Mandatory Liberation: the new self-maintenance

Posted: January 5th, 2009 | Filed under: The Production of Creativity |

A review:

How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Art Life Museum
by Keri Smith

Throughout creativity’s recent rebirth as an economic asset, I’ve watched the core concepts of my own fine arts education translated and mobilized for mass culture. Just as tattooing, punk rock and DIY culture have moved from the margins of consumerism to the center, so activities from the art professor’s bag of head-spinning tricks have become almost mandatory behavior for good citizens.

In pre-digital High School, the kid with the camera and darkroom access performed an edgy ritual, she was the voyeur we all wanted to have around. Now everyone’s snapping, and the off-kilter ephemeral shot is just part of one’s duty in the collective media memory machine.

The composition of surrealist poetry, once a polemical response to specific conditions of sense and nonsense, is available now as an impulse purchase at Borders, via refrigerator magnets that fold into daily kitchen routines.

Such moves are interesting as examples of changing categories of consumption, what the market deems “normal” and what’s relegated to the fringe. They are even more interesting to me as part of a rise of new obligatory behavior for some classes of good modern folk. Creativity is increasingly lauded as not only an employable asset, a competitive trait, but as a required set of practices for all sound individuals.

There are a slew of books to this end, but one that recently caught my eye at the local library was Keri Smith’s How to be an Explorer of the World: Portable Art Life Museum (Penguin 2008). It’s a trade paperback, classified by the Dewey System under the number 153.35 (Psychology > Mental Processes and Intelligence > Imagination and Imagery > Creativity).

This playfully designed book is printed in entirely hand-written script, all caps, and is designed to appear as if scissors and a Xerox machine played a large part in process. Forty of the book’s 204 pages are designated as a notebook for “Field Work.”

The book is far from dogmatic - “Read in any order” is the first instruction on the “How To Use This Book” page. However, the author also admits to borrowing from arenas where the same content is in fact professional dogma. The book attempts to aid the reader in processes of noticing and collecting that are allegedly common to the artist and the scientist. “The tendency to collect and document is similar to the work of an ethnographer,” Smith writes on page 8, “EVERYTHING IS INTERESTING.” She then goes on to describe for us our “mission” - “to document and observe the world around you as if you’ve never seen it before.”

To aid us in this mission, we’re offered a series of 59 “explorations,” catalysts to seeing the ordinary in a new light. These include plenty of arrows from the avant-garde quiver, such as “Found Writing Utensils” “How to Wander Aimlessly” “Interesting Garbage” “The Shapes of Stains and Splotches” and “Case of Curiosities.” Each exploration is written in the imperative tense - we’re ordered to try this or that new way of acting in the world, and then we’re reminded to do it well, to be thorough, to document everything carefully.

In content and in tone, it’s stuff my students would probably recognize from me. In other words, it’s all stuff I think is good and useful, advice worth following. But the question I have - of myself for sure, but certainly for this book - is to what end we’re being asked to follow these instructions? Smith’s book, however playfully and casually framed, still advocates for a particular set of practices, habits of living, that would be better imitated than ignored. We are gently invited to try these things in our own way, but there’s still a sense that we OUGHT to do these things, and to do them well.

What are we to fear if we don’t live in this way? Boredom? Inauthenticity? Chumpdom? Loserhood? Unoriginality? Smith’s language is almost liberatory - liberation through the voluntary adoption of professional rigor outside of any particular professional sphere. It’s tempting to see the rigor itself as the implicit goal (shades of de Sade?). At the least, it’s a rigor applied first for the aim of self-betterment, outside of any one social context. Real ancient Greek stuff, Spartan.

I could say the same of other books that equally reflect my values and even my habits - Wrights & Site’s Misguide to Anywhere, the Do-It project from Obrist and e-flux, Miranda July’s project with Harrell Fletcher, Learning to Love you More, or even the dreaded PostSecret project. For those of us moderns who don’t have to worry about food and shelter most days, the spectre of the regimented life always hangs close, so such prods to new sensation and intentional living are welcome.

But intentional living can serve many different ends - there’s always SOME end. Thoreau’s the guy that started me thinking about it, and sure his “experiment” in the woods was primarily an exercise in self-improvement. But in the case of Walden, the end was a book, a text, an attempt to grapple with the medium of printed words to produce a meaningful experience for readers. He didn’t let those two years by the pond stay as organized collections of experiences, logged for posterity. Rather, the records served as a catalyst to his own memory and imaginative attempts to connect with readers.

On the book’s back cover, Smith urges those without imagination to “put the book back immediately.” What about the imagination required in empathy? A confrontation with an enemy, a stranger, or even a friend can render life as strange as any charmed tour or scavenger hunt. The strangeness one feels when the bottom falls out of a familiar relationship is both transformational and scary. If we work at it, and are ready to extend forgiveness and peace, we may find a world as new as any surrealist vision.

But that requires love, not rigor. Smith invites us to set up our own personal museum, after centuries of museum practice have left us with a horde of problems around provenance, reclamation, theft and forgery. Museums are monuments to someone or something - I’d rather they be to something we all understand or even fear, than to replace them with millions of individual museums that only monumentalize the self.

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