In 1975 an artist named Chris Burden announced that he would lay down on the floor beneath a large sheet of plate glass on the floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He did not say what he would do then. I covered that story for the paper, not because it was assigned, but because the concept held an eerie fascination for me. It still does. I have no idea what he was trying to prove. But, surely, he was proving something?
I recently had occasion to read The Hunger Artist, by Franz Kafka. It involves a sideshow performer who goes without food for long, long periods of time. This becomes a futile exercise, because while he's starving there's nothing much to see, and most people assume he isn't really starving; a man need only be thin to lock himself in a cage and say he is fasting. Who watches him at night or when the show is moving to another town? The story has a famous ending that is savage in its implacability. I've linked to it below.
Bloodletting man, from the Calendar of Regiomontanus (1475)
Reading Kafka, I was reminded of the article I wrote about Chris Burden, and looked it up. It engaged and perplexed me. I will quote from it here, and then in italics I will think some more about Chris Burden.
¶ At 8:20 p.m., the body artist Chris Burden entered a large gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art, did not look at his audience of 400 or more, set a clock for midnight, and lay down on the floor beneath a large sheet of plate glass that was angled against the wall. So commenced on April 11 a deceptively simple piece of conceptual art that would eventually involve the imaginations of thousands of Chicagoans who had never heard of Burden, would cause the museum to fear for Burden's life, and would end at a time and in a way that Burden did not remotely anticipate.
The piece began in a sense a month earlier, when I was interviewing Burden at the Arts Club of Chicago in the company of Ira Licht, the museum's curator. At that time Burden had just completed a piece in a New York art gallery that involved his living for three weeks on a triangular platform set so high against one of the gallery's walls that no one could see for sure if he was really up there. He took no nourishment except celery juice. The piece had been spooky, mystical, Burden was saying. There had been something infuriating, for some of the visitors to the gallery, in the notion that a human presence was up there in the shadows under the ceiling, not speaking, not doing anything, just waiting.
Some of the visitors tried to take running jumps up the wall in an attempt to see Burden, or a hand, or a shoe, or a couple of eyeballs in the darkness. Others took it on trust that he was there. Burden heard one young man telling his friend that the feeling in the gallery was almost spiritual: "He can hear us, and he doesn't answer, but he can't help listening...it's like God."¶
It is like God, in a way, in its detachment. It is also infuriating. There was no way to see is Burden really was up there. He could have slipped away the first night and checked into a hotel, and the piece would have been precisely the same from the point of view of the gallery visitors. So, too, is the presence or absence of God. What difference does it make? If there were God, would there be more good in the world? If there were not a God, more evil? What we believe is sometimes more important than what we can see. Visitors to the gallery believed that Chris Burden was out of sight on the shelf.
¶
Burden had been invited to Chicago to participate in an exhibition of "conceptual art" at the museum. Earlier that morning, he'd visited the gallery where he'd be performing, and now at lunch he said he wasn't sure yet what he would do, but he had a few ideas.
"Would it be fair," Ira Licht asked, "to ask for some rough estimate of how long the piece might last?"
"No", Burden said, "it wouldn't." A piece lasting 45 seconds might be richer than one lasting two hours.
Licht said there might be a problem if some of the museum's members arrived a few minutes late and the piece was already over. Well, Burden sighed, he couldn't please all of the people all of the time. And it was at that moment that the idea for his April 11 performance came to him.
Our conversation moved on to some of Burden's earlier pieces, and inevitably to the performance by which he earned his master's thesis at the University of California at Irvine: He had himself locked into a locker measuring 2-by-3-by-3 feet for five days; there was a five-galloon jug of water in the locker above him and, with admirable logic, an empty five-gallon container in the locker below him. Word of the piece spread all over the campus, and hundreds of students came to talk to him through the locker's grillwork.The beauty of the piece, Burden said, was that, of course, he had to listen: "I was a box with ears and a voice."
¶
This, too, placed Burden in a godlike role. If God is omnipotent, he must hear not only our prayers but our most fleeting thoughts. Was that what he was doing, playing God? I don't believe it was. The pieces were about himself. In a way, both of those pieces were saying, Me! Me! Me. He, Chris Burden, was on the shelf or in the locker, and the focus of his thought was his solitary experience. If others jumped to see if he was really there, or talked through the door, they were focused on him, his situation, his choice, his pain or pleasure. If they thought he was brilliant or insane, an artist or a fake, no matter what they thought, he was in the locker or on the shelf, and they were thinking about him.
¶
On another occasion, Burden had himself manacled with brass rings to a concrete floor, and flanked by two buckets of water with live electric wires in them. The audience was admitted, and it had to be trusted not to knock over a bucket and electrocute the artist. "I had absolute faith that they wouldn't," Burden said. "After all...I'm not suicidal."
For other works Burden had himself nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen, and shot in the arm with a rifle ("It was supposed to be a graze wound, but the marksman missed"). These more violent pieces tended to attract more attention, he said, but some of his quieter pieces were perhaps more interesting. The idea in conceptual art is that the artist causes experiences to happen to himself, and then ruminates on the interaction between the self and the experience; an audience may be permitted to observe, but is not essential.
When he returned to Chicago in April, Burden told the museum he would require the large industrial-style clock, the sheet of plate glass, and nothing else. The clock was fastened to the wall and the sheet glass was leaning against it at a 45-degree angle when the museum's doors were opened at 8 p.m. An unusually large crowd filed in, attracted perhaps by publicity about Burden's previous performances. There was a slight carnival atmosphere. The tone was muted somewhat because of a large number of spectators who were seriously interested in body art, but all the same a definite feeling existed in the room that some people had come to see blood.
¶Were these people all frequent visitors to the museum, or to art exhibitions in general? Five years after the 1960s ended, were they now drawn to a man whose work seemed to negate love and music and flowers and--anything at all? Burden was not of the Woodstock Generation. His art perhaps said that art was a mockery. That it was about the artist, who when fully committed was not engaged in life at all, but was on Pause.
¶
At 8:20, Burden entered the gallery, set the clock for midnight and laid down under the glass. He was wearing a Navy blue sweater and pants, and jogging shoes. He let his hands rest easily at his sides and looked up at the ceiling, blinking occasionally. He could not see the clock.
The audience perhaps expected more. There was a pregnant period of silence, about 10 minutes, and when at the end of it nothing else had happened, there were a few loud whistles and sporadic outbursts of clapping. Burden did not react. At various times during the next two hours, audience members tried to approach Burden with advice, greetings, exhortations, and a red carnation. They were politely but firmly kept away by the museum attendants. A girl threw her brassiere at the glass; it was taken away by a smiling guard. At 10:30 p.m., when I left, the crowd had dwindled down to perhaps 100. I came back to the Sun-Times to write a mildly quizzical article, and then called Alene Valkanas, the museum's publicist, to ask if Burden was still on the floor.
"Yes, he is," she said. "It's a really strange scene here right now. There are about 40 people left, and they're all very quiet. Burden doesn't move. It was more like a circus before; but now it's more like a shrine...very mysterious and beautiful."
I returned to the office and filed the story with a pre-written editor's note: "At (fill in the time and day), Chris Burden ended his self-imposed vigil." The editor's note was never to run. I left to meet some friends for a drink, and we talked about Burden and what he was up to. There was the suggestion that this was another of his danger pieces, that eventually someone would become impatient enough to throw something at the plate glass and break it, that Burden's immobility was an impudent invitation of violence toward himself. Nobody had a better idea.
O'Rourke's Pub was crowded, happy and noisy, but I felt my thoughts being pulled back to that vast, empty gallery with the sheet glass leaning against one wall. At 1:15 a.m., I went to the pay telephone and called Alene. She said Burden was still on the floor. I said the hell with it and drove back downtown to the museum. Burden had not moved.
Two of the museum guards still remained. One of them, Herman Peoples, would become so involved in the piece that he would voluntarily share the vigil with Burden, vowing not to leave until it was over. There was a television reporter, Rich Samuels of WMAQ, sitting on a mat of foam rubber, and a young couple who left soon after I arrived. Two banks of spotlights illuminated Burden against the wall, and the other lights had been turned out; a zaftig nude by Gaston Lachaise lounged in the shadows.
"He doesn't move except for what look like isometric flexings," Alene Valkanas said "He flexes his fingers sometimes, and once in a while you can see his toes flexing." Burden seemed removed to a great distance. He was not asleep. There was no way to tell if he was in a meditative trance, or had hypnotized himself, or was fully aware of his surroundings. After an hour, I left very quietly, as if from a church.
The next day I planned to drive down to Urbana. Before I left I called the museum. It was noon; Burden had still not moved, the museum said. Fifteen hours and 40 minutes. During the drive downstate, my thoughts kept returning to him, and I wondered what he was thinking and how he felt, and if he was thirsty, and if he had to piss. The radio stations had picked up on the piece by now, and were inserting progress reports on their newscast. Disc jockeys were finding the whole thing hilarious.
On Sunday, driving back to Chicago, I stopped at the Standard Oil truck stop in Gilman to call the museum. Burden had not moved. The time was 2:30 p.m. Forty-two hours and ten minutes. I came into the office, where I learned that Ira Licht and other museum authorities were consulting specialists to determine whether Burden's life was in danger. A urologist said no one could go more than perhaps 48 hours without urinating and not risk uremic poisoning. Burden hadn't had anything to drink, but that was not a problem at the moment, apparently; since he was not exercising he would not dehydrate dangerously in only two days.
Alene Valkanas called at a little before 6 p.m.
"The piece ended at 5:20," she said. Forty-five hours. "We felt a moral obligation not to interfere with Burden's intentions, but we felt we couldn't stand by and allow him to do serious physical harm to himself. There was a possibility he was in such a deep trance that he didn't have control over his will. We decided to place a pitcher of water next to his head and see if he would drink from it. The moment we put the water down, Chris got up, walked into the next room, returned with a hammer and a sealed envelope, and smashed the clock, stopping it."
The envelope contained Burden's explanation of the piece. It consisted, he had written, of three elements: The clock, the glass, and himself. The piece would continue, he said, until the museum staff acted on one of the three elements. By providing the pitcher of water, they had done so.
"I was prepared to lie in this position indefinitely," he wrote. "The responsibility for ending the piece rested with the museum staff but they were always unaware of this crucial aspect." The piece had been titled "Doomed."The idea for the piece, Burden explained later, had come during our lunch with Licht: "I thought, if he's concerned about how long the piece will be, I'll do a piece in which he has complete control over the length."
"My God," Alene Valkanas said. "All we had to do was end it ourselves, and we thought the rules of the piece required us to do nothing."
¶
About Chris Burden I have little doubt. He was fully prepared to remain prone under the glass for an indefinite period of time. Like the Hunger Artist, his performance was life itself. He has removed his own choice from the equation. If he had remained on the floor for days or weeks and then died, well, that would have been how the piece ended. He had turned over his life and will to exterior forces.
So do we all, but we rarely think of that as a choice. A vast engine of fate and genetics, coincidence and desire, propels us helplessly in a direction we choose to think is ours. The clock ticks until something breaks or some eternal force does something to us. Then we die, and the piece is over.
¶
During the 45 hours, Burden had been in psychological danger, perhaps, but not in physical danger; he had urinated, but the museum staff had not noted the signs on his navy-blue dungarees. He had been thirsty and hungry, Burden said, and he had been completely conscious at all times except for some fleeting periods of sleep. He had not used a self-imposed trance, or yoga, or anything else except self-discipline to keep himself lying there.
"I thought perhaps the piece would last several hours," Burden said. "I thought maybe they'd come up and say, okay, Chris, it's 2 a.m. and everybody's gone home and the guards are on overtime and we have to close up. That would have ended the piece, and I would have broken the clock, recording the elapsed time.
On the first night, when I realized they weren't going to stop the piece, I was pleased and impressed that they had placed the integrity of the piece ahead of the institutional requirements of the museum."On the second night, I thought, my God, don't they care anything at all about me? Are they going to leave me here to die?"
¶
In gathering art and video for this entry, I discovered something that rather surprised me. Burden had made no particular effort to photograph or film his performance pieces. The photos that exist are of low quality, suggesting snapshots by casual visitors. Some of the video was done by news organizations. When David Blaine is frozen into a block of ice or buried alive, he is always visible, and takes care that his performance is documented. For Chris Burden, I believe, the experience is what remains. His experience, and ours. Continuing as an artist, he eventually ended his body art, and became a teacher. For some years he has refused to discuss that period in his life.
¶
Crawling through glass: Burden explains a TV ad
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"The Flying Steamroller." Photo below, video here.
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"Big Wheel"
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The performance piece "Shoot"
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Read Franz Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" here.
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Painting by Shawn Yu; this link is to the artist's blog.
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Davd Bowie sings "Joe The Lion," which according to Wikipedia was inspired by Chris Burden. Thanks to reader Carlton Harris..
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¶
I'm relieved this was inspired by "The Hunger Artist" rather than the "Rape Tunnel" hoax that everybody's falling for lately, http://gawker.com/5370397/rape-tunnel-succeeds-in-sparking-conversation-but-not-rape
Ebert: Me, too.
It was nice to read Kafka's story after decades.Such an intensely written story(what a fine translation, hardly sounds like one) must refer to something deep and important about human nature. It's a wonderfully thought provoking topic and I'm looking to the kind of discussion it provokes.
Since you mention God. I fail to understand the importance of this question. One's own existence seems assured by the cartesian argument. Existence of others a bet if we jump solipsism. What need more?
We have a hunger for somethin' infinite and that's a fact as well as a proof of our existence.
Methink I'm getting bit ahead in the discussion.
This is my favourite one:
"On another occasion, Burden had himself manacled with brass rings to a concrete floor, and flanked by two buckets of water with live electric wires in them. The audience was admitted, and it had to be trusted not to knock over a bucket and electrocute the artist ..."
"To die for one's art" seems to be a fairly uninteresting remark. But it has always made me curious as to when they just might end up killing someone in the name of art.
Ebert: Exactly: "No thanks, you go first."
Some words in the Preface to, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde are perhaps prescient of this artist's work:
"No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."
This entry reminded me of "Man on Wire." It has the same sense of re-creation and appreciation of one form of art through another.
I love that illustration by Shawn Yu.
There is also the true "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters."
That should qualify as a square meal.
As though ordinary life with its recessions and illnesses was not art enough, that one has to go out of the way to hang upside down.
I'm wondering if this is so different from what other artists do. We've all heard of writers,directors etc losing sleep and internally torturing themselves in various ways while they are working on their art; maybe Burden's idea was to take this and, as you say, just get his own personal experience out of it, cutting out what is generally left behind. This isn't so different from what you say, merely a different way of looking at it.
In some ways I consider myself open minded when it comes to art, in other ways a very old white business man in a suit saying 'What the hell is this mess?' While there are actual artists who express themsleves in very different ways, I can't help but think a lot of this is 'Emperor's New Clothes Territory'. That had someone stood out and said 'Is this it? He's going to lie there all? This is STUPID!', that he would have been rushed out as uncouth and narrow-minded. Certainly there were those there moved by Burden's performance, but I bet the largest percentage were people thinking it was lame but not having the guts to say so.
I would argue with my art teacher in high school that some artists were taking advantage of the Abstract art scene and producing stuff any five year old could create. Her argument was that I didn't understand it, and that if it created controversy it was justified. (Hitler created controversy, but nevermind.) We went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts once and I spotted three pieces of canvas each painted a solid color, one red, one green, one blue as I recall. The name of the piece was Three Canvases: Red, Green, Blue. While the intent of the artist was to generate some profound discussion, I found it cheap and insulting to artists who truly inspire, such as Da Vinci and Michelangelo, Van Gogh and Dali.
I just think our artistic interests have gotten lazy over the centuries, and most artists have stopped trying. I saw that some guy actually cut up a cow and suspended it's parts in plastic resin. Call me narrow-minded all you like, but step 2 in the How To Make Sausage guide should not be considered art.
Ebert: I tend to be suspicious of any artwork that I personally could create more or less identically ("Three Canvases: Red, Green, Blue."). That said,I've just completed my newest oil, titled "Three Canvases: Ecru, Violet and Payne's Grey." It takes the work of previous artists in a radically new direction, and incorporates a color previously associated only with watercolour.
Yet another God piece? We're in control, but don't realize it?
Ebert: You can, by definition, never speak too much about God.
...Then answered the Lord unto Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
"Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee,
and declare thou unto me.
Wilt thou disannul my judgement? Wilt thou condemn me,
that thou mayest be righteous?
...Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency, and array thyself
with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath; and behold every one that is
proud and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low;
and tread down the wicked in their place."
Is it not the most exquisite of ironies that as God has taken thy tongue, he has
given thee a voice? You speak for so many, now, sir.
The whole time I was reading this I kept thinking "This guy sounds like David Blaine, but more mysterious and magical (ironically)." Then at the end you mentioned David Blaine and I was pleased that you hadn't missed the parallell. I think the difference between this sort of performance stunt and David Blaine's performances and the reason one is widely regarded as art and the other typically isn't does boil down to presentation and documentation. David Blaine does things out on the street, usually in plain view, where he can always be seen and seems (to me at least) to relish the media attention. Chris Burden, from your description here, seems to have mostly performed in museum and gallery spaces, thus relating his performance to the art establishment and art history (Arthur Danto considers these the defining aspects of art), he does not court a media circus (though one may spring up anyway), and he takes only a few discreet photographs in order to document the piece. There is also a difference in purpose I suppose, with David Blaine seeking to impress audiences with the feat of endurance itself, while Chris Burden seeks to use the performance to provoke thoughts in some other direction.
Ebert: Yes, there's a purity to it. There's little or no money to be made, and the publicity hasn't made Burden famous. David Blaine, to give him his due, accomplishes extraordinary feats. What sets them both apart from the rest of us is their willingness to subject themselves to such ordeals for such rewards as they receive.
How much would you and I want to be paid to be frozen inside a block of ice? In my case, no sum would be adequate, no matter what lifestyle it might purchase. Just give me the little room described two entries ago. To be fair, Blaine has never called himself an artist, has he?
This guy sounds really interesting. Criss Angel better recognize.
Roger, thanks for reminding me of Burden. Interestingly enough I've just discovered Kafka and read The Hunger Artist just this week. I somehow hadn't made the obvious connection between The Hunger Artist and Burden. I'm a high school art teacher, and I'm going to read your blog entry and THA to my Seniors tomorrow and hopefully spark an interesting discussion.
You might be interested to know that David Bowie wrote a song related to Chris Burden called Joe the Lion from his "Heroes" album.
Here is a link to the song with lyrics and also the wikipedia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtQ3JLF9lYI
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Joe-The-Lion-lyrics-David-Bowie/C07D407AFFB1F147482568A2001389E0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Lion
Ebert: I'm linking that under the entry! Also found a crappy video.
This made me think of my recent conclusions about art.
I was comparing the modern entertainment industry (especially trilogies and other joint business franchises) to the ancient building of cathedrals; in a sense that they both require a vast vision, employ many kinds of artists (most of them unknown to the audience) and, comically, sometimes endure a development hell in order to bring a very complete experience for the audience's senses.
This experience serves also as a persuasive one. 500 years ago, the goal was to make people believe in God, a belief that leaders used to keep their system in order. It may sound paranoid, but today these franchises make people buy things and feel good about it, so the modern system is in order.
Art has changed. A lot. It evokes many more things and it is simpler in its approach. Many pieces are made thinking of museums and galleries. They do reach out to the same basic ideas art has reached out to since its beginning, but the people have to come to it and most of the time it is not the other way around.
Conceptual art is still an impact society has not recovered from, at least in the way Duchamp presented it and many others followed.
I don't know why I posted this here, but I just needed to say it.
Thanks!
Jay Faulconer wrote, I just think our artistic interests have gotten lazy over the centuries, and most artists have stopped trying.
I don't think so. Like Roger and you, I have little patience for things like Three Canvases: Red, Green, Blue. However, I don't believe that "most artists have stopped trying." The guy who cut up a cow was most likely convinced that he was doing something with real artistic value (whether that is the case or not is another question). I think a lot has to do with emulation and reaction to previous styles (how many of the pop artists that followed in Andy Warhol's footsteps had the man's talent?): extreme simplicity (e.g. monochromatic canvases) often comes in reaction to more ornate styles (or as the logical conclusion of more abstract ones). When it is not considered social commentary by the artist.
That doesn't make Three Canvases any less grating to those of us who like our art to be more than a monochromatic canvas, but I don't think the artist really was thinking, "hey, I'm sure I can get away with this and they'll still think it's genius."
Ebert: Damien Hurst, who embalmed half a sheep and displayed it suspended in a block of plastic, won the Turner Prize. Turner. You know, this guy:
http://www.wga.hu/art/t/turner/1/110turne.jpg
I believe Burden also had a piece called Sleep, where he set up a bed in a gallery and slept for two weeks. Some years ago, I saw an art installation by a Chris Burden involving miniature wooden submarines, and I kept thinking is this the same guy who had himself shot?
I wonder what it was that changed his mind about performance art. Maybe it's a young man's game.
I also thought of the David Blaine parallel. But why do so many people shun a performer like David Blaine -- who, like Burden, works in the realm that tests and comments on the human condition and not in the realm of illusion? And if Blaine is more commercial than a Chris Burden, is this not mainly because our society has become more commercialized in the intervening years? If anyone knows of a person -- self-defined artist or otherwise -- who is today doing the kinds of things these guys have done and yet not getting attention, I'd like to know about them. Certainly Blaine seeks out attention and sponsors, but one could argue that this is the only way to have his desired affect to reach people with his work.
True, Blaine does place focus on the endurance aspect and not necessarily on any artistic meaning, but his roots are in magic tricks and the explanation that he wants to bring people together through the kinds of reactions he will get out of his performances. No doubt that some of his performances are more compelling than others. But if people are not provoked to marvel at Blaine's dedication to his craft, to ponder his deeper intentions for wanting to engage in these various tests of will, or at least simply to wonder what it is he must be thinking while buried alive for a week, frozen in ice for over 63 hours, or suspended for over 6 weeks over the River Thames in a glass box, I'd suggest that the failure is in their own lack of appreciation for Blaine's desire to to reach the outer limits of human possibility, not in the work itself.
Ebert: I may have given the wrong impression. I'm amazed by Blaine. But ... is there anybody here who can tell me what it does to one's mental health to be suspended for six weeks over the River Thames in a glass box?
Regarding art which is easy to create:
I wonder if it limits our critical minds to be suspicious of art which we ("we" meaning those of us who are not artists) can create ourselves. As grade school children, perhaps, we believe that "art" (a term which, at that age, we usually associate with sculpting and painting) is impressive only when it takes a lot of skill to execute. A great big canvas like "The Coronation of Napoleon" for instance, or Leonardo Da Vinci's "Madonna of the Rocks". But I think, in light of the abstract art movement, or even in light of Picasso's collages, we might also consider the amount of thought that goes into a work. How does it react against, or absorb the influences of past art? This is the unseen effort of the artist. The decision to be simple, profoundly simple, is often a decision which only great artistic talents can generate. To bring this discussion into another medium--literature--we can use Gertrude Stein as an example. "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Simple sentence. A third grader could think that up. The simplest grammatical structure, the simplest vocabulary and, on the surface, the simplest sense. So simple it's downright dull. And yet the phrase speaks multitudes about language, the meaning of language, sign and signifier. It simultaneously affirms and challenges our notions of the Platonic "ideal". The phrase resonates across many disciplines, and it is, when read aloud, beautiful.
Some art may be exceedingly simple; for me the question is not "could I have made this?" I prefer to ask 1) Would I have had the guts to see art in it? And 2) Is this exciting stuff, or is it not?
Ebert: But a third grader could not have written these lyrics:
A Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is
A rose is what Moses supposes his toes is
Couldn't be a lily or a daphi daphi dilli
It's gotta be a rose cuz it rhymes with mose!
It's funny, I recently was talking with a friend about A Hunger Artist (and more recently reading a biography of Kafka illustrated by Robert Crumb). I'd been involved in a student production of the story, and the person running it seemed to think that A Hunger Artist was a comedy or satire.
Looking over the story again, it most certainly was not sneering at the Artist, at least as far as I could tell. It's about suffering of the barest kind, and art of the deepest kind, which also happened to sap the Artist of life. Many artists sacrifice to achieve their vision, and his was somehow the purest form of this, even though it was subject to the whims of popular opinion on the art and suffered directly for pursuing it. His words toward the end are especially telling.
I got in a fight over direction the student production had taken, and was given the boot. Every year I feel more proud of myself for doing that, even if the specific tipping point for me becomes foggier over time :)
Maybe it's something in our humanity, or maybe it's something about the era we live in, but I think we get thrilled when people are honest about what they're doing or claiming. I certainly do.
Omer M
Roger,
Are you a fan of Houdini then? His exhibitions were often quite painful for him, in fact. And early in his career, he did not announce or advertise his most public escapes and feats the way David Blaine does. Crowds would just form, seeing him dangling and escaping from a straight jacket while hanging high over the street.
What a compelling story! Told in your compelling style.
Here's the line that will stick with me:
If God is omnipotent, he must hear not only our prayers but our most fleeting thoughts.
Ouch! Our prayers, yes. They are usually eloquent and noble. Our fleeting thoughts? Yikes! That must be why Morgan Freeman gave up the job to Jim Carrey in "Bruce Almighty". The incessant racket of all of our inconsequential fleeting thoughts combined...
I dunno. Based on Chris Burden's remarks, I'd have titled it "Misunderstanding."
I never thought Kafka was funny until my 14 year old started reading his stories and laughed a lot. Apparently that's what Kafka thought, too.
Your "Me! Me! Me." was right on the money. Only thing is, it's also true of all artists who are not also saints.
Some of us artists are piqued at the reality that permits a Chris Burden to forgo years of learning to draw and paint and sculpt in such a way as to attract a viewer's attention, opting instead for antics such as drinking from the locker above him and urinating into the locker below him. It isn't particularly clever or arduous to do the locker thing. I will stpulate that the ground-glass thing and the VW-crucifixion thing are not for the normal, but what if he likes it?
No maintenance of a level of artistic facility through repeated exercise, practice, and challenge-meeting is required. Possible future "projects" are easy to conceive--I'll take five minutes to do so:
Walking down a corridor with a date-and-time stamp impressing every footstep. "Footprints in the Corridor of Time"
Under a black light that turns off and on every quarter hour in the desert, wrapping yourself on the desert floor in impervious plastic, letting scorpions crawl all over you. (They look really spooky under black light!) "Obsessed With Demons"
Putting a bungee cord on a winch, and jumping off with the cord too long, but switching on the winch with a handheld remote so it reels to sufficient shortness before you hit the ground--MAYBE. "Leashed or Unleashed?"
--Well, I thought I'd come up with more than three, but I'm a slow typist. I trust an eight-hour workday would yield fifty or more concept roughs, from which I'd choose the best five.
Instead, I draw and draw and draw, luckily never tiring of it more than sporadically, meeting some challenges, failing some, always "the next one will be better" as my mantra, fearing loss of sight or eye-hand coordination or mental acuity . . . but that's all just as Me! as Mr. Burden is, isn't it?
Robert Heinlein, a favorite quote source of mine, once said, "Art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation." I'm not 100% with him on that one, nor do I think Evoking Pity And Terror and Pseudo-Intellectual Masturbation are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I do have a preference for art that is demonstrative of skill acquisition.
Ebert: Such as your own. You have a wide sample on your excellent blog (linked above), but I confess this is my favorite:
http://www.eons.com/photos/group/drawing-and-painting/photo/428370-Sextuple-Acrostic-For-Roger-Ebert-Profile-In-Courage?context=browse_album_createdat_183659
I think one issue is what one defines as art. Is it the squiggles and lines on a canvas, colors and shapes on a mobile, or even endlessly looping movements on a video installation. Personally, I think anything that creates a space between the observed and observer where a cognitive breakthrough has the chance to occur is art. Therefore, I would consider Burden's work, which has several mediums (glass, clock, himself, and museum staff) and an intentional to be art. Science is art, too, according to this framing.
Great post, thank you.
I remember first hearing of Chris Burden in the mid-70s, and feeling like he was defining a disturbing cultural turning point. It was the just-before-punk era, and there was a lot of bottled-up screaming waiting to escape. Jaws was in movie theatres, tapping into primal fears in a shockingly graphic (for then) way. Vietnam vets were showing up homeless, lying on the street as people walked by on their way to the menagerie (to quote A Hunger Artist). And here was Chris Burden, volunteering to be the target of violence, torture, even death.
I bailed out of the "Shoot" video, just didn't want to be there... but I watched all of the others. As you say, Burden "ended his body art, and became an etcher." What I didn't know, and was astonished to see, was the work with the giant heavy equipment. The moment when the Flying Steamroller actually takes off is tremendous, and the Beam Drop is just wonderful. It's what every little kid with a Tonka toy wishes for.
Those pieces make me appreciate Burden as more of a "real" artist, less of a conceptual one.
Thanks again for the piece.
Ebert: Actually, I didn't say he became an etcher. My bloody spell-checker did. He became a college teacher.
Finish that novel you've been thinking about!
You write:
"This, too, placed Burden in a godlike role. If God is omnipotent, he must hear not only our prayers but our most fleeting thoughts. Was that what he was doing, playing God? I don't believe it was. The pieces were about himself. In a way, both of those pieces were saying, Me! Me! Me. He, Chris Burden, was on the shelf or in the locker, and the focus of his thought was his solitary experience. If others jumped to see if he was really there, or talked through the door, they were focused on him, his situation, his choice, his pain or pleasure. If they thought he was brilliant or insane, an artist or a fake, no matter what they thought, he was in the locker or on the shelf, and they were thinking about him."
But I think your argument makes a stronger case for Burden playing God than against it. After all, my recollection of childhood Christian indoctrination is that God gave humans free will so that humans could choose to worship God. Doesn't this act reveal just the sort of need for attention and elevation of self that Burden (in the case of elevation, literally) incorporated into his works? Both God and Burden created situations in which the crux was whether the audience would choose to ignore or to acknowledge and interact with the unseen artist/creator.
Ebert: For me, his value is in making me think. In our conversations he never offered the slightest flight of theory. He discussed the pieces in practical terms.
Roger:
Great piece on Burden but what first caught my eye was the mention of Kafka's "A Hunger Artist." As a student at Chicago's Columbia College in the 1980s I made a film adaptation of the story. It played on WTTW's IMAGE UNION and currently has an afterlife on their web page.
If interested you can see a tiny version of it here:
http://www.mediaburn.org/Video-Preview.128.0.html?&action=2&uid=4934&PHPSESSID=eb9b29639b28baf2d67086a4e050dc2a
There is a Burden body art connection to the film: the actor playing the Hunger Artist - Robert Rothman - endured a real life fast to drop about 20 pounds to play the part. Burden might have appreciated that.
Ebert: You post an entry, you find out neat things.
Readers, just click on John's name.
I was once at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and upon entering a room in the gallery all I found was a series of lead tiles on the floor. Well that was it, I was disgusted. How dare anyone charge me good money to waste my time with tiles on the floor? I was outraged and it tarnished the way I viewed art for a while (not to mention the rest of my visit to MoMA)but oddly enough it stands as one of only 3 or 4 pieces that I can vividly remember from that day. It has relentlessly stirred within me time and time again feelings of anger and frustration with the art world but ultimately it has made me consider myself and my own values in regards to art more than just about any other piece I've ever seen
In regards to art of this sort there is often much skepticism about the validity of the art and artist. Anyone can dribble paint on a canvas so what makes Pollock so special and anyone can paint a few lines so what makes Barrett Newman so special? The standard response is often "anyone CAN do it but this person DID."
Well this always seems to me to be entirely besides the point. Jay Faulconer says that he believes "some artists were taking advantage of the Abstract art scene" and who am I to say he's wrong? I think the most important part of any art is the reaction it will illicit from a viewer. An artist makes a piece of art that to one person is nothing more than three solidly painted canvases and a waste of time but to another it may stir up a strong emotional reaction perhaps due to the symbolism of the triad or maybe some deep connection to those specific colours or whatever. The point is, whether the artist is attempting to make a quick dollar or if they have a very specific message in mind is entirely irrelevant. In the case of both viewers a message is relayed and a reaction is created; the first viewer may be distressed or frustrated and perhaps they ruminate on the nature of contemporary art. The second viewer has had an equally powerful experience that was deeply moving and personal. In both cases the artist, through their work has achieved the ability to move and make people think.
Any reaction caused by a piece of art is ultimately an effective piece of art regardless of original intent. If one disagrees with a work of art or the artist the piece immediately becomes relevant to them for it forces them to consider the nature of art, their role as a viewer and their relationship with the artwork and artist.
Thank you for introducing me to Chris Burden, he is quite a fascinating artist.
Ebert: I vaguely recall a story about a janitor throwing out a work of art, mistaking it for trash.
The artists who use (or abuse) their body for art are fascinating. I think though the spectators are the one who are really a little off in the head. They come to see artists like Burden and David Blaine wanting to see them fail at their tasks. Perfectly sane and normal people deeply intrigued by blood. The near death illusion is fascinating to people.
Ebert: NASCAR thrives on the same death wish.
I'm surprised not to see Bob Flanagan, the super-masochistic cystic fibrosis sufferer and performance artist who died during the making of Kirby Dick's documentary about him.
"Super-masochistic Bob has cystic fibrosis.
He should have died when he was ten, but he was too precocious.
How much longer he will last is anyone's prognosis.
Super-masochistic Bob has cystic fibrosis.
Hum-diddle-iddle-iddle, I'm-gonna-die.
Hum-diddle-iddle-iddle, I'm-gonna-die...."
i have to wonder if david blaine would do what he does if there were no television cameras, if he lived when the media weren't so starved for a story and joe public weren't so bored and boring. i like his street tricks and slight of hand. his stunts are boring, and his levitation attempt silly.
criss angel is a fraud and doesn't do anything unless it's taped and edited.
david copperfield scares me in more ways than one.
i prefer the magic of larry esposito. he had a magic club back in high school in the late 70's. once a week we'd meet in his basement, he'd demonstrate things for us to try and purchase, and i'd get sooo disappointed when he revealed the "magic" and it should have been obvious to catch it. once a year he performed in the lyndhurst high school talent show. i haven't talked to him since the last reunion in 1990. my bad.
Tracy Emin's "My Bed" (a somewhat less-than-hygienic bed, complete with rumpled unwashed sheets, bloodstained underwear and used condoms) was both vandalised by two semi-undressed Chinamen who improved it by having a pillow fight on it, and it was also nearly "tidied up" by a visitor who came with cleaning materials: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bed
And there was also the artwork "Equivalent VIII", a rectangular pile of bricks by Carl Andre: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=508
I believe there was a legend that the former was tidied away by a janitor, the latter by a car park / parking lot attendant. Robert Hughes did comment about the latter that the difference between it and a Rodin is that a Rodin in a car park is still a work of art, but outside a gallery something like Equivalent VIII is just a pile of bricks. It also seems (Hughes again) that contemporary artists have taken a leaf out of filmmakers books and now do not let critics near their stuff for fear of losing value after a bad review or public laughter. Worth it for this bit alone:
"[*Jeff Koons's work*] is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into Bush's America the way Warhol fitted into Reagan's."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/jun/30/art1
... though that comparison may be a bit unfair to Andy Warhol. He was around before Reagan became president, had something to say about mass-produced culture even as he bought into it, and has managed to last in a way that Koons probably never will. I loved the "Warholised" Bill Murray portraits in Zombieland. Though speaking of Warhol...
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19670626/REVIEWS/706260301/1023
Ebert: This article puts it well:
http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2009/09/25/jeff-koons-to-curate-a-new-museum-exhibition-of-his-main-patrons-collection
And this is different from Annie Sprinkle how?
First time you've let me down, Roger. Jesus Christ, you say the star wars nerds are wasting their time and then you write about something like this...come on, man, you're slipping.
From the Answerman: Why do zombies prefer to eat only living flesh, anyway?
Roger: You make good sense, Pennsylvania Zombieologist. Since the living eat the dead, why shouldn't the dead turn the tables?
Well, thank you, Roger. I didn't know cannibals, dead or alive, use tables.
Ebert: Duck!
An artist worth respecting is an artist who seeks to provoke conversation and thought instead of fame.
I've never heard of him before, thanks for the great read.
"Ebert: I tend to be suspicious of any artwork that I personally could create more or less identically ("Three Canvases: Red, Green, Blue."). That said,I've just completed my newest oil, titled "Three Canvases: Ecru, Violet and Payne's Grey." It takes the work of previous artists in a radically new direction, and incorporates a color previously associated only with watercolour."
You have made an interesting comment that lends some insight into why anyone would find performing arts (of the Burden sort) interesting (or not at all).
The frequently made comment that "my child could do it" or "I could do it", says something disquieting about how we view art in the first place. Most of us are perhaps admittedly too unsophisticated to be living participants in art. Being a distant spectator and pseudo-judge of aesthetic value is fine, but we can't push it any further because we do not have the slightest clue of what it is to be an artist, or a great one.
For instance, the aesthetic value of a painting is not exhausted by its purely material features. A perfect replica copy of Gauguin's 'By The Sea', is not great art, yet Gauguin's 'By The Sea' is. The person who produced/manufactured the replica has also yet to show that he is a great artist.
However, it is not originality that carries aesthetic value nor is it intention. An artist's intention may lend an otherwise worthless piece of stuff some value, but it is how the audience comes to connect the points that gives it genuine worth.
Perhaps all in all, Chris Burden is performing in spite of the people who gawk and spectate as "consumers of culture". We are supposed to read something into the "art", yet make a mistake of taking it for granted that it is a work of art. Of course, what most of these performing artists are doing is beyond my capacity to comprehend.
I remember being introduced to Chris Burden and various other conceptual and performance artists when I was in college. His work from the 70's is still fascinating, though my taste for that kind of art has grown limited. I do like what the Viennese Aktionists were doing roughly around the same time, perhaps because they made some great images out of their actions, I'm not sure.
I can definitely see the parallels between what someone like Burden and even David Blaine do and "The Hunger Artist." Maybe the reason I like that story so much is related to what fascinates me about that extreme and violent sort of art.
Thanks for posting the article and the videos and reminding me about Burden's work.
What an interesting entry!
Ironically, I was busy painting earlier or I'd have jumped in sooner; smile.
In order to talk about Art, I find it useful to first define my term.
I personally feel that Art is a manifestation of the soul seeking to express the intangible; thoughts, feelings, ideas and emotions and by pulling them into the physical world - via music, paintings, sculpture, books, films, dance, theatre, etc, etc.
So there's that.
Then there's "good and bad" Art.
I personally think that good Art achieves something: it moves you. Maybe it makes you laugh? Or gives you pause for thought? Maybe it makes you smile - or feel sad and thus empathize with another? Good Art does that, in my opinion. Bad art doesn't.
Good and bad are subjective calls.
And then there's GREAT ART.
Great Art manages to transcend the subjective. Ie: most people looking at it will be moved by it. It touches something basic and visceral and fundamental in a person and ergo, in the collective.
A Masterpiece....
An artist can make great art and if they're lucky, before they die, they will transcend themselves - and make a Masterpiece; your BEST PIECE EVER.
And so you see the trouble, eh?
When someone walks into an Art Gallery and a piece doesn't speak to them, maybe it's a judgment call; you don't like the banality of Jeffery Koons. Or maybe you're right - and it's total, pretentious shyte.
Note: technical skill or craftsmanship used to be a measuring stick of "good" until the 19th century when things started to loosen-up. Billie Holiday does not have an instrument as good as Ella Fitzgerald (many singers were technically better at hitting their notes) but she's nevertheless my favorite female Jazz singer. And I love the Sex Pistols - and they could barely play; chuckle!
Which leaves you with this, I think...
Does it contribute anything positive or meaningful to the world? Or is it simply the contents found inside a used condom?
Does it have soul?
Or is it just self-important wanking, and hyped so as to make a buck?
That's my personal measuring stick. Does it have soul or not?
Note: Jeffery Koons studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art. After college, he worked as a Wall Street commodities broker while establishing himself as an artist.
He also doesn't do most of the work; he pays other people crap wages to do it - then signs his name to it and makes $$$$.
Wanker. :)
Thanks for the link Roger ( http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2009/09/25/jeff-koons-to-curate-a-new-museum-exhibition-of-his-main-patrons-collection and see above for previous comments).
Jeez, that Koons effort looks like a bad 80s New Wave album cover. Irony doesn't cover it, it's just terrible!
Still, for connoiseurs of gloriously bad art in a similar vein, check out some of these album covers (and remember, some people make a good living from this sort of thing):
http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/index.htm
After all, it's not as if the Beatles couldn't afford good graphic design: http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/hallofsh29.htm
Thank you for letting us know you're on Twitter. I finally joined after hearing you joined (I'm one of your 8,000 and growing fast unknown 'followers' - sounds a little odd). I wrote a post today on my blog praising your title writing ability:
"If you want to read a great writer who understands the importance of consistently excellent, clear, humorous, and inviting titles, visit rogerebert.com and enjoy the free lessons Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Roger Ebert gives to would-be writers every day."
I love the variety of your blog, the care you take to respond to so many comments, and the time you genuinely put into adding visual and video content. I enjoyed the 50,000 book video about the messy bookstore the other day. A fascinating video few people had watched before you posted it. Thank you for your work.
Ebert: The title of your blog prompts me to observe:
I have just been re-reading Penrod by Booth Tarkington, and I find it similar to, as good as, and perhaps an influence on, P. G. Wodehouse.
Regarding art we think we can do ourselves:
I vividly remember a picture I drew and colored in second grade. It was of a werewolf (remember - second grade). After I had finished I was of the belief that it was a remarkably good and detailed drawing of a werewolf. To me it looked like something that could be hanging in a gallery. Less than 2 years ago I found it in a box in my parents' house. It was what I would expect a drawing of a werewolf from a second grader would look like. It was nothing like I remembered it or what I thought of it at the time. I was honestly embarassed by it. How could I have ever thought that looked good?
That single piece of terrible artwork has had a lasting impression on me from the moment that I finished it. I have never forgotten it. But it was crap. I'll leave art to the professionals.
Ebert: It looked good when you finished it. That was its only purpose. If you'd saved your second-grade prose, would you have a blog today?
Now, damn you, sit down and draw a werewolf and post it on your blog and I'll link it here. Remember the rules: Finish every drawing you begin, and keep every drawing you finish.
Roger: Duck!
Thanks for the warning. But if it was you Roger coming after me, I'd gladly be a sitting duck, as long as you don't discriminate. :) Just kidding.
Hmmm, I wonder if there is such a thing as a zombie gourmet...?
That's a great article. It has stayed with me ever since I read it when it made its "first time online" appearance on your site.
Your response to Pat in Newfoundland referred to an artwork that was thrown in the trash by accident . I believe the work was by Joseph Beuys who had had placed 5 pounds of butter in the corner of the ceiling of his office at the Duesseldorf Art Academyin the 1980's. He had given the work to an assistant who after Beuy's death had gone to the office to retrieve the "Fat Corner" only to find the butter in the trash having been thrown there by a janitor . The assistant sued the Academy and won $22,000 in damages.
I remember a quote by an artist whose name I have forgotten who said
"An artist can tell you nothing , all we can do is take from a work of art what we need".
For the pantheist, isn't everything God's body art? Do the seething stars burn? Do crawling glaciers sting?
NO NEED TO PUBLISH THIS, and I hate to seem a prig, because I am often enough sending you corrections for your truly wonderful blog; but, speaking of your bloody spell-checker, what's up with this sentence in your first paragraph: "I have no idea what he was trying got prove"?
For that matter, what's up with the echoing "lie down on the floor" in your first sentence?
How you do all this, write movie reviews, post blogs, reply to readers of your blog, tweet, attend film festivals, and live your own life seemingly all at once, I have no idea. But I know it is an act of kindness on your part, and I thank you for it.
LJK
Ebert: Both fixed. Bloody spell-checker. Every correction solicited! I'm doing my own copy-editing, which means you are reading without a net.
An interesting read.
For about twenty years now I've held more than a passing interest in something called the "demoscene". It involves a programmer, a "graphician", a musician, and a computer of one sort or another. The end result is a sort of real-time music video, often created within strict limits -- either due to hardware capabilities (eg. Commodore 64) or file size limits (4 kB).
A reoccurring theme within this "demoscene" is the question, "Is it art?"
Some productions can be aesthetically and technically pleasing, but is it art?
The same question churned around in my skull whilst I read the above blog entry. Certainly the concepts of Burden character are interesting and can generate thought-provoking discussion, but is it art?
Much like the demoscene, twenty years from know I still won't know.
Marie Haws,
"And I love the Sex Pistols - and they could barely play; chuckle!"
I've been looking for an excuse to mention this band. So, I'd like to mention the punk band, "The Slits." Her mother later married John Lydon of the Sex Pistols, but check out her adventurous story:
http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/Article.aspx?id=3712
--with this main paragraph:
"In the ultimate escape from the post consensus, unabashed consumerism of the 80's, Ari claimed her descent into the jungle came as a natural progression from the Slits. The artwork from 'Cut', where the band loaf around wearing little else but mud, is a testament to this. Living with Diak Borneo Indians, Ari swapped the dangers of being eaten up by what she calls the "Yuppie yucky hippy yippy junky 80's" in favour of the rather more real threat of being eaten by jaguars and snakes. "It was all bows and arrows and stuff like that… [we used to walk] with a jungle guy and a dog in front because if a jaguar attacks he’ll attack the dog. The corn feed making Indians [we lived with] got bitten by snakes and died regularly." It was this return to nature that helped her overcome the rejections of the music industry and allow her to fall out from the pressures of modern life, from child star to nomad in less than six years. When Ari emerged from the jungle she went to Jamaica, sporting a new found serenity and waist length dreadlocks that she still has today. She reinvented herself as Medusa and started designing clothes, as well as becoming well known for her now purified reggae and dub."
And, not to forget their music, they are probably the best punk band of that era. Not only are their punk songs very good, but their reggae new versions of them are pretty great--and always groovy.
Isn't she great?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x78FDlEcts
Compare their punk and their later reggae version on my myspace page.
Punk Versions: http://music.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=music.singleplaylist&friendid=396014880&plid=665775
Reggae Version: http://music.myspace.com/index.cfm?
fuseaction=music.singleplaylist&friendid=396014880&plid=693257
And it's myspace (so, it doesn't have a lot of their songs--probably not their best punk ones).
Ebert: Here's something I'll bet you didn't know:
http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5144661
I had heard of Burden and read Kafka, but until now I never realized that Chris Burden may have redefined how we read the Hunger Artist. Some people see it as a parable of the suffering of a misunderstood artist in an indifferent world, even though it’s hard to reconcile that view with the artist’s final confession. When I try to put myself in the place of someone reading it when it was first written – about fifty years before Burden or anyone like him, it seems likely that they would have thought that the audience was right, that what the artist was doing was boring, and wasn’t art. They might have seen an ironic statement that art that exists only to depict suffering is all just a stunt and not high art. This also seems a little too simple. Reading your description and watching the videos I felt like actually seeing what Burden did makes it harder to dismiss as mere gimmickry. His discussion of how he experienced the work and the audience makes me suspect that Kafka probably knew his story would be read more than one way because like Burden he saw a sort of Uncertainty Principle of Art – that the meaning of a work is partly defined by the spectator, rather than entirely a matter of the creator’s intent.
I remember when Canada's National Gallery spent a couple of million (I think it was 1.8 million) of our monopoly money in 1989 to buy a canvas called Voice of Fire (at the time, the Cdn dollar was worth about 60 US cents - I remember seeing an editorial cartoon of two cops standing near a pile of money, and one was saying to the other, "The thieves stole the armoured car - they left the money.")
The canvas was not by a Canadian artist, so there were the usual complaints about spending so much money on something that had no connection to Canada. But by far most of the complaints were because of the painting itself. It is a single red vertical stripe on a blue background. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire
The most biting comment I remember was a gentleman who asked why the National Gallery should pay so much money for a closeup of a Mountie's pant leg.
So, what is art? I seem to remember reading an explanation that art is what you get when someone intends to do something artistic. I'm not sure I completely buy that explanation, but I think intent does have something to do with it.
Ebert: Perform this thought experiment: Would the gallery have purchased the painting if its title had been, "Closeup of a Mountie's Pant Leg?"
Now read this, especially the closing sentences:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/feast_in_the_house_of_levi.htmN
Thought you would enjoy this funny. Have a great day.
http://www.uclick.com/client/sea/db/
Ebert: Readers: Worth a click!
Spell checkers seem to have their own agenda...
With on-the-fly spellchecking we've reached the point where we may start to see a return to intelligible prose... at least until we start reading. Validly spelled mistakes wind up taking the place of you garden variety typo to where it's actually HARDER to proofread than it used to be.
I realize online and print are still separated by oceans, but since online seems to be supplanting print, both in attention and in quantity of releases, so-called, it's as if the job of editing and fact checking is more and more left up to the reader.
If I thought average critical thinking skills were up to the task I'd say error checking would be the 21st century version of the crossword puzzle, but I think we're not quite keeping up.
Certainly food for thought apart from the questions of the definition of art and the existence or otherwise of G(or g)od?
What was our artist trying to achieve at the cost of not inconsiderable inconvenience, risk to health and even danger to his life?
Like Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Chris is making it seems a journey to the unchartered regions of the mind. I thought of Dostoevsky facing the firing squad before the last moment reprieve came in. What did those minutes feel like? Shakespeare perhaps has the capacity to experience such things vicariously but most people would not.
Darshan Singh Pheruman, a Sikh zealot, actually starved himself to
death on the sixty second or so day of his fast unto death in the early 60's. Gandhi too fasted on several ocassions with a similar determination. Ascetics of old performed similar austerities.
Clearly they are driven by some inner hunger to expand and transcend-this seems to be a fundamental thing.And there are breaking points. Think of the vomiting and urinating soldiers in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. Think of Dave the astronaut in Kubrick's Space Odyssey as he flies at supersonic through tunnels of light and colour reminiscent of the well documented and researched near death experiences.
I would guess that Borden too was motivated by a spirit of exploration of the infinities within.
His experiments desrve the name art because of the aesthetic minimalism of his locales and settings, his refusal to elaborate or theorise and the minimal size of the audience(read vicarious participants). Art is communication but the beauty of the performance would have been lost had it been a much publicised affair.
I personally believe that it's one's own daily life has to be raised to the level of an objet d'art. It's really not necessary to go out of the way. Birth, old age, sickness and death, the four classic and universal sufferings in the buddhist faith, provide ample dramatic material to stretch our capacities as far as we would like to.
Ebert: An inspiring post.
Of the four sufferings, I've made it to #3, and so far, so good.
As I recall the MoCA was fairly new at the time and Chris Burden's art "shows" put it on the map so to speak. At the same time the Museum of Science and Industry had a show in a room filled with speakers and you walked around the room and listened to the different sounds coming out of the speakers (Laurie Anderson may have been involved in that but my memory isn't so good any more). It was an exciting time in Chicago when we felt we were beginning to become as sophisticated and cutting edge as New York.
You dwell on the way Burden's earlier stuff called up questions about God.
How many of the museum patrons, based on their experience viewing him behind the glass, would have understood Burden's intentions? They may have come away with their own ideas about what the thing meant, but the central aspect of that exhibition was deliberately withheld. Only someone who devoted the necessary time to watch that clock turning all the way through would even know what happened when Burden tore open the envelope. You and the staff at the museum were required for anyone to understand it at all.
The relationships involved in Burden's rulebook, the terms on which it would end, had everything to do with a sort of priesthood in the museum staff. They were the only ones allowed to intercede on the artist's behalf. When ordinary folk made their conversation or brought their red carnation offerings, the rules didn't end it then. The water had to come from the curators.
The glass -- putting things behind glass, protecting them from the people -- hints at that. Doesn't it?
I read through this entry again, and somehow the role of the guards seems horribly jarring to me now in that light. I'm sort've.... grateful to the woman who threw her bra, thinking about it. Thank goodness for her.
Ebert: Oh, I'm always grateful for that.
It seems to me that by any of the standards enumerated above, your blog could be considered art; it invites (perhaps even forces) people to think, not simply react, and it asks and allows them to participate as well. For those of us who are suspicious of art that is purely notional, it includes that necessary element of craft, the skill and effort that go into its creation.
You've also reminded me that here, as elsewhere, my mind is divided in its opinions. Although I want that element of craft, I also realize that my education and experience give me little basis for judging twentieth-century art, and what feels like a lack of appreciation may be only a lack of understanding.
Finally, you've reminded me of this: back in the seventies and early eighties, I occasionally listened to a classical-music program hosted by a man named DeKoven. He was highly opinionated (as well as enthusiastic and amusing), and he firmly believed that music had reached its apex in the 18th century, and that little or nothing produced after the death of Haydn was worth his attention. I once heard him declare that all of the arts -- not just music, but painting and sculpture and poetry, too -- had declined so precipitously that by the second half of the 20th century, no "art" of any value was being produced by anyone, anywhere, with one exception: the art of the movies, for which he had nothing but praise.
Ebert: Is there another art form so clearly identified as having been born within a specific century?
Fascinating essay, Roger. Particularly interesting to me at the moment, as I've been sampling the analysis and reviews of several other film critics (gotta love having a huge campus library at your disposal like I do here at KU), particularly Jonathan Rosenbaum - and he offhandedly mentioned Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" in one of his essays, which spurred me to give it a look. (That essay, by the way, makes a specific point of discussing Kafka - round and round we go...)
It's hard for me to think of any particularly strong rebuttal to her thesis, that is, a work of art's power and beauty reside primarily in its ability to prompt an emotional reaction from the viewer, and that analysis can dull the power of art. I was especially struck by this excerpt:
"The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs 'behind' the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. [...] All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud's phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be pushed aside to find the true meaning - the latent content - beneath."
Of course, there is a huge range of reactions one can have to a given work of art, such as being pissed at it for wasting your time and energy (which could constitute, but doesn't necessitate, a bad work), but the instinctual habit many have of dismissing art due to simplicity is troubling. To me, what it comes down to is, on the simplest level, what emotions does a given work of art inspire in you? How does it inspire it? I've read plenty of reviews which attempt to delve into the subtexts of my favorite films, and my general reaction is that if a film cannot be appreciated on a surface level, subtext is unlikely to make me appreciate it any further.
When I watch Alien, I do not give thought to feminist readings of the film that cast the alien as a sexual aggressor. I watch it because of its perfection as a tense, tightly-constructed horror movie. Such theories are interesting to ponder, but in the end, quite frankly this sort of analysis adds little or nothing to my appreciation of a work. I don't mean to sound dismissive of in-depth interpretations of works of art, and I'm afraid I am - a work of art can have plenty to say beyond the immediacy of its basic plot elements, but what it says should be instructed by its form and be readily accessible, not merely stifling, academic analyses that project all sorts of unwritten contexts onto a work.
I remember reading Under the Volcano a year or two ago, and being, admittedly, terribly confused by the end. I spent the next few days wondering what Lowry was trying to say with his novel, what the meaning of Firmin's spiraling existence was. But in the end, I came to appreciate it simply for its inspired portrayal of a man wrestling with his demons, alcohol and romance, and ultimately being destroyed by them, in one way or another. I came to love it for its utter mastery of language and the way in which Lowry commanded his style in a way that was inextricable from the tale he was telling.
Art is a sensual experience. The academics of art, I can take or leave.
Ebert: "The Immediate Experience."
Academic film theory is bullshit, a con game to obtain tenure.
Roger,
I know this probably has nothing to do with this blog entry, but I don't know how else to reach you. I came across this seemingly lost, 1-hour interview with Alfred Hitchcock that was just thrown up on line. Figured you'd enjoy it: http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/10/16/votd-a-rare-hour-long-interview-with-alfred-hitchcock/
This is a perfect example of Kafka's observations about the world.
The man can 'escape' if the watchers release him. The watchers are sure they are supposed to do nothing, it is up to the man to 'escape' on his own.
The man waits for the watchers and the watchers wait for the man.
The perfect ending of THE HUNGER ARTIST is that he would eat if only he could find food which appealed to him.
Ah - Kafka!
Ebert: You can, by definition, never speak too much about God.
The Neo-Platonists would disagree. Dionysius the Areopagite claimed that one could not even say the phrase "God exists" because the reality is too profound to be expressed via the limited medium of language. (In effect, he was talking in semiotic terms a millennium-and-a-half before de Saussaure, Barthes, and Eco.) As a result, he argued, all attempts to reason and debate about God are doomed. The only justifiable response to the divine is silent contemplation.
As for Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" (a story I teach most semesters), the story goes that Kafka read all his stories aloud in a tone of high good-humor, as if they were comedies. I like to think that they are comedies in the same way the Book of Job is a comedy -- a comedy that one only laughs at after having passed through the last gate of despair. Despair presumes hope; we despair because we desire something other than what is and believe we might have it in our power to make it happen, if we could only figure out how. But if one accepts that that is not the case, one is relieved of all responsibility. I remember a bad day in my life -- the specifics don't matter, and I'm not sure I recall all of them, but they involved a relationship, living situation, and job all unraveling at once. Shortly before midnight, just after I thought, "Wow, this has been the worst day of my life. At least it's over," someone giving me a lift backed rapidly into my parked car, smashing the whole driver's door and front quarter-panel in a foot. I started laughing. There's just such a feeling of relief associated with being utterly and completely screwed by the universe.
Kafka's universe denies any free will whatsoever. We can wake up a giant beetle, or be put on trial for a crime of which we are unaware and which is not described to us. At the end of "The Hunger Artist," the artist (and we could take "Hunger" out of the title) realizes he was wrong to want to be admired. He became a hunger artist only because he didn't like food. (Every time I read that story, I insert a mental rim-shot at that moment.) He is replaced by a panther -- beautiful, surely, and worth being put on display. But no one says, "I've seen a lot of panthers, and he's the best. He must have worked hard to become such a great panther." The panther is a panther because he was born a panther. The hunger artist was a hunger artist because he was born to be a hunger artist. There's nothing to admire, because in a world without free will, no one has any right to take pride in (or be ashamed of) anything.
Quick joke: A woman has a baby who seems perfectly healthy. He smiles, crawls, and walks, all at the usual times. But he never speaks. She takes him to doctors. They test his hearing, his intelligence, look at his voice-box -- all normal. They are baffled. Two more years pass. One day, she gives him a bowl of soup. He spits it out and says, "Oh God, that's disgusting! What were you thinking? What is wrong with you?!" Overcome, the mother says, "You talked! You talked! Oh, but why have you waited so long?" The baby thinks a second and says, "Well, up till now the soup's been good."
As for the value of conceptual art, I think that like any other art-form there is good and bad, and necessarily more of the latter. Painting has given us Renoir and Picasso -- and Thomas Kincade, who outsells both. Classical music gives us Bach's fugues and Beethoven's sonatas, but also a thousand works derivative of them and justifiably forgotten. I find several of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's works to make me unreasonably happy, and Burden's work (with which I was not familiar) to be at least interesting, though like Roger I find the more obviously violent pieces less compelling. I am not surprised to read that Burden was influenced by Schwarzkogler and Viennese Actionism.
Complexity in art is not always on the surface, in the technique. I love this fable told by Italo Calvino:
Among Chuan-tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. "I need another five years," said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.
Was Chuang-tzu a con man? He got a house and servants for ten years in return for something he ended up doing in a few seconds, tops. Yet we must consider that the crab is "the most perfect crab ever seen." Perhaps ten years of study and preparation and gestation were necessary for that one creative act. We will never know.
Ebert: If it had been a lousy crab, that would have made a difference.
Marie Haws on Great Art: "Does it contribute anything positive or meaningful to the world? Or is it simply the contents found inside a used condom?"
A number of years ago I was teaching a creative writing class and related to a friend of mine--a poet himself, and a Shakespearean--a student's question concerning the difference between hack writing and literature. I told him the usual: the former is formulaic and refers only to itself--that is, it tells us all we need to know about it, and invites passive reading--while the latter invites the audience to become an active participant and supply at least some of its meaning. My friend noted that I'd given a pretty modern answer, that before, say, the late 1800s the answer would be that for something to be art it had to be moral--not merely in the sense of "morally uplifting" or in service to a particular moral code (although that's possible), but simply in that it comments on the problem of "goodness," of proper conduct and virtue--and more: of the dilemmas of living in a moral universe, in which one's actions have repercussions. Aristotle stuff, Oedipus the King kind of thing.
Marie took up less space, time, and hot air to say the same thing. Thanks.
p.s. As for the value of that used condom, Marie: depends on what it was used for. Ahem.
Ebert: Would this qualify?
http://j.mp/uWO6d
Thank goodness the art patrons did not kill Burden with their politeness. In my youth I modeled for studio art classes at a public university, no nudity involved. Not an artist myself but open to what was going on around me, it was a wonderful gig. Sometimes they would set me up in a seated pose to last several sessions and I could read :>) I vividly remember Plato's Republic during one of those and tears streaming down my face with A Tale of Two Cities. The better figure students managed to produce nudes in spite of the Dean of Students.
Outside the scope of this piece but good news to share nevertheless. Twenty miles from my driveway - the Kentucky Theatre. I'm now on the email list. Just received this - and will see Bright Star a second time.
*****************************************************
Kentucky Theatre
214 E. Main St.
Lexington KY
859-231-6997
www.kentuckytheater.com
At http://www.kentuckytheater.com you'll find the latest up-to-date showtimes
as well as our blog about the movies, events and concerts that make the Kentucky
Theater the place to go in downtown Lexington!
Here's what's showing for the week of October 16-22:
A New Film From the Director of SHINE!
Clive Owen in Scott Hicks' THE BOYS ARE BACK (PG-13)
http://www.boysarebackmovie.com
Fri. 10/16 - 5:20; 7:40; 9:40
Sat.-Sun. 10/17-18 - 1:00; 3:10; 5:20; 7:40; 9:40
Mon.-Thu. 10/19-22 - 5:20; 7:40; 9:40
(Final Week!) Abby Cornish in Jane Campion's BRIGHT STAR (PG)
http://www.brightstar-movie.com
Fri. 10/16 - 4:50; 7:25
Sat.-Sun. 10/17-18 - 1:40; 4:50; 7:25
Mon. 10/19 - No Showings
Tue.-Thu. 10/20-22 - 4:50; 7:25
(Final Week! Rock Guitar at Its Best! IT MIGHT GET LOUD (PG-13)
featuring Jack White, The Edge, and Jimmy Page
http://www.sonyclassics.com/itmightgetloud/
Fri.-Sat. 10/16-17 - 9:45; 12 Midnite
Sun.-Thu. 10/18-22 - 9:45
Midnite Shows:
Fri-Sat 10/16-17 - New 35mm Print! James Cameron's ALIENS (R)
Coming Soon:
10/23 - Hillary Swank and Richard Gere in AMELIA (PG-13)
11/6 - Audrey Tautou in COCO BEFORE CHANEL (PG-13)
11/20 - Written by Nick Hornby AN EDUCATION (PG-13)
1/15 - Penelope Cruz in Pedro Almodovar's BROKEN EMBRACES (R)
Upcoming Midnite Shows:
10/23-24 - Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING (R)
10/30-31 - Do The Halloween Time Warp!! ROCKY HORROR both nights (R)
11/6-7 - Rob Reiner's THE PRINCESS BRIDE (PG) - New 35mm print!
11/13-14 - Christopher Guest and Friends! THIS IS SPINAL TAP (R)
11/20-21 - The Dude is Back! THE BIG LEBOWSKI (R)
Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main Street, Lexington, KY 40507, USA
Life is good.
Ebert: Rescued from spam.
The way you teased the event, I expected some defenestration. I am mostly relieved and slightly disappointed.
And man do I dislike David Blaine. All he does are endurance tests.
And the block of ice thing was hardly an endurance test. Had he never heard of an igloo before? The man's a jack-ass.
Talk about suffering for one's art!
I'll have to come back and comment on Kafka's short story after I've put aside some time to read it. Having read "The Metamorphosis," I can say that Kafka had a sense of humor, as twisted as it was. I mean, imagine a giant cockroach that has fallen on its side and can't get up, or the fact that the man/cockroach still tries to go to work that day! Perhaps he shares something in common with the theater of the absurd dramatists, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he was one of their influences.
Ebert: Damien Hurst, who embalmed half a sheep and displayed it suspended in a block of plastic, won the Turner Prize.
Wouldn't that be the equivalent of writing a bad nursery rhyme and winning the PEN/Faulkner award?
Ebert: It should be a good nursery rhyme.
Ebert: Is there another art form so clearly identified as having been born within a specific century?
I dunno about that, Rodge... the term "performance artist" has been coined in our time, but the activity wasn't...
Was thinking about the Buddhist who set himself afire for the famous picture in the Viet Nam war era; the tale of the Yogi who had himself buried underground for a couple years; the other who threw his arm up over his head, kept it there, until it atrophied and a bird built a nest in his hand. That Indian kid who recently sat still in the hollow of a tree for months or a year. And all the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey. None of these people were putting on sideshow enterprises either. All were making statements.
THEN I remembered St. Simeon Stylites from Catholic school. Way back when, he lived on a flagpole... for God.
I s'pose if we must have A God, a "challenge to the unknown recesses of the mind" (credit to the poster above for the phrase) must be a necessary part of it. So, perhaps these performers and their deliberately inexplicable behavior automatically brings up those thoughts. We meet an incongruity for which we have no reference at all, and wonder "what in God's name is he doing?"
The closest I've come to performance art was to bend myself into funny shapes while rassling with my dog. I loved to see him twist his head this way and that, thinking "what in Dog's name is he doing?"
Don't believe DeKoven. Any art is always an historical journey of peaks and valleys. Remember that Ninety Percent of Everything is Crap (I know now it's credited to Sturgeon, but I stick to my 1959 Akron Beacon Journal critic for it. I'd have found out for myself anyway.)
But this crap is the stuff from which the most memorable flowers bloom. I'm sure I'll be dust before what started out as rock'n'roll peaks.
Ebert: Ever seen Luis Bunuel's "Simon of the Desert?" Watch it legally online:
http://j.mp/1iFXPK
"Academic film theory is bullshit, a con game to obtain tenure"
Roger, please elaborate a little bit on that one!
Thanks for reminding me of Chris Burden again, his pieces are fabulous. I hold works like his as a barometer for people's creativity. You don't have to like him, love him, or even get him, but if you just trivially dismiss him without any serious thought maybe you need to try and expand your horizons a little bit.
On a side note, do you ever plan another book on a director like you did with Scorsese? (Bergman or Ozu would be ones I would like to read).
Hi, Roger.
Ebert: Perform this thought experiment: Would the gallery have purchased the painting if its title had been, "Closeup of a Mountie's Pant Leg?"
Now read this, especially the closing sentences:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/feast_in_the_house_of_levi.htm
Would the Gallery have bought "Closeup of a Mountie's Pant Leg"? Before reading the account of Veronese's treatment by the Inquisition, I would have answered...probably. After reading, I'm not sure. I do know that there is often an undercurrent of pretentiousness in art - possibly a reaction to a self-doubt about the worthiness of one's own art? - and so a painting with a frivolous title might be [ahem] passed over.
Ebert: "... is there anybody here who can tell me what it does to one's mental health to be suspended for six weeks over the River Thames in a glass box?"
I won't even try, but if I did I would have to factor in what their state of mental health had to be before voluntarily doing such a thing. Which is in itself something to contemplate.
Ebert: Here's something I'll bet you didn't know:
http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5144661
The movie? I didn't know there was a script, I think, and I certainly didn't know it was for sale on the internet. Fascinating!
The message I got from "A Hunger Artist" is that it's pointless to suffer for your art because nobody cares about anything but novelty - once your message is delivered, you need a new message or you become irrelevant no matter what you go through.
ten years ago i needed a large tree to put on a bulletin board in my classroom. i went to the art teacher and asked her to sketch one for me. she ripped two 3' by 4' sheets of paper from a roll and showed me how to make a trunk, roots, large boughs, elbows, etc. hers looked great, mine weak. then she guided me through a few more attempts until i was very proud of my tree, so much that i used it as a model for a wall mural feature some winnie the pooh characters in my kid's bedroom. i have never since bought pre-made decorations for my classroom.
i recently bought a condo near a beach in new jersey and was browsing through a furniture store when i saw framed pictures of lifeboats bearing the names of various shore towns. i thought (very unoriginally) that it would look great to either get a nice one of my shore town or even a collection of towns that i like. then i noticed that i had a camera, that the beach was two blocks away, and that lifeboats were everywhere. then noticed i had two kids who could frolic in the water as the waves almost reached the lifeboat as the sun was setting. i also noticed that some boats were white, some blue, some orange while the picture in the store was only of the white boat. then i noticed that i could spend the same money for the framed picture in the store as i would to go to staples, make a nice print of a picture i took, and put it in a nice frame.
try making your own "art." it won't be perfect the first time, but you'll learn that it's not difficult.
Ebert [Regarding film]: Is there another art form so clearly identified as having been born within a specific century?
What about video games? Smile.
I'm not sure this is the right place to bring up such a sensitive subject (still waiting for a dedicated blog entry on games as art). But since you have opened the can of worms by raising the question of what constitutes Art, maybe it's relevant to this piece as well. One of your main criticisms of video games has been that the high level of control the user (audience?) has over the experience prevents the author from making a valid artistic statement. But it seems to me that in Burden's "Doomed", this was the whole point. Now I'm not saying video games should be treated the same as concept art, but how about a little consistency? :) As several posters have pointed out, the true "Art" of the piece lay not so much in what Burden actually did; rather it was in the very personal individual responses of his audience to their experience of his work.
Also, not to be nit-picky (okay, maybe a little), but Edison invented the kinetoscope in 1891, the Lumiere brothers exhibited their first films in December 1895, and Georges Melies was already employing trick photography and special effects in 1896 (The Vanishing Lady comes to mind). The movies undoubtedly grew and developed to maturity as an art form in the 20th century, but it was born in the 19th. Maybe video games will prove similar--born in the 20th century, but not developed to maturity as an art form until the 21st? The jury is still out, but I think there's hope.
Ebert: Ever seen Luis Bunuel's "Simon of the Desert?" Watch it legally online:
http://j.mp/1iFXPK
Hot diggety dog, a personal recommendation from the best film critic on the planet! As good as a handwritten note from Abe Lincoln himself!
It so happened I was searching around for info on Simeon Stylites when I returned and found Roger's recommendation. So I hopped to it.
Bunuel fans, which I am, will enjoy it very much. It is true enough to the spare stories about the saint, and I couldn't judge if it's a satire or a very charming wish of Bunuel's. I don't want to say more than I wished it hadn't ended at 45 minutes. Do watch it.
Ebert: Criterion has a pristine DVD restoration.
Having now read Kafka's "A Starving Artist," I sense a similar theme to the one explored in "The Metamorphosis," which is that once a person is no longer useful to people, he is shunned by them.
In a way, this story reminded me of "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Melville. Both Bartlebly and the starving artist are obsessed with one task: Bartleby with copying, the starving artist with fasting. In both cases, the world has ceased to care for these men when their services are no longer needed. Did Kafka feel as unappreciated as a writer as Melville did?
And yet there is humor in this story, as well, though not as readily apparent as in "The Metamorphosis." It's there when the starving artist gives his reason for fasting. Also, Kafka's comments on the panther seem to have been written with a wink and a nudge, both in how it contrasts with his description of the starving artist and in how the crowd reacts to these contrasts. In these comments and the reactions of the people to the starving artist, is he saying that people no longer appreciate art created through struggle? Is he saying that people would rather settle for pretty superficialities in art, rather than ugly truths? If he is, I hope he's wrong.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-0Oya2eqkc
^^^ Lon Chaney, the original body artist, in The Penalty where he painful contorts his legs to play a double amputee
Ebert: Ever seen Luis Bunuel's "Simon of the Desert?" Watch it legally online
Ah, and I see Ivan the Terrible Parts I and II are up again.
@ Matt Sands –
“Poor is the man whose pleasures depends upon the permission of another” – Madonna
Dude, find that werewolf drawing and hang it up with PRIDE!
Not everything will be so admired as to be coveted by the world, and for so many wanting it, leading to a monetary value placed upon it – but so what? Is that the only measuring stick of anything anymore?
Rescue that drawing! Don’t leave the little guy to collect dust in the dark, unloved by the boy who’d made him!
Note: not everyone thinks Ralph Steadman is art, either.
http://dakotajoes.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/webassets/appr-steadman450.jpg
@ Keith Carrizosa – “I've been looking for an excuse to mention this band. So, I'd like to mention the punk band, "The Slits." Her mother later married John Lydon of the Sex Pistols…”
Man, those were the days, eh? I so admire Ari’s resistance and independent spirit. However for me, the Sex Pistols will always be THE Punk Rock band. Nothing can touch ‘em. :)
“Early Seventies Britain was a very depressing place. It was completely run-down, there was trash on the streets, total unemployment—just about everybody was on strike. Everybody was brought up with an education system that told you point blank that if you came from the wrong side of the tracks...then you had no hope in hell and no career prospects at all. Out of that came pretentious moi and the Sex Pistols and then a whole bunch of copycat wankers after us.” – John Lyndon “Johnny Rotten”, Sex Pistols
Note: that’s one of the reasons I loved “Life on Mars” so much. Manchester 1973 – unvarnished.
Ebert wrote: Here's something I'll bet you didn't know…
OMG! The original script! Holy shyte!
Lot Description
The Sex Pistols
A July 1977, 101 page, second draft script for The Sex Pistols in ANARCHY IN THE U.K., directed by Russ Meyer and written by Roger Ebert. 9x11in.
Which sold for $313 at auction with Christies in 2008!
I knew about the failed film project (huge Sex Pistols fan!) but under this title: “Who Killed Bambi?” and because of a book written by John Savage called “England' s Dreaming.” He mentions it, etc.
@ Wayne Hepner – “His discussion of how he experienced the work and the audience makes me suspect that Kafka probably knew his story would be read more than one way because like Burden he saw a sort of Uncertainty Principle of Art – that the meaning of a work is partly defined by the spectator, rather than entirely a matter of the creator’s intent.”
Any time you look at something, you can free-associate and project whatever you want onto it. You can give meaning to a dirty brick wall in Manchester for example; smile.
In that sense, ART is open and free to be whatever someone says it is. And adopting that position opens up two very interesting doors now, depending on where you stand:
If you define “what is art?” for yourself, then you’ll never be taken advantage of by anyone trying to play you for a fool and pick your pocket while they do so. For you’ll always be buying or collecting art you genuinely like and which moves you. I personally regard that as the best way to go about things.
If, however, you need or require others to validate your likes and dislikes for you, then you’ll always be ripe for the plucking; not just open to being enlightened. And a quick and clever fox will soon lead your horse to water AND get it to drink. This is the downside of not trusting your own views. Both butterflies and parasites can fly in through an open window, eh?
And how do you deal with that, as a sincere Artist not looking to take advantage of people? If that’s also your viewer and they’re guarded for a reason, and suspicious with just cause? For we do live in a world where some people will try and sell you swamp land in Florida etc. And it applies to the Arts as well. If you don’t trust your own opinion, I can sell you a piece of pretentious shyte for $150,000. I just have to talk the talk, and play the Artist and hype myself like a product and get you to buy into THAT.
And faux-Artists make me NUTS. Bunch of wankers! They make it harder for the rest of us!
That’s one of things the Sex Pistols took a massive p*ss on - and one of the reasons I loved them. For better or for worse, they were authentic and not passing the music off as being anything other than “this where we’re from, what we’re about and how it feels to be there. Take it or leave it.”
And yeah okay, sure, they were also f*cked-up, but nobody’s perfect. Grin.
And so to know that Roger was even remotely connected to Sid and Co. via a script that never got produced, I confess, does impresses me somewhat.
Note: The Turner Prize is famous in some circles for being a pretentious joke. And accused of awarding top prize to whatever’s able to generate the most controversy. I tend to agree, as too much of it requires an “explanation” for failing to convey anything to the viewer they can readily perceive on their own without help.
In the spirit of Veronese, in reaction to the Art World, as a finger to the wankers and to undercut the bullshyte I loathe while mocking it ala the cheekiness of my beloved Sex Pistols – were I to do it, here’s my unofficial entry for the Turner Prize:
A large mirror hanging on the back wall of an otherwise blank, vacant space. The only other thing in the room with it, a small card bearing the title of my piece:
F*CK THE TURNER PRIZE
That’s the art; a reflection of YOU, the individual viewer reacting to the title card. It can only “be art” if the viewer sees it as such. It’s only value lies in what you bring to the piece and project onto it. But it’s not superior-minded or snotty – for it also invites the viewer to burst out laughing for getting the in-joke, before heading off to mock the pretentiousness of the Art World with your friends down at the pub.
And is that art…? And if not, why? See what a total mind f*ck conceptual art can be?
Grin.
Meanwhile… heads up! As I’ve never seen this documentary and it’s going to air up here for free on a local channel…
“Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vic2rVsx71I
“Two years after Stanley Kubrick's death, Jon Ronson was invited to the director's estate to explore the hundreds of boxes the legendary film director had collected. This documentary follows Ronson's journey through Kubrick's boxes, as he seeks to understand the enigmatic director through the many things he acquired in his life, and then left behind.” – Knowledge Network BC, air date: October 29th 2009.
So if you live in BC, and you want to catch it, stick a posted note on your fridge!
@ Paul J Marasa – p.s. As for the value of that used condom, Marie: depends on what it was used for. Ahem.
Ebert: Would this qualify?
Oh my GOD! That’s hilarious! How To Put A Condom Over Your Head – LAUGH! Actually, that might qualify as performance art.
As for the condom, the key word here is USED. What’s “in” it? If not a byproduct of you satisfying yourself? I mean, it wasn’t about creating anything, eh? No baby. Nothing gets born. Its contents no more meaningful than the flotsam and jetsam found floating on the sea.
P.S. re: the "Closeup of a Mountie's Pant Leg" -
I was at the National Gallery for a Renoir Exhibit and saw that infamous painting. Is it Art? I find it pretentious myself. Is it worth $1.8 million? I guess that depends on how much the National Gallery made after buying it - for that's why it was added to the collection - to attract more viewers; the Gallery was finding it tough going and needed to boast attendance. They didn't have the buying power to match other National Galleries and unless you can afford to pay the insurance to show a Van Gogh, you can't get a Van Gogh on loan, eh? So the uproar was wanted. And here's the thing - it worked. Attendance went up.
Is the painting worth $1.8 million on its own? Nope. You can reproduce for under $100 worth of supplies. (My pals and I worked out the costs.)
Chuckle!
Blaine is a trickster, like most magicians. He is a performer, something very different from a performance artist. His work is showy and interesting, but it's not artwork.
Your story about Burden is simply amazing. His artwork will live forever in my mind.
I was really surprised to see your very clear impression of academic theory above. Not that I necessarily disagree, just surprised. Haven't you taught film classes? Is the 'theory' part that is the bullshit part? I'm a math guy - I guess it's the difference in what was called 'applied mathematics' and 'abstract math' in our faculty.
This tendency towards academic analysis bled into our study of literature in high school, and scared many people from a life of reading. It would turn the reading of 'The Old Man and the Sea' into a dry interpretation of symbolism much like dissecting a frog, rather than watching a frog be a frog.
One of your reviews once spoke about a professor who envied anyone reading Romeo and Juliet for the first time, I believe? I can't even enjoy 'Great Expectations' thirty years later, because memories of slogging through it with an uninspired professor in freshman English at university makes it as banal as a computer manual. When I hear people talk about its greatness, I feel robbed of even that first reading.
Ebert: I was also forced through it in high school. Years later, I couldn't put it down.
I taught film, not theory.
In a non-technical field, if you can't express what you know in clear language, you don't understand it.
Ebert: I tend to be suspicious of any artwork . . .
And I'm quite certain that I could reproduce The Great Gatsby word for word. That said, I've just completed my latest book, titled "Gatsby the Good." The original text has not been altered, however, Gatsby's greatness is radically reconsidered within the space of the title. Trust me folks, it's a whole different read.
Yoko Ono would love Roger, and critics like him. She began her "career" by snuggling in a bag, and inviting the gullible audience to check her out ("The Beatles," by Bob Spitz). Performance Art. I have the same problem with film (and other arts) critics that I have with sports writers. Film critics should be forced to "Paper-Lion"-like participate in NFL contact drills, and sports writers should be forced to sit through "performance art" for 10-12 hours. Both versions of the Fourth Estate would soon realize that they experience a very, very limited view of reality, or, the human experience. Nietzsche howls.
I've always been wary of "performance art", mostly because it seemed self indulgent and infantile to my eyes. However, your article has convinced me to rethink my opinion and admit my ignorance. After all, art's ultimate purpose is to evoke an interesting response in the audience, and if performance art's goal is to simplify the link between the audience and artist by very nearly removing the subject of art altogether, then so be it. I can agree with that.
"Is it art if anyone can do it?"
Yes... and no.
People worry too much about the medium. One of the things that always annoyed the hell out of me when I would submit short stories for review to other writers is that they would go on and on, and onnnnnnn... about every little grammatical and spelling error, never even bothering to mention the damn story sometimes. In fact, they'd be almost perplexed when I would say "Yes, I know that the word refrigerator doesn't have a D in it, please make a note of it. What do you think about the work?" as if the work itself was so tainted by a few errors that it could never be taken seriously.
This lesson stayed with me and is where I got most of my ideas about artistic appreciation. Wether it's a book, movie, painting, photograph (pick your poison) a critic needs to view it in two equally important ways: emotionally and intellectually.
I believe it's the artist's job to try and move as many people as possible with the work, but it's also the audience's job to suspend their disbelief and let the art speak. Only then can you pass fair judgement.
The cold hard reality of the thing is that a movie is just images on the screen and a book is just words on a page. None of it exists. None of it is "true". Only your mind brings it to life, and only if you let it feel first, and then think about it.
Most people over-intellectualize what they see and ruin the experience for themselves. That said, intellectual critique does have it's place. Just because something moves you doesn't mean it's art. I laugh my ass off at "Up The Creek" and it's one of my favorite comedies of all time, yet I'm the first to point out how awful it is. It moved me, but it didn't exactly make me think too hard. Good art, true art, is as much about thought as it is about feeling.
If something moves you emotionally, but doesn't make you think, it's not art. Goosing your sister in the haunted house ride at the park does not qualify as art, no matter how genuinely terrified she was.
If something makes you think, but doesn't move you, it's not art. That's why "Henry Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body" isn't art.
In the end, I believe that art is about the artists themselves and the world they see through their eyes and their ability to communicate that to the audience. Anyone can take a picture, but it takes a keen mind to take a picture that resonates. There's a difference between snapshots of Uncle Harry washing his brand new DeSoto and the work Kubrick did with Look Magazine. The difference being that Aunt Harriet is a boring housewife and Kubrick is not.
Which brings us all the way back to performance art. Burden's work was interesting because Burden himself was interesting. Anyone could have done what he did, but there was only one Chris Burden.
what an awesome article. the part when you called alene at 1:15 am and went down there for me was the most touching part.
Reading this, I couldn't help but think of Foucault and some of his musings on the role that watching and being watched plays in our society. To be always listening - more, to be unable not to listen - would seem to me to be a painful thing; an annoyance to the listener, yes; disconcerting to the speakers, yes; but, more than that, an isolating thing. People don't trust those who are privy to their every thought, and to whose thoughts they are not in turn privy: it sets up an imbalance of power, which is Of All Things Most To Be Feared; there's an argument to be made that this is one reason why therapists are fetishized.
Anyways... it's late. Beautiful stuff, Roger, as, I won't say always, but often.
"Academic film theory is bullshit, a con game to obtain tenure"
And suddenly, Roger Ebert takes a disappointingly anti-intellectual turn.
Perhaps you should apply Sturgeon's Law to academic film theory. Then you'd be on to something.
Ebert: Only 90% of it is bullshit?
Art of the body has become common place. In the 60s and 70s, we had artists (Yoko and many others) using the body as their visual communicating point. We had artists, dipping their hair in buckets of paint and writhing around, "painting" the floor.
Now with the commonality of tattoos and piercings, it's the exception to the rule to not have one or the other. This latest generation of 20-somethings is intent on creating "irremovable" visual body expressions.
Is does seem like a foreign concept in this "We Live In Public" age that Burden did not film or photo his events much.
It also seems foreign that you could take a day to simply go watch an "unassigned" art event. Was there more time in the 1970s for side adventures and entire evenings spent conversing in eateries and bars? Where did people find the time?
btw, I read your 3 star review of "Where The Wild Things Are," and so, I went to see it. I respectfully disagree with your appraisal, and I posted a written & video review that is . . . less complimentary.
Ebert: It is inded a thin story concept.
I remember years ago reading about a man being nailed to a Volkswagon and getting shot in the arm as artistic pieces. My thoughts were "Why did nobody stop him from doing this? He could have suffered serious injury or death?" I imagined stuffy art critics stroking their beards, and nodding and clapping as he screamed in agony. It struck me as something out of Monty Python. Not knowing much about performance art at the time, I just thought he was mentally ill, and was seeking help through outrageous acts, much as a person contemplating suicide wishes to make their death very public.
Thanks to your article, I now know more about this man, and I actually found the story of his time under glass fascinating and stirring. It still brings up the old argument of "What is art?" or what are the limits of art?
I studied art to an extent, and have built a career as an illustrator. I would not call myself an artist, but the word 'craftsman' I would accept gladly. I love all aspects of the visual arts and visit galleries to feed my soul, to be reminded of the yearning we have to express through our hands the visions we cannot shake from our minds or experiences of life. I see artists as brave and generous beings at best, self-indulgent and attention-seeking at worst. Performance art seems to walk that fine line of brave or bravado. I have witnessed some that have expressed universal themes, where the point of the piece is much greater than the individual expressing it. It reminds me of good theater, where the actor and the words transcend the mere mortal on stage.
Where I tune out and become frustrated with contemporary art is when it is aggressively pushing a personal agenda toward the patrons. I walked through a gallery once of horrible, poorly-painted canvases meant to express the artist's anger at the world. The technique wasn't accomplished enough to get the message across properly. All I saw was a frustrated person who needed therapy and some art lessons. The problem is that many artists are encouraged to put forth self-expression before ability. It's like giving someone a saxophone for the first time and told to play some jazz.
Similarly, performance artists risk going out there with something to say, but without the maturity and means to tell it well. As daring as Chris Burden's act of getting shot in the arm was, it smacked of sensationalism with nothing really to say. A personal or psychological need made public. No amount of art criticism about this act could, in my mind, justify it as more than a stunt. He was young at the time, and I can see how this young man needed to get some of that out of his system before pursuing other, less dangerous directions. I applaud his desire to pursue his art, and perhaps now as an older man he looks back on those days as a trial period. I'm not sure the art world could see it that way at the time. The fact that he refused to talk about that period says a lot.
I'm not sure what my point is here - I'm meandering a bit - but I'd like to leave you with a quote from David Mamet about performance art:
'I suggest you think about the difference between the way people talk about any performance artist and the way they talk about Cary grant. And to you lovely enthusiasts who will aver that the purpose of modern art is not to be liked, I respond, "oh, grow up".'
"Ebert: I vaguely recall a story about a janitor throwing out a work of art, mistaking it for trash."
Having trouble remembering the name of the artist or the piece, but I seem to remember reading that the work of art in question was actually a garbage bag filled with trash and displayed by being tossed on the floor against a wall, and the museum was sued for the loss. I think it being thrown away and dumped in a landfill should've been part of the piece.
My dominant left brain works in such a way that I tend to think that everything in the universe - even emotions - are quantifiable, and that includes people. People hate being labeled, but modern artists in particular seem to actively resist categorization. They like to push the boundaries of art to the point where it's status as "art" is called into question. Marcel Duchamp is certainly to blame for this mess.
The one thing I DO know about art is that it is a uniquely human construct. No creature on the planet other than man can create art. A spider does not construct its web with an aesthetic purpose in mind; a lion doesn't ponder what is "meant" by the act of eating a gazelle; a turtle doesn't sit motionless in a room to provoke thoughtful reaction. A spider's web isn't "beautiful" - it just is. Aesthetics are a product of the human mind (it's also the primary reason intelligent design seems to have caught on with so many people).
I think that the best way to define art is to define it as a human function with varying degrees of the following three aspects - the aesthetic, the technical, and the conceptual. I also apply the following criteria to art: is it something that would have occurred naturally without human interference - and with no regard to its usefulness? A nuclear water tower, for example, is artificial but is built and designed with a utilitarian purpose in mind; I don't consider it art. But if the same tower were placed in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip and stripped away of all of its utilitarian functions, then I believe it's art. The art world may have long moved away from the aesthetic and the technical in favor of exploring its historically neglected third aspect - the conceptual; nevertheless, I think that the definition is big enough to accommodate Michaelangelo, Picasso, Pollock, Burden, and maybe even Blaine.
Or maybe I'm just too damn reptilian for my own good.
Ebert: "I also apply the following criteria to art: is it something that would have occurred naturally without human interference - and with no regard to its usefulness?"
Does it then even require an observer?
Ebert: "I also apply the following criteria to art: is it something that would have occurred naturally without human interference - and with no regard to its usefulness?"
Does it then even require an observer?
Makes me think of Barthes... a text that is created "intransitively" is one that becomes opened to a flood of potential meanings outside the one Authorial meaning; the creator of the piece is decentralized, and the work itself becomes the focus. From that perspective - it is the observer (the Reader) who gives the work meaning(s), whether or not those meanings are what were originally intended for the piece - but the Reader exists outside of biology, or history, or individualism; that is, the Observer (in this case) is central to the piece, but is simultaneously abstracted from the individual people who are observing.
Re "Academic film theory is bullshit, a con game to obtain tenure"--it reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut's reference to his notes on his friend Syd Solomon's paintings as a "standard load of horse crap." So I Googled "standard load of horse crap," and lo and behold, in the whole Googleverse there are only two occurrences of the text string "standard load of horse crap." One leads directly to Vonnegut's Palm Sunday essay, and the other to a fascinating discussion on how a music composer composes--or doesn't.
Also, Roger, THANKS for your kind words on my images; how it warmed my heart that you remembered that one of you, sent on Christmas Day 2008 and acknowledged by you the same day! One hard-working, generous fellow, indeed!
In a non-technical field, if you can't express what you know in clear language, you don't understand it.
Yes. Thank you, Roger! My students know that one of my most damning comments is "it did not take this to say this," meaning that the sophistication of the thinking the language is intended to express does not justify the complexity of the language used to express it. Some concepts are unavoidably complex, but then it is incumbent upon a writer to make them as intelligible as possible to as wide an audience as possible without doing violence to the ideas. Too much writing -- especially academic writing -- is meant not to elucidate but to obfuscate, and not to educate but to intimidate.
I have this comic on my office door:
http://www.wac.ohio-state.edu/tutorials/images/calvin-writing.gif
Bill Watterson is on the short list of creative talents who stopped too soon without dying. (Rimbaud? Okay. Salinger? I'm unconvinced.)
Aesthetics are a product of the human mind
Aesthetic creation may be a product of the human mind (though some people who have worked with elephants would argue even that), but aesthetic appreciation is not so limited. I remember that every year my mother put up a Christmas tree, her springer spaniel would often go into that room by himself -- a room he almost never went in otherwise alone -- lie down on the floor facing the tree, and gaze up into the lights and ornaments, sighing contentedly the whole time. He'd stay that way for an hour or more. He wouldn't sleep, just look. Nor would he attempt to remove any ornaments or even get closer to the tree than a foot or so.
Now, presuming his reaction was not theological in nature -- and I strongly believe that he was too sagacious a soul to get caught up in human doctrines -- I can only credit his reaction to aesthetic instinct.
Perhaps I should also mention that that house contains a quarter-grand piano I sometimes play, though not particularly well. When I would play, both he and (years later) my 70-pound standard poodle rescue would come in and lie next to or even under the piano, provided I was playing a Chopin Prelude, some David Lanz, or even something by R.E.M. But Thelonius Monk sent them both out of the room within ten seconds every time.
I don't play Monk anymore, come to think of it.
This was an interesting entry. I went from frowning to myself, thinking this guy was full of sh*t, to gradually becoming more and more fascinated by him. I, like many of the posters, am often wary of art that seemingly anyone could create themselves; there's too much pretentious garbage out there not to be. But I do try to have an open mind. I think all anything really requires to be art is that the artist has put something of themselves into it, and if it speaks to a single soul (even if that soul happens to be the one who created it), than it has accomplished what it needed to.
From the way you described him, I do think Chris Burden was an artist. It sounds like his performances genuinely spoke to people. The museum guard was moved enough to stay for the duration of the piece, the almost spiritual mood he achieved, the fact that he made no attempts to over-publicize what he was doing - all these things attest to him being the real deal. While I do think in some cases he may not have accomplished what he set out to (getting shot was one of his poorer ideas, it seems to me), but what artist hasn't had the occasional fluke?
,
(So where's my Pulitzer?)
Chris Burden had totally fallen off the radar. Now remember him from conversations mostly from my West Coast years in the late "70's." Guess the reason is simple. I never experienced one of his performance pieces firsthand.
Doing some research, I found in his bio at the Gagosian Gallery website, Burden's contention that "the truly important, viable art of the future would not be with objects, not things you hang on the wall. Art, instead, would address political, social, environmental, technical change." The guy definitely practices what he preaches.
And wherever I turned there were always references to "Shoot." 1971. Usually the photograph Roger features here. 1971. This was 7th year of a war that had already claimed close to 50,000 American lives, the Vietnamese in the millions. Untold numbers wounded. An aching, interminable nightmare.
And it was a most troubling year for me personally. Like many, but not all, guys of Chris Burden and my age, I had tried to find ways to avoid facing the prospects of going to Viet Nam. My four years of college deferments had expired. Hopes for a cherished fifth deferment were futile. They were saved for the very bright or the truly well connected. I was neither. An example of the latter was the old wanker-warmonger, Cheney. He got one.
And I was unlucky to boot. When the much anticipated draft lottery came about in late "69," I drew a 12. It sure as hell didn't appear I was going to outlast the damn thing, especially since another wanker, Nixon, was in charge. I was Cong fodder for sure if I didn't do something quick.
Had an acquaintance that had gotten in a local medical reserve unit in Chicago. Had previously talked to them but very briefly. This unit was much less popular with the guys who had pull, since the unit had been called up for active duty on occasion, several of their brave lads having died in Viet Nam. Must remember this was the exception to the National Guard and Army Reserve rules back in those days. Turned out they were a great group of guys. They allowed me to join. That solved half my problem. At least I would most likely not have to worry about shooting anybody.
But it did nothing to allay my gravest fear. Somebody pointing a gun at me and pulling the trigger. It wasn't directly talked about much in my crowd, mostly cloaked in other rhetoric, usually anti-war diatribes and what not. But it was always there,lingering.
Before leaving for basic training and AIT, do remember a friend reminding me over a few farewell beers, at The Earl, or some other saloon, that there was truth to the adage that slacker medics in Viet Nam had almost a 100% chance of getting shot, if not by the enemy, then by one of our own.
So when I got to Fort Sam Houston for my advanced medical training, I heeded my friend's advise. I paid attention. The result was they actually kept me beyond my allotted time, trying to coax me into actually going active duty. This offer I always gracefully declined. I stayed right up to, if memory serves, the last day of my total allowable 364 reservist duty time. If they kept me one day longer, they would have had to award me future medical benefits and other perks. They didn't need me that bad. But that's where I was when Chris Burden stood against a wall and allowed himself to be purposefully shot.
In another recent article I just found at wmagazine.com, Burton was actively discounting much of the speculation about the reasoning and motivations for "Shoot,", stating directly he was, "trying to think about a big fear, rather than turn from it, to make something out of it, to doodle it out."
That hit a nerve.
Could the BIG FEAR have been just what I'm talking about-the dread spectre of someone someday pointing a gun at me and pulling the trigger. And his choice was to address it in an artistic setting.
Of course this is strictly conjecture. I know not whether I am anywhere near the mark concerning Mr. Burden's intentions. But it makes sense to me. Got me thinking, remembering, how it sure as hell was on my mind back then. Had never gone very far away since my friend, Bill Martin, got shot in the head in 1966. It grew as guys started coming back, like my college pal, Capt. Denny Klein, a decorated war hero. Stay out of it, he would ever so quietly caution.
And the dread was very close in 1971, when I was tending to those sad and broken kids in the long term care facility at Fort Sam. Many of them I had become friends. Knowing I was leaving soon, some would softly urge me to just stay out Viet Nam-no matter what it took. The most impact always came from the unpretentious words of those who had been there.
Had a transfer to a safe Denver unit in the works before I ever got back. Never went.
But I still remember. Where are those boys now? Must admit some residue of guilt still lingers. Should I have gone anyway? Why them, not me?
Note: Roger, this turned into one of those cathartic things I do on occasion. Was going to end after paragraph 2. Now that I have finished, I see where I wrote it in the wrong place. If you want to post it in the Chris Burden entry, that's fine. No big deal either way of course. Just ain't going to write it again.
Roger, invoking David Blaine's name with his buried-alive and frozen-in-a-block-of-ice stunts in comparison to the subject here is not accurate. Both of those performances of Blaine's involve elements whose nature I will not discuss here, however they are not as simple and straight-forward as they appear. Things which Blaine has done subsequently have been more akin to the performance art you're writing about rather than illusions.
Ebert: Oh, I agree. Buried in that box, he was really buried in that box.
In a non-technical field, if you can't express what you know in clear language, you don't understand it.
add this quote to the calvin and hobbes comic, and it's starting to seem like the explanations i'm getting about why the great gatsby is so great.
There is such a fine line between a genius modern artist and a sniggering smart ass.
(Although I always suspect that genius modern artists are sniggering all the same.)
The werewolf drawing is complete. I'm incredibly embarassed and self-conscious about it, but it's done and it's posted and there is no going back.
http://reeltoreel.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/werewolves-and-roger-ebert-lessons-from-second-grade/
Ebert: That is one fine werewolf. In motion, even, Proportions and fur admirable. Admit it. And I daresay you will draw something else today. Day after day, you will love it more. Give me an honest answer: When you were drawing, you dropped outside of time, right? You were in the Zone? It was a peaceful place and you liked it.
Why is your blog anonymous?
@ Richard Nanian - "I have this comic on my office door.."
Gasp! Calvin & Hobbes!
SPACEMAN SPIFF......!
"Our courageous spaceman spiff, interplanetary explorer extraordinaire, lands yet another bizarre planet..."
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/1961/spiff950305.jpg
Grin.
"Too much writing -- especially academic writing -- is meant not to elucidate but to obfuscate, and not to educate but to intimidate." - Richard Nathan
Exactly. Bunch a useless toffs.
That's why I loved Sister Wendy - remember her on the BBC? Here she is with Bill Moyers talking about Art!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9pAKdkJh-Y
And see? That's the way to do it! No big fancy long words so as to impress those gathered. Instead, it about sharing what you think and how you feel about it. It's about communicating.
And I agree with her about American photographer Andres Serrano. I thought his "beep beep" was hamfisted too.
NOTE: @%$#! spam filter.
And that's my issue with Modern Art in general. Art should challenge, yes. But what if what makes it challenging is how silly or pretentious it is? I mean, what are you reacting to? The Art? Or the medium?
That's why I prefer it when someone actually gives me something to think about. If I have to go looking for the Art before I can even think about the Art - you've lost me and I'm gone.
I think this is great Art: Louise Bourgeois' "Maman" Spider...
http://static.guim.co.uk/Guardian/arts/gallery/2007/oct/03/1/GD4868670@London,-03102007-1440.jpg
As it is impossible not to have an immediate, visceral reaction to it. It challenges the viewer to look beyond that reaction moreover, and look to the spider for the answers - and they're there along with other clues.
Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine: a trailer for the Documentary Film which premiered in New York - on my birthday; smile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMdWNwOWnng&feature=related
Note: Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and lives in New York.
Ebert: And she is incredible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6UZKBL-iBE
I'm OK with performance art. I don't necessarily like or even get all of it, but if the artist is willing to get out there and do, say, or be something for us to experience, I'll take a look.
Conceptual art, I'm a good deal more skeptical. The one that actually pissed me off was a few years ago at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the magnificent museum in Kansas City. They featured an installation by an artist, name mercifully blurred by time, which consisted of a large block of ice melting and draining on a metal table. This was a chunk of ice delivered by a commercial ice house. No other claim was made for it. The artist did nothing whatever to modify it, or our experience of it, or a damn thing else. No special lighting, no nothin'. Ice.
Sorry, Pal. You gotta do SOMETHING. My standards, God knows, are low and flexible, but I can still draw some lines.
Thank you again for pushing me to draw again. I enjoyed it immensely!
Re: the anonymity of my blog, I'm honestly not sure why I keep it that way. It wasn't really intentional. It just sort of happened that way. I think when I first started, I wanted to get my footing and get a feel for writing reviews and things of that nature. I wasn't sure if it would last or if anyone would read it. I think it's the same issue I had with posting my drawing. I was putting it out there for anyone to stumble across. What would they think? But I'm becoming more confident in my writing and I think I'll slowly begin to strip the anonymity away. Thanks for the encouragement! It truly means a lot to know that you've read it and don't hate it. :)
Ebert: What in the world do you think it's missing?
Ebert: Does it then even require an observer?
Many artists incorporate the idea of participation into their pieces, but I don't believe that an audience is ever required of art. A performance piece would be incomplete without an observer, but then the Mona Lisa would be incomplete without yellow ochre. At least I think he used yellow ochre...
Matt Sands- Speaking as a sometimes-paid-professional-artist, that werewolf drawing has what good drawings have and what bad drawings lack. It's expressive, it looks like the werewolf is ready to jump off the page and eat someone. There are people who take years of art school and never figure out how to make their drawings look alive.
I'm not sure what I think it's missing. I'm just apprehensive. This is what I want to do. I live and breath movies. My dream is to become a screenwriter and a close second is becoming a critic. I guess it's the fear of it never coming true that's keeping me from being 100% confident about my writing. But if I'm not 100% confident then it probably won't go anywhere because I'll be too afraid to put myself out there and take the chances necessary to make it happen. I feel like Charlie Kaufman in "Adaptation."
Has Bill Watterson just stopped cartooning (I still love 'em too, Marie), or has he stopped his art altogether? Thought I read he quit because he now had enough moolah to work on his serious stuff without having to worry about having to sell anything.
I'm a longer and deeper fan of MK Brown www.benway.com/mkbrown -- still laugh about her cartoons from nigh 40 years ago -- and just about dropped dead to see her fine art paintings. Wish I could find the URL for a show she did in Santa Fe. MK, are you lurking around here or not?
Of the hundreds and hundreds of High Science GewGaws I don't buy into, "left brain right brain" (actually started in the 70s) is certainly one of them.
Particularly as I corresponded for quite awhile with a woman whose hubby had to have his entire right brain removed. He seemed to be getting along fine, no lessening of appreciation for art or things warm, fuzzy or intuitive. He appreciated the cliche "anybody with half-a-brain" more than he used to, tho.
Previous to this, all I had to go on was the story about the London taxi driver who was also getting along fine on a brain that had shrunk to the size of a walnut.
"Science" fed some LSD to a spider to see what would become of it. Its web went all cranky. Like, wow, man. Art.
Freud, as I recall, viewed art as a product of a kind of neurotic irritation, like the way an oyster creates a pearl from the irritation of a sand granule. As things have come to pass, it turns out the irritation was Freud. I'm sure Louise Bourgeoisie is quite right, art promotes sanity. Freud promoted overpriced confessionals.
Not agin' your bold statements about arts turned into academic mutations at all, Rodge. Nor James T. Farrell's words to you about it in your interview of him. I had a brother in law (gladly ex) who was one of those, an art historian. His stuff on artists was an irritating read and he couldn't draw so much as a crisscross to play tic-tac-toe on.
People holed up in their "left brains" we shall always have with us. What was the name of the Cardinal who objected to Michelangelo's work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling as "a voluptuous bathroom?"
Bierce:
ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related as follows by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.
One day a wag -- what would the wretch be at? --
Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT,
And said it was a god's name! Straight arose
Fantastic priests and postulants (with shows,
And mysteries, and mummeries, and hymns,
And disputations dire that lamed their limbs)
To serve his temple and maintain the fires,
Expound the law, manipulate the wires.
Amazed, the populace that rites attend,
Believe whate'er they cannot comprehend,
And, inly edified to learn that two
Half-hairs joined so and so (as Art can do)
Have sweeter values and a grace more fit
Than Nature's hairs that never have been split,
Bring cakes and wines for sacrificial feasts,
And sell their garments to support the priests.
Has Bill Watterson just stopped cartooning (I still love 'em too, Marie), or has he stopped his art altogether? Thought I read he quit because he now had enough moolah to work on his serious stuff without having to worry about having to sell anything.
I'm a longer and deeper fan of MK Brown www.benway.com/mkbrown -- still laugh about her cartoons from nigh 40 years ago -- and just about dropped dead to see her fine art paintings. Wish I could find the URL for a show she did in Santa Fe. MK, are you lurking around here or not?
Of the hundreds and hundreds of High Science GewGaws I don't buy into, "left brain right brain" (actually started in the 70s) is certainly one of them.
Particularly as I corresponded for quite awhile with a woman whose hubby had to have his entire right brain removed. He seemed to be getting along fine, no lessening of appreciation for art or things warm, fuzzy or intuitive. He appreciated the cliche "anybody with half-a-brain" more than he used to, tho.
Previous to this, all I had to go on was the story about the London taxi driver who was also getting along fine on a brain that had shrunk to the size of a walnut.
"Science" fed some LSD to a spider to see what would become of it. Its web went all cranky. Like, wow, man. Art.
Freud, as I recall, viewed art as a product of a kind of neurotic irritation, like the way an oyster creates a pearl from the irritation of a sand granule. As things have come to pass, it turns out the irritation was Freud. I'm sure Louise Bourgeoisie is quite right, art promotes sanity. Freud promoted overpriced confessionals.
Not agin' your bold statements about arts turned into academic mutations at all, Rodge. Nor James T. Farrell's words to you about it in your interview of him. I had a brother in law (gladly ex) who was one of those, an art historian. His stuff on artists was an irritating read and he couldn't draw so much as a crisscross to play tic-tac-toe on.
People holed up in their "left brains" we shall always have with us. What was the name of the Cardinal who objected to Michelangelo's work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling as "a voluptuous bathroom?"
Bierce:
ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related as follows by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.
One day a wag -- what would the wretch be at? --
Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT,
And said it was a god's name! Straight arose
Fantastic priests and postulants (with shows,
And mysteries, and mummeries, and hymns,
And disputations dire that lamed their limbs)
To serve his temple and maintain the fires,
Expound the law, manipulate the wires.
Amazed, the populace that rites attend,
Believe whate'er they cannot comprehend,
And, inly edified to learn that two
Half-hairs joined so and so (as Art can do)
Have sweeter values and a grace more fit
Than Nature's hairs that never have been split,
Bring cakes and wines for sacrificial feasts,
And sell their garments to support the priests.
I think it's brilliant.
My definition of art includes:
A transformation in the way we experience (see) things
An intention on the artist's part to cause that change.
So here we have the museum administration thinking that their part in art was passive. They made it possible, and then they watched to see what it was.
Burden made them unwitting participants.
Do you suppose that after the performance they unexpectedly had the experience of waiting for something to happen, and suddenly saying, "Wait a minute, I've seen this before," and think of Chris Burden.
Did this work change the way they viewed their world - instead of being either didactically passive or active, did they come to understand that the choice of action always belongs to them - and may be required?
I think it's a great lesson for us all.
Just reading about it has changed the way I'll see things.
Hello Roger,
An interesting piece as usual. I found your comment on film theory interesting, because here at the University of Colorado at Boulder there's a considerable amount of emphasis placed on film theory. The primary focus is avant-garde cinema, and I will admit that this post is somewhat timely for me and some thoughts I've been having on experimental film (Stan Brakhage, Phil Solomon, Luis Bunuel, and Maya Deren are names commonly thrown around here)
Your comment was doubly interesting because every year you come to our campus and spend a week examining a single film in meticulous detail. Could you clarify the distinction you make between that sort of thing and film theory. Maybe I missed your point, and you were saying that basing an academic career on film theory is the part that's bull.
By the way, I loved Chop Shop, so thank you for introducing it to me.
With regard to the discussion on modern art, my view is this: the paintings of Botticelli, Carvaggio, or Michelangelo during the Renaissance are magnificent, and they would still be magnificent no matter who painted them, or why. Nowadays, a painting requires the persona of the artist, a story, a psychological analysis in order to be interesting, it can no longer be judged outside of context. If I read about the history behind a Botticelli painting, or the historical event that inspired it, that's all perfectly fine, but it doesn't substantially alter my opinion of it for better or for worse. Maybe it becomes more interesting, but I've found that "interesting" is a quality that's usually independent of whether a work's good or bad. These days, the merit of a work, like those canvases of solid color mentioned, usually hinges entirely on the backstory or some extensive analysis needed to bring the meaning out.
But I want to hear about the film theory, Roger. And maybe some of your favorite painters/sculptors. Mine would probably be Caspar David Friedrich.
Ebert: Funny thing is, Brackage, the ol' tobaccy-chawer, didn't traffic in theory in his lectures at the School of the Art Institute.
Close analysis of a work in terms of compositional strategy isn't the same thing as Theory, which in its extreme forms doesn't even require for the film to be seen.
DeLillo hit the same topic, same title--"The Body Artist."
Something about performance art that delineates it from representational or other types of art (including most film): it has an end. A piece usually starts somewhere and ends somewhere and unlike, say, painting, it is really over at that juncture. It's not hard to imagine talking a painter into adding just one more stroke. With performance art, that would be another piece of art entirely.
I particularly like the way DeLillo's characters spoke in little overlapping unfinished phrases. The art had structure and life had only what could be given it.
Woody Allen hit on this too, with Deconstructing Harry. I loved the way his life was so terribly jump-cut, but his writing was beautifully ordered.
I spent part of the weekend listening to Trout Mask Replica. In these days of the population dancing to a machine, it's so nice to hear irreproducible sound, a kind of performance art in music.
Nice post, Roger. Thank you.
Ebert: Anyone interested in this thread is going to have to see "(Untitled)," opening
JMW: I too remember the Voice of Fire "debate", if you can call such inane criticisms of the National Gallery a debate. The piece was not by a Canadian artist, true, but the gallery does not have a mandate to buy only Canadian works. Barnett Newman was a decisive influence on the Canadian abstract expressionism scene; his painting was placed in a room alongside examples of such works, for context. Unlike many critics I visited that room and was quite impressed. Certainly not just any child could have done it. Certainly too it will not be everyone's cup of tea. But it was relevant and important for the museum to have it in their collection.
As for the price, what does the art market have to do with anything? Would it have been a good piece of art if the gallery could have gotten a better deal? Maybe some sort of two for one?
I'd rather complain about a useless road extension or tax boondoggle, any one of which would cost more than this painting.
Alex: The feminist readings of Alien have indeed enhanced my appreciation of the film. I can re-watch it with greater enjoyment since the text is now richer. Theory is not in conflict with fun.
Just because there are bad films does not make all films bad. Just because there are bad theory writers does not make all theory bad. This is obvious but apparently some here have not mastered this basic level of comprehension.
Bring on more theory, please, as I'm not interested in wallowing in ignorance. Or in limiting my perceptions.
Kafka's story is enigmatic and not exactly entertainment. Yet no-one here has questioned its status as literature or art. Why then not grant conceptual and performance artists similar consideration? Burden's works discussed here are elegant and poignant, saying much about our place in societal systems of complicity and violence. Roger, you do a great job of bringing this work to wider attention, and an OK job of starting to tease out some of the implications. But I think your aversion to theory holds you up.
To armchair artists: Performance art does not exist without praxis. Writing up a bunch of ideas or claiming it's easy is not the same thing. In fact, it's cowardly. Instead, dare to put yourself on the line. Risk disaster; be brave. Unless you do that you're not making art. You're just wasting our time with small-mindedness and conformity.
Ebert: The only reason I posted that sunset at the bottom of my Sleep entry is because of the debate here about the red stripe painting.
"Ebert: Oh, I agree. Buried in that box, he was really buried in that box."
Roger, what makes you so certain? In the clear box hanging from a crane in London he was REALLY in the box; in the glass water globe in Manhattan he was REALLY in the water; but what makes you so certain he was really in the clear casket buried in New York City? A casket of which only one side out of six can be seen? Magicians are a wily bunch.
Ebert: Then that was him I saw at Elaine's!
Just to inject a literary note...
I believe that picture of 'Bloodletting Man' which you have at the top of this blog is what allows Will Graham to capture Hannibal Lecter in the novel Red Dragon (did they mention that in the movie? I can't remember). Hannibal the Cannibal arranged one of his victims to match the drawing, and Graham recognized it.
Wow! This reads like a suspense piece. Love it! PLEASE adapt this article into a screenplay. If you don't want to, I can write it! Truly amazing. Thanks for the post.
@ Peter
I suspect Mr. Ebert has had his fill of the video game debate for the time being, but between us I also found this entry and the nature of Chris Burden's work surprisingly relevant. Specifically, one of Ebert's objections was the degree of control the game designer yields to the player. I recall that he asked something along the lines of: is Romeo and Juliet still great art if the viewer may decide whether they live or die? And obviously the answer is no. But the most common mistake debaters on both sides make is to confuse video games with narrative art (game designers often err the same way). The narrative forms - literature, theater, film - are actually quite unique in the extent of control they wrest from the viewer, taking it to the greatest extreme through continuity editing, which practically reaches out through the screen to grab your eyeballs and move them for you-- look HERE *blink* now HERE *blink* now HERE *blink*
But many artforms do not require such linearity or other controls. Much of a painter's skill is based on the ability to quide a viewer's gaze through suggestive, non-cohersive means. A sculpture may be viewed from nearly any angle, in whatever order and at whatever pace the viewer pleases. The experience of these arts becomes individualized, allowing the moments of gestalt to come naturally. Yet a line may be drawn between the viewer's control of the experience, and actual creation. Though I may look at The David from any angle I like, I can see nothing Michealangelo did not give me to see, and in fact much of his genius comes from his consideration of my mobility. (Seeing David in person was nearly a religious experience for me - I never understood its fame from prints, but now I understand that it can only tell its story when the viewer can move freely around it. Also, it glows.) Similarly, while a game may have many options and possibilities, it has nothing the designers did not make for me. There is no such thing as a game that allows you to arrive at any ending you choose. There are only the endings made for you by its creators.
Which brings me to Chris Burden and "Doomed." He handed complete control of the progression and ending of the work to the audience. And this was not coincidental to the work, but the very thing that defined it. Of course, he created the idea, and the rules, and did not reveal his full intent to the participants, and yet he could never have known the full range of actions the staff might have taken to meet one of his three ending conditions.
I would say that all art hopes to elicit a response from the viewer. Maybe a specific response, though artists like Burden seem like explorers - most intrigued by the responses they didn't expect. What I found fascinating about "Doomed" was the recognition that "response" doesn't just have to mean an internal response: an emotion and/or intellectual insight. Compelling the viewer to actual, external action is also an interesting response. Of course, enciting external responses to the kind of passionate, provocative subject matter that much high art aspires to is likely to be dangerous business - so one can see the advantage of containing it within the virtual realm.
I really like when you said, he was turning his will over to external forces. I read that that is what we should do, how we should live. We shouldn't be trying to control things all the time. Instead, we should let things flow, that is what Taoism teaches. I think that Mr. Burden's piece speaks to me by reminding me that.
Plum
Don't Be a Plum
Eureka! I've found it! Here's the secret formula:
Art=Magic. Magic=Art.
If it ain't magic, it ain't art. If it ain't art, it ain't magic.
Hand this over to a theoretician, somebody, so we can have it in a 793 page treatise nobody will understand.
@ Tom Dark -
"Eureka! I've found it! Here's the secret formula.... "
Okay, now that made me laugh; chuckle!
I'm not and never will be, an academic-minded intellectual. I like cartoons too much and they tend to encourage popping balloons not inflating them. :)
I find that people who "TALK" a great deal about Art are usually people who don't create any.
As otherwise, you just get the f*ck on with things and do the work. There will be time later on to sit around with brethren and talk shop. In my case, that usually means reference materials, art supplies, comparing notes and grumbling; in addition to more metaphysical matters. But even then, there's a cut off point - as you don't want your buddies to pelt you in the head and call you a pontificating wanker.
Note: every time I hear a bunch of guys talking about ART (capital letters) I immediately see them as their more humorous counterparts aka: teenager girls deeply engrossed in an extremely important conversation about Vampires which no one else could ever possibly understand because they simply don't get it. :)
I've been a Fine Artist, Graphic Artist, Animation Artist - jack of all trades, basically. And the truth is, you can do whatever you want - unless you want to get paid for it. Or you need someone's approval and applause. Ego and economics.
And so for knowing what it is to be a hired gun and work those hours, I have little patience for the Fine Art world. Ie: the "dressed in black and drinking coffee from small cups" crowd as seen outside cafes, where wannabes linger and watch the cool with envy from the shadows.
Tip for the day! Go buy yourself a Bialetti dude, and make your own damn espresso; it's cheaper and you can play music you actually like, too. :)
Ie: Years of grueling production work on Film and TV projects along with similar forms of prostitution will do that to you, as an Artist. You get all seasoned and "kevlar'd" and snarky and stuff, chuckle!
And then there's the stuff you do pour "moi". Fine Arts. You only have to answer to yourself. Which can be both good and bad, depending upon how your day is going. You'll either cut yourself some slack, accept a thing as good enough, or crack a mental whip over your head and shout "DON'T BE SO DAMNED LAZY!"
But either way, albeit for yourself or a much needed paycheck, analyzing stuff to death pulls whatever joy it had, out of it, for me. And what's left is the carcass in a sandbox, which then gets fought over by eager hands looking to possess it.
When Artists "I don't actually hate" get together, whatever the medium, they talk shop. Not shyte. I'm working on a painting for Roger at the moment (set inside O'Rourke's Pub) and I talk paint. I send him mail, show and tell, moan and groan and stuff; Hey Roger, it's 5:00 am, blah, blah, blah. ;)
And that's the reality, the truth of making art; at least if you're a woman and for drawing birth parallels. You get inspired, aka pregnant, carry it to term and push it out. Once done, you send it off into the world and hope for the best - you can't control the world into which you release it, eh?
If the painting is a success, it will speak for itself more so than not.
And people who do that (waving!) don't sit around and pick it apart and in a language so over your head it can only be heard by dogs. Whereas very important academic, do. What did Roger call it?
Oh yeah, chasing tenor. :)
I'm not entirely sure I've articulated what I wanted to, as I've been sniffing turpentine for the last two days and kinda surfing a stream of consciousness at the moment, but I think it's pretty close.
I enjoy talking about Art but more so how I feel about it - emotional adjectives, lots of crayons flying everywhere and in readily accessible terms so everyone can join in, too!
"Academic film theory is b.s."...
I've responded to that in detail here:
http://www.genjipress.com/2009/10/theory-vs-practice-dept.html
Short version: Yes, and here's why.
Well yeah, Marie! PS anybody who hasn't seen Marie's work, click on her name.
My whole life built up to that secret formula, revelated just today and revealed here to the world for the first time! An incredible breakthrough if I do say so myself!
But I can't take all the credit. I'd like to thank my Dad, my Mom, all the people who thought they could push me around in school, the Department of Motor Vehicles, that guy with one hand who picked me up hitchhiking across Texas...
But most of all, that fella named Joe who was a famous old-time dulcimer player. Don't know his last name. It was on the brochure I got when I bought one a few years ago. He was the Master Dulcimer Player of All Time. When people asked him his secret, Joe said,
"I don't know no notes. I just play."
I figure everything is magic when you don't know what you're doing or where you're going. That's what Miles Davis said about jazz, unless I've just now made this up. But that's no excuse not to write a 793 page treatise about it. Plus footnotes and an appendix. XOX
To be able to say, “Hey, I knew so and so and appreciated their brilliance before they became famous is enviable. It’s my understanding that Franz Kafka never issued any of his work. That it was discovered only after his death. I happen to know the late great CanInDeed. Oh, how his musings made me laugh. Now there is nothing more left to him than a spectral visage of Sid Barret. He stands in front of a mirror for hours at a time while saying , “You talkin’ to me?” Or he sits in front of a TV that he never turns on and howls at the Dark Side of the Moon. But I knew him when he was of this world, and I understood him.
For some reason, I am reminded of a perhaps apocryphal quote, on how to tell a true artist from an art critic / art theorist. The latter discusses theory, design, etc. while the former discusses concrete things like brands of paint thinner and the physical / mechanical tools of his/her craft.
I honestly don't consider the work of Burden to be art. In all of his exhibits he simply inserts himself into an obscure situation. He then acts passively and places all responsibility for himself in the hands of others. Is a person who stands on train tracks and does not move an artist? Sure there may be fascination and it may draw a crowd, but public interest doesn't make something art.
As for people who find deep meaning in these kinds of exhibitions, I argue the fact that you can find the same kind of deep meaning in nearly everything you look at. A blank piece of paper for example, could represent the absence of something. Everyone sees some different "hidden" message based off of their own experiences, and when they want to see something deep they will find it. Is it meaningful? Perhaps, but shouldn't art be universal? Often times you will find that the creator has no idea what message they are trying to get across, they simply perform because they are expected to perform.
I know many people feel that art has no solid definition, and is fluid. Something to be defined by the individual, but I disagree. To me art should be something so powerful, that no matter who experiences it they know and feel the same thing. An example could be a painting or an exhibition that makes everyone regardless of who they are feel/think about home. Or something that makes everyone feel sorrow, or happiness. This is something extremely challenging to do. To attempt to unite everyone in a sense of commonality, now that is worthy of being called art.
My two cents.
The moment we put the water down, Chris got up, walked into the next room, returned with a hammer and a sealed envelope, and smashed the clock, stopping it."
I once read a book on how to do magic tricks many years ago and I don't remember much about the tricks, but something the writer said has always remained in my memory. He said that some of the tricks he had seen other magicians do were impressive to the audience, but that they were really impressive to him, because he knew what the guy had to do to accomplish the illusion.
However, it's hard to know where the illusion ends and the reality begins. If I were Chris, I would have a dozen envelops in the back with a dozen different scenarios of what might occur, ready and waiting.
Ebert: Might explain some "mentalism."
The truth is that Burden is seen as one of the more theatrical of the first generation of body artists. Certainly you are right that there is a fatal self-absorption in his work. Your clue is the fact that David Blaine now feeds off of a similar practice of spectacular pseudo-self-torture.
Far more interesting is Vito Acconci, some of whose works might be compared to Burden's, among them "Seedbed," for which he crafted a raised floor in the gallery, hid beneath it, fantasized about the viewer making the footsteps above him, and had his voice broadcast over a set of speakers in the gallery.
"Seedbed" is the diametric opposite of Burden's hiding-from-viewers-like-God piece. As opposed to a coy, attention-seeking gesture, Acconci over-shares and perhaps repulses-- but at least the gesture to the other human being is there, however debased or desperate.
I wrote a blog post a couple years ago that I think is relevant to this discussion, and hopefully I'm not being too self serving by posting a link to it. Summary: the contemporary art forms whose validity people often question are highly dependent on context - e.g., a stack of bricks is only art if it's in an art gallery - whereas this is not true for traditional art.
http://allworkandnoplay.net/9/fairy-doors-toynbee-tiles-and-vincent-van-gogh/
Amazingly, one of the artists I refer to left a comment on the blog. No, not van Gogh. Do zombie artists use tables?
I heard this today, and I think it's Art. And great Art at that, because it transcends so much for ultimately speaking from a universal place, while still being a deeply personal thing.
Wait till you hear this young woman's voice (Marie stands and applauds!)
Priscilla Renea - Dollhouse - Live Acoustic Performance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEVHtR6mUKw
And I found it because it was being promoted on Canadian site where I go each morning to check the weather, read local news, etc.
Note: "A self-taught musician who plays both guitar and piano, Priscilla first earned attention on YouTube where she would upload videos of herself singing both original and cover songs. One of her most popular videos, which earned her 1.1 million views alone, was her singing the dictionary to the melody of Fergie's song "Glamorous," proving that with her undeniable talent and moxie, she can make virtually anything, even something as mundane as the dictionary, compelling. Her performances earned her a fan base and evetually led to her singing on the MTV show Say What? Her first album Jukebox was released on October 20, 2009. The first single off the album is "Dollhouse"." - Livejournal, wiki.
So here's this young African American woman using the Internet to promote herself but in a totally cool way. This is not Britney Spears. It's the anti-Britney Spears.
It's a 3:57 minute song. Give her that much of your day, readers. It's easy to, absolutely free and also Art. In my opinion. :)
P.S. I'd like to imagine that one day, the character we meet in the film "Precious" as played by Gabourey Sidibe, will be like this girl.
Ebert: I like her! She explains how she did it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6y16PNdemM&feature=channel
Donald Miller Himself: However, it's hard to know where the illusion ends and the reality begins. If I were Chris, I would have a dozen envelops in the back with a dozen different scenarios of what might occur, ready and waiting.
Ebert: Might explain some "mentalism."
---Thanks to Roger's review of "The Great Buck Howard", I looked up some poop on the Amazing Kreskin. Do you suppose he had his paycheck hidden in a dozen different places?
Ebert: I like her! She explains how she did it...
Yeah! I saw that too! The big chair and growth as a metaphor; smile.
The minute I saw the acoustic version of her single "Dollhouse" I was checking out all her other videos!
What a wonderful voice she has. And I love that song! For while it's a feminist piece, it's not banging you over the head with it, eh? Rather, it's this glowing, shinning beacon of self-worth rising up in the face of all that would put it down. Awesome.
And you know what she's got? Elevation. That's what! She picks you up along with her.
Makes Lars von Trier look like a sad little troll, by comparison. :)
Roger, have you come up against much Theodor Adorno? Here's an essay of his which gets into a little bit of Kafka, and seemingly some of the general ideas in this blog entry: http://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/commitment/commitment.pdf
It's one of the best essays I've read (at least the 5% of it I can understand) in my time at uni. It seems his approach to the world, as an intellectual, flowers out of his ideas on art criticism, which incorporate really cool arguments about aesthetics and morality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu) has a good page on him.
Thanks for introducing me to Chris Burden.
It seems to me that both Burden and Kafka's story plays with a kind of productive dualism at work in modernity. Namely, in order to participate in a highly ordered economic structure where the body is adjusted to the cycles of the work week, and not pastoral rhythms, the body must be disciplined. What struck me about Burden's events were the ways he forced his body to completely separate from its needs to the point of creating dangerous conditions. He is able to do this because he keeps himself hyper vigilant (he doesn't sleep). He controls himself. This subjugation of the body by reason is the bedrock of what it means to be modern. This is why the ending of "The Hunger Artist" provides a double irony: first, we see that the artist considers himself a fake -- he wasn't forcing himself to fast, he just didn't like food. Second, once the artist dies he is replaced with a live, unpredictable, untamed panther. The panther is a more entertaining spectacle because it reminds the audience of what they have forfeited, but also reinforces the idea that such excessive living MUST be caged, for who knows what would happen if the panther were to escape! Whereas, the hunger artist -- like Burden -- uncomfortably reminds us of the conditions of control in which we spend our days (except of course in the frenzy of the spectacle).
Thanks for posting such a thought-provoking piece, and for linking the Kafka story. It was a nice diversion...
Art is communication.
Thus it requires an observer, and is therefore fundamentally subjective.
For a given individual, some works are more highly artistic than others. The uniqueness, number, depth and relevance of the ideas and emotions a work communicates to a person defines how highly artistic that work is to that person. If you appreciate a film like "Apocalypse Now", you do so because you think and feel differently during and after viewing the film. If Coppola puts you to sleep (and I know a couple of intelligent people who, sadly, suffer from such Francis-narcolepsy), then his films are not highly artistic for you; they communicate little more than sleepiness.
Given this, we can also say that the number individuals so affected by a work also count toward its artistry. Many people find "Apocalypse Now" to be riveting in its communicativeness, and so long as such people live, the film's status as great art is secure.
@Rob Rosenbaum: You are right: context matters, because context is the lens through which a piece's communication filters through to individuals.
@Jon: "art should be something so powerful, that no matter who experiences it they know and feel the same thing..."
Impossible; subject the same person to the same work at two different times and the work will have a (if only slightly) different effect as a result of the person's differing state of mind. Subjecting two different people to the same work typically produces even greater differences in effect; Coppola really does put some people to sleep, but that doesn't mean he's not a great artist.
@Peter: "...while a game may have many options and possibilities, it has nothing the designers did not make for me... there are only the endings made for you by its creators."
As a game developer, I've thought a lot about how to make games more deeply artistic; your post clarified my thinking. Thank you.
@Richard Nanian wrote; "[my mother's springer spaniel] and (years later) my 70-pound standard poodle rescue would come in and lie next to or even under [my] piano, provided I was playing a Chopin Prelude, some David Lanz, or even something by R.E.M. But Thelonius Monk sent them both out of the room within ten seconds every time."
I had a box turtle that would crawl under stereos or pianos when music was emanating from them. He liked everything though.
However, when my electric bass amplifier began cohabiting with a rabbit, it was another story altogether. Legato basslines played at a lazy tempo seemingly didn't disturb it, but thrash-metal riffing sent it into a tizzy of frantic laps around its cage, and futile attempts at digging.
After a few days, though, the rabbit seemed to stop reacting to my bass practices entirely.
Also, tamarin monkeys find Metallica calming:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6124100/Monkeys-are-Metallica-fans.html
I feel like there is so little I can do. What if everything doesn’t turn out well? What then? How do I go on living if everything isn’t well? I don’t understand this or anything else. How can I have so much I want to do then suddenly not want to do it? How come I just can’t be consistent? Consistency of self, that’s what’s hard. I once told my friend that there was a bitter end to everything and that I was going to murder a cow in the field by the desert under the sun around the corn stalks of golden salamander ribbons and teeter totter alcoholics dreaming of satin sheets like milky white dew burning in the sour prairie while butterscotch pudding is being made by Alfred Jenkins who cant help but be solemn during a moment so pressed and impressed into the minds deepest cavity so illusionary and splendid and undertaken by thoughts of burdening soil so frolic if you will because I cant seem to know what im trying to do here or what I should be doing filling up this paragraph with nothing and something and meaning or no meaning, do I continue or do I stop? What will the outcome be if I continue until the bell rings and what will be the outcome if I stop and do something that…matters? Matters? Something inside of me wants to forget it all and run away deep into something more or less sophisticated. Perhaps a sovereign cave or an atlantic reef or do I? what do I want to do? What will make me happy? Or what will make me sad yet happy both the same? What can I do to unleash this inconsistency and banish far under the air to something trapping and capable of holding such a substance of beauty and impeccable frame. Please help me, for I ramble and ramble yet nothing is getting done, all of this is going to end and be erased and these thoughts i'm spilling out are not going to help. Maybe this can be the beginning of a novel or something good, maybe I can read this when I feel messed up or do this when I feel messed up. Please please please please please please please please
Getting shot in the arm, crawling through glass, trusting the public not to electrocute you....all art.
So the MTV was really airing powerful art statements with the Johnny Knoxville show "Jackass."
And "Ow, my balls," the fictitious tv show in Mike Judge's "Idiocracy" could really be an installation piece in any art museum at any time.
Sweet.
Body art? no
Performance art? probably
Art? Certainly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOhf3OvRXKg
Kseniya Simonova wins the Ukrainian version of "America's Got Talent."
WW2 history in sand. Why do I think of Marie Haws when I watch this?
The piece you mention in which he allowed a marksman to shoot him in the arm has always caused me an ethical dilemma. The visitors to the piece had no idea that would be the content of his performance. And though they couldn't actually see Burden and his counterpart, as they were behind a wall, the very sound of a potentially mortal wound being inflicted on another person has to be, in at least the smallest way, traumatic. Had the audience members known what they were about to see, I would feel much differently, but as it is, I can't help but wonder if he's somehow victimized his audience, and I can't help but wonder if he should take some sort of ethical responsibility and choose to not endanger the psychological health of his audience.
Having said all that, I find it even more interesting that, while he was teaching in California, a student working on his master's thesis did a piece somewhat similar. The only important difference, in my opinion, is that this particular man's performance was visible. I may be mistaken about the content, as it has been some time since I read about this piece, but from what I remember, the student enters a classroom visibly distressed with the intention of shooting himself in the room in front of all the students. The other students are frightened, terrified in fact. But he does not shoot himself. He exits to the hall and the students inside the room hear the gun go off.
What is interesting is that the university punished the student. I believe he was remove from the school (though, again, I can't remember if this is the case exactly). And Burden did not stand up for this student--a man who had traumatized his audience years earlier found this piece immoral.
A part me does think that, yes, there is a difference. After all, the students in this case were not even aware that they were witnessing an art piece, but Burden's judgment seems almost questionable, as it now has on many occasions. Suppose the museum had done nothing. He would be casting them in the role of killer in a way. And it's a role they've only passively chosen--maybe one that it is unfair of Burden to choose for them.
I am still not sold on Burden--after having studied him in school and really tried to think through his pieces. I'm a writer, so ethics are usually a little easier to have, I suppose, but I think there must be a line between showing your audience something and doing them legitimate harm.
But perhaps I'm wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.
Hey yeah wow! I've since seen "The Great Buck Howard." XLNT film. Watch, everybody.
Roger...
Love this! Believe it or not, I was a performance artist whilst an undergrad in college. My pieces always involved singing, movement, prerecorded sound effects, spoken word or none of that... the themes were usually about weight, beauty, secrets, racial identity, and decadence... (drugs, pornography - no violence) But unlike Burden I was mostly in control - I never left it up to outside forces to end, begin or direct my work. It may not have been completely orchestrated but I could reel it in or go for it. But to lie helpless, waiting... now that is something brave indeed. It shows an optimism, a curiosity, an exploration and a faith in Humanity that belies the perceived disconnect that this art seems to represent for most observers. My life as an artist seems so muted and mundane now... but the journey is still good and I believe my blogging about it makes it an ongoing piece... whaddaya think?
But you know what? I still work on that edge at times. I will openly weep in front of an audience - tell a very personal story - sometimes I go there on purpose to open them up. Sometimes I choose not to be so vulnerable. I rarely do a set list. I work off the vibe of the room - off the audience. A lot of musicians say it's wrong to work that way - irresponsible, foolish, risky... hmm... maybe there's a bit of that performance artist left in me yet...
I never really judge art - it is my dalliance into the form that has given me such a wide tolerance for most artistic expressions. Don't get me wrong - I hate some stuff- I just don't make a fuss about it. I'm not that smart.
Ah... those were the daze! Thanks for this post. I love how you turn the themes inside out... and perhaps turned a bunch of folks onto conceptual & performance art.
Ebert: Why wouldn't I believe you were a performance artist?
Readers, check out Lynne's blog.
Roger, this is really a very fine piece of work. I enjoyed it a great deal, and have written about it on my blog. I don't know what to call what you're doing here -- philosophy, theology, personal essay -- and I don't much care. But it's very compelling.
I am an undergraduate at the University of Rochester, and I am writing a senior thesis on Chris Burden, and this is one of my favorite articles you've written, and Burden is one of my favorite artists generally speaking, and you posted this two years ago on my birthday!
Thank you for all the great work; I really enjoy it!