Viewing Flanagan installed as a piece in a museum, knowing him since the 1980s, I felt disorientated — installed momentarily in his hell. “Voyeuristic” pales as a description of my looking. Was his métier disorientation? Flanagan’s conflation of art, body and disease bewildered me, rebelling against any modifier, such as progressive or regressive, which might characterize the politics of an art practice.
Some say artists should make work for an audience, that anything else is indulgent; art should be “accessible.” To whom is never clear. Recently, in various newspapers and literary magazines, a debate about so-called “difficult books” has been unfolding. Writers should remember their readers, one side insisted, by making books enjoyable. For one thing, “difficulty” and “pleasure” are relative terms; without foundation, the argument lacked cogency and drifted into nowheresville.
Filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha reckoned with the concept of audience differently. Minh-ha was present at the New York premiere of Naked Spaces — Living is Round (1985), at the Museum of Modern Art. The film pictured women working, walking, socializing. No narrator explained the women or the spaces they inhabited. Instead, words shaped and suggested more impressions, ways of seeing.
The first question to Minh-ha came from a man, who asked, vehemently: “Who is this film for? Who’s the audience for this film?” Minh-ha took a moment, then said: “I make films for sensitive people.” Her audience fell silent, maybe stunned by her brilliant tactic, which leaped over patterned responses. Minh-ha allowed for the contemplation of positions, by escaping the usual discursive traps. It’s the hardest thing to do, and in art and politics the most imaginative and stimulating.
Z is for Jonze
Stars In Their Eyes: Fame is a Frame
Life’s tough as a street-art puppeteer, but when Craig Schwartz (cunning John Cusack) starts a deadbeat day job in an office where the ceiling’s so low everyone has to bend over, he discovers a way out — a secret tunnel into the mind and body of John Malkovich (playing himself, sort of). Spike Jonze’s first feature Being John Malkovich renders identity as the playground and prison it is. When everyone wants to be known, rather than to try to know, celebrity is the pinnacle of success. To the star-obsessed, being known might mean not having to know yourself, and if you don’t like yourself, this must be freedom. Dropped into the body of someone else, though, might allow for the ironic discovery that others are just as limited as you are. I laugh every time I think of Cameron Diaz — so thoroughly unglamorous she’s a sight gag — in a cage with a monkey; and Malkovich at home halfnaked, his paunch smiling at the fantasy of celebrity perfection.
Acknowledgments
The publisher and author would like to acknowledge and thank Stephen Frailey, artist/photographer and chair of Undergraduate Photography Department (The School of Visual Arts), for providing the title for this collection. Frailey edits a photography magazine, Dear Dave, and for its advertising campaign, several years ago, chose to run, in every issue, a powder-blue page, with white letters: “WHAT WOULD LYNNE TILLMAN DO?” (This was a great surprise to LT.) On the side of the page, it says: Subscribe to Dear Dave, WWW.DEARDAVEMAGAZINE.COM. We heartily recommend you do.
About the Author
Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She has collaborated often with artists and writes regularly on culture. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1997), a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Cast in Doubt (1992); Motion Sickness (1991); and Haunted Houses (1987). Someday This Will Be Funny (2012) is her most recent short story collection. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore (1995); Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (1999), a cultural history of a literary landmark, and The Broad Picture, an essay collection.