Accidental Art Consumption
Posted: December 24th, 2009 | Filed under: Sketches in Time and Space
Anticipation of an immanent holiday visit, and rediscovery of an item lost in last summer’s house move, prompted these thoughts on difficult family relationships and accidental art reception.
The following item could well have served my previous post summarizing a summer of flux through found objects:
What you see here are two parts of a little artist’s book by Jonathan Monk. It’s essentially an artwork, one of my favorites, and one of the very few that I own. The piece consists of a folded message detailing a place and time, and also an envelope in which to mail the piece to an intended person. The assumption here is that the recipient of this artwork can expect to find either the artist Monk or the person from whom she received the letter on that place at that time - in this case, at the Eiffel Tower at noon on October 30, 2008. Here’s what it looks like unfolded, in pristine form:
I love this little thing, for some reasons I admit are wholly subjective and others I’d try to convince you about. So when, in the process of moving, I found it disassembled and used as a coaster/sketchpad by my mother-in-law, I was - well, I was pretty pissed. By the time I found it, there was really no reason to call her attention to the infraction. Despite the fact that she really had to have gone way out of her way to use this artwork as scrap paper, I could never have expected her to understand what this thing was, and she was trying to help.
Besides serving as a catalyst to my usual selfish judgments of others, the object now serves as a funny little interruption of my aesthetic pleasure. Here an artist sought to orchestrate a willful, intentional, if arbitrary social encounter across space and time. Instead, like a kite caught in some power lines, the work ended up channeling other information from a different source. The sender and recipient of this added information were less arbitrary, the object more so.
It’s not the first time this has happened. A few years ago, the same relative paid us a visit and, somehow missing some soap while taking a shower, grabbed and used an artwork by Anne Beffel instead.
Anne had cast a series of soap bars labelled “I’m Sorry,” and distributed them for free at the World Financial Center in 2002. I chose to try and preserve the object as a poetic catalyst, rather than subject it to ritual washing and eventual disappearance. Instead, it got used just enough to remind me of the things that drive me nuts about my in-laws.
Of course, the artwork was the better for it - this hardly needs saying.
So as I head into a week or so of co-existence with people who love me dearly, but whom I sometimes struggle to connect with, I’ll take with me these memories of objects thwarted by life with others. In both cases, I was saddened and alarmed by the gap these harmless and naive infractions illuminated. In both cases, the original object and my enjoyment of it is the better for it. I’m still mad and sad to have lost these things in the state I wanted them in - but I can see the rightness of it.
And I’ll add, as one last infraction, an account of my own act of accidental reception. If I had evidence, I’d tell you about the time I accidentally flooded Christoph Büchel’s first show in the U.S., and shut down Maccarone for a day. (I’m really sorry for ruining your day, Michelle.) Instead, here’s the back cover of the only Stanley Brouwn book I own.
As you can see, I once set this beautiful little artwork down in coffee on my messy desk. The rest of the book is spotless - white paper, no pictures, black text. In keeping with Brouwn’s work, all the materiality and specifics are brought by the viewer; reading the book, the viewer has conjured in her mind a series of lengths of raw material. It’s a poem composed of copper pipe and rope and brick.
And now, coffee - liquid, out-of-control, and destined for my body - thwarted temporarily by art.