About Style and Substance
Rain blurs the view of the world in Maine.
I took a week off blogging last week as I watched the siege of Ukraine. Even as I attended to how the horror unfolded, I was also preparing to move out of New York City (NYC). My goal in leaving is to return to the Ghost Nets site where I restored habitat (1990-2000) in Maine by April 8. In Maine the view I have of the greater world is softer. There are different lessons to learn from that site than what I can learn in NYC. Both trajectories feel driven by familiar narratives about dominance and helplessness but really point us to different and unfamiliar outcomes. The former, siege and the latter, leaving, are narrational styles.
Putin seems to be the tip of the narrative spear of a capitalist paradigm. That tip is where ecocide meets totalitarianism. The bind Putin has the world in is that our economic stability still depends on fossil fuels, such as the natural gas he supplies to Europe. That dependency is his leverage. If we challenge his behavior, he will not only unleash nuclear weapons but also, cut off natural gas. A strongman is defined by the Brittanica Dictionary as,
1 : a politician or leader who uses violence or threats
2 : a man who performs in a circus and who is very strong
Putin fulfills the first definition.
Trump, his favored ally fulfills at least half of the second definition.
Putin exemplifies how a contemporary strong man behaves: dangling the carrot of fossil fuel
dependency while brandishing the violent sword of cruel and tyrannical power over the lives of others. He is not, however, invulnerable. Modern hackers have joined the war and Zelensky has craftily used social media to artfully resist this asymmetric war .
As I considered the news, I was also negotiating the complicated and layered logistics of leaving NYC. I was born in NYC and feel like I’ve been a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker since childhood. As a mature artist, I feel woven into the vital force that still locates NYC at the epicenter of international cultural life. I enjoying my lifestyle and a vibrant art community here. But like Europes’ dependency on natural gas, staying has become untenable for me. That may change, but right now I need to pull in my own economic traces. It is a known given that artists are barely supported in the United States and the cost of living and stamina required to maintain that engagement in NYC is very expensive. Google tells me that, “To live comfortably, a (NYC) resident would need to earn at least $12,489 monthly before taxes. That's pretty steep. If you chose to live in the more affordable Bronx borough, you'd need to earn three times the $2,312 monthly rent rate before taxes, which amounts to $6,936.”
My personal fairy tale is that the market will imminently recognize my value and recompense my loyalty with an easier time of it all in NYC. In fact, very few artists or our purveyors can manage well. This is not a new idea. In Maine, I can live a simpler lifestyle as an artist at the cost of close personal connections to a bigger artworld. Leaving feels like a divorce. Some colleagues have responded to my leaving as an abandonment.
Both narratives, Putin’s aggression and my leaving seem dramatic, respectively on the global scale and in my personal life. Both activated memes that obscured realities. Both are relevant to my aesthetic concerns.
The Oxford Dictionary defines a meme as, “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.”
Arguably, a meme, by definition, is something stylistically familiar. In a world out of control, with people like Putin able to create massive havoc, it’s comforting, despite the downside, to resort to a resonant meme: the fairy tale of a strong man’s indomitable power; the NY artworld’s absolute control of an artist’s fate.
The meme that links global, personal and aesthetics right now is a fairy tale that a white knight will save the princess. That meme has become disconnected from the substance of reality. The political translation on the global stage that Putin seems to exemplify to himself and some other eagerly avaricious politicians across the world whom hope to emulate his “success,” such as Trump and his acolytes, is that a strong man will bring order to ravished humanity, even when they are the perpetrators. Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine by claiming he was rescuing the population from Fasicists. In fact, there is zero evidence of such a threat. In the case of Putin and the Ukraine, despite Russian assertions that Putin was rescuing a nation, in fact, Putin in the guise of the white knight, instead of “saving” Ukraine Putin, is ravishing the Ukrainian princess.
The best analyses I’ve heard are close to home. Putin is acting as the uber-bully not only because he CAN but because he embodies toxic masculinity and must dominate the world to feel secure. NATO and the US are red herrings. We have embraced our own helplessness by failing to divest ourselves entirely from fossil fuels. But there are options and the options for alternative fuels and energy conservation continue to expand, not easy but as this report from the Brookings Institute, possible.
The real question to me is why most of us enable and support the meme of the flawed male hero. Personally, my simplistic opinion is that this goes back to tropes of certain ape behaviors that reify an alpha male. Actually, that conflation of community position and heinous behavior may be completely unfair. Most of us however have never gone beyond the meme of the bully as leader. In the real primate world, an alpha male is not always the strongest but rather the one recognized as the most successful negotiator, protective, generous, compassionate and unifying in the group, as Frans De Waal has detailed. In the human world, the term alpha male is often pejorative, synonymous with being a strong man bully and yet reified as necessary to economic success. Newt Gingrich was a key architect of that conflation in the public and especially political mind, paving the way for the current drive towards totalitarianism in the USA, even as he proclaimed, as Putin has been, that this behavior is all that stands between “us” and Auschwitz. In this case, I would argue that the real narrative is between the style and appearance of dominance vs. the substance of common good. The fairy tale is that the style of bullying dominance, as, totalitarian control, is equivalent to the substance of what makes a great people.
In the artworld, the inexorable danger of a totalitarian system, is the danger of how a small number of people may dominate and capitalize on an underserved majority. That critique was analyzed before the NFT explosion by Clare McAndrew for Artsy in 2017. This is a physically located dominance: as the artist Nancy Chunn once said to me because, “NYC is still Mecca.” Today, that MIGHT be a fairy tale. We don’t know yet. But NFTs and Zooms have disengaged the locus of global art activity from place. Art has migrated into a geographically disengaged virtual world where culture continues to adapt to exigency, hinting at a new aesthetic.
That migration is challenging our assumptions about what art should look like and where it should live. The fairy tale is that the that look of what we recognize as art must be styled to fit vary narrow margins and seen in very special places, in which the uber gallery assumes the role of white knight (ravishing the marginal artists that feed the system). That meme may be breaking down, just as climate change, COVID and the war in Ukraine have dissolved national boundaries.
As NFTs become ubiquitous, the question of visual style arises: high tech, high polish vs copies of what already exists, or something else. My question is, when is high polish a reflection of classism that reifies the status quo of privilege?
I may be leaving NYC but I’m not leaving the artworld. I don’t even need to assume I won’t come back. My new work will unfold over the year ahead as a hybrid experiment between the geolocated and the geo-dematerialized: an exploration of substance over style. I don’t aspire to high style. I want to escape the white knights of the world and find my own path to aesthetic agency in whatever geolocation I find myself. I aspire.
The thing is, although New York is exciting, the Maine islands are mystically beautiful albeit like all islands today, vulnerable. I can aspire and nurture my soul in a whole other way there, a way that includes all our vulnerability. That will be the substance I will bring to the climate change negotiating table from Maine.