What is art

[AhabsOtherLeg]

That is a photo of something my ex threw together

Wait... you mean your ex threw the picture together? Or your ex built the building?!

there is no such thing as art.

Seriously? C'mon, think about it... Do you honestly believe there could be a whole respected historic profession, with it's own unique highly-developed code and worldview, and it's own interior trading and value system, which is essentially based on absolutely nothing at all?


Oh....

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Neither - in order to have the creature make art, the elephant was rewarded with food pellets and punished with a lash. This does, however, offer some insight into the OP question, I think.

Christ... just post Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." Go on, get it over and done with, you depressing (and almost certainly correct) bastid.

[OP ED]

That is a photo of something my ex threw together

Wait... you mean your ex threw the picture together? Or your ex built the building?!

there is no such thing as art.

Seriously? C'mon, think about it... Do you honestly believe there could be a whole respected historic profession, with it's own unique highly-developed code and worldview, and it's own interior trading and value system, which is essentially based on absolutely nothing at all?


Oh....

its called nihilism. art is what remains after the rest turns to dust.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Ahab the first painting is an illusion, the second is getting nearer to fart.

[MacCruiskeen]

What is art?

Art is Dotty's husband:



Art & Dotty Todd on The Dick Clark Saturday Night Beechnut Show (1959): 'Chanson d'Amour'

(That clip is possibly the scariest thing I have ever seen. Or heard. It explains why the Sixties had to happen.)

[brainpanhandler]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_fluting

[brainpanhandler]

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/12/ ... -neurosis/

[vanlose kid]

deleted

[AhabsOtherLeg]

I've been reading Roger Ebert's Journal for a short while now (only first heard of him a few years back, so he's not a cultural fixture to me in the same way as he seems to be in the States - for us it was Barry Norman, who was a lot duller) but he did a great post on a risky piece by a performance artist not too long ago, remembering it from his younger days, which I think is worth reading in full.

It's not just the work described that qualifies as Art (not a big fan of conceptual stuff myself, though I suppose it has it's place) but Ebert's writing itself. I've cut it slightly here, 'cos I'm a vandal, but the full story and pics are at the link.

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...

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 if 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.

..........

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."

VW12.jpgI 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.
shoot.jpg

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 had 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....

"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.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/10 ... rtist.html

As always, I'm afeared that somebody's posted this before. I hope not, though.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

deleted - double post

[MacCruiskeen]

Thanks very much for that extract from Roger Ebert's journals, Ahab. It's a great piece of writing, and a great piece of art criticism.

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.

Reminds me of certain other artists, including this guy:



and, more indirectly, this one:

[barracuda]

Thanks very much for that extract from Roger Ebert's journals, Ahab. It's a great piece of writing, and a great piece of art criticism.

I very much enjoyed reading that as well, as a anecdotal telling of an interesting work of art. But I wouldn't call it art criticism. Art criticism generally addresses the work in the context of a theory of art, or a proposed cultural milieu, in order to meaningfully situate the work in the historical or theoretical spectrum. Ebert's interesting article does none of these things, but leaves the distinct impression that the work at the Contemporary occurred in a sort of context-free vaccuum, and leaves the reader feeling that this is a sort of weird, abberant event in the annals of museum culture, which it is distinctly not.

I think it is safe to say that my own exposure to Chris Burden's work significantly and permanently changed my life in so many ways it is difficult to even begin to expound upon them here. But it did, influencing not only my own production as an artist, but also the very manner in which I lived my life after coming to personal terms with his pieces of the 1970's. In the early 1980's I found myself in a position to hire him to work as a visiting artist at the school I was at, and I did, spending a few days talking to him and drinking a bit. I think his art was and is a matter of personal survival to him, and to his conception of the survival of the planet as well. Appropo of that, some of his early work, if realised in our world today, would most likely get him sent to Guantanamo. Just another reason to love him.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

I very much enjoyed reading that as well, as a anecdotal telling of an interesting work of art. But I wouldn't call it art criticism. Art criticism generally addresses the work in the context of a theory of art, or a proposed cultural milieu, in order to meaningfully situate the work in the historical or theoretical spectrum. Ebert's interesting article does none of these things, but leaves the distinct impression that the work at the Contemporary occurred in a sort of context-free vaccuum, and leaves the reader feeling that this is a sort of weird, abberant event in the annals of museum culture, which it is distinctly not.

I agree that Ebert's post was not real art criticism as such - I don't think Mac saw it as genuine academic art criticism either - but that's why I liked it.

To me, the article was a very minor work of Art in it's own right - it was a real piece of work. I just liked hearing his own interpretation of the event, thoughtfully and evocatively expressed. To him and most other viewers Burden's actions probably were abberant and free of context, as they would be to me, even now. I've got no real grounding in art. I have no Art History. But I like to think I know it when I see it, or that I feel it when I need to.

I can see a heretical, renegade-Catholic reading in Burden's two "isolation" pieces, though. ...Actually, no, I can't. I see it in Ebert's article (he's a Catholic), and probably Burden wouldn't like the idea.

But at least one viewer of Burden's earlier piece (where he's up on a ledge on the wall, out of view) is mentioned as thinking of the artist as being like God - distant, unreachable, unknowable, but there - and listening, even if incapable of action.

And in this scenario God is deliberately incapable of action through his own choice. Because his own deliberate disengagement allows free will and freedom of action to those beneath him.

Some resent the God figure for his lack of action, and who can blame them? They've come to see him, in particular, and he's hidden somewhere high and far away, doing fuck all.

In the piece that the article concentrates on, Burden (who is playing the Godlike role in this scenario, at least by that one viewer's reckoning) lies there, deliberately inactive, once again doing fuck all, for ages - and after a time even he starts thinking: "Why don't they do anything? Don't they care about me at all?"

So if you wanted to put the relationship-of-God-to-Man spin on it (which you don't, and I don't, but I just have anyway) it's basically a wholly reciprocal relationship of nobody doing nothing much to each other for ages, and thereby allowing pure contingency to take charge... the random pitcher of water, brought in from outside the structure of the piece, was the only thing that could break the spell. Neither the artist nor his audience could do it, by deliberate design.

And who was the water bearer again? It was Aquari....

...Yeah, I should drink more water myself sometimes.

And I still haven't seen the film about the Twin Towers wire-walk. Like most things, I've read a fair bit about it, but inaction and the avoidance of real (even second-hand) experience is still my modus operandi. I reckon Chris Burden stole my act. I like lying about the place not moving or doing anything all the time.

But I will see that film.

J.D. Salinger... Prepare thyself for heresy... I never thought he was all that good. I mean, he's good. He's clearly a good writer - his worst is better than most folk's best. But I don't think the reclusiveness was anything other than reclusiveness. We've all had uncles like that, they just never wrote any great books. I'm like that. And as Gore Vidal said - hinting, subtly as ever, at a worldly explanation - "...I hear it's very cold where he lives."

Thanks for enjoying that article... I'm sometimes reluctant about posting stuff that'd probably be good because I assume it will have been posted before. In a brief fit of appreciativeness, I would like to say thanks to Brainpanhandler as well for his cave and fingerpainting posts. They are great.

I think it is safe to say that my own exposure to Chris Burden's work significantly and permanently changed my life in so many ways it is difficult to even begin to expound upon them here. But it did, influencing not only my own production as an artist, but also the very manner in which I lived my life after coming to personal terms with his pieces of the 1970's. In the early 1980's I found myself in a position to hire him to work as a visiting artist at the school I was at, and I did, spending a few days talking to him and drinking a bit. I think his art was and is a matter of personal survival to him, and to his conception of the survival of the planet as well. Appropo of that, some of his early work, if realised in our world today, would most likely get him sent to Guantanamo. Just another reason to love him.

Ah, see, there's another bit of Art, far as I'm concerned. Beautifully written, both personal and universal, with a bit of craft to it, and a whole lot of truth.

Seriously, though, Barracuda - you've led an interesting life. You've drank with Chris Burden, and you were at Winterland! There's no competing with that. From now on I'm going to be waiting to hear about your torrid affair with Saul Bellow, your bad date with Dan Mitrione, and the time you kicked Mayor Daley in the nuts!

Of course, I can compete with that - I phoned George Galloway's radio show a few weeks back, and he spoke to me personally as a person. And as a kid I saw Malcolm Rifkind outside a specialist toffee shop on the Isle of Mull.