Different Strokes for Different Folks in Different Times and Places
The first winter snow of 2022 in the Joan of Arc Park.
I spent the evening of January 6, 2022, at a Vigil organized by Move On for Voting Rights in Verdi Square on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a few blocks North of Trader Joe’s. A snowstorm was predicted. I planned to do a short performance at the event to culminate the project I have been developing for Legal Graffiti. The project has been a series of tests for The Blued Trees Opera. There are a number of ideas I’m exploring, including how to leverage the virtual world as a platform for experimental opera and other ways to tackle the political narrative.
I didn't feel excited about heading out to do this event and wished I did. I'd listened to and read the news off & on all day and watched the drifting clouds on our political horizons at a time when the world has never more needed democratic ideals and the truth based on fact seemed dark indeed. Those needs for ideals and truth had never seemed more urgent or more imperiled nor had I ever felt more threatened by my neighbors or the future as I modestly tried to stand for what I humbly believed is right. The darkness of the clouds I saw filled me with dread as I prepared my voice and closed the door of my apartment behind me.
This is what was interesting about my experience performing during the Vigil before the snow began. The setting was rush hour traffic. The mood of the vigil was very sedate and serious: sober. The crowd was mixed but seemed weighted to over 50 and predominantly white. It was hard to calculate how many people attended. Maybe 1-200. Move On had organized many small sites as additional events that took place across the city and is planning voting outreach initiatives nationally. There was a fair amount of singing familiar songs, like “This little light of mine,” some with new lyrics and a somber walk with handheld lights around the square. I had come with a preconception of how I intended to perform The Blued Trees Opera fragment I had planned but I soon realized a discreet event was uninteresting. The work I did, excerpt loaded on Facebook, is intentionally embedded in the location & circumstances without any finessing. I still have one more experiment I mean to do in the snow at the Joan of Arc Park for this phase of work and then I have a lot to think about. The completed project won’t launch publicly for several months.
These experiments have evoked a number of technical and political questions as I’ve moved things along. The most direct interface with any virtual platform is to document and then upload directly from my phone. That begs a lot of questions about aesthetic polish because direct interface doesn’t allow for a lot of polish. I’ve been watching Succession and reading Don Quixote as I think through my own observations about polish, narrative and politics.
Art polish is the extent to which conventional formalism is applied to content. for example, Succession is highly polished. That's part of the attraction and repulsion. It's a comment on the content- ie., elitism and conventional commodification values, which is fueling my current interest in NFTs. Cervantes is very deliberately accessible, continually making commentary on his protagonist and everyone he encounters and undermining and perception of any specialness except in his vulnerability and even pathos, engaging the audience in his humanity.
My research isn't pedantic because polish determines the perception of narrative. I think how we deliver narrative is what stands between us and kleptocratic fascism. This question is part of what fueled the de-skilling movement a few years ago, a part of an effort to disengage art objects from capitalism but it also legitimized a lot of simple laziness and sloppiness in delivery.
Succession requires a very strong stomach and a lot of patience because the confluence of polish and repulsion is excruciating to accept. It is an endless stream of fat man slips on a banana peel humor, which I have always found odious and cruel. I haven't yet completed my research & reflection. Psychologically, I find it to be very hard work.
In Succession, meanness is not only given a high gloss of polish but combined with gross forms of vulgarity. That is what makes it so difficult for anyone with empathy to watch but it seems that's exactly the point. I've tried hard to be clinical in my analysis of the aesthetic strategies and have been comparing them to "Don't Look Up” directed by Adam McKay, one of the writers on Succession, which I think is much more successful in engaging an audience with similar premises about privilege, especially because of the (spoiler alert) hilarious ending. Succession makes an effort to reconcile the same conflict in character development by season 3. It's all about choices and intentions but very difficult to wade thru the tensions. Interesting to consider why some "lay" viewers among us love watching it. I suspect the attraction is very simple: art polish is extremely comfortable because it offers conventional elements of entertainment packaged with enuf distance that the issue of accountability is eliminated. My ambivalence about that is the extent to which it leaves the audience comfortable with a cultural status quo. But for many people, that's the only door into content.
Despite the arguably hot and volatile market for NFTs and how it bypasses all these implicit issues about commodification inherent in narratives and polish, the very notion of dematerialized but physically located art challenges assumptions that are way ahead of how gallerists and museums or even current NFT collectors are thinking about art, artmaking and ownership. That landscape is changing so fast and so responsively to other current events that it’s really hard to think through, especially when time during COVID has become so dislocated and out of sequence. Launching anything, as much art must eventually realize, particularly anything planned for “later in the year,” as any part of The Blued Trees Opera will be, becomes ever more surreal, precariously and dangerously uncertain even as I build the project with small bricks of fragments of sound, visuals and text in unfamiliar forms.