Reflections on a Return

It has been five days since I left Florida. I am now in Los Angeles as if I had never left and in other ways, as if I had never lived here. Undoubtedly, my mindset is different, though I don’t know how or if it will affect the work. From a distance, and without whatever clarity time might bring, Florida seems an important period. It might not be inaccurate to think of it as a self-imposed exile, thought I have to smirk at the idea of exiling oneself to anyplace in which there is a mall and a beach. But it was precisely that resort-quality of the little town in which I lived that wiped away the romantic aspirations to self-discovery and “toughness” that inevitably come up in pilgrimages to deserts, to Alaska or to New York. The charm of a little beach town, the homes decorated with coral, the gentle nights and the Lily Pulitzer outfits, meant that whatever ideas I wrestled had to be my own and, frequently, foreign to the day to day conditions. In other words, the angst of the artist in the little beach town is felt in sharp contrast to its surroundings. There is no nasty grit of the city or garbage or frostbite, no traditionally-grand landscape or historical weight to echo the brutality of living or to applaud the act of getting up in the morning.

Art in South Florida

I think about Florida more consciously now that I am leaving and in particular, I think of the arts in South Florida.

First, there is the Florida landscape, the water that is everywhere and the changing sky: these are good points of reference for artists. The housing developments and malls notwithstanding, there is also an end-of-the-world-everything-could-happen-here sense to Florida that is freeing for artists trying to find themselves (which ought to mean all artists).

Miami is an international city in ways New York and Los Angeles are not. Surely, NY and LA have people from many nationalities but these groups are frequently relegated to ghettoes and parades, and their appearance on TV and newspapers is usually as victims or perpetrators of crimes. In South Florida minorities and people from other countries are a visible force, not just token exceptions, and since they represent a wide variety of nationalities and economic backgrounds, their causes, unlike in other places, tend to be more than just self-serving.

Another interesting and useful quality of the arts South Florida is that here—with exceptions—people in the arts are a little insecure about their worth. Insecurity is good in the arts. It promotes self-discovery and expansion. This searching impetus can be of significance now that the Basel Fair and the proposed new Miami Art Museum are giving the arts in this region a boost. I think MAM has better leadership, scholarship and honesty than many museums—if this is not more obvious is because they are relatively understated; hopefully the new building will bring the necessary attention to the museum.

But in order to develop a world-class art community, South Florida needs to overcome some challenges. For instance, Basel has been good for the city but furthering the art’s community dependency on the Basel Fair is a precarious formula for success. Another danger is that the city can give in to the temptation of being a satellite of New York or a playground for the city’s well-known collectors—there are already signs of some of this going on. An approach the city could take to develop itself independently of Basel, New York and powerful figures, is to encourage education and exhibition spaces. By education I mean rigorous art programs whose intellectual preoccupations go beyond reading art magazines and theory blurbs. By exhibition spaces I mean venues that range from the true alternative spaces to a lively gallery scene, which should include a few dealers concerned with art.

I am cautiously hopeful.

The Times They Are a-Changin

Now I have finished Nomad, which will be shown at the Miami Art Museum this fall and winter (opens to the public November 2). For better or for worse, the environment—its parts and their relationship—represents most of what I know about painting.

Earlier this afternoon, after I finished my notes on Nomad, I went for a long swim in the ocean. The beach was empty. Then a skinny and hairy man sat down on the sand and turned on his radio. I got out of the water. We both nodded—he seemed homeless and his radio was small. I sat near my things and we both looked straight ahead, towards the horizon: a band of dark ocean under an almost white sky. I could hear his songs. They seemed to be coming from farther away than the twenty yards between us. Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin came on. While listening, I noticed the dark clouds moving above. I knew it wasn’t going to rain but I left when the song ended, just in case.

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Complexity and Tidy Packages

One can appreciate the complexity of a notion and work within that complexity, or one can try to simplify it to fit into a tidy package. Both ways have their merits but, usually, only the former advances the notion in ways that can be called something other than trivial. Why then pursue the “tidy package"? There are many motivations but I think most of them focus on the immediacy of certain rewards: tidy packages are portable, allowing application in a wide variety of situations; they usually don’t require intense engagement; and they are frequently all that is required to advance socially and professionally (not only do tidy packages foster advances because they are sufficient to quench most people’s thirst for knowledge and truth, but also because deeper engagements are usually not welcomed).

A while back I was at a gallery with a well-known collector who considers himself quite sharp. He stopped in front of one of Sol LeWitt’s numbered pictograms. He leaned into the work. He squinted and tightened his lips, as if he was in thought. After a while he turned to me with something like insight in his eyes, and he spoke of the mathematical and conceptual power of the sets of numbers arranged in boxes. I told him I didn’t see it and he looked at me with contempt. What serious mathematics could there be in those drawings, really? I don’t know anyone, other than “art people,” who goes to LeWitt’s work in order to get structural or mathematical insight. It is math-lite, in the same way that some art works are politics-lite and and so on.

Remarkably (remarkably considering what one sees and reads) few people would admit to be interested in tidy packages.

House Where Nobody Lives

Our house is almost empty. The toys are gone and my family is gone. Only I am left behind—to finish a few projects. I did a walkthrough last night. It reminded me of that song by Tom Waits, "House Where Nobody Lives.”

In Favor of Speaking Up

A friend sent me a note. It said that while he agreed with the comments about Rosalind Krauss, he was not sure of the value of such comments. And knowing him, a remarkable person, I think I understand where he is coming from. It is difficult to walk lightly through life when one is attacking, criticizing and the like. It increases one’s burden—one’s footprint. Moreover, what has been said is difficult to take back and difficult to forget. Instead of attacking or criticizing other people’s views, the focus could be in living one’s beliefs. In this way, it might be possible to remain light and unmarked by the stain of public words. It seems a more elegant way to live and it would be hard to argue against its rewards. In my book Guide, Thomas Hoveling lived like that.

I frequently consider the question, and while I am never completely comfortable with my actions, I have, so far, concluded that it is important to speak up. It is important to take a visible stand against ideas one judges incorrect, misleading or evil. It is a burden, an annoyance, one is frequently wrong, and speaking up is often a detour from other projects. But unless alternatives are heard or read, they almost don’t exist, and ideas that don't exist are never re-discovered. The romantic (in the conventional use of the term) notion that greatness ultimately triumphs is the outcome of self-serving excuses and feel-good notions about life’s fairness, and it is frequently justified with misunderstandings about history and misquoted biographies.

Ideas do not exist in isolation. They are refined and clarified through exchange. Weaknesses in one’s position, for instance, are revealed quickly in the friction of a critique. It is easy to be pedantic about the value of one’s ideas when those ideas are not tested, poked—used beyond their circle of safety. Silence, something I revere, is at certain times the greatest arrogance, and has been at some key moments the greatest immorality. Moreover, many of the keepers-to-themselves are disingenuous: they feel above struggle but harbor resentment, pride and self-importance.

There is also the issue of offering alternatives, particularly in the art world, which for all its “diversity” often appears (particularly to emerging artists and students) polarized as a whole and monolithic in the particular sub-space of the relevant mainstream. If you consider the art world from their point of view, it would seem a conglomerate of sectors defined by the Artforum crowd or by the neo-conservatives or by the gut-trusters or by one of the many other “interest groups.” All these sectors have their canon, their loudspeakers, their publications.

So, if one believes something better or more authentic is possible, that belief should be shared and supported publicly. Many artists whose potential had not yet unfolded don't know what to think because they are bombarded everyday with, or intimidated by, ideas they distrust but don't know why. In our age there is a tendency towards polarization and tidy worldviews, so it is important to combat this tendency by putting “out there” the view that contradictions or dissonant points of view can co-exist in one mind, which makes me think of Fitzgerald: “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” So, one good reason to speak up is to put forth ideas and attitudes that are ambitious and honest enough to retain internal conflicts, conflicts whose resolution propels investigation and inquiry.

Art and Embarrassment

Today I received the following announcement regarding the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art (don't laugh for too long: there's something not so funny hiding underneath the foolery):


2007 Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art

00s - The history of a decade that has not yet been named
September 19, 2007 - January 6, 2008

Artistic direction : Thierry Raspail
Conception : Stéphanie Moisdon & Hans Ulrich Obrist
Production Management : Thierry Prat
Visual Identity : M/M (Paris)

Membres du jury:
Présidente Susanne Pagé, directrice de la Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris
Gunnar Kvaran, directeur du Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo
Knight Landesman, Artforum
Samuel Keller, Art Basel
Elaine Sturtevant, artiste
Kasper König, Sculpture Project, Münster
Silvia Karman Cubina, The Moore Space, Miami

Preview : September 17-18, 2007
Opening : September 18, 2007

Conceived of as a history and geography manual in the form of a game, the 2007 Lyon Biennial is inviting sixty-six Players from all over the world, distributed in two circles. Forty-nine of them (curators, art critics...) are being asked to answer the following question: "Who, in your opinion, is the artist who best represents this decade?" A second circle is composed of nineteen other Players - mostly artists - each devising a program, a system or a problematics intended to define the decade in progress.

A New Body of Work

My project, “For two Martinson poems, poorly understood,” is now finished. It consists of paintings, sculptures and one photograph. It will be shown (it opens October 4th) at the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco.

In this series, like in most of the work of the past four or five years, I tried to explore (by tapping, maybe like a physician testing reflexes) the limits to holding basic questions of existence in thought or words or art; in particular, how those limits impose themselves on my efforts to consider new choices against a growing body of past choices. The concern here is not memory, as it has often been said about my work, but the past as a definite force on the present—as a comparative weight on the balance scale of meaning.

In this exploration of or inquiry about highly abstract ideas, I have used the poetry of the Russian Osip Mandelshtam and the Swede Harry Martinson, both of whom, in deceivingly simple poems, transverse a lonely landscape of "the personal" while striving towards large and unwieldy concepts.

The imagery of this new body of work is dominated by trees, snow, horizon, light, soil and figures: I have paired down the work to those elements I consider fundamental in order to manifest and understand (better but, of course, poorly) the nature of choice, regrets and possibility. As always, this work is not the result of an a priori agenda of representational painting nor of a conceptual strategy. Instead, it is the CURRENT embodiment of my efforts towards making sense of the world as I want to make sense of it TODAY; tomorrow, I might work with words or empty rooms.

Neither culture (in the way “culture” is used in art writings) nor contemporary art have been considerations in this new body of work. If I had to locate this work anywhere outside of itself, it would be with poetry, but poetry in its most limited use of the framework created by Mandelshtam and Martinson. To be more specific, not in any way involved with the “discourse of poetry” nor with “the poetic,” a term frequently used to describe affected works lacking in strength of character.

The end is important in all things (III)

From the Hagakure:

In the Kamigata area they have a sort of tiered lunch box they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. As might be expected, this is one of my recollections of the capital [Kyoto]. The end is important in all things.

Criticism and Imitation

It is interesting to consider “Art’s Prospect: the challenge of tradition in an age of celebrity” by Roger Kimball in relation to “Stranger Shores: literary essays, 1986-1999” by J.M. Coetzee. While quite different, and their difference is what I would like to highlight here, there are reasons to place them together for a moment: they are both non-aligned with the contemporary discourse—this is less true of Coetzee; both share a certain impatience with mediocrity; both writers have a considerable following; and they both feel it is reasonable to pass judgments on the work of others.

It is instructive to compare how they construct those judgments.

Roger Kimball usually makes his arguments by concatenating colorful sentences which are not always constrained by logic and that often sacrifice accuracy for energy. Here are two representative examples,

“A quick glance around our culture shows that the avant-garde assault on tradition has long since degenerated into a sclerotic orthodoxy. What established taste makers now herald a cutting-edge turns out time and again to be a stale reminder of past impotence.”

“It is a good rule of thumb in the contemporary art world that the level of pretension is inversely proportional to the level of artistic achievement.”

Roger Kimball is annoyed with the art world and his writings convey his annoyance through a writing style that is both ironic and bombastic. He has an extensive group of people and institutions he dislikes, and he also has a pantheon of artists he admires. The shared qualities of the former are easy to recognize—their cult of novelty, their “semi-beatified status,” their “unbearable pretentiousness”—but the latter, the pantheon, does not seem to respond to a unified philosophy, instead Kimball would most likely say they share “quality.”

What I find remarkable about Roger Kimball’s writing is how thin it is. Once the exaggerated adjectives, the insults, the condescension and the many occurrences of “undoubtedly” and “it is clear,” are removed there is very little left; and what's leftover is neither interesting nor new. This scarcity of substance is surprising considering Kimball stands for quality and lack of artifice above novelty and pretentiousness.

While I share much of Roger Kimball’s dislike for the art world, I find “Art’s Prospect” to be a weak argument in favor of or against anything. J.M. Coetzee’s “Stranger Shores,” on the other hand, is an impressive example of what is possible when seriousness, quality and originality of thought combine.

The best case against the pretentious obscurity of Rosalind Krauss’s writing is not Kimball’s essay “Feeling Sorry for Rosalind Krauss” but the lucidity and intelligence of Coetzee’s writings. Unlike Krauss or Kimball, Coetzee downplays rather than exaggerates his intellectuality, and his judgments on the work of others seem carefully assessed and measured in his effort to not be petty or arrogant. Coetzee’s writing has a distinct voice without the need for the decorative flair and it comes across as profoundly knowledgeable without pedantic poses or fancy terminology.

Although other claims are voiced, we like to imitate and in an environment like art and academia imitating intellectual stars (who Kimball is not but Coetzee and Krauss are) has significant rewards. It is easy to figure out how to write and think like Kimball. The reason we don’t read more Kimball-like writings is because the people who write like him are usually standing on soap boxes not, unlike him, editing intellectual journals. It is also easy to figure out, but harder to execute, how to write and think like Krauss, and since the Krauss-type writings fit well within the vehicles of intellectual dissemination, we often read thinkers like Krauss—for instance, in the magazine October, which Krauss helped found. Coetzee is a different story. It is easy to see how he writes and thinks but he is very difficult to imitate because at the heart of his writing there is formidable intelligence, erudition and strength of character. I expect more Coetzee imitators to continue to appear but unlike the case of Krauss or Kimball, the Coetzee imitators are easy to distinguish from the original.

The end is important in all things (II)

The ending of a body of work is like coming to the end of a good but difficult book: I wish I could stay in the world created by the work but the work itself expels me.

At the end of a series or a cycle there are no victorious trumpets and no certainty, at least for me. If a trumpet were to be heard it would be a little one, made of plastic, with a strident ironic sound. Instead of the sounds of victory, the ending of a series brings the confetti of doubt and regrets, questions about the works in the world, and ambivalence about parting with things I wish to keep.

The end is important in all things (I)

Nomad is almost finished and, as if to emphasize this finality, it has rained all afternoon. From time to time the sky looked like the sky in the summer painting.

The Road

Bolle, the main character of Harry Martinson’s The Road, wanders through the Swedish countryside. Here is one passage,

"So I went, and all that summer I tramped round the country, heard the birds sing, bathed in quiet streams and lakes and roamed through glens and valleys where the grass was dewy and clean. Clouds drifted, winds moved in the woods, flowers bowed and gleamed, bumble-bees buzzed in the clover, girls sang in the hay-fields."

Bolle’s aim is the wandering itself. It is a lifestyle for which he pays in fear and detachment, but for him it is a worthwhile trade: as a tramp, he gains nature, he resists the externally imposed and he finds hope in what might be around the next turn of the road.

Many times I have fancied myself a Bolle, someone who chooses the road however unknown. But it is a fancy. Like Ungaretti, I am always ready for departures but, unlike Bolle, it is “ready” as in “expectant” nor as in “prepared.”

Maybe no one can be prepared and maybe the road is not so much a choice. Maybe it is a reaction, which sometimes ends well and sometimes does not. When does it end well? Maybe as often as the settled life ends well, which is not often. But probably not even that much. What the road opens (irreversibly) is more sensible to keep close.

Martinson’s book points at the limitations on freedom imposed by social arrangements, the oppression of machines and the tyranny of those who hand down the rules, but it makes less of an issue of the challenge posed by the past. Maybe his approach was to tackle an idea akin to “practical freedom,” but it seems to me that the most intriguing questions come in search of “pure freedom,” even if such a concept proves silly upon further analysis—and it does, I think.

Every event, good or bad, narrows what’s possible and enslaves us in ways we often don’t want to give up; ways the road won’t always release. I have events, Bolle had events and Martinson as well—and Martinson, the beautiful tramp, was ultimately disheartened by his.

And yet, who, at least sometimes, wouldn’t want to wander or perhaps, to walk a mile without hypocrisy, without attachments?

The Road is too simple; one reason why it is touching.