Nature doesn’t love me yet.
Jacob Wren
Before:
I started writing about art in 2005 because my friend Rosemary became editor at C Magazine and invited me to write something. My first piece was on the relation between Alain Badiou (who I had just discovered) and contemporary art. Rosemary was loyal and, between 2005 and 2008, invited me to write for every issue. Several times I missed the deadline and, due to her kindness, my piece was simply postponed to the next issue. I enjoyed writing for C Magazine but have to admit I didn’t take it so seriously. I wrote basically when I wanted to, about what interested me, and (miraculously) took as much time as I required for each piece. At the time, I had absolutely no idea what a luxurious situation I had accidently stumbled into.
Today is July 21, 2014. In the past few months I have written and delivered four texts (three about art and one for a literary periodical) and now have four more to write (including this one) in the months to come. Of the texts I agreed to write this year, I am suddenly realizing that basically none of them deeply interest me and wonder why I keep saying yes. At the very least, I should only say yes to the ones that pay properly and turn down the others, but I can’t bring myself to turn down artists or institutions based only on how much they are able to pay. After I turn in a draft, I often have this feeling that it doesn’t particularly matter what I write: if it sounds intelligent and has a bit of panache they immediately accept it (sometimes making more suggestions, usually less.)
As I write this, I am approximately three weeks away from joining you all at the Wild Bush Residency. I have never particularly cared for nature, and I’m wondering if there might be some parallels between my attitude towards the great outdoors and my current qualms regarding art writing. The first parallel I have in mind is almost comically literal: I say yes to writing about art I’m not particularly interested in and I’ve said yes to joining you all in “nature”, where I never go and am not drawn to. A few years ago, when I for some reason bought a bathing suit, I don’t think I’d been swimming in over ten years. I still haven’t used it. I wonder if it’s like riding a bike or if I would simply drown in the attempt.
My lack of interest in nature was one of the main ways I differentiated myself from my parents as a child, on our many car trips out into, or across, Canadian nature. My parents were people who (claimed to) like taking long hikes through the woods. I was not like them, preferred to listen to little known music that could be many things but was always produced in and by the city. I remember almost nothing of our many family trips, only the cassette Walkman that never left my ears, perhaps playing Soul Mining by The The, music that described the alienation of city life as something terrible but paradoxically also the ultimate ideal. Art was another way I differentiated myself from my parents, all the weird books and records. Visual art came a little bit later but represented something even more rarefied. It was an activity even more consumed with its specialized status as art and all that might entail. It was years before I found any visual artists whose work I actually connected with, but nonetheless felt the only way to go was forward, across this territory where artistic questions were the only questions that mattered, territory I somehow considered to be opposite to trees, mountains or lakes, territory that emerged through thinking, through the imagination, through reinventing oneself in ways that hopefully broke with the dull family trips that made up the content of my actual upbringing. I ran away from this more nature-based way of thinking of the world, of pleasure, and of myself, and have (so far) never looked back.
But now I find myself at a strange impasse, where the art I’m supposed to be writing about interests me no more or less than the nature I’m supposed to be joining you in. I’m now far more critical of the claims art makes for itself, and far more worried that any alienation I feel from nature is only the personalized edge of ecological catastrophe. Over the course of the twentieth century art fought extremely hard for its autonomy, and in many ways achieved it, but the current ecological crisis suggests another picture of reality: there in fact is no autonomy from the natural world we are destroying and simultaneously depend on for our survival. Wall Street has also fought very hard for its autonomy (from regulation) over the past fifty years, and though there will always be a part of me that believes in art, I am now far more likely to see art’s desire for autonomy as a kind of corruption, as an unwillingness to deal with so many aspects of the world that in fact most need our care.
When I write about contemporary art I rarely write about it in these terms. I am critical of the art world in my texts, but at the same time attempt to engage with the artists’ intentions and approach their work with respect. However, more and more I feel a kind of anxiety. That my respect for the work is not genuine, but takes place only because an institution is paying me. And this, of course, also has something to do with autonomy. The high-modernist idea of artistic autonomy might now be out of fashion, but our conception of an artist still has much to do with someone to whom the normal rules do not apply, who can go their own way without necessarily considering the full context or repercussions. An artist is someone who decides what art is. There are of course many artists working today to make art less autonomous, more responsible, more socially engaged, etc., but they are often still working as artists and therefore a paradox is present at the heart of this endeavour. Of course, I love paradoxes, and believe that working within and around paradox is often the closest we come to truth. But then I fear that I think this only because I am an artist, that my ways of thinking about the world were formed in and through art, and that paradoxes definitely won’t save us. What we need is rather an almost complete change in how we think, live and work; a change so complete that I no longer believe art can provide it.
After:
I didn’t swim, but I did put on my bathing suit and go in the water. The lake was cold and I didn’t like it. Slowly, over the course of thirty minutes, or maybe longer, I walked in up to my waist and perhaps higher. This experience was significant enough that I am trying to write about it here while at the same time knowing I won’t be able to do it justice. It was stupid. I wasn’t terrified but it was the most visceral fear I have felt in a very long time. It wasn’t a flashback but the fear was extremely resonant with the kinds of fear I am sure I often experienced as a child. As I waded in, I was simultaneously realizing that I had a fear of swimming, a fear of the water, was seized by this fear as I slowly forced myself to take small steps forward, processing the fact that it had been so long since I’d been in the water that I’d genuinely almost forgotten such a fear had even existed in the first place. (I mean, of course I was afraid of swimming. Why else wouldn’t I have done it in over ten years?)
I thought about fear and distaste, about how many things I now avoided, and about how many of the avoidances that over time had shaped my personality were now more or less forgotten, so my personality and habits simply felt self-evident to me, the way things had always been. But they hadn’t always been exactly like this. There was an earlier fear or bad experience at the heart of each avoidance, a fear or bad experience I mostly no longer thought about. How does this contradict or not contradict my feeling that as soon as things are one way it opens up the possibility that they could also be otherwise?
I thought about fear in relation to contemporary art. How when you are an artist you’re never supposed to say: I wanted to do something more adventurous but was afraid so I chose something safer instead. Of course this happens all the time, another of arts many dirty little secrets. As an artist I’m perhaps allowed to be afraid of the water (as a child it was something I was naturally expected to overcome), but I’m not supposed to be afraid of taking artistic risks. Or I am, but I’m not supposed to go around announcing it.
It also got me thinking about ecological catastrophe as the result of a fear of nature. So many technologies began as ways of conquering some aspect of nature – the fire to warm the cold and light the night, the spear to protect yourself from animals and, in doing so, hunt them to stave off hunger – or are these only unexamined clichés? New technologies often begin in military desires, and wars are always about land and natural resources. I have most often understood these things as exploitation of the natural world, based on greed or addiction, but I find it striking, counter-intuitive, to see behind some of our actions long buried moments of fear. Many others must have written about this before.
There is a concept I remember reading in Ivan Illich, that all tools go through two watersheds, a first at which they become productive and a second at which they become counter-productive and turn from means into ends in themselves. There was a past moment when new tools might have helped assuage immediate fears, and our current moment in which so many of the old tools that surround us do anything but. Fear often leads to paranoia, and there is a certain quality of paranoia to the way in which capitalism devours everything, wants to keep growing, wants more and more as if anxious some day there will be nothing left. An anxiety that is little more than a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was standing with the lake above my waist, feeling fears I hadn’t felt in a very long time. Earlier I wrote that art had been a way to differentiate myself from my parents. But art also became a place I could start to feel in control, make my own rules, escape so many of the contingent threats and fears that made up my interactions with others and the world. Control can of course be a reaction to fear, but it is certainly not the only one. Curiosity might be another. Wanting to learn about something until it no longer frightens you. But I was in the water and I felt this fear. It was the moment of the residency that I definitely now remember most strongly. I am still speculating on what this moment might tell me about art and the world, hoping that it is not only about my own small neurosis. But perhaps the only lesson is that I can almost still feel it. It is something I will remember. And that is what we want, in the end, from art: something that will be remembered. Just another way to try to survive.