The Art of Cruelty Page 5
In short, after decades of critical focus on the evils of spectatorship, the gaze, and the presumably passive role of the audience, an increasing chorus of critical voices is currently arguing that we have somehow gotten wildly off course by treating the condition of spectatorship as a problem, or at least as the problem. There’s Jacques Rancière, who argues in 2009’s The Emancipated Spectator that spectatorship is not “the passivity that has to be turned into activity,” but rather “our normal situation.” Then, of course, there’s Sontag, whose final book, Regarding the Pain of Others, argues that to impugn the sense of sight for allowing us to “stand back from the aggressiveness of the world” and to free us up “for observation and for elective attention” is to impugn the function of the mind itself. Sontag concludes, “There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: ‘Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.’ ” In a culture obsessed with pitting thought against action (in order to privilege the latter), not to mention a culture perpetually dubious of the cash value of rumination, these are fighting words. In 2006, T. J. Clark—who is known as much for his fierce political convictions as his insights into Picasso (he is, in fact, a member of RETORT)—published The Sight of Death, a 242-page meditation on two works by seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin, in which Clark aims to honor the slow work of “this focusing, this staying still, this allowing oneself to respond to the picture’s stillness—everything hidden and travestied, in short, by the current word ‘gaze.’ ” Clark also rebukes those scholars of “visual culture” who, in his words, are “chained to their image-displacement machines like lab animals to dispensers of morphine,” and whose knee-jerk response to an expansive, devoted, patient contemplation of classical painting (such as his) would be to dismiss it as nostalgic, or elitist, or “some such canting parrot-cry.”
The above-mentioned writers have dedicated their lives to slow seeing, slow thinking, measured articulation, and radical dissent or defection from any doxa that stifles existence or adds injustice to it. I am inclined to listen to them. Rather than lambast that which mediates as our enemy, each makes a concerted effort to reclaim the value of the “third term.” “In the logic of emancipation,” Rancière writes, “there is always a third thing—a book or some other piece of writing—alien to both [teacher and student] and to which they can refer to verify in common what the pupil has seen, what she says about it and what she thinks about it.” The emancipatory value of this third thing, as Rancière sees it, lies in the fact that no one can own it; no one can own its meaning. Its function is to mediate, but not in the sense of imitating or representing a reality from which spectators are barred. Here, “the mediate” relates people to each other, with relation signifying the process of being brought together and given a measure of space from each other at the same time.
This is essentially a spatial construct—a diagram, or, as Bacon might have it, a ring of action—that constructs both distance and association (or, if you like, individuality and collectivity). Its construction demarcates some sort of boundary, but it does not follow that the function of that boundary need be a constrictive or restrictive one. In fact, the function of the boundary may be wildly variable and even liberating, especially insofar as it creates sub-spaces, and guarantees that there can be a game. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it, “If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game and the players supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may shew where the property of one man ends and that of another begins; and so on. So if I draw a boundary line that is not yet to say what I am drawing it for.” Given that “breaking down boundaries” has come to act as a synonym for innovative or progressive action, be it in art, social justice, or beyond, Wittgenstein’s distinctions bear some repeating. Not all boundaries or mediating forces are created equal; not all serve the same purpose. Neither politics nor art is served if and when the distinctions between them are willingly or unthinkingly smeared out.
Rancière’s veneration of this third term also echoes certain remarks Hannah Arendt made over fifty years ago, in speaking about the importance of the public realm (which, Arendt makes clear, is definitively not the same as the social realm). “The public realm, as the common world,” Arendt wrote, “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered round a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.”
For Arendt, this collapse signifies a deep and dangerous failure in human relations. (God only knows what she would have made of the vast social realm of the Internet, and its creation of a wholly different type of séance—one in which the table remains, but the human bodies are disappeared.) For others, this collapse serves as the gateway to ecstatic, unmediated union. Others still, seeing this fantasized union as utopian nonsense, but who are equally troubled by the forms of alienation that ostensibly prohibit it, offer up satirical or cynical dystopias in its place. And others—especially younger others—simply ignore both the promises and the perils of the whole communion/alienation dyad, as one typically ignores any binaries that no longer speak to the defining conditions and possibilities of one’s time. The mind-bending work of an artist such as Ryan Trecartin offers a particularly gripping example of the latter.
Trecartin’s 2007 feature-length video, I-Be Area, while nominally based on the concept of “virtual reality,” is a riotous exploration of what kinds of space, identity, physicality, language, sexuality, and consciousness might be possible once one leaves the dichotomy of the virtual and the real behind, along with a whole host of other need-not-apply binaries (the everyday and the apocalyptic, the public and the private, the utopic and the dystopic, male and female, gay and straight, among them). The hyperactive cloning, frenetic strobing of characters, and post-identity verbiage of I-Be Area make James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) or the Internet game Second Life look like relics from the Stone Age. “I love the idea of technology and culture moving faster than the understanding of those mediums by people,” Trecartin has said, and his works aim to immerse viewers in this failed-to-upload state. The disorientation of this state is not that of grandpa befuddled by a fistful of printer cables, but rather the sort of psychological and physiological stupefaction more often associated with acid overdoses and schizoid breakdowns.
I-Be Area takes incapacity—to absorb, to make sense, to cohere, to sort, to concentrate—as its starting point. (“It’s like the jumper being jumped before the onset of ‘jump,’ ” Trecartin explains, both helpfully and unhelpfully.) Then it amplifies this incapacity by turning up the speed, the color, the hysteria, the flicker. Image or speech overflow is no longer a problem, and certainly not one that art could or should aid in solving. It is where we live, at least while watching Trecartin; it is our “abstract plot of now,” as he calls it. Trecartin’s ability to sustain us here for some real time often feels like a miracle, in that such an ability seems as if it should be, by definition, also beyond the artist. That is to say, the art often feels as if it is moving faster than Trecartin himself could be—which is likely why his films, when combined with his youth (I-Be Area was finished when he was twenty-six), have had something of an awe-inducing effect on the art world. “All I can do is generalize about this world and point to it with a yearning, stumped pleasure,” writes Wayne Koestenbaum about Trecartin’s work. “My pointing finger is the gesture of an outsider, a tourist, gawking at a radioactive carnival I can’t domest
icate or quarantine.”
Koestenbaum notes that Trecartin’s work is about radical distraction—that dreaded, proliferate state that leads to dazzlingly high numbers of cell phone–related car crashes each day, or that leads otherwise progressive professors to shake their heads in despair as their students text each other under the classroom table. But Trecartin’s brand of distraction doesn’t rely on any simple use of the imitative fallacy—that is, “contemporary life is mind-scrambling, fragmented, and distracted, so my art must be mind-scrambling, fragmented, and distracted, too.” It is too tightly orchestrated for that—too layered, too well performed, too purposefully edited, too intelligently perverse. However bawdy and hysterical, Trecartin’s videos draw tight rings of action: they are condensed, fast-moving world creations that make an intense demand on our attention. And the animating paradox of this world, as Koestenbaum has put it, is that “Trecartin’s characters concentrate on distraction.” However frenetic I-Be Area may be, its distraction is not of the same order as that of, say, the idiotic pop-up balloons and crawling tickers that have become staples of the television screen. To stay with I-Be Area all the way through—to listen to every word, to follow every decision and cut—requires a keen effort. You’ll get the most out of it if you, too, can concentrate on distraction.
Of course, you may not remember much of what happened; you may not remember any of the characters; you may not even be left with an image. If your experience resembles mine, you’ll be left with something far more amorphous—a kind of vibrating memory of the unnerving psychic state the work induced, or captured, or invented (and, perhaps, a notebook full of scrawled lines that sounded great at the time, such as, “My personal really concise pussy is developing a very inner monologue which I will not reveal to you as I become dynamic”). In his lucid, compelling book on craft, Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater, famed avant-garde dramatist Richard Foreman articulates this aesthetic-of-amnesia quite well: “The image of the Marlboro man riding his horse and smoking his cigarette has stuck with me for many years—and so what? It’s garbage. It’s kitsch. All it means is that the image seduced me, that it pushed a button that was ready to be pushed, and I responded. It didn’t widen my sensibilities, compassion, or intuition. Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.”
Foreman is a bit more sanguine about the possibility of “growing into what you are not yet” than Trecartin, whose enthusiasm about new technologies and their relationship to human consciousness has a decidedly who-cares-where-we’re-headed-let’s-party vibe. I don’t think, for example, that Trecartin is explicitly setting out to make work that offers his viewers “artistic structures—models of consciousness—that might evolve into a new kind of lucidity and self-possession, which would enable us to navigate the rapids of our times,” as Foreman says he has been trying to do for upward of forty years now. In short, critics and viewers who look to Trecartin as an idiot savant emissary from the next generation who has come to answer the question Are we going to be alright? are not likely to feel reassured.
But in the end, it may not matter. Both Foreman and Trecartin work from a conception of the human, or the “real,” borne out of contradiction, fluctuation, incoherence, and perversity; both offer immersion in their vision without rehashing the avant-garde fetish of terrorizing the audience or the mainstream one of chaperoning it. “We abide by cultural directives that urge us: clarify each thought, each experience, so you can cull from them their single, dominant meaning and, in the process, become a responsible adult who knows what he or she thinks,” Foreman has said. “But what I try to show is the opposite: how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity.” After an hour or so of watching I-Be Area, or of watching a Foreman play, you start to swim in such a sea. The experience seems to me at least a start on a worthwhile sense of human freedom.
CAPTIVITY, CATHARSIS
IN Unbalancing Acts, Richard Foreman writes that reactionary critics are correct to worry that subversive forms of contemporary art might undermine Western culture. “But they shouldn’t worry,” he counsels calmly. “Something better is coming.”
For better or worse, no one seems so worried anymore. After all, why bother picking on Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ or Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of a fist up someone’s ass when queers can get legally married in six states and counting? Surely there are reactionaries out there who remain periodically or perpetually preoccupied by the filth and degeneracy of modern art (God bless them). But since the culture wars of the late 1980s and early ’90s—that is, the ones that swirled around funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, and culminated with the Supreme Court case National Endowment for the Arts et al. vs. Finley et al. (1998)—the question of whether images can lead to injury (moral or otherwise) has been posed and tested most literally (and most hysterically, and most litigiously) in relation to art’s trashy cousin, mass media.
Not that the change of venue has changed the preoccupations of the family-values crowd very much. Consider, for example, the American Family Association, whose mission statement says the organization’s purpose is “to promote traditional family values, focusing primarily on the influence of television and other media on our society.” A quick trip to the AFA’s Web site reveals the main gist of its concerns regarding television and media: its homepage today (February 21, 2010) showcases a boycott of PepsiCo, on account of its running of a “non-neutral” ad about homosexuality—all part and parcel of PepsiCo’s (reprehensible) effort to become “the gay cola.” Then there’s the featured article on the site titled “News Just Keeps Getting Worse for Homosexuality,” which contains this reassurance: “Pro-family groups are the ones who are accused of lacking compassion. But note this: we are not calling for homosexuals to be put to death. We’re calling for them to get help.”
Should the likes of the AFA become one’s bedfellows, it’s hard to feel much appetite to join in a debate about “the influence of television and other media on our society.” With a handful of exceptions, this is a debate populated by moralists and marketers, who can appear in the bright light of C-SPAN as opponents, but who regularly work together to promote the conjoined forces of the so-called free market and so-called family values, even when the alliance frays into conceptual incoherence.
At this point, it would be naive to express surprise at the fact that of the twenty-two items listed under the AFA’s heading of “television indecency,” only one is concerned with violence. (The rest, unsurprisingly, have to do with sex.) Countless other organizations, however—from the Federal Communications Commission to the American Academy of Pediatrics to Parents Against Media Violence—have taken a different tack, and have placed representations of violence at the forefront of their concerns. This conversation typically heats up in the wake of a Columbine- or a Virginia Tech–type massacre, even though school shootings (which, as of February 12, 2010, must sadly now include those by professors in faculty meetings) have become a frequent enough staple of American life to ensure a near continuous—and perhaps increasingly futile—discourse in their wake.
By this point I have read countless studies, editorials, congressional transcripts, and book-length investigations of media violence. In doing so, I have been consistently struck by the fact that the one question that seems to gain the most traction with anyone—including the American Civil Liberties Union—is the most literal one: does viewing TV, comic-book, movie, or video-game violence increase the chances of people—usually boys or men—hurting other people? I respect the pra
gmatism of that question—even if the morass of statistics that constitutes its answer seems to me an inadequate response to much larger questions about what kind of reality-making we, as a culture, and as a species, might want to put our efforts and imagination into. (A culture that spends an enormous amount of its time glutting itself on, say, ultraviolent, misogynistic video games, but that maintains miraculously low rates of rape and murder—perhaps because so many people remain narcotically affixed to their devices—still does not strike me as one I would want to live in.) At any rate, while I am disinclined to see prohibition as a solution, I have come to believe that the larger questions deserve our attention, even if they do not lend themselves as easily to measure.
ON MARCH 13, 2007, I awoke to find my neighborhood blanketed by an ad campaign for a movie titled Captivity. The first round of advertisements, which consisted of 30 billboards in Los Angeles, and 1,400 taxi-cab tops in New York City, was divided into four panels, each charting a woman’s progress through four possible stages of being: “abduction,” “confinement,” “torture,” and “termination.” The abduction panel showed a black man’s hand or a black-gloved hand (the difference blurred, so as to provoke racial panic while shrugging off the trick) over her mouth. The confinement panel showed a close-up of her face, smeared with dirt and mascara, pressed up against a chain-link fence. The torture panel featured her face bandaged up like a mummy’s, a tube shoved up its nose, with dark red blood draining out of the tube, then out of the frame. The termination panel showed her mostly disrobed body splayed over a table, its dead head dangling toward the ground, its dead breasts facing up toward the heavens, another sacrifice to God-knows-what.