"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying".
Woody Allen
I saw the Sacramento Bee photographer's work (Reneé C. Byer). I am usually kind of offended by this kind of work, as it seems somewhat vampiric or vulture-esque, and maybe at first, I just thought it was interesting but still awful as a premise, but then I felt miserable, nauseated, and very depressed. It had been a rough two days, but rather silly compared to what this family went through. I sat down to try and read something and forget the whole thing, perhaps avoiding art questions at all, and sure as shit I picked up the wrong thing. "Can you think of occasions when your first response to an artwork has been immediately and overwhelmingly physical instead of intellectual?" (Ben Brantley, quoted by Peter Schejeldahl in "Let's See").
I immediately then thought of an Anselm Kiefer painting in a room of his and other artist's work which was hanging, at the at the National Gallery of Art in London, the first day I got there (I had decided for the last time to try and go to art school, way back in 2001), and it was the first place my lovely sister took me, and I couldn't believe it was really Kiefer's work hanging, as I had only seen it in books before as photos, and that moment, to this one, and all those aspirations I had and thought impossible, conflated with the feelings I had or have about those photographs of Byer and the child dead from cancer, thinking of all those moments, collapsing into one another, devastated me. Post modernism has taught us to hate emotions, almost like the religious dogma of hating the sex, but I would not even conceive of my life had it been not for those Kiefers and what they meant to me (they were, after all, about stars and the cosmos, and they reminded me of all the times I tried so hard to come up with different things to make in my silly little room I had made into a studio, in the improbable place of Tegucigalpa, with the same pathetic H.W. Jansen art book second volume, and all the cheesiness was just too much for my overdramatic heart). But that is undeniably real. As real as the deaths of children by cancer, and as real as shitty work posing as a political message posing as artwork. William T. Vollmann's explanation of a forensic doctors' (in his nonfiction book "Rainbow Stories") rather cold humor as a reaction/defense mechanism developed from working for too long in a children's cancer ward, where the mortality rate reached about 80%, made perfect sense.
I might not visit those photos of Byer again for a while, but I certainly won't need to. Right now just being alive seems like such a privilege! I don't care if they are high, middle, or low art. They might be tragic, overdramatic, etc. But they also give you a lot to think about, at least, if you are cold-hearted, emotionless postmodern.
If work (art) is apathy producing, or very easily understood and digested as a socio-political message which can be clear-cut, separated, packaged, and consumed, never even thought of again, like a pair of trendy shoes, then it is not really worth seeing. If you saw it and nothing happened, you didn't even get annoyed at having to pay the ticket for watching a piece of pseudo marxist propaganda or some weak interpretations about the Iraq War or whatever, it probably is not worth trying to decipher "why is this art or not?" or get involved in such silly dilemmas. Facts are facts, life is what it is. Using cheap semiotics tricks of turning objects into symbols and fancy wordplay in order to make 'political art' is like sticking feathers up your ass in order to fly, if I am allowed the cliché. Which is fair enough, but don't try to make me watch you doing it, please.
You know who you are you pseudo artists! And you are too boring to even mention. So I will not.
Q.E. fucking D. assholes.
X
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