Well, I gave my presentation on three artists today in Catherine’s class, and well, people are sick of my cynicism. Talking about art as a useless excuse alienates people, makes my own stuff look worse, and is really restating something very obvious - that art can and has been used to do all sorts of things otherwise impossible.
So, sounds like this is a tree I should stop barking up. Baca pointed out that starting my presentation by talking about Art makes it sound like my art is about Art, which its not (thank goodness), and Catherine said my job is not to talk about Art, but to discuss what my art does. And Chris is just sick and tired of my spiel, and feels it covers up some worthwile ideas. No one else said anything. Well, Carmen said I should read Shopenhauer and Nietzche about Nihilism (which i will, I remember loving Nietzche, and realize his whole life is inherently meaningless we need to define our own meaning in life is exactly the cynical positive art is useless and thus magical dichotomy I am espousing. I guess people prefer the positive side of that, and I feel like I am lying if I leave out the negative. I need to think how to phrase it so it is acceptable, or else just toss it out for marketing purposes, because it is clearly not doing me any good. Would it in the real world, or do people just want to hear the good regardless? Of course, I am misrepresenting here. Its not about hearing only the good, its about being put throught the same pointless and offensive rant. I can adress the positive and negative of uselessness without alienating everyone, shooting myself in the foot, and really speaking in generalizations I can’t truly address. So, as Chris asked me, what are my real motives? Sincerely? Well, I truly want to bring Dirt to Nauru. I wanted to when I was working there, but knew it was a futile effort, a naive act of paternalism, and generally just bad development. But here I realized that art let me off the hook. I know it sound derogatory, but shit man, art gives me a viable method for getting the funding (with a clear consience) and doing this act that I, personally, want to do. And I want to build the Plywood Tree because I know the tree will be beatiful, I know the plywood will be beautiful, and because I think the self-sacrifice of the cycle is beautiful and poetic. I also acknowledge that both acts are useless, and though I feel that makes them all the more poignant, marketing them in those terms puts people off. I see uselessness as something divine, it divides art from the commonplace. Remember these posts? I have been on about this for some time… My take home is that showing the valkue of uselessness is interesting and positive and valid; claimig that Art is Useless and expounding on exactly what Christopher Robbins hopes to get from his art is vainglorious.
November 16th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Well, what you are showing is perhaps how fruitless those efforts of development are. That, even though the intentions may be the best, the execution leaves a lot to be desired and ultimately the “natives” are not helped at all. Thus, making an art work, which does not have to be “effective” as an effort in development, is accurate and sincere in representing what you believe is flawed with development “missions.” Ultimately, an artwork is about creating meaning, about representing an idea, whatever that representation may be. Thus, your act of bringing dirt to Nauru, although “useless”, is full of meaning and purpose, and thus, “usefulness”. And that, I think, is the point of making art.
There is no problem with you acknowledging that there is pointlessness in the physical act, but the motivation behind the act is not pointless. Logically then, the act was/is never pointless. This is why your cynicism, in the words of Catherine, short-circuits your work, because there IS a point you are trying to make, but you deny it by asserting the obvious (that the work/act is pointless). With that optic, most EVERYTHING is pointless, except those things that keep us alive: food, health, shelter, sex (we do need to reproduce to stay alive as a species). The nice thing about being human is that what is seemingly one thing can be another, that there is subtlety in our construction of reality. Yes Robbins, thats it: be aggressively subtle (hah)
c.