Western Solipsism and Conceptual Art
Published in C Magazine, Issue 86, Summer 2005
Emily Vey Duke and Kevin Rodgers
Throughout history, people have made art in order to become famous, to become enlightened and to win God's love. These three impulses are, in fact, essentially the same drive. They each have their own dogmas, but they all trap humans behind the same thick glass. We feel inadequate and we feel arrogant in turn. We shuttle back and forth between those two poles like a bead on a string without ever having the clarity or wisdom to see that we're confined to a single dimension.
Much 1970s conceptual art (especially time based work like video and performance) has often struck me as a relatively explicit (if ineffectual) form of meditation instruction. It's so intensely boring that it forces the viewer inward, into a dialogue with his or her interiority. It's different from meditation, of course, in that it simultaneously forces the viewer into dialogue with the artist. As well as being a prop for a meditative state, it's a prop for the artist's ego, and as such it fails as meditation for both maker and viewer.
There's a structure of domination inherent in every authored work, and that structure is pushed to the fore in the time based "endurance" works of the 1970s. In those cases the author isn't asking the viewer to be entertained or informed by the work, he's asking her to be annoyed by it. Some examples of this kind of work include David Askevold's Fill, Cage's chance or 'aleatoric' music, Bruce Nauman's Revolving Upside Down and Stomping in the Studio, and Carolee Schneeman's Up to and Including Her Limits. There are certainly many more.
As a viewer who came to prayer and meditation practices before I came to the avant-garde film, video and performance works of the seventies, I found those works exceptionally irritating. It was clear that these artists were working with the same principles that I had learned about in my (admittedly half-assed) spiritual studies. It was equally clear that they were so missing the point. By claiming the title 'author', they were hopelessly embroiling their works in the net of ego'and thereby positioning the viewer in a power- or ego centred relation to their authorship.
Linda Montano's work, on the other hand, deals with meditation and spirituality in a way that I've always admired, if only for its shameless, artless candor. Her Seven Years of Living Art is a seven-year performance piece in which she devoted one year to each of the seven chakras. Each year Montano lived as a different persona, speaking in an accent appropriate to that persona, wearing only one colour of clothing, spending an allotted amount of time in a room painted that colour and listening to a tone related to the chakra of the year. This work is an incredibly comprehensive expression of Montano's fundamental principles as an artist. It's a complete melding of her art practice, her spiritual practice and her practice of everyday life. I was surprised and interested when my friend Kevin Rodgers noted to me that he found the work to be a failure in spiritual terms because of Montano's relative disengagement from the social sphere (During the years of her performance she lived, for the most part privately, in her home in Kingston, a small town in upper New York State). Kevin told me that for him spirituality was tied to social responsibility'responsibility for the greater good'and that because Montano's work was focused almost exclusively inward, it could not claim to be spiritually efficacious.
This points to an over-riding problem with eastern religion as it is practiced in the west'especially in North America. While Judeo-Christian spirituality may have drawn us deeper and deeper into the neurotic cycle of hope and fear, or abjection and redemption, it's also generated some really exceptional movements for social change (for instance the student Christian left of the 60s and the first-wave feminist temperance movement). There's a strong sense of responsibility to ones fellow citizens that comes part and parcel with the imperative to proselytize.
Kevin describes this model in art-making as 'contemporary art as co-production' and goes on to write about the conditions that necessitated it:
'We'd so convinced ourselves by the turn of the millennium that art was about not meeting expectations, and in fact valorized our refusal to do so. We'd found our own little places to deflect public contempt and balk at responsibility. What we now need to do is reconceive our commitment to viewers, friends, partners, and the community around us.'
For many westerners, the meditative practices of eastern religion simply provide a justification for even greater individualistic narcissism than that in which they already engage. Meditation seems to more and more deeply entrench their sense of moral and aesthetic superiority. Looking inward becomes the end, rather than the means to an increased compassion for others.
Although I am usually full of pronouncements about what art must and must not accomplish, it is not my intention to suggest that art must perform a spiritual function. Some works do, others do not. For some artists, it is clear that their art practice occupies the same psychic space that a religious or spiritual practice would. For other artists, art practice is more akin to shopping for clothes or composing a shelf of books on prominent display in their apartment--a carefully nuanced expression of personal style. I make no judgment on either modality. However, once an artist moves toward the spiritual (especially if she is aiming to provide an experience of the spiritual to the viewer rather than only to herself), the stakes become much higher.
This weekend I went to see a screening of Velcrow Ripper's new documentary film Scared Sacred. I was really pleased when I heard that it was showing here (Ripper was brought to Halifax by the Centre for Art Tapes), because it was so relevant to my research for this article. I have also really enjoyed his previous works, made in collaboration with Heather Frise (Bones of the Forest and Open Season are the two that I have seen). In Scared Sacred, Ripper visits seven of what he refers to as "the world's ground zeroes": Bhopal, India, the site of the devastating Union Carbide pesticide leak in 1984; The Killing Fields of Cambodia; Bombed out Bosnia and Iraq; Hiroshima; Afghanistan, where he spends time with the girls and women of RAWA, the Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association; New York City immediately after September 11th, 2001; and the separation wall between Israel and Palestine, where he and his crew are shot at by a teenage sniper. In each of these places, Ripper spends time with people who are transforming tragedy and injustice through the power of empathy. The central metaphor in the film is the Tibetan meditation practice of Tonglen, in which the practitioner breathes in the suffering of another person and then transforms that suffering into compassion on the out-breath.
While I was watching this film, I found myself in turns irritated with Ripper for his western solipsism and embarrassed for his corny earnestness. There was something so incredibly tacky about the box-of-chocolates approach to suffering the film took. It wasn't that I doubted that Ripper's heart was in the right place--that was unquestionable--and I certainly appreciated his ambition. I just felt that he had taken on an impossible task, or at least a task that it was impossible to do well.
And therein lies the danger of undertaking to make spiritual work. Artists who make the other kind of work--the kind I described earlier--have a much less risky job. It's relatively easy (and perhaps relatively trivial) to express one's clever or idiosyncratic style or sensibility. Artists like Marcel Dzama, Elizabeth Peyton and Paper Rad, for example, positively excel at this. Their works are instantly, if only moderately, gratifying.
When an artist undertakes to make work that is spiritual in nature--whether that means it provokes a meditative state or a feeling of spiritual uplift or a sense of mutual responsibility and love--the risk of failure becomes really fearsome, because failing to do so is really much more serious than failing to be witty and cute.
What I am asserting is this: explicitly spiritual art often makes us feel embarrassed; work that is not is often shallow and coy. Kevin Rodgers proposes a possible alternative:
'I've always found it difficult to share, be it time or company. I'm not an emotional exhibitionist. Yet the self-satisfaction I get from being alone is hardly fulfilling, and is certainly a model for exclusivity. While reflection isn't in short supply, making concrete an ethical commitment to respect and care is. For me the Christian dictum 'know thy neighbor' is a task unto itself. I live in an apartment building with fifty other people and know only two of them, because they were friends when they moved in. We don't need more 7-year experiments on tone and chakra. We need to know our neighbors.'
This is a call that's outlined in Nicholas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. Bourriaud argues that art can be made of human relationships, made of compassion and empathy, in the same way that it's historically been made of stone or light or emulsion. What Kevin is suggesting is that this may be the material with which we can best fabricate spiritual works.