Repeatedly I have written and spoken about exhaustion in the
arts. Think how easy it was for the possibly pseudonymous Longus to write the
immortal pastoral romance Daphnis and
Chloe in the third or fourth century, when there was relatively little
competition in fiction writing. Think also of how easy it was for the early
composers to write not especially original music at a time when originality was
not much called for. In the fine arts, even before representation yielded to
abstraction, it has been easier to be original all along, what with the variety
of faces, landscapes and possible still lifes. Yet even there a certain sense
of déjà vu is now making things more difficult.
For artists with words—poets, novelists, dramatists,
essayists—it is, despite seemingly infinite possibilities, getting harder and
harder to be original, given the prevailing glut. Forays into the absurd have
become more and more frequent, what with true newness ever more difficult to
achieve. As for dance, the beauty of the human body in motion guarantees a
putative inexhaustibility, yet even so there is no superabundance nowadays of
outstanding choreographers.
Where mass production is by way of becoming deleterious is
in the cinema, where it would appear that the great innovators have been dying
out, and the newcomers are having the devil of a time trying not to look like
the epigones they are. And there is a big increase in remakes, mostly inferior
to the makes.
But where the desperate quest to be new is most pronounced,
or most demented, is in the hard-to-classify realms of conceptual and body art,
in which the frantic pursuit of elusive novelty has wreaked the greatest havoc.
Here let us accost one of the major practitioners of the typical quest for
originality—or just difference— yielding the most pitiful examples. I name that salient practitioner of
non-art posturing as art: Marina Abramovic.
A couple of years ago her so-called retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art was entitled “The Artist Is Present.” It consisted of
having persons sit in a chair opposite her and gazing at her admiringly. And
would you believe it? People stood in line for the privilege of sitting and
staring at her. So what could she do now to top this? Well, now she has
London’s Serpentine Gallery showing nothing except the colored empty panels of
its walls. It is called “512 Hours” after the total time she will spend there
doing nothing. And folks have stood in line to see Abramovic’s nothing,
presumably superior to the nothing of lesser mortals.
It is written up in an article of the June 14 New York
Times, which can be read as either laudatory or ironic, or possibly neither. It
goes into some detail about how Marina is spending the 512 hours of the
duration of this exhibition. She says, “There is just me and the public. It is
insane what I try to do.” Note that here “insane” is a term of praise.
There is no limit to Abramovic’s superior insanity. She is
“widely known in the art world,” the Times states, “as a pioneer in her field
who had not just created performances of physical intensity—carving a star into
her stomach with a razor, lying on a block of ice for hours, screaming until
her voice gave out—but had also re-enacted grueling performance pieces by other
artists.” For, alas, she is not alone in her art. “A number of Americans and
curators have written . . . accusing Ms. Abramovic and the gallery of failing
to acknowledge the work of Mary Ellen Carroll, a New York based conceptual
artist. Ms. Carroll said in an email that she had been working on a project
called ‘Nothing’ since 1984, describing it as ‘an engagement with the public’ without documentation.” Thirty years of
working on creating nothing is indeed impressive.
One of the gallery’s co-curators with Julia Taylor Jones,
Hans Ulrich Obrist, told the Times in a telephone interview that “Ms. Carroll
was one of numerous artists before Ms. Abramovic who had explored the
relationship between art and nothingness.” And Abramovic herself confirms that
“now we are getting letters every day from people who did nothing first.” Truly
a situation worthy of the pen of Jonathan Swift or Lewis Carroll (no relation to Mary Ellen).
But did they receive the same sort of recognition as the one
for “512 Hours”? No. Lady Gaga did not come to them for instruction, and Time
magazine did not put them on this year’s list of the 100 most influential
people. I have no doubt that at this very moment doctoral theses are being
written on the art of nothing. Indeed, Marina informs us, “relishing her fame,”
that her public “are super young, and I become for them some kind of example of
things they want to know.” And we read that on a given Wednesday attendance at
“52 Hours” consisted of hundreds of knowledge seekers, and not only young ones,
but that on the following Thursday there was no such crowd. We are not told
what happened on Friday.
“There is an enormous need for young people to have contact
with the artist,” Ms. A. avers. And how does that play out at the Serpentine
Galleries? For example, Ms. A. hands a small mirror to a visitor and tells her
to walk backward, using the mirror as a guide. “Reality is behind you,” she
whispers.
This was, presumably, a young contact needer. But how about
older ones? “You look suspicious,” Ms. A. said to an older couple. They looked
“well, suspicious, as around them people contemplated those panels in bright
primary colors [not painted by Ms. A.]
or lay on he floor eyes closed.
Ms. A. took the couple by the hand, “gently asked them to close their
eyes, and led them away walking with a slow measured tread.” She explains: “The
public are my material, and I am theirs. “ To this end, our material girl opens
the gallery with her private key at 6 A.M. and presumably tarries there till
closing time.
Now you may fear that this art is too ephemeral, too
conditioned on the artist’s living presence. Not to worry. In Hudson, New York,
there is a Marina Abramovic Institute, a center for long-durational work, that
“she hopes will bring together figures from the worlds or art, science and
spirituality.” I wonder who these figures might be? For art, we already have
Lady Gaga—or is she there for spirituality?—but who might attend from the world
of science? Scientologists, perhaps; I can’t see Mary Ellen Carroll making the
pilgrimage.
So there you have it. “A Gallery Filled with Emptiness,” as
one Times headline has it. The follow-up one, more explicitly, reads “Now She
Fills Her Gallery With Emptiness.” But, of course, she won’t stop there. There
are still many heads to be filled with emptiness, albeit not so the fillers’
pockets. It is all highly symptomatic. And this, and similar manifestations,
are where modern art has progressed to. How much really separates those
primary-colored gallery panels from the masterworks of Mark Rothko and his
likes, say Yves Klein, the Monochrome?
Simultaneously in music, we get John Cage’s measured silence
and the not much better Minimalists. In literature, where it all began, we had
Gertrude Stein, the surrealists and Oulipo. The floodgates were open to a
French writer who wrote a whole book with the letter E removed from his
typewriter. But why stop at one letter? How about a book with no letters at
all?
