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HOLD IT AGAINST ME
difficulty and emotion in contemporary art
By JENNIFER DOYLE Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5313-3
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCING DIFFICULTY
Critics have limits. Our faculties break down when an artwork reminds us of something so painful, or makes us so mad, or is something we like so much we struggle to write about it. Or when we are tired and having a bad day. There are whole genres certain critics just don't get (for Adorno, famously, it was jazz). Critics can be tone deaf; we can miss the pleasures others take, ignore the irritation that others feel. We can be willful and stubborn, blind to the dwindling relevance of those artists we love and indifferent to the emergence of new practices we don't understand. We all have limits that look pretty uncritical from most angles, and we rarely know these limits until we encounter them.
I begin this chapter with a story about hitting my own wall. In the fall of 2007, I booked and then failed to make an appointment for a one-on-one performance encounter with the English artist Adrian Howells. I had also made an appointment that day at a beauty salon for a cut and color, far too close to the timeslot I'd arranged to see Howells's performance. My hair was covered in a mud of dye and wrapped in plastic when I looked at my watch and realized that I needed to be across London in an hour, and it would take at least that to get there. I flipped through magazines, doing the math in my head. Anxiety rose like a tide in my throat as I realized that there was no way I was going to make it there. I dug the phone out of my purse and called to cancel, without, however, leaving enough time for another person to take my place.
It was a careless and ordinary mistake. But the nature of Howells's performance and my reaction to missing the appointment suggested that something more was in play. Howells's work maximizes the possibilities of what he describes as "accelerated intimacy." He has explored the contours of confession and autobiography in performances that rehearse the most painful and embarrassing moments in his history for small audiences, and sometimes audiences of one. In Held, Howells invites his audience into three twenty-minute scenes. First, they sit at a table, drink tea, and chat. Then they sit together on a couch in front of the television and hold hands. Last, they go up to a bedroom, lie down together, and spoon (fig. 3). Participants respond to this performance differently. Some are ill at ease and on their guard; some make themselves right at home. One person fell asleep. When Howells stages a performance like this, he sees perhaps six people in a day. As one might imagine, these appointments are hard to come by. I felt the full weight of this; by screwing up the appointment, I prevented another person from seeing his work.
Later that day I went to the venue's address to meet friends who had honored their appointments. I held in my hands a small gift of cookies, brought to convey my apologies to the artist. Howells had just finished up for the day when I got there. I wanted to be simply apologetic, but instead I found myself fighting back tears—and, worse, failing to keep them in check. We drank tea and ate the cookies. I was embarrassed and self-conscious that my affect risked expanding into a selfish display of abjection: shame mounted as a kind of counterattack.
Howells was sympathetic and warm. Looking at him through my tears, I felt even worse. My emotionality was well out of proportion to the circumstance. My friends and I walked back to the train station. As I listened to them talk about their experience of Held, I tried to come to terms with the fact that I'd subconsciously sabotaged my appointment. I'd been looking forward to it all week, had been careful to make sure I got the timeslot, and then scheduled a pointless event right over it. Clearly the whole idea of Held challenged me. Apparently I couldn't inhabit the structure of that encounter without being overwhelmed—by what, though?
I was afraid of what might happen, of how it might make me feel. I think too I was equally put off by its artificiality—not that my own feelings would be inauthentic but that they would be delivered within a temporary architecture of intimacy. What happens at the end of the appointment? I was attracted enough to the idea to schedule the appointment but disturbed enough that I made it impossible for me to honor it. In doing so, I subconsciously preempted the betrayal I expected, for the experience of Held would feel either very empty and disappointing or very full and disappointing. I had reacted badly to what Jon Cairns describes as the "confusing context of 'staged' intimacy" in which Howells works. His medium is the affective density of the interaction between artist and audience, and even a failure like mine should be understood as part of the work's performative field. By failing to make the appointment, by failing to cancel in time to allow another person to take my place, and then by trekking down there anyway to solicit his forgiveness, I managed to extract the caretaking that Howells offered within the boundaries of Held but outside the boundaries of the event. I insisted on getting what I thought the artist had promised me, but on my own terms, and after blowing him off. (Of course, behind this self-analysis are years of therapy. The responsibility to each other's time is one of the first things one works through with an analyst, especially if one has missed an appointment or is habitually late.)
Until that day I had considered myself a seasoned spectator to some of the most challenging forms of performance. When we think about challenging performance art, we generally mean not the domestic normalcy cited by Held but what is often described as "extreme" performance involving violence toward the body and sexualized forms of display. Familiar with this kind of work (e.g., the work of Ron Athey, Bob Flanagan, Franko B, Kembra Pfahler, Kira O'Reilly), I had come to assume that there was nothing I couldn't handle.
I would say, in fact, that prior to this experience I was cavalier about my own limits and dismissive of others', as if it were a moral failing to be averse to the sight of blood or be uncomfortable with the idea of live performances engaging in acts that look (and sometimes are) sexual. Howells showed me how deluded I'd been: the mere idea of certain kinds of performance provoked in me a defensive need to assert control over my place in the picture. As a spectator to performance art, I might have a high tolerance for blood, nudity, and noise, but I seem to have a lower tolerance for work engaged with more ordinary forms of relational intimacy, for the things that "feel" like life and therefore cut too close.
* * *
This book is an experiment in thinking about the difficulty that many of us have with some forms of contemporary art and the centrality of emotion to that kind of difficulty. Emotion can make our experience of art harder, but it also makes that experience more interesting. It may make things harder because the work provokes unpleasant or painful feelings. It may also make things more complicated; an artwork might provoke contradictory feelings, and it may provoke in the viewer feelings that are at odds with the affective culture of its context. Emotions themselves are very complicated. They can be impossible to stabilize. For example, none of the following questions is easy to answer: Does a feeling come from inside the spectator or from the artwork? Does an artwork represent feeling? Whose: the artist's or the viewer's? Does a work make feelings? How?
The setting for our encounters with art can make thinking about our feelings especially confusing. For all the ways that emotion animates the way we talk about art—being "carried away" or "moved" by the beauty of a painting, for example—it can be hard to have intense feelings in museums when those feelings go against social protocol. In an art gallery, anger, tears, arousal, and certain kinds of laughter may appear to signal the disintegration of composure, naïveté, and a lack of class. In such spaces, as much as we are encouraged to be moved by works of art, we are also encouraged to remain cool. One of the primary disciplinary contributions of cultural studies to the study of art and literature is its observation that questions of aesthetic judgment are questions of taste and that they are historically and socially conditioned. They reflect and reproduce the values of a class. What you enjoy, how you enjoy it, and how you express that enjoyment can reveal a lot about who you are and where you come from. For this reason, few places will make people more self-conscious of their reactions than a museum or an art gallery. Museums and art galleries are like schools: they are spaces in which we encounter culture, usually on someone else's terms. Many find themselves at odds with a world in which appearing to be cool and aloof is the mark of sophistication. Many of us feel weird and ill at ease before we even cross a museum's threshold. As Jennifer González writes, "The museum as a whole, as an ideological home, does not welcome us equally."
Thankfully, museums and galleries are not the only grounds upon which we encounter art. Many artists project their work into completely different social spaces, in no small part because they want to avoid the affective protocols of official culture. Festivals, underground music venues, city streets, fields, deserts, and private homes can all be more generous in terms of the range of affects they will accommodate. The mood of such contexts is very important to how we experience works of art, for understanding how those works can develop and how their meanings shift as they migrate from one social context to another. Some artists choose to work from the edges of the social spaces of art-making; as practitioners of challenging art, they know all too well the difficulty such work presents to schools, galleries, and museums and so work happily in alternative venues. As critics, what are our responsibilities toward work that quite literally takes us out of our comfort zone, and toward the audiences who seek out these experiences?
Hard Feelings
I was caught off guard by my reaction to Held not only because I am a regular at performance art events that people might characterize as extreme but because I am also an avid consumer of cinematic melodrama (Stella Dallas is one of my favorite movies) and nearly all forms of novels that demand emotional investment from their readers (from the sugary Little Women to the grim Germinal). In general, I love a good weepie like Now, Voyager, and I eat up the stark realism of a film like Matewan. Perhaps it's the professor in me (always looking for the teachable moment), but my reaction to the idea of Held made me reexamine how I thought about the emotionality of such work. Previously I'd approached emotion as something that cuts across mediums; for example, I thought of a sentimental pop song as like a sentimental novel or film, as if sentimentality were a thing in and of itself, which a text might embody and communicate.
The sentimentality deployed within Howells's performances has its own particular challenges. Much of his work has evolved around a feminine persona named Adrienne. In An Audience with Adrienne (2007), for example, Adrienne invites people to watch home movies with her and to talk about episodes from her life that participants select from a café-style menu. Audience members may be invited to share their own stories. Reviewing that work for The Guardian, Lyn Gardner explains that the "unthreatening realm of the domestic" offers the viewer-participant "a direct conduit to our own childhoods, the episodes we recall with pin-sharp clarity and those we bury somewhere deep inside and try to forget." The coziness of the domestic space is a lure; as any student of sentimental fiction knows, homes are haunted. Howells invites his audience into a queer space of intimacy whose edges are shaped by failure and isolation. (What domestic scene isn't?) Held distills the autobiographical exchange of his other projects to the act of simply keeping company.
There is something jarring about the idea of Howells receiving visitors for Held, as if this home were a bordello offering not the sexual excitement of the mistress but the grounding companionship of the wife. He may use the innocence of domestic normalcy to frame your encounter with him, but this very slight shift in the most banal scene of intimacy (from that of a romantic couple to that of an artist and his audience; from that of straight romance to queer domesticity) exposes just how loaded, how overdetermined that scene of domestic intimacy is for many of us. Cairns therefore describes the artist as practicing an ambivalent form of intimacy—a fundamentally queer occupation of domestic, personal, feminine, and reproductive scenes in which sites associated with privacy and safety become instead scenes of exposure. Lauren Berlant describes these kinds of spaces as "intimate publics"; Tavia Nyong'o uses the term extimate to suggest how they can fail, leaving us feeling more alone than ever.
If we expect such a performance to be easy on the spectator, it is because we've already coded these terms (privacy, domesticity, the personal) as well as the feminized labor that defines them (nurturing, supporting, caring) as such. My failure as an audience for Howells forced me to take notice of the contingency of difficulty and consider the place of affect and emotion in a conversation about what makes a work hard for one person and easy for another. Those contingencies pertain not only to the person (and his or her history) but also to that person's conditioning as a viewer, reader, and audience member.
Comparing different forms—novels, music, films, and visual art—one might ask why we are prepared to accept the value of feeling bad when we read a novel, for example, but are less prepared to do so when we go to a museum. Why is it easier for us to watch an upsetting movie than it is to keep company with contemporary art that makes similar emotional demands on us? Why should the idea of attending Howells's performance be more unsettling than sitting through a movie like Secrets and Lies (1996) or Steel Magnolias (1989)? Most of the works of art I discuss in this book ask far less from their audiences in terms of time and emotional investment than does a feature length-film. (Held, for example, is relatively long for performance art, and lasts an hour.) Similarly, why is it easier for many of us to read an upsetting novel than to attend a performance event in which our comfort zone is being challenged? When I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006)—a painful postapocalyptic nightmare in which refugees wander a barren planet, surrounded by starvation, rape, and cannibalism—I felt like someone had ripped out a piece of my soul. Typical for the author, its flatly narrated portrait of a world of extreme violence is also a deeply sexist novel in which women figure as dead weight, objects of rape, or emptied-out symbols of salvation. Finishing it was (for me) an emotional chore. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize, Oprah selected it for her book club, and it was made into a film starring Viggo Mortensen. As readers and filmgoers, we are, apparently, eager to suffer. Contemporary art presenting its audiences with challenging, urgent, but far less cruel images, on the other hand, tends to provoke moral outrage, even when it asks far less of us than do these other genres. So when I ask, "Why is it harder?," I am referring not only to our individual reactions to the idea of certain kinds of works but also to the social contexts that frame those reactions. Try contrasting the reaction to Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary (1997), Ron Athey's Four Scenes in a Harsh Life (1994), or David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly (1986–87) with the celebration of McCarthy's novel or the laurels awarded the artists behind difficult films. Think about it: it takes days to read a novel, and a feature-length film like Lars Von Trier's bleak Dancer in the Dark (2000) demands far more from its audience than does looking at Ofili's work or watching an Athey performance or a short film by Wojnarowicz. Maggie Nelson describes that director's cruelty as both unforgiving and self-righteous: "Von Trier's cruelty does not lie in any capacity to strip away cant or delusion, but rather in an ability to construct malignant, ultimately conventional fictions that masquerade as parables of profundity, or as protests against the brutalities of the man's world in which we must inevitably live and suffer." Thus this kind of work accrues cultural value not in spite of its cruelty but because of it: it rationalizes the brutality of the status quo. It presents "the way things are" as realism, as insight, when in fact it is pure ideology. If people have reacted to work by Ofili, Athey, and Wojnarowicz as if it represented the absolute limit of the tolerable, it is because that work bucks against those conventional narratives regarding the brutal, the abject, and the obscene.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from HOLD IT AGAINST ME by JENNIFER DOYLE. Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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