Art. The only profession in which idleness is an asset is the
artist's. It takes time--distance some like to say--to make something
interesting, unusual or unexpected. This is one of the reasons that
great art is rare; it takes time, a lot
of time (and not a little talent). It cannot be scheduled, regimented,
put on a calendar or
charted by project management software. It is not some romantic notion
of inspiration we are
talking about, but a kind of lack of industry.
Lou Reed quoted Andy Warhol's refrain, "All that really matters is work." ('Work' on 'Songs for Drella'
) And he was right. But a large part of what Warhol called 'work' is
not the physical production of objects as might be assumed. Producing
an object is but the last five or ten percent, for me anyway, the
flowering of a plant whose root system is deeper and wider and has
taken longer to manifest than is commonly acknowledged.
Additionally, one of the greatest things about most art today is
that it is worthless, at least according to the principles by which
most ventures in
the west are measured: it can't be processed, incorporated, unionized,
depreciated, consumed, added to or subtracted from? [this argument is
not the Platonic/Aristotelean split in which Plato dismisses art as
mere imitation while Aristotle champions it as a means of conveying
universal truths, this little riff has more to do with economics than
philosophy, though the slope is slippery] Obviously, this is not the
art that is stolen from museums or auctioned at Sotheby's. We are
talking about the world of objects and ideas that are never
commodified, that never make it into the history books, but that make
up the vast majority of art that is produced every day--the painting
you saw at a swap meet, the novel that came and went and was never read
again, the poem by that unknown poet you heard that one time downtown
and will never forget, but which will nevertheless go on to be
forgotten by 'history'. Its 'worthlessness' is the very thing that
makes art so important in a world of de facto global capitalism.
On one end of the spectrum, Duchamp plays chess; on the other, Chihuly
fills the world with glass, glass, glass...the rest of us fall
somewhere in between. I make art and I run a business, several business
ventures actually. I am married, have children, need exercise,
nourishment and sleep. I want a house, a car, a TV, maybe some nice
shoes--all that bourgeois shit. I want to feel good about the work I
do. For me and for many of the artists that I know, ambition and
idleness are constantly at war. Does this seem odd? It shouldn't. It is
a cliché. Finding the balance-- the sweet spot between the joy of the
creative process and the rest of life's joys--continues to elude me.
In the classic "The Poetics of Space", Gaston Bachelard wrote that,
"To say that one has left certain intellectual habits behind is easy
enough, but how is it to be achieved? For a rationalist, this
constitutes a minor daily crisis, a sort of split in one's thinking
which, even though its object be partial--a mere image--has none the
less great psychic repercussions." He was laying the ground work for
his definition of the transsubjectivity of images, what he called a
"phenomenology of the imagination", but what he described resonates
with my own daily experience.
My "minor daily [psychic] crisis" is also a kind of transsubjectivity,
not of images but rather of consciousness, a way of being in the world;
a subjectivity that is not fixed but fluid, fickle and unpredictable.
It could also be called a kind of schizophrenia, which is kind of a
relief, and kind of fucked-up.
Found this in my inbox. It looks like a good one to check out if you're going to be in Chi-town this spring. Might even be a reason to plan a trip! Though it looks to be traveling a bit later in the year...
