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I am a great admirer of microcosms: all those little worlds that replicate what is going on in the officially defined big world, but replicate it differently.
Oftentimes the little worlds are subpar or mediocre, because they actually obey the laws of statistics that rank phenomena as they would be in a perfect ecological setup (which the world is not): most comprehensively attained at the top, least comprehensively at the bottom. (Forget the morally-tinged language of “good” and “bad” here; we are talking degrees of complexity, levels of interaction, there being, simply, more of whatever it is we are ranking, and that “more” being itself organized in a more comprehensively and consistently interactive way.)
I am getting into abstractions that perhaps hark back, subconsciously, to some prehistoric influence like D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, but I don’t think so since that was one of those books I was always going to get around to taking off the shelf and reading, someday. I discovered it via Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, a marvelous book about the epoch and implications of a poet who was simultaneously essential, insightful, short-sighted, dull-witted, brilliant, reprehensible, admirable, ego-besotted and self-sacrificing. Like most of the people who are worthy of study and emulation, just not in their entirety.
The model I was setting up, on which I base my overall aesthetic practice, simply says that once you have the rules of the game, those who play the game best should be ranked near the top; but that, since art is not football, those who modify the rules to make a more interesting game should also be ranked near the top, especially when they do it well, but even when they do not, but fail interestingly.
And since daily life is a form of artistic practice, the same goes for how one goes about one’s public appearance in the world, in all its many manifestations, from style of speech to choice of clothing. Variations that violate the rules of the game in productive and intriguing ways count. Conscious incorporations of them into works of art count even more. Ability to communicate the meaning and implications of them to a non-art audience count most of all.
I suppose I could write about the Atlanta artworld in that way, all the little worlds that fail admirably or succeed in intriguing but flawed ways, versus the flawless practitioners who break no new ground but leave us breathless anyway. Any art scene is like that, anywhere big enough to attract folks from still littler worlds. And some of the players get into the bigger game, often enough largely by accident or by the obscure economic forces that motivate the moves of a game in which major money is involved. On the microscale, Kissinger’s familiar maxim applies, that the passions run high because the stakes are low.
This post was spurred, for not so obscure reasons, by the review of Kiran Desai’s Man Booker prize novel The Inheritance of Loss in the new NYRB (which, unlike the officially-abbreviated TLS, still calls itself the New York Review of Books); the novel that has been dutifully placed by my bedside since last October. The review goes off into the actual topic of the novel, globalization and its discontents in 1986 as lived through in two very specific families in two very little worlds, the hometown on the West Bengal-Nepal border and the kitchens of various Manhattan ethnic restaurants, the Gandhi Café being one.
I have already devoted several thousand words of this blog to all that, starting with Césaire and negritude and going through to, well, Kiran Desai, whose point I grasped via reviews last October, else I’d not have bought the still mostly unread novel.
But what brought me up short in this review was the reference to the New York dishwasher’s realization that the rising tide of globalization lifts all boats by ensuring that people like him will never get aboard one, never mind being the owner of one. He returns home to face a less ambiguous poverty. (This is not a spoiler reference, since all the reviews discuss that and this is one of those novels that one reads for the characterization and gorgeous language after one has learned the basic plot from reviewers, rather than to find out how it all comes out in the end.)
Okay, I guess it is a spoiler reference, because the review actually discusses what a “proper” emotionally satisfying novel would do with the characters, all the expected outcomes of the love relationship, et cetera. But that is why we read those types of novels: to find out which expected ending or twist on it will satisfy our cravings; whereas Desai, like far greater novelists before her, simply throws in enough subplot resolutions to fulfill our need for a literary fix, before applying her analytical tools again to the business at hand.
This blog post, too, should get back to the business at hand, which is how to deal with the singular successes of small worlds that will most likely never get into the game played by the big world.
I actually started writing this because I was thinking about a local performance artist who adroitly explains how she is going to manipulate you; then manipulates you; then lets it be known that she has manipulated you and effectively asks if you would like to be exploited in that pleasurable manner again. And the amazing thing is, we would; the tradeoffs of exploitative relationships being such that when they are made clear, they scarcely count as exploitation any longer, but as unequal but conscious exchanges. You get something, I get something, you get more than I do but I have more to let go of or I care less about the little I do have than about getting the satisfactions that only your performance can provide. This is the plot of a vast number of standard-issue novels, but there the trick is that the characters have to keep the workings secret from one another. It is we the readers who get to feel superior because the writer has telegraphed the real situation to us. This performer, these performers (actually, there are a few who fall into this category) make the mechanics of exploitation the subject of their art. Their audience is put in the superior situation of the readers, but they are put in that situation vis-à-vis their own lives, not the lives of imagined characters from whom wise readers extrapolate lessons. (Of course, dense audience members can take away as little from the experience as dense readers can from reading a novel. But in this case they have to work harder at staying clueless, because the experience is more immediate.)
Now, the preferred subject of the mainstream big art world these days is mostly how the concealed mechanisms of global exploitation function. (That, at least, is the stuff that gets into the big contemporary shows; galleries are another matter.) Folks like Allan Sekula have made a good living by displaying photographs of the hardscrabble livelihoods of the sailors who bring us those big containers of cheap luxury goods from the farflung lands of the Pacific rim. There are art careers and paid-for flights to biennials to be gotten from such successful revelations of what the corporate powers wish to have remain unnoticed.
But there are those artists who have returned from living on the margins of the lands of privilege, concluding that the rising tide of artworld success depends on a limited number of people being able to get on the boats. Lots of bright individuals have aspects of their practice that won’t hack it in the world of globalized art, and the best of them figure out how to have fun anyway. Many, perhaps most, of them, have already done their stint working in those Manhattan kitchens beside the defeated illegals who will eventually go back home to assorted borderlands. (They, like the illegals, are sometimes the better human beings for having had this experience, and just as often not.)
I suspect that the world of internet communications will soon create a sub-network of subversively localized artworlds that both do their own thing and let other people know about it. The other people will stumble across such worlds as they stumble across interesting blogs, or the word will spread as informally but exponentially as happened with Kate Kretz’s painting. Small eddies and swirls of controversy and conversation will erupt. Some of them will be important. Someday someone will establish an online magazine that actually links these multiple small perturbations of the big world’s artificially smoothed-out surface. Lots of online publications exist that could do that, but nobody in particular knows that they are there, and most of them simply don’t have the content or the design smarts to spark that connection of global interest. But eventually somebody, or more likely several somebodies, will pull it off.
Then we will have the beginnings of genuine counterforces.
Oftentimes the little worlds are subpar or mediocre, because they actually obey the laws of statistics that rank phenomena as they would be in a perfect ecological setup (which the world is not): most comprehensively attained at the top, least comprehensively at the bottom. (Forget the morally-tinged language of “good” and “bad” here; we are talking degrees of complexity, levels of interaction, there being, simply, more of whatever it is we are ranking, and that “more” being itself organized in a more comprehensively and consistently interactive way.)
I am getting into abstractions that perhaps hark back, subconsciously, to some prehistoric influence like D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, but I don’t think so since that was one of those books I was always going to get around to taking off the shelf and reading, someday. I discovered it via Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, a marvelous book about the epoch and implications of a poet who was simultaneously essential, insightful, short-sighted, dull-witted, brilliant, reprehensible, admirable, ego-besotted and self-sacrificing. Like most of the people who are worthy of study and emulation, just not in their entirety.
The model I was setting up, on which I base my overall aesthetic practice, simply says that once you have the rules of the game, those who play the game best should be ranked near the top; but that, since art is not football, those who modify the rules to make a more interesting game should also be ranked near the top, especially when they do it well, but even when they do not, but fail interestingly.
And since daily life is a form of artistic practice, the same goes for how one goes about one’s public appearance in the world, in all its many manifestations, from style of speech to choice of clothing. Variations that violate the rules of the game in productive and intriguing ways count. Conscious incorporations of them into works of art count even more. Ability to communicate the meaning and implications of them to a non-art audience count most of all.
I suppose I could write about the Atlanta artworld in that way, all the little worlds that fail admirably or succeed in intriguing but flawed ways, versus the flawless practitioners who break no new ground but leave us breathless anyway. Any art scene is like that, anywhere big enough to attract folks from still littler worlds. And some of the players get into the bigger game, often enough largely by accident or by the obscure economic forces that motivate the moves of a game in which major money is involved. On the microscale, Kissinger’s familiar maxim applies, that the passions run high because the stakes are low.
This post was spurred, for not so obscure reasons, by the review of Kiran Desai’s Man Booker prize novel The Inheritance of Loss in the new NYRB (which, unlike the officially-abbreviated TLS, still calls itself the New York Review of Books); the novel that has been dutifully placed by my bedside since last October. The review goes off into the actual topic of the novel, globalization and its discontents in 1986 as lived through in two very specific families in two very little worlds, the hometown on the West Bengal-Nepal border and the kitchens of various Manhattan ethnic restaurants, the Gandhi Café being one.
I have already devoted several thousand words of this blog to all that, starting with Césaire and negritude and going through to, well, Kiran Desai, whose point I grasped via reviews last October, else I’d not have bought the still mostly unread novel.
But what brought me up short in this review was the reference to the New York dishwasher’s realization that the rising tide of globalization lifts all boats by ensuring that people like him will never get aboard one, never mind being the owner of one. He returns home to face a less ambiguous poverty. (This is not a spoiler reference, since all the reviews discuss that and this is one of those novels that one reads for the characterization and gorgeous language after one has learned the basic plot from reviewers, rather than to find out how it all comes out in the end.)
Okay, I guess it is a spoiler reference, because the review actually discusses what a “proper” emotionally satisfying novel would do with the characters, all the expected outcomes of the love relationship, et cetera. But that is why we read those types of novels: to find out which expected ending or twist on it will satisfy our cravings; whereas Desai, like far greater novelists before her, simply throws in enough subplot resolutions to fulfill our need for a literary fix, before applying her analytical tools again to the business at hand.
This blog post, too, should get back to the business at hand, which is how to deal with the singular successes of small worlds that will most likely never get into the game played by the big world.
I actually started writing this because I was thinking about a local performance artist who adroitly explains how she is going to manipulate you; then manipulates you; then lets it be known that she has manipulated you and effectively asks if you would like to be exploited in that pleasurable manner again. And the amazing thing is, we would; the tradeoffs of exploitative relationships being such that when they are made clear, they scarcely count as exploitation any longer, but as unequal but conscious exchanges. You get something, I get something, you get more than I do but I have more to let go of or I care less about the little I do have than about getting the satisfactions that only your performance can provide. This is the plot of a vast number of standard-issue novels, but there the trick is that the characters have to keep the workings secret from one another. It is we the readers who get to feel superior because the writer has telegraphed the real situation to us. This performer, these performers (actually, there are a few who fall into this category) make the mechanics of exploitation the subject of their art. Their audience is put in the superior situation of the readers, but they are put in that situation vis-à-vis their own lives, not the lives of imagined characters from whom wise readers extrapolate lessons. (Of course, dense audience members can take away as little from the experience as dense readers can from reading a novel. But in this case they have to work harder at staying clueless, because the experience is more immediate.)
Now, the preferred subject of the mainstream big art world these days is mostly how the concealed mechanisms of global exploitation function. (That, at least, is the stuff that gets into the big contemporary shows; galleries are another matter.) Folks like Allan Sekula have made a good living by displaying photographs of the hardscrabble livelihoods of the sailors who bring us those big containers of cheap luxury goods from the farflung lands of the Pacific rim. There are art careers and paid-for flights to biennials to be gotten from such successful revelations of what the corporate powers wish to have remain unnoticed.
But there are those artists who have returned from living on the margins of the lands of privilege, concluding that the rising tide of artworld success depends on a limited number of people being able to get on the boats. Lots of bright individuals have aspects of their practice that won’t hack it in the world of globalized art, and the best of them figure out how to have fun anyway. Many, perhaps most, of them, have already done their stint working in those Manhattan kitchens beside the defeated illegals who will eventually go back home to assorted borderlands. (They, like the illegals, are sometimes the better human beings for having had this experience, and just as often not.)
I suspect that the world of internet communications will soon create a sub-network of subversively localized artworlds that both do their own thing and let other people know about it. The other people will stumble across such worlds as they stumble across interesting blogs, or the word will spread as informally but exponentially as happened with Kate Kretz’s painting. Small eddies and swirls of controversy and conversation will erupt. Some of them will be important. Someday someone will establish an online magazine that actually links these multiple small perturbations of the big world’s artificially smoothed-out surface. Lots of online publications exist that could do that, but nobody in particular knows that they are there, and most of them simply don’t have the content or the design smarts to spark that connection of global interest. But eventually somebody, or more likely several somebodies, will pull it off.
Then we will have the beginnings of genuine counterforces.
