who is photographer, makes me rethink my conception of Gailsburg life, and other situations that I would never question, because of his intimacy with the subjects, because he sees beyond what I would see if I did the research. Even Tom Friedman, who can rely too much on punchlines makes you rethink spaghetti. And as much as I hate his position, John Curin casts a new light on art and art collecting. It's hard now to see certain old masters without thinking "melon breasts."
Art has no business restating reality. That is for documentation. Art is creative, or nothing.

just for reference

well, it's not going to be pretty, but at least it's here (and altered a bit so as not to be too formal)...


Piccinini is an artist who, for me at least, successfully combines attraction and repulsion within the realm of the intersection of technology and nature. Nature’s Little Helpers at Robert Miller, has photographs, drawings, a video, and several sculptures (which either fall into the bio-engineered "toy/tool" category or a biological entity). The latter group is what caught me, no doubt due to their almost horrific details (moles, hair, skin, scales, and birth pouches) combined with those giant, almost sad, eyes. Alternately fierce and sad, they mimic mammalian hybridization so well they elicit a visceral shudder, which has stuck with me ever since. I love that something inanimate, which I know is not real, can still make me squirm.

Less successful for me were her photographs and video, which seemed all too obvious in their material trickery, in a time when Photoshop amalgams of impossible scenes are almost expected. I don't quite know how any of it is REALLY made, but I have an idea - the difference being that the photos and video seem like almost too easy of an answer and the sculptures emit a palpable engagement with material.

No doubt I am sculpturally biased and seduced by the on a certain level by their technical mastery, but that doesn't really explain my lack of interest in the "Cycle-pups" and other autofinished pieces. My feeling is that the "Helpers" convey an all-too-real squeamishness when contemplating their possibility - they are more ethically challenging.


“…her menagerie of genetically modified, cloned, and artificially created life-forms suggests a world in constant transition…In these works, fact, fiction and fantasy co-exist suggesting that ‘reality’ as we know it is no longer a stable concept.” Rachel Kent, “Patricia Piccinini: Nature’s Little Helpers” exhibition catalog.