Comments on Sought/found by CK MacLeod

@ Scott Miller:
This reminds me of a conundrum I recently encountered with a certain DrJ in relation to a project. I cannot win this argument except by undermining myself, and, if I were to win, I would undermine you, further devaluing my victory. For my victory to matter, I need you to wax (grow). That would require my waning (shrinking), but your growth depends upon mine.

It seems my best bet would be continuing, ever more abject failure. I think this is a good beginning.

Scott Miller wrote:

Imagine what you could do if you weren’t, in your opinion, “a fake.”

Maybe the only thing that enables me to be less than 100% fake is my open recognition of my lack of qualifications. I can critique an art video like the above from a certain perspective, but it's not the perspective of an authentic connoisseur of art videos/films.

Take the last little uncertainty: It looks to me like this particular work may originally have been on film, but has been transferred to video, but I'm not really sure even of that - thus my faker's uncertainty about the correct designation. I'm not really sure what the "whole" work consisted of. I've heard that the film was 30 minutes long, but the 'tube seems like a self-contained excerpt.

I could name several makers of art videos/films - the biggest names plus a few more significant artists whom I know to have dabbled - but, though I may have run across Wojnarowicz's name somewhere or another, before a few days ago I wouldn't have been able to identify him. I have no idea how many works like this one he did, if any. I have no good idea who might have influenced him.

I'm not saying at all that someone who isn't an expert can't have anything valid to say. I just try to stay clear about what I am and amn't in a position to do. To whatetever extent I imply greater expertise than I possess, then I am faking it, and risk being embarrassed by someone who comes along and points out where I got things wrong.

The artist wasn't the only one dealing with vanishing time - he was just more conscious of it. If there were more time for us, we could examine the piece in that relation, as "concrete universal."

@ Scott Miller:
The Crucible has never been the same for me since I saw the Wooster Group do a version in which they ran through it at auctioneer speed. Unfortunately, it was in the pre-YouTube era.

I'm not sure that the Wojnarowicz piece should be interpreted as representational art, but it lends itself to being taken that way at least to an extent - as the inside of a 1992 John Proctor's head, his pre- or extra-verbal subjectivity.

@ Scott Miller:
"Piss Christ" was such a stroke of genius, and so beautifully realized, that it makes me feel sorry for all artists working in the genre and in some sense competing with Serrano, and even for Serrano himself, having to find new reasons to work after having done that.

"A Fire in My Belly," being called "Ant Christ" by some, is a more complex piece with a different intention. It unfolds in time, something which the artist is running out of. That he uses up his vanishing life in part by repeating and reversing himself, over and over, and with obscure, never-to-be-explained, raw and ugly gestures seems to deepen the sense of waste, but waste is integral to his message: He's becoming a wasted life, one of many wasted lives, declared "unclean" and tossed out with the garbage. Yet out of pain and loss and nightmare and nonsense he constructs a timeless space, an intimation of immortality shaped by an unflinching confrontation with death, with the reduction of life and funerary symbols to dead matter, as "trite" as ant trails.

@ fuster:
I'm not playing schlemiel. I honestly disagree. The video does something for me that perhaps it doesn't do for you or Scott, or certainly for migs. I take what it does seriously enough to have to doubt that a blog post about its reception rises to its level. It would be a flaw in the critique if it got in the way of or pretended to be superior to the work it depended on and was in a sense seeking to rescue.

If you can get Eric Cantor and John Boehner to call a press conference condemning me, I might be inclined to give the question a second look.

Scott Miller wrote:

Your writing about the work was more creative than the work itself.

Y'know, there I've got to disagree with you. I tried to write about how the reception of the work more fully realized the artist's intentions, but, totally apart from his success on that level - identifying himself as a martyr, his martyrdom hallowed by the infinitely regressive Pharisees of our time - I think the work itself succeeds on its own terms.

I don't know if you clicked on the link to Sullivan's piece. I think he handles the video's thematic elements well: As an HIV victim, a gay man who came of age during the time of the epidemic, and an avowed Christian, he connects with video viscerally, and is quick to grasp it thematically. I'd try to break it down formally, try to explain its cinematic grammar, and why I admire it, but migs has already informed us that it's "trite."

@ Scott Miller:
You don't agree with everything I write? That's appalling.

I think a few generations ago I might almost have been able to fake my way forward as an "art critic," but it's been too long since I was anywhere near engaged enough in the "art world." This piece was about a political-cultural collision, not much about the particular work at all.

@ Scott Miller:
You assholiness is on a different level. But back to miguel's comment:

that some one would undergo such an ordeal, in order to lift that immortal burden from the rest of us, that is the symbolism.

What an economical summary of conservatism's inverted Christianity: Christ's suffering as an eternal "get out of jail free" card for the righteous, relieving them of all burdens, especially the burden of compassion.

miguel cervantes wrote:

If such a thing was attempted about
Mohammed, the artist would run the fate of Van Gogh, or Naguib
Mahfouz’s translators

This particular artist is rather beyond the reach of terrorists as well as of your expert theological and aesthetic critique, but I guess you missed that part, along with everything else.

In other words, can we presume and hold sacred, or put in the place of the sacred, the attainment and delivery (to those "with ears to hear") by the artists of oneness with a greater, eternal spirit, even in anguish and agony, and pity those who know nothing better than craven opportunism? Or, even without our pity, we can leave Boehner and Cantor to their smallness, and laugh at how easily, automatically they're converted into co-curators and promoters of what they and their presumed followers seek to destroy.

Scott Miller wrote:

The winning happens as a result of what happens to the Pharisees.

"I may be dead, but you'll always be an asshole."

(Michael Rooker in CLIFFHANGER)