At dinner with my artist friend, I told him I didn’t know if artists owed anyone an answer or what a writer’s responsibility to readers was, if there was one. The ethics of these peculiar relationships remain conundrums. Notions of service to the field may not matter, if the proof isn’t in the pudding. Anyway, writers and artists are not voted in or out by an electorate, though institutions — including collectors, gallerists, publishers, art magazines, critics — do vote but not in a transparent manner, not democratically. It’s insisted there is a public for art, but those who remark on it generally presume themselves separate from it.
Working with words and pictures engages artists and writers in a world they didn’t make, to which they may or may not contribute. I often think about Samuel Beckett and his agonistic relationship to writing and living. Beckett wrote novels, he wrote in two languages, he wrote plays. Beckett talked with actors, had intentions about how his plays should be performed, specified the props he wanted on stage, in service of communicating the incommunicable. A play is such an earnest art form, as it is written for, acted by and presented in front of living people. Its earnestness also resides in its ephemerality, the precariousness of every performance, tethering the genre to life’s temporariness. That Beckett wrote is a thrilling paradox. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Societies find cunning solutions for communicating even the incommunicable. Which brings me to the time I lived in London. I didn’t understand the British use of “I don’t mind” to mean “yes,” “no,” “maybe.” The phrase seemed to allow for ineffable negotiations between people, though. “I don’t mind,” I saw, opened a conversational door through which either party could leave, without embarrassment. But it was hard for a foreigner to use, because it’s part of a British dance whose subtle moves are learned from childhood. The British also sometimes avoided answering direct questions. I loved that, it was so un-American, and now I sometimes do it in New York, where people expect answers. I change the subject or pretend I haven’t heard the question, and watch surprise or chagrin appear on faces. It’s a liberation from others’ nosiness, a freedom I never expected. I recommend it, with reservations that will be different for each person, discerned only through trial and error.
K is for Kafka
The Litvaks Are Not Funny
The film shows at the Museum of Modern Art attract a strange audience. Very old people who come to all the shows tend to talk throughout the experimental work or leave. People drift in and out. The serious remain. Very big audiences become small ones. It’s a hard crowd to figure.
One night when I was there, before the start of the film, a young man leaped onto the stage and announced that he was an unemployed actor looking for a role in a movie. He pointed to his seat and urged anyone interested to contact him then and there. Smiling, he leaped from the stage and the audience applauded.
We became a more relaxed crowd and I remarked casually to the elderly women beside me, “New York is such a crazy place.”
Her answer was less casual. She replied: “Yes, that’s because of the Galiciani. The Litvaks are not funny.” She paused and continued: “The English are Jews. Gaelic is Hebrew but no one knew this until Pittman invented shorthand and then without the vowels it was clear that Gaelic and Hebrew were the same. The English are Jews.” Her hand waved in front of her and she said: “My daughter wrote the best art book ever written. It’s across the street at the Donnell Library. My husband invented radar. All the books are across the street.” I consider this and the lights dim.
L is for Lamentation
Of Its Time
What happened in 2012?
Otto Muehl, the Viennese Actionist, once kept a diary. A whole year was represented by this line: “Extreme Hatred for the Mayor of Vienna.” Stealing from Muehl, about 2012 I could note: “Impulse to Slap All Birthers.” Through our annus horribilus, or the US presidential campaign, some comfort came from thinking about history: people have always been stupid, wrong. Smart people, with generative ideas, occasionally prevail. This cheered me up.
I tend to believe that, before total annihilation, this clever/dumb species will design ingenious devices to ameliorate the poisonous effects of previous ones. I predict: The end is not near. Believing it, though, could be as reassuring to some as my recourse to history.
Future beings will laugh at us; each generation does about its predecessor. It’s an endless competition. The chunky, clumsy, slow things they devised — electrical wires, sockets. Coming soon — tiny memory implants, iWands.
But let’s not forget forgetfulness: A normal amnesia overwhelms most of any lived life. Recalling a year, last month? Stray scenes can return in startling dreams we usually forget; vague images surface, slip away.
In 2011, with millions, I watched Egypt’s revolution on television: “I’m watching history; history is being made.” But what does that mean, to watch an event that will be recorded, remembered, but not to have been in or of it? Anything could have happened in Tahrir Square. Normal disappeared. A few Americans told me they’d have liked to be part of their revolution. I thought, but didn’t say: A revolution doesn’t send out invitations. The Egyptians weren’t “having a revolution.” They were the revolution.
2012 rode in on the back of chaotic, thrilling, frightening political events: the clamoring will of people in the Middle East; the fragility of hope, and rebellion spreading; the instability of the euro and Greece’s desperation; the Occupy movement’s impact; now, street-by-street fighting in Syria, a government slaughtering its citizens, and no stopping yet.
In 2012, on May 1, I gave a reading at the KGB Bar in the East Village, with fellow writer Colm Tóibín. Afterward, a bunch of us had dinner. About 11 p.m., in a funky bar on Second Avenue, I heard a guy, who was peering into his iPhone, whisper: “Bin Laden’s been killed.” What? The bar turned dead quiet. He said, louder: “Bin Laden’s dead.” The bartender switched on the television. “Bin Laden’s been killed.” Colm and I walked outside, told passersby, or they told us: “Bin Laden’s dead.” I admit to shock, excitement, but more a rush of relief. “Admit” because I didn’t expect relief; I didn’t know that particular anxiety was lodged in me. What else didn’t “whoever I was” know that might inflect or form “my positions” and “my ideas”?
Unique characters, like Marshall McLuhan, envisioned the future, and speculated brilliantly. But no one knows exactly what’s coming, or the consequences that will follow. No one knows what artists will do next, either, or why. Maybe perceptive, ludic, didactic, inspiring or dull art, film, writing. Contemporary work usually responds obliquely to its time, which necessarily includes the past, hidden or disguised. I didn’t expect relief at Bin Laden’s death, and artists may imagine and describe a surprising object from and of its time, with no obvious source.
In 2012, I saw an exhibition of work by Anna Molska at the gallery Broadway 1602 in New York. I remember her video, The Mourners (2010), in part because it caught me — thematically, formally, psychologically — and made present what I hadn’t expected. Molska asked seven Polish women to participate in a “social experiment.” The women were friends, who also had a folk-singing group, and sang songs at funerals. Molksa invited them to use a gallery, once a greenhouse, to do in it what they wanted. She provided neutral-colored parkas as costumes; and, in the windowed, spacious gallery, one wide bench and a white sheet, which became props.