Going On and On About Art

It's a demonstrable fact

 

The Creative Act

From the labyrinth beyond time and space

 

White Collar

California contacts New York to check up on Connecticut

Going On and On About Art

I never really realized how much people write about art until I came across ARTbibliographies: Volume 29, Number 1. It's full of little, one-paragraph summaries of articles from a six-month period, and, at nearly eight hundred pages, it's thicker than many phone books!

At first I liked the idea of getting the gist of an article without having to trudge through the whole thing. But then I discovered that the summaries were as dreadful at the articles themselves. In a way, I suppose that's a compliment to the reviewers, since they did such a good job of condensing without any loss to the original content.

Take, for example, the summary of Shaheen Merali's "Under Different Skies," a piece from Third Text: "The author suggests that the site of a converted slaughterhouse [for an exhibit] conveyed a sense of the vulnerability the artistic community feels in the face of cuts in funding ..."

Poor pitiful artists!

Jerry Cullums' article in Art Papers showed more promise; at least it had an amusing title: "On Cultural Ownership and the Migration of Symbols: An Essay Containing Only One Quotation from Homi Bhabha." It turned out to be one of those impenetrable treatises with phrases like "explores the notions of syncretism and hybridity ..."

"Syncretism and hybridity," indeed!

A.D. Coleman, one of those rare people who can write well about art, and not writing some dreadful, little summary, had an interesting explanation for such (un)aesthetic verbosity: "How my colleagues have managed to go on and on about the stuff can only be explained by the demonstrable fact that many of my colleagues love to go on and on."

The Creative Act

Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.

If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

T. S. Eliot, in his essay on "Tradition and Individual Talent," writes: "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."

Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.

In the last analysis; the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Art History.

I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this mediumistic role and insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act--yet art history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art through considerations completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist.

If the artist, as a human being, full of the best intentions toward himself and the whole world, plays no role at all in the judgement of his own work, how can one describe the phenomenon which prompts the spectator to react critically to the work of art? In other words, how does this reaction come about?

This phenomenon is comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano, or marble.

But before we go further, I want to clarify our understanding of the word "art"--to be sure, without any attempt at a definition.

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good, or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Therefore, when I refer to "art coefficient," it will be understood that I refer not only to great art, but I am trying to describe the subjective mechanism which produces art in the raw state--à l'état brut--bad, good, or indifferent.

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfactions, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane.

The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of.

Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal "art coefficient contained in the work."

In other words, the personal "art coefficient" is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.

To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this "art coefficient" is a personal expression of art à l'état brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be "refined" as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his verdict. The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation: through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.

White Collar

The short daylight in February brings out the worst in folks. Some get downright meaner than usual, while others experiment with ever greater doses of depression. In response to the coldest temperatures of the year, people end up fanning some of the darkest flames of human nature, often with questionable result.

David Sipkoff wasn't having the very best morning. The trip from New Rochelle to New London started out much too early and then deteriorated rapidly into one of the worst driving experiences of his life. The unpredicted, early morning storm of snow and ice, complete with frequent near-whiteout conditions, turned the highway into little more than a shooting gallery: a carnage of twisted metal, shattered glass, and screaming ambulances. According to the advertisements offered by Connecticut's Chamber of Commerce, the state lay outside the two major storm tracks on the East Coast and so avoided the worst effects of North Atlantic winters, but that morning, for David, it all seemed like a lie. He wished he could have met personally with the Connecticut Chamber to let them know verbally and richly the level of what might be called charitably their "self-deception," yet such a recital would only have ended up proving that they weren't from New York and that he surely was.

But, of course, he wasn't really from New York. He'd started his life in Philadelphia, but he'd been thrashing it out in Gotham City and the nearby area so long, and so successfully, that they might as well have made him an honorary native. Unlike those whom he regarded as an army of insecure or complacent incompetents hiding behind any number of inflated titles and tiny job-appointments, Sipkoff had deliberately grafted himself onto a big-city vein that flashed him through any number of Bijou financial establishments on Manhattan at lightning speed. And every step was just a little bit higher. He may or may not have clawed his way to the top of the pyramid, but he surely felt important when the call came through from Allen, Cathcart, & Reynolds, a firm so prestigious that they no longer needed a downtown address. Early on, the partners offered to put his name on the masthead, but Sipkoff politely declined. He told them that he did his best work out of the light. Yet, in a funny sort of way, David's working life had been exactly like the drive he'd made that very morning. All kinds of slashing and spinning, some of it very gruesome, and all flying this way and that, but he kept it on the road and kept going no matter what, and no matter who.

That was why he'd been contacted about New London in the first place. He didn't suffer from sentiment, and the conglomerate, whose name Sipkoff didn't even care about, needed desperately the services of just such a man. Because problems at a near-invisible corporate arm could hide so deep and dark, solutions required someone who wouldn't come up for air even if it took days or weeks, no matter how perilous the water. And that was how bad things might be, and why the conglomerate went so far from the usual paths to find Sipkoff's special brand of help, regardless of the cost. After all, it wasn't everyday that California contacted New York to check up on Connecticut.

As such circumstances might suggest, the job had demanded extensive research, far beyond the usual. For better than a month, Sipkoff had been analyzing every lead from every document he could secretly pry out of Connecticut via the main headquarters in Los Angeles, working to isolate and then reconstitute the disparate elements. But the process needed more than what he could gather from conventional means. Despite the best use of his contacts, he'd had to hop impromptu flights to California, Quebec, Massachusetts, and, oddly enough, Ohio. All very secretive. All chasing down very dirty information. And, after considerable travel, after staying up repeatedly on informational jags, two and maybe three days at a time, Sipkoff had perhaps made his way toward powerful and even dangerous results. At least, that was what he could suggest to his employers, but matters of absolute proof were not so simple. Certain names kept appearing, but disappearing: Hopkins, DellaGuardia, Fowler, Davis. He'd found tracks to phantom bank accounts and mysterious money transfers, but it was difficult to establish the kind of detail that would stand up in a court of law, everything being lost and not lost in an unusually industrious backwater of documents and not documents.

So, even with the best research, he might not be entirely convincing, although he could be entirely sure. To obtain the best results, somebody was going to have to jump off the deep end to help him, although they might need a little push. This was also why Sipkoff was perfect for the job. David knew timing, how to find the exact moment and force the maximum profit from what he'd obtained. And that was why, just the evening before, he'd settled on DellaGuardia as the most vulnerable target and decided to make the drive the next morning. After all, he'd had to. He sensed that the file on New London had reached that critical stage at which it threatened to melt down to nothing in the cabinet. So it didn't matter to Sipkoff what the next morning was going to do, it was time. He might also have been reacting to something like his pride. But, regardless, after one final late-night pass to select the most devastating materials, Sipkoff stuffed near-pure heat into his black, cloth briefcase and pulled the straps tighter than usual in hopes that the unstable nature of it all would hold together through the next thirty-six hours of test and trial. Really, it wouldn't take much longer than that.

Or maybe it would. Despite David's melting cabinet, or official pronouncements from the Connecticut Chamber, the particularly low barometric isobar, coupled with that most deleterious shift of the oceanic air mass, threatened to spoil everybody's fun. Of course, nothing lethal happened on the drive, not to David anyway, a near miracle, but when Sipkoff arrived at the Unidyne Building in New London, a near-anonymous building in a near-anonymous industrial complex, its vast parking lot boasted far too many open spaces for a work day. It was almost as if David had outsmarted himself. All that perfect timing ending up suddenly on an almost empty stage. But, even if Sipkoff was anxious for a fraction of a second, he was experienced enough that he wouldn't let it show.

As a matter of fact, he was so experienced that he knew enough to plan for unexpected eventualities. Now standing beside the car door in the subsiding storm, carefully holding the dangerous briefcase, he knew the situation required him to appear appropriate to the surroundings, safe, just in case anyone happened to notice that he wasn't exactly a character from the everyday. To that end, he'd left his expensive car at home and dressed a bit less Manhattan. After all, New London offered a rather complicated atmosphere. The town still openly depended most on its coastal identity as opposed to the relatively new industrial and commercial parks that had taken hold on its periphery. Errors of appearance were certainly possible, but gross errors of ostentation he left to those foolish enough to make them. DellaGuardia came to mind. Sipkoff remembered an interview in Malden, Massachusetts, when an informant went on and on about the expensive bad taste of DellaGuardia's ever-changing wardrobe. As David now moved through the last of the crystalline sleet toward Unidyne's glass front, he congratulated himself on selecting a modest, black trench coat and a near-anonymous gray jacket beneath, choices calculated to give the impression of a world below the board room, but not that far below. Still, if necessary, he probably could have passed for believable down on the docks. He'd carefully developed a number of faces to fit a variety of situations and even could be very ingratiating if it ever served his ends.

And maybe that's what made it so easy for the main receptionist to like him. Maybe, looking into what she thought were his eyes, she believed he was more or less just like she was. Perhaps, on such a cold morning, she saw something that made her wish she was somewhere else with someone just like him. And she was sorry to send him on so quickly to DellaGuardia's office on the sixth floor, almost the top floor, because there was something so warm and so personable about him and the way that he thanked her.

Unlike the scene he'd played in the lobby, however, Sipkoff didn't need anything out of DellaGuardia's receptionist. When he looked at her, he saw mountains of puffed-up hair, washed out to look beige, a middle-aged woman who thought she was a "professional," trying to fool the world with applications of beautician-recommended, anti-aging make-up and lots and lots of bad theater. Sipkoff recognized her more as a caricature than a character, more of a creature than a person. She probably wasn't much better than her boss. Maybe she was just as arrogant. David thought it might be amusing to allow her full opportunity to demonstrate what she'd turned herself into.

Typing at a computer when he entered, she did not look toward him. Sipkoff shifted the briefcase from his side to directly in front, grasping the handle with both hands, not only to round his shoulders down and look more sheepish, but also to appear defensive and insecure. Further, he wagered to himself that the movement might cause her instinctively to look in his direction. He won the bet, although she didn't stop what she was doing, and only turned for a second. After looking him up and down quickly, she went back to the world of keyboard and screen: the not-so-subtle sign of an instant dismissal.

"Good morning," she said automatically. And then, with a tone floating gently on the surface of an undercurrent of bother, "Is there anything I can do for you?"

Sipkoff reasoned that she was entirely uninterested in doing anything for anyone other than herself.

"Good morning," he said with a feigned timidity. "My name is David Sipkoff. I'd like to see Mr. DellaGuardia, if he's in. I don't have an appointment, but Mr. Cathcart, he's been doing business with Unidyne for some time, he called me last night about some figures negotiated at the close of the year requiring Mr. DellaGuardia's immediate personal review." And then, with a carefully practiced whine designed to foster irritation rather than sympathy, he added, "I had to drive all the way up from New York."

Of course, Sipkoff knew that his having driven all the way from New York, or Newcastle for that matter, wouldn't have made the slightest difference.

It didn't.

"Well, Mr. Sipkoff, at the very least, you should have called. As it happens, Mr. DellaGuardia hasn't been able to make it in as of yet. And, although I expect him shortly, he has considerable important business that may take most of the morning. I certainly can't guarantee that he'll have time to see you personally. Perhaps you could leave the package and he could get back to you?"

David was pleased that she hadn't even glanced at him while reciting what he knew to be nothing other than a string of often-rehearsed phrases. Still, he had been impressed with the smile that flashed across her face at what he could only read as moments when she richly enjoyed the petty meanness of what she was saying. Finally, however, he knew that he had a script much better than hers. He knew about the Los Angeles message that DellaGuardia would find when he arrived and the kind of paroxysms it would cause. Still, it was time to heighten the effect, and David thought he ought to stutter.

"N-No. Mr. C-Cathcart told me that he needed Mr. DellaGuardia's signature, and I-I think he'd want me to wait."

The receptionist sighed something in response, and there was a needle of contempt in her voice, but David had a hard time not laughing openly at her performance. The irritating delay that he had expected from the moment he arrived had not been without its entertaining aspects. Though held up by the storm, DellaGuardia would be in shortly, and it didn't seem as if anybody knew what would be waiting for him. So, in part to be as comfortable as possible, Sipkoff asked the secretary with the mountainous hair where he could find the closest lounge. Because as far as she knew he was nothing other than a minor annoyance, she directed him down two floors, over to the right, then to the left, and far, far away from where she otherwise might have sent him if she had any real idea of what he was just about to do. Not that he minded. As a matter of fact, he would have been worried if it had happened any other way. He was always an invisible traveler until the very last second, and it would not be too much to suggest that he'd come to enjoy the sudden look of recognition on the faces of those who had failed to appreciate just what could happen when they weren't looking. But it wasn't the very last second, so Sipkoff exited the office temporarily to discover just where DellaGuardia's "left arm" had sent him.

The lounge was truly awful, a hole-in-the-wall created no doubt by executives to address a "low morale problem," basically with the effect of making it worse. As could be deduced from the polyester decor, cheap appliances, blaring colors, and meaningless art, executives spent no time there, and they didn't think much of those who did. Not that Sipkoff didn't somewhat share the same opinion. As a matter of fact, when he noticed the two near-invisible employees in the lounge, along with the other furniture, a man and woman quietly involved in an impassioned conversation, he wondered if he wouldn't have yet a bit more entertainment to pass the time.

Sipkoff noticed that the lady was a little overweight and that she was crying, or trying not to cry.

She sobbed, "I-I know I screwed up. I didn't get any of the answers right. I-I just know I didn't say what they wanted."

She jerked her head back, a reflex gesture to toss the long, dark hair away from the front of her face. But her gaze remained downcast. She was seated, and the man was standing, and Sipkoff reasoned that she was asking for comfort, but her companion appeared puzzled.

He asked, "When did all this happen?"

"Yesterday afternoon," she replied, shuddering slightly in a way that made Sipkoff want to cover his mouth.

Her companion continued, "Have you heard from them? Have they turned you down?"

The woman looked up somewhat surprised.

"No, but I-I screwed up so bad. I just know I didn't make it." And then she said, "I can't seem to make anything work out right."

Her head lowered again.

Sipkoff watched invisibly as the companion's eyes drifted from one side to another and the corners of his mouth turned down for just a moment.

"Well," he said, "I'm not sure, but it seems a bit soon to be so worried. I think you ought to let them call you and say one way or the other before you get yourself so strung out."

No effect; or, the wrong effect. The lady sighed heavily and shook her head.

The companion tried something else: "Well, look at it this way, even if they turn you down, you'll know better what to say next time."

But the lady might as well have been dead. Sipkoff, still invisible, leaned forward with interest, keeping his hand on the briefcase. The woman's companion colored slightly and scowled; his eyes went dark, and he said to her with a quiet speed, almost as if he were impatient:

"Look, I'm not sure this'll do any good, but I grew up in one of those rotten, little towns, you know, small enough to be one of those everybody-knows-everybody-else's-business kind of places. And that's really not so bad. Lots of folks get born in places like that. Lots of them grow up and stay there. Just because I ended up somewhere else doesn't mean much of anything.

"And, back there, too long ago, I knew this kid a couple of years younger than I was. I might not have known him at all except, when I was really little, my parents made me go to church. This other kid's parents did the same, so I knew who he was and who his parents were, but I never really talked with him. Church didn't let you make much conversation. Besides, he was a couple of years younger, and that kind of thing mattered a lot back then.

"But, later on, it didn't matter so much. After the days of school and church, the world allowed a larger tribe, and I saw Tom out and about during the week, or on the weekends. I'm sure he and I met up in the same bunch now and then or talked a few words from time to time, but we were never close, not like, 'tight friends' or anything. Still, he seemed right enough."

The woman looked up quizzically toward her companion, and Sipkoff wondered what any of this had to do with anything. The speaker continued:

"But I can see you don't exactly understand where all this is going. I figured I'd say something about my mom. She's almost seventy now. She's still ok, gets around alright, goes to work and the grocery store. But even though I moved out of town at least twenty-five years back, I guess she suddenly thought I might enjoy reading items from the local newspaper. Mostly without warning, she'd send something about somebody who I hung around with opening a new business or something about a storm knocking a few houses and phone poles around. When I'd write or call, I'd say something like, 'How interesting,' or 'Glad to hear that so-and-so's doing ok,' that sort of thing. After all, what was I supposed to say? Local papers are most interesting to locals. For all I know, it was her way of thinking that I was still there. Of course, I'll never really know, and she'll never really tell me."

From the far-left corner of the room, a soda machine suddenly whirred into high-gear.

"But imagine my surprise when I opened the letter that popped up in my mailbox only last week. The small-town paper had a really big story, jam-packed with exciting detail. Evidently, just a couple of weeks before, the body of a twenty-nine-year-old woman was found scraping against the pilings of one of the wharves. Pretty steamy stuff for February, particularly for midday, and there it was splattered all across the front page with as many pictures as the local cameraboy could snap. Better still, there was absolutely no mystery. Everybody knew everything, even if it was a bit after the fact.

"I mean, apparently, on Friday evening of the week before, a very important person arrived in town. He'd come all the way from New Bedford with a very important package. The paper said he was forty-one years old, nearly my age, and that his name was Dan. The package contained what, when I was much younger, would have been called 'junk'--heroin. But nobody talks about 'junkies' anymore. You know how it is with fashion. They're all pretty rich these days.

"Anyway, Dan meets up with Tom, the kid who used to go to church, who also happens to be forty-one years old, and the twenty-nine-year-old lady. And I guess they decided to have some fun, the kind of fun where you pull down the shades for a long time--a long time. And they decided that Tom's mother's house would offer the most comfortable yet discreet surroundings. So off they go.

"You see, Tom was living at home, as they say. His father died a couple of years back, and his mother just didn't know what to do. I guess she took it real hard, wouldn't go out of the house, wouldn't see anybody. The property started having real problems--the lawn, the fence, the paint, stuff like that--and because it was in one of those neighborhoods where appearances mattered, Tom had to come to the rescue, if you know what I mean. Years and years ago, Washington Avenue was one of those byways down below the bluff, near to Main Street, but not so near as to be in the same neighborhood with the wealthier folks who really ran the town. Washington Avenue started out as nothing but fishing people, workers, folks like that. But time marches on, as they say, and a bunch of lawyers, doctors, and real estate dealers marched right in along with it. That's why appearances came to matter as much as they did in the neighborhood, and that's how Tom ended up back at his mother's house, why they all went there late that Friday night, and why the surroundings were so comfortable and discreet."

Sipkoff was practically beside himself, and it was all he could do to keep from roaring with laughter. And he wasn't the only one amazed by the inappropriate story. The speaker continued:

"But it probably seemed to take forever to get from where they met up to where they wanted to be. It's like that sometimes. Anyway, after they made their way to the house, the part that was purely Tom's, at about the same instant that the bottom of the shade hit the windowsill, the very important package, probably full of equally important tinier packages, hit the table. And, like I said before, off they go.

"And fun is suddenly everywhere and everything, so much fun that the twenty-nine-year-old lady stops breathing. The paper didn't say whether she turned a couple of colors before she went South, but I figure that doesn't mean she wasn't still having fun. At least that might explain why there was so little detail. What the paper did say was that the two gentlemen eventually noticed, and that they thought she might be more comfortable wrapped in a blanket. They put her under a bed. Then I guess they forgot all about her for the better part of a day and a half, when suddenly it's somewhere around three o'clock Monday morning, and everybody remembers to go for a walk down by the beach. And then it's suddenly midday, and the twenty-nine-year-old-lady is discovered getting to know the barnacles along the pilings of North Wharf."

The unhappy woman in the lounge had heard enough and was practically at the point of exploding. Her friend had turned into a horrible bastard, and his irrelevant story sounded to her like little other than ridiculous garbage.

"Why are you telling me this?" she loudly insisted. She was having a difficult time holding back the hot tears of failure and all that could happen to her if she was right about her interview. She almost shouted, "What does this have to do with anything?"

Perhaps she was right. There was something like cruelty in his voice.

He answered her more forcefully than the way he had told the story, "I guess I'm just trying to say that folks seem to enjoy shooting up lots of stuff these days." And, as he made a quick gesture with his right hand jamming a phantom hypodermic into his left arm, he said, "It all seems like a lot of self-indulgent, poisonous crap to me."

He was wrong, of course.

And, suddenly, DellaGuardia's receptionist appeared in the doorway. Her eyes wide, she looked pale and almost as if she were visibly shaking.

Sipkoff turned, stared deeply into her panic, and then smiled so broadly as to make himself, finally, entirely visible.

Any comment or inquiry regarding this work, specific or general, may be addressed to Conrad's literary executor at archivcon@stare.com.