More Events!

Three more readings coming up. You can find the entire list here.

Saturday, Sept 11
7pm
Von Bar, 3 Bleecker Street
with Rakesh Satyal and Frank Polito

Saturday, Oct 2
9pm
Brooklyn Museum of Art

Wednesday, Oct 27
8pm
Nowhere Bar
part of PANIC !

Being Present

I am thinking these days about presence. About what creates it. About what makes it real, or maybe palpable, since what is real and what is unreal, these days, I find difficult to decipher. (And, of course, the other huge question here is: Does real matter?) More specifically, I am thinking about how much energy it takes to be present. To respect another person's presence by showing up, by becoming present yourself.

I am first thinking of how being present can take everything out of you. As evidence: me standing on South 4th Street and Bedford Avenue, waiting on the blessed B62 (which, by the way, hasn't gotten better since the restructuring.) There was a man standing there as well, mid 50s maybe, something slightly off-kilter about his clothing. (But this is New York, and you never know anything about anyone, really.) I notice that he's looking at me. Not looking at me like one New Yorker looks at another New Yorker. He's trying to make eye contact. I get the feeling that he wants to ask me something. (This is natural at the bus stop. People often have logistical or directional questions at bus stops, and I, apparently, look like the kind of person who has the answers.) So, I take the bait, and look back at him.

"My wife died," he said. "Two weeks ago. She was 62 years old." "I'm sorry," I said. He said thank you, and we stood there a minute, quietly, waiting on the bus, with this fact suddenly between us.

For the rest of the day I carried all that around with me, and before I crawled into bed, I spent an hour playing thrashy folk songs on the guitar, maybe annoying the neighbors, until all that was out of me and I felt like myself again. He needed to say it out loud. He needed to give some of the weight to someone else so that he could go on with the motion of living. This makes sense to me. Sometimes saying something out loud can make it real. Or sometimes we say things out loud that aren't true at all, and it's a way of feeling the realness of them, if only an instant, like trying on a new pair of strange glasses, or like sliding your feet into a pair of your father's shoes. That guy just needed me to be present. Or, by default, my presence contributed his relief. Even if he made it all up, I was there, and we shared that weird, horrible, tragic conversation. And there was nothing to say afterward.

Second, I went to MoMA to see the Marina Abromovic retrospective. In addition to filling the 6th floor with lots of photos and videos, there are several recreations, or "reperformances" as Abromovic is calling them, by actors, dancers and other performance artists, of her previous work. Meanwhile, for the duration of the exhibit--about 700 hours that is--Abromovic herself will be seated at a table in the main atrium. Museum guests are invited to sit across from her for a duration of their choosing and do nothing but meet her gaze and feel whatever you feel, in a piece called "The Artist is Present." This is what it looks like, from the outside:



Sitting in a chair for an hour is difficult. Try it for 700 hours, all the while under the gaze of lights, viewers, the art world, critics, fans, people who hate you, etc. Marina ain't kidding, y'all. I've been thinking so much about presence after seeing this piece because of the way the reperformances failed to create the kind of excitement, mystery, emotion, verve--any of the things you feel when you see "The Artist is Present" in the Atrium.

So then what is creating that feeling? The situation is so simple, and other than blinking and the slight movement from her breathing, she didn't move at all for the half hour I stood watching her. So how can it be that the reperformances don't carry the same weight, if the actions are the same as in the original pieces? And Abromovic herself has been coaching and training the performers for the past several weeks. It begs the question, what is performance? Is it the sum of the actions, or is it the intention behind the actions? (I recall Yeats here and "how can we know the dancer from the dance?") And if the reperformers are supposed to be truly in the moment, and truly present, then why not call them performers? Why divide the past from the present, if what you are looking for--I think--is the magic of the moment?

In the new piece, Abromovic is basically doing everything at once, controlling every aspect, either directly or indirectly, by just being present. One museum-goer opted to sit across from her for about two hours. This made me angry--this person was taking up so much time, other people were waiting, how selfish! But what does that say about my sense of time? What does that say about my own selfishness? What does it say about what I think about the act of being present, and the limits, or extensions of it?

One of the things I like most about "The Artist is Present" is that the catalog copy calls the piece "generous." Such a rarity in art, I think. A kind of slow, meaningful present generosity.

Letter from Greece, Part 9 of 10

Day Seven: Santorini/Athens
The morning is insanity. The airport in Santorini is small and crowded, as you would expect, with lines of passengers spilling out onto the sidewalk. Inside there are a dozen Chinese women buying refrigerated sandwiches from the small kiosk, and on the roof are tables where everyone is smoking. Although we all have assigned seats on the flight back to Athens, people crowd against the doors to the tarmac, then cram onto a lumbering bus, which rides us out to the plane itself. People rush, again, to board.

After about thirty minutes, we’ve landed in Athens, dumped into a choked mess of traffic and angry drivers—it takes almost two hours to get to our hotel. Kip and I are rattled by the speed of Athens, after having been downgraded to the lull of Santorini. We throw down our bags and walk quickly to the Archaeological Museum, only a few blocks away, and after discovering that they are open later than we previously thought, we step into a coffee bar across the street to eat bad sandwiches next to two loud smokers.

Athens needs a better museum. The artifacts here are some of the oldest, most extraordinary objects in the history of known history, they are the tiny beginnings of what we know about culture and art and democracy—at least in the West. But the building is old and badly ventilated, and at the most basic, very unpretty to look at. I think they should build a room for the Elgin Marbles, which were stolen off the Parthenon and now reside in the British Museum in London. (Here, they are called the “Parthenon Marbles,” naturally.) The Greeks should make themselves ready for their return, I think, and maybe in the new Acropolis Museum, they have.
Kip implores that we choose a contemporary restaurant for dinner, enough of these “taverna” type traditional places with all the same food over and over. I agree. We look to our guidebook for a new restaurant, something younger. Dare we hope for something gay?

Cook Coo Food is buried in a neighborhood that feels like the East Village—with rock show posters for bands called “Gods of Blood,” “Drunk Motherfuckers,” and “DeathWram”—I realize now that the neighborhood we stayed in before was more Upper East Side. The walls of the restaurant are decorated in blown-up photos of sign language letters, a hundred hands and fingers all along the walls. From the ceiling hang chandeliers that look like silver crowns spotted with fake roses—very gay. We order the tomato fritters, which the witty menu has listed as “Santorini’s favorite!!!” They are fantastic, the freshness of the tomato covered up, briefly, by the hot crunch, and then the cool touch of mint. Kip orders a roasted pork thing with feta and potatoes, and I have a vegetable coconut curry. On the walk home, we find a pastry shop with a freezer full of tiny ice cream pops—pale green, as big as your thumb, for only pennies.

That night, I have a dream about someone I went to high school with—Pearl Hwang, of all people. She and I are driving my car around some nameless town, and in the back are all these electrical cords that I know connect to some matching set of vacuum cleaners, somewhere. Then—the way things happen in dreams—they are stolen. Then the police come. And, turns out, Pearl is undercover, and she takes down some details about where I’ve been, even though she was with me in the car the whole time. In the morning, I tell Kip about the dream as he brushes his teeth.

What I'm Thinking About Lately

--I'm coming up on 500 blog posts. I guess maybe I should think about what the blog has done for me, and maybe what it hasn't. How it has changed the way I write, the way I think about writing, the way I think about what it means to make writing for free, and give it away for free. I find that even though I'm not particularly interested in marking certain passages--year marks, large round numbers--I am also compelled to mark them, as evidence. Of something.

--I am ambivalent about everything. Perhaps too much.

--Does supplemental material change the perception of a work of art? I'm thinking about this age of DVD commentary, bonus tracks, and so on. I think about Doris Salcedo's work "Shibboleth," which was at the Tate Modern in 2007. She wouldn't discuss how the crack was made--and that actually made the work less interesting to me. Perhaps because the feat of it was so startling. I'm with her, in some senses--the work stands alone. But...

--Antony Gormley's current work of art, in London, "One & Other." Basically, for 100 days, 2400 members of the public will stand on the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for an hour each. Watching the public use this moment--their 1 hour of a certain kind of fame--has been interesting. People are using it to raise awareness for a certain cause....or they are hanging out, taking pictures, having tea. It's interesting to me to think about use, and identity, and art, and how all these things are crammed in together with activism--which I never even thought about until the public started bringing signs and stuff with them to their hour on the plinth. This brings about the question of visibility, and what that means.

--I used to have a lot of sadness about finishing my novel--only in that you're essentially killing off people who have lived in your brain for so long, your friends in the loneliest of times. But, for whatever reason, it never occurred to me that, actually, in finishing it--you're giving them life, forever. (Or, as least, as long as you remain in print.)

Upcoming Excitement

Here's what's on the horizon that excites me:

--Cyndi Lauper, B-52s and the Indigo Girls at Radio City Music Hall
--Circus AMOK! planning and stuff.
--New AMOK! executive director.
--A friend says Amy Ray has a new record on the horizon.
--I'm taking a day off to see August: Osage County.
--Jeff Koons on the roof at the Met.
--Memorial Day picnic in the park with all the peeps.
--4th of July in Chattanooga with my family, and Kip!, and Nephews.
--I'm gonna be in two more queer anthologies in the fall. (Maybe that first novel does actually get published, only one chapter at a time, in 30 different volumes.)

The Trouble with Audioguides

Witold and I were recently at the MoMA to see the Richard Serra exhibit, and we wandered through the upper floors of paintings, photography and design. I have a habit, sometimes, of watching the people watch the art. I am, perhaps by nature, an observer. It was while watching a family of four, along with some other tourists, look at Paul Cezanne's "The Bather," when I really got stuck thinking about those troublesome Audioguides.

You know these Audioguides: a telephone-like device which you hold to your ear as you walk through the galleries. You punch in the number that corresponds to an item in the collection, and the Audioguide gives you background, perhaps some narrative or anecdotes, or information on technique, historical context, or even the details of how the museum came to own the piece. They are narrated by the curator, the museum director, or often by some celebrity or voice-over actor who has some vague, or more direct, connection to the exhibit. I was once involved in the securing talent for Audioguide tracks for an exhibit of African-American prints and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The trouble with Audioguides is that they make art-viewing a passive experience. They create an essentially didactic relationship between the art and the viewer, and force museum goers down a kind of "best-of" cafeteria line-style museum experience. Most museum visitors, particularly in large tourist destination cities like Paris, New York and London, are new to art, or at least to new to skills or tools which may help them have a more meaningful, personal experience.

If a group of people are briefly gathered around a painting looking in silence, there is some kind of interaction going on within that group--they have, collectively, created a relationship with each other, and with that painting. The Audiguides remove that (however brief or fleeting) sense of community that is randomly created over and over again as people pass through the galleries. (Not to mention the traffic jams.)

I understand the benefit--new museum goers are often intimidated by art and museums in general, and it's good to have a "companion" to guide you through the art, and give you some, if limited, context or background. Particularly for beginning viewers, Who painted it and When are less important than, for example, what ideas or feelings that beginning viewer might discover if pressed to consider the work on her own. Why delve into the art if all you need to know about it is fed through a device in your ear? Movements, styles and periods are meaningless to most museum goers--and the Audioguides often distance us from the work itself, relegating it, again, to the elite world of Art, capital A.

Perhaps I can offer this example more clearly: At the Greenmarket, where I work selling maple syrup, what makes me the most irate are the customers who force their children to do math during a transaction. "Now, I just gave him five dollars, little Jenny, so how much do I get back?" The more interesting--the more important--lessons learned from shopping at the Greenmarket have less to do with math than with sustainable agriculture, local economies, and the plain old (read: extraordinary) miracle of food. You can talk about all these ideas on a child's level, of course.

So, go to the museum. Look at the art. Watch it. Think about it, wonder about it. Skip the Audioguide.


**Much of my pondering which inspired this post has been informed by the work of Abigial Housen and Philip Yenawine. Read more about their work here.**

***Check out this project, in which people created their own podcasts--witty, musical, sardonic, Audioguides--that you can put on your iPod and bring with you to the museum. (These are created for the MOMA, specifically.) In this way, at least, you're getting alternate perspectives.***