8.28.23. - 9.6.23.
8.28.23.
The 1951 São Paulo Art Biennial was held in a Niemeyer-designed pavilion–the Modernist ideal. Shiny, floating, geometric, the architecture proclaimed that South America was a site of universal ideas and aesthetics. If this was the architecture of the future, if this was the celebration of the world’s finest artists, then Brazil was the proper host. By using "international" design, they were laying claim to this host-status. But there goes your specifically-Brazilian aesthetic–or so the reasoning goes.
I work at the Armenian Museum of America, which rotates contemporary art shows in a modest exhibition space upstairs. The board of directors has unwittingly stumbled into the same dilemma–the dilemma, in fact, when you live inside of the market. Shall we exhibit an Armenian artist, or a non-Armenian with more name-recognition? There always has to be some connection to Armenia of course, but more often than not it’s a flimsy justification (married to an Armenian, collected by an Armenian, et cetera).
The more conservative elements in the museum balk with each selection, straying further and further from a recognizably Armenian subject matter. Ah, but don’t they realize? This is now the arc of history: to maintain your people’s relevance, to be remembered, you must become universal. And of course, there are newer artists who incorporate their Armenianness into their abstraction–but this is missing the point. Within the exhibition space itself, the art is reconquered by the market. Black Abstraction, for example, which is both abstract and political, has come to dominate major American museums in the past few years. Non-identity based art is cast off, and we assimilate again to the market's new favorite aesthetic.
The first two floors of the Armenian Museum house ancient and medieval pottery, rugs, instruments; and the third floor is a gallery space completely unmoored from that atmosphere. It is the art produced by people who now live within the market and stare at the first two floors from an outsider's view (the Armenian outsider sees the same thing as the non-Armenian outsider: there lies the repressed insight, the existential threat to every visitor who steps into the museum). This is what people come for, the content they could find in any semi-hip galleryspace across this country. Now outpaced by its own market offspring, American culture has reached a strange point where you must assimilate in order to retain your cultural particularity.
International film festivals are successful in this country because we are drawn in by their unspecified difference, not because of their particular offerings. And think of the cooking videos which dominate social media algorithms–most highlight a particular cuisine but must operate within a digital space that forces creators to capitalize on our homogenized libido if they want any chance at ‘survival’ (clicks): the bazaar-cum-market.
8.29.23.
Rich kids are often the stingiest when it comes time to split the bill–Venmo requests to the cent. Not always, but often enough. They have this pathological relationship to money because they grew up with unfettered access to it. It is the source of their position (and, sometimes, their difference) but it comes from an obscured fountain. Kids who work a job associate their spending with labor (always dependent on the job, of course, so we can never have an objective notion of value) but rich kids’ sense of self and wealth is mystified. They simply have it. So they can either form a self-identity through pure consumption (a proper, "unashamed" rich kid) or through repressed consumption (I am not rich, I am in fact poor now that I’ve set out on my own–and you owe me).
8.31.23.
I went to a poetry slam last night. The crowd was mostly queer, and even those who weren’t still dressed and walked accordingly (not necessarily as queer people, but quite obviously coding themselves in a set of identity markers which permitted them to belong). At the start of the night, the emcee laid a few ground rules, one of which went a bit like this:
“If you say something fucked up, or maybe you don’t know as much as the audience, and someone comes up to you after the show to let you know where you went wrong–then, first of all, thank them, because that’s not easy, and it’s pretty awesome that they want to invest their time in you and it shows that they want you to be a part of the community.”
Yes, thank them. You strayed from the program without realizing it.
A series of mostly-horny poems followed, none longer than three minutes, which in concert revealed an excitement and energy completely restricted to oneself: the post-Woodstock religious event was nothing more than a series of individual ecstasies and spasms experienced alone, but whose particular masturbatory qualities were only possible because of the quasi-collective dynamic of the event. Every speaker’s poem received massive applause and ridiculous gasps each time the denim-clad mustaches in the back of the room felt the need to peacock their faux-euphoria: can't you see how much I'm enjoying myself? How much I'm enjoying you? The room was aware of the charade, surely, since uniform, unquestioning praise indicates that the audience is not really listening–how could someone enjoy all fifty speakers? They applaud for each other to ensure their own poem’s success, since most of the audience performed (perhaps there should be more of a buffer between artist and audience).
This is the fundamental credo of our time: comfort, not pleasure. Pleasure derives from the content of a particular experience. Comfort is oceanic, often determined before it actually occurs. We have comfort movies, comfort food, because we know it will set us at ease before we actually experience it. It functions in the same manner as addiction, because we know what we will get and, at its most dangerous, we can’t rest until we catch the feeling again, with all of its security. And comfort is of course the opposite of anxiety–its temporary, self-inflaming antidote. No wonder that this is the core value of our time.
On the other hand, pleasure–as I would like to describe it–is related to anxiety because it requires us to experience something unknown in order to grow, or at least to feel something lasting. There is an element of danger. We are required to sit with something before it reveals itself to us. Where the content of comfort is predetermined, pleasure is inaccessible until spoken and, critically, received. In the context of a poetry slam, this means that an audience must actually interpret, either in feeling or thought. How can someone be horny when they only want comfort? Comfort is antithetical to eroticism, and we intuitively know this. That’s why these kinds of spaces are so obviously laden with internet cultures and proclivities–we are still alone.
9.6.23.
So difficult to bring myself to the end of a thought. The initial insight appears before language, and I am confident that I know it from its very conception, that I have digested it and reorganized my life around it already, before putting it to paper in its completion. Yes, that’s what I tell myself.
The Doctrine of Signatures. 9.26.23.
My recent writing has been unsuccessful apart from poetry and transcribing my dreams.
From there, I’ve tried to translate the passages into prose, and often back again to their original format, all the while cutting away the fat. I occasionally indulge my essayistic impulse–childish in my belief that I can capture culture or history within the frame of a few pages–but I am more likely to fall for scenery: the ground under my feet as I fished with my father three summers back, the binding of a 13th century gospel book, the medicinal use of walnuts by the Romans. (With the Doctrine of Signatures, the ancients found the “use” of foods and plants in their appearance. Bearing a resemblance to brains, Plutarch wrote that walnuts could grant us sleep–and, as it turns out, walnuts do indeed contain melatonin.)
What is touching about a walnut, isn’t that it stands for itself, that it simply is how it appears, and stands testament to its own importance if we would only accept it as such. The Fluxus artists already expressed this, that beauty and aesthetic experience need not be limited to museums, literature, and haute culture–“just let yourself, even will yourself to enjoy.” To me, this misses everything. The walnut captures me because its internal logic cannot be captured. There is a fundamental but specific truth at play within the walnut: it looks like a brain and indeed affects it. And yet the moment we try to articulate these truths, our hypotheses break and we are stranded again to nihilistic, wonderless secularism. Do not tell me what the walnut stands for: it only stands for itself when we revere it (reverence maintains both distance and respect). Our direct, imminent experience of the world is beautiful and rich, certainly not simple.
(Smith, Andrew, Historical Virtues of the Walnut), 2010)