Media for Heartbreak

Attempts at conversation

Important work was being done at the press check-in desk of one of New York’s several art fairs during “New York Art Week”. Instances of sunglasses worn indoors: 51. Outfits that bore a pop of red: 90. Tabis: only 7. Pleats Please: 5. The tabis, it is safe to assert, have been memed out of fashion. The meager Pleats Please count is due to the fact that travel for this occasion was minimal. Between the observations, the work being done was making known members of the art press feel like celebrities and asking unknown ones how their names are spelled. The latter would often produce their tattered press credentials, some of which have not been used for their intended purpose in years, if real at all, others belonging to publications and media holdings whose names must have been generated by a randomizer, if they, too, were real at all. All of them would receive their press bracelets, but for the brief moment that it was thought they might not, some managed to radiate an astounding amount of anxious haughtiness. “I AM GOING TO KILL HIM!” yelled the Turkish woman, dressed in boho chic ca. 2014 and brandishing a press pass of doubtful veracity, complaining about the member of the security staff who did not allow her un-bracleted plus ones in. “She would say that,” muttered my colleague, whose roommate is Armenian.

What to say of the art upstairs? Not all that much. Few things, it seems, are allowed: tiny blurry still lifes; paintings of women taking selfies, also small but less blurry; paintings of asses in fishnets and feet in heels, not as small, but also blurry; colorful and listless abstractions; contemporary takes on old master genre painting; small-scale ceramic and metal sculptures, also listlessly abstract; absurd toy-like stunt pieces that rotate so as to amuse. As Alex and I take hungover laps through the main fair of the week, hopping from one escalator onto the next, we joke half-heartedly that we are at the art mall. We are not the only ones to make this joke, I’m sure. The fair is empty, largely, and the placid presentations of unstirring blue-chip art are reminiscent of pebbles on a beach. By the coffee-and-sparkling-wine bar there’s a Turkish Airlines Business Lounge, the installation of which is explained only by tens of thousands of dollars worth of “partnership” fees. Next the events: at an old firehouse in honor of a Triennial in St. Louis, at a Femme-and Queer-led art space in honor of the existence of Femme- and Queer-led art spaces during “Art Week,” at the satellite office of the prestigious residency in honor, seemingly, of champagne. Crudités galore. I was supposed to end up at the upscale fake health-store-supermarket activation in support of the friend who organized it, but before that happens, other friends heading to the party of a literary magazine intercept me in Nomad, and my night ends in the speakeasy of a co-working space.

The lack of names and titles here is not out of pretension but rather out of an excessive consciousness of Google Alerts, myself being on the receiving end of a great number of them, for the “accounts” on which I work for my job. I try not to write about things that bore me, and yet, what else is there to write about when that’s all there is? I don’t bother going to the rest of the fairs—the two, or three, of them there are—this is the worst way to see art, anyway. The “art world” was never my destination, but it makes complete sense that I ended up here, along with my fellow malaised practitioners of the beaux arts in need of a living who make up the corpus of this labor force. Actual artists struggle here, where the people to be most admired are those who have a natural acumen for administration or bureaucracy.

Why do anything anymore? A question I ask myself often. It is good, this question, powerful even, has driven many a man to suicide. And while, thankfully, I’m past mulling over the utility of rituals such as showering, eating regular meals, going to bed every night, and any of those other repetitive things one has to do to maintain function, being seated in the window seat of the plane that is whatever one might call art as an industrial complex (“the art world,” “the creative industries,” “the art industrial complex”), with a somewhat decent view of the goings on outside, a limited ability to leave the seat if one’s neighbor’s asleep, and no control whatsoever, the question flashes above the galley entry in an alarming red. I do not need to bore anyone by listing the causes of this—technological, economic, political, or otherwise—but I will state that the outcomes are, more often than not, dispiriting and might make one feel like their participation is just contributing to the general terminal decline of pretty much everything. Certainly, “art week” made me feel this way, along with the endless dispatching of emails into the void for which I am paid and my extracurricular efforts to write something of worth—artistic (ideal) or monetary (unlikely); perhaps it could help me qualify as “an alien of extraordinary ability” (mercenary).

I snap out of it every now and then, though—mostly through encounters with great works of art (a term I’ll admit I wield in an esoteric manner), meaning not just mastery, but a wholly sincere attempt at portraying a central thought, feeling, problem, intention. Commitment to the bit, I guess. It’s not even the isolated fact of a given work’s existence that revives the will to live in me, but the way it converses with its viewer/reader/listener, such as to. Yes, great (to me) art births conversation (NOT discourse), or what someone else might call community.

Just the week after that cursed other one to which I keep referring, I had found myself at the induction ceremony for new members of the pre-eminent honors society for artists in this country, and was struck by how informal an affair it was, even if it did take place in the institution’s grand auditorium, with its large ornamental mouldings and crystal chandeliers. Painters, architects, composers, and writers, as famous as painters, architects, composers, and writers can be, scurrying about, late to their seats on stage, some unable to stop their endearing, mischievous whispering and giggling with their seatmates, even as the group picture is being taken by a photographer with an unwieldy flash system on the balcony across the room. The photographer jokes around, singling out errant subjects of the group photo, conducting these luminaries into stillness. In the audience — more luminaries, as those on stage introduce the awardees and inductees, who are sometimes their friends, mentors, mentees. The mood was that of giddy celebration, and, at times, it nearly brought me to tears.

In fact, the question of art’s purpose, in these troubled times, was raised in the central keynote of the ceremony. Delivered barefoot by its author (heels, blisters), it asserted that art for art’s sake was never a fashionable notion—and that nobody ever thought it was; that the idea that art generates empathy, too, is a boring argument; that art is best regarded as autonomous from, or parallel to, the propulsive forces of power and progress. You can read it here, but, ultimately, it landed on the thought that art’s most important function is to put humans in relation with one another. So: consensus, it seems.

Concurrently, I was reading The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm, which happens to be a great book, mostly about conversations. An excavation of the many narratives (conflicting, subjective, malicious as they may be) that make up the mythos of a public biography, in this case that of Sylvia Plath. It’s a complicated web extending from the center that was Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes, its dissolution, and her suicide, by which she is often spoken of as being defined in death, though the book reminds us constantly, that it is Hughes who was defined by it in life.The conversations that make up the web range from items of gossip whispered and misheard at parties; protracted-and-forths between lovers, friends, and all those in-between, epistolary or otherwise; arguments between practitioners of the same craft; family quarrels; the conversations that writers struggling to write have with themselves.

In this web, her biographers get caught—both those who take on the formal task of writing the zstory of Sylvia Plath as well as friends, acquaintances, and neighbors who stumble into it inadvertently, motivated by rebuke, record straight-setting, self-exoneration, and whatever else; more often than not they end up trapped by the spider who presides over this web: Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s aggressively protective sister, and the custodian of Plath’s estate. The book maintains its focus on one particular strand of conversation and conflict, which is between Olwyn and Anne Stevenson, of which Bitter Fame, Stevenson’s long-suffering biography of Plath, ended up being the product.

I mention Olwyn mostly to say: fucking Olwyn. At one point, Malcolm compares an abusive letter Ms. Hughes sends to Anne Stevenson, to the malicious hissing of writer’s block; and indeed, Olwyn’s insults spare none of Anne’s virtues and faculties, intellectual, writerly, or personal, in an attempt to convince her that the project—or rather, specifically, her work on it—is worthless. In all of her wile, Malcolm positions herself as a fascinated observer of the web (though occasionally wearied by it), prodding the spider, too big to become its prey.

But of all of all the strains of conversation that the book presents, it is the tension—the negotiation—between being a woman and being a writer, that I nodded along to most ardently, writing “Bachmann!” (Ingeborg Bachmann, who is famously quoted as saying “The first thing between a man and a woman is fascism.”) in the margins, every time Plath’s Daddy is presented in close reading. It is a tension that Malcolm examines in Plath, in Anne Stevenson, in herself: “Writing is a fraught activity for everyone, of course, male or female, but women writers seem to have to take stronger measures, make more peculiar psychic arrangements, than men do to activate their imaginations.” Do I need to go into why a woman of nearly 31 (me), still fostering fantasies of literary greatness is particularly preoccupied with these questions? I don’t think so. But I’ll say that having recently become what I’ll call “alone,” I still do not find writing easier, and the same questions plague me now with the added consciousness of the ways in which my life as a woman may be hampered by my life as a writer. But we all have choices to make, and the best I can do is stand by mine.

In heartbreak, even the most mediocre art can become “great” because, in some essential way, it fills the conversational void that crashes upon the heartbroken with its deaf silence (caveat: not if it’s shown at an art fair). In fact, I’m not sure if any piece of art has ever expanded what empathy I naturally possess, but indeed it has made me feel less lonely. Here’s the playlist I’ve been trying to drown the silence with; it includes many versions of the same song, sung and arranged by different artists, not always best serving the song, but repetitive and uncanny as heartbreak itself can be.