Cynthia Daignault

Call me Ishmael

 Only the Lonely 

We say the sea is lonely; better say
Ourselves are lonesome creatures whom the sea
Gives neither yes or no for company

—William Meredith[i]

 In 1968, nine men embarked from London on the first solo, nonstop, round-the-world yacht race. Each hoped to become the first person to circumnavigate the earth uninterrupted. The voyage would require each to sail alone at sea for almost a year, crossing the oceans’ most treacherous waters. The journey was so dangerous, in fact, that seven of the men shipwrecked or abandoned the race before finishing. The remaining two were Robert Knox-Johnston and Donald Crowhurst. Knox-Johnston won the race: he was the first and only man to return to London, for which he was lauded, was knighted, and secured a place in nautical history. The other man, Crowhurst, was the last at sea. A relative amateur, he had staked everything on the race. Yet after a series of problems at the outset, he attempted to fake the voyage. He spent months hiding off the coast of Brazil, making no radio contact, circling, falsifying coordinates, and scribbling ever more incoherent entries into his logbooks—poetry, philosophy, ramblings, and outright madness. In the end, as his plans splintered and the certainty of discovery and disgrace became clear, he threw himself into the sea, succumbing to the swells of an indifferent ocean.

 In 1993, Sean Landers embarked on a parallel voyage in writing his novel [sic]. He, too, set out to cross an epic geography of space—one thousand blank and landless pages—on a voyage that would consume his life for just over a year, roughly the timeline of the 1968–69 circumnavigation. Much like Crowhurst, Landers embarked as an amateur driven by dreams of fame, glory, and money, but more deeply by a primal urge toward selfhood. And Landers, too, staked family, reputation, and honor on the achievement. Yet sheer intention cannot guarantee success when crossing an unpredictable void such as the sea, and in many ways [sic] would prove to be a journey as dangerous as Crowhurst’s. Just like a solo sail around the earth, to write [sic] was to float through one thousand pages of undulating, shark-infested uncertainty with only the caged tiger of the human mind as company. Or, as Landers put it in the painting Sea[sic], “when one commits to [a solo circumnavigation] they not only put their lives into the mercurial will of the sea, but their minds are turned over to the mercies and horrors of itself… . All the waves and wind in the seven seas contain not the power and horror of the dark corners of the human mind.”[ii] No wonder, then, that passages in [sic] read like the increasingly delirious babble of Crowhurst. Even the victorious sailor Knox-Johnston remarked that “anyone who goes to sea and says they do not feel fear is a liar.”[iii] Landers set his stakes between the fates of the two sailors: either write the epic and go down in literary history, securing immortality and unquestionable selfhood, or else fail and bring shame upon family, leaving behind only the logbook of a madman who threw himself into the depths.

Solo circumnavigation is not an arbitrary metaphor. The idea of artist as lone sailor is one of the most central symbols throughout Landers’s work, invoked both literally and allegorically from the earliest works ([sic], Sea[sic], 36 Hours, Worry Wart, Alone) to the paintings of his forthcoming 2011 exhibition at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York (where Landers qua sailor returns to the helm, much as Knox-Johnston did, to circumnavigate the earth again as an older man). Perhaps the most moving of all these works is the 1996 painting Alone. The painting, invoking Édouard Manet’s Rochefort’s Escape, depicts a diminutive clown in an insufficient rowboat, alone on a formidable sea—seemingly so hopeless, but embodying what Samuel Beckett wrote of life, “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”[iv] So, too, the clown; so, too, Landers; so, too, each of us. Landers describes the mind-set of such a clown further in the text painting Sea[sic], which imagines a solo circumnavigation and literalizes the metaphor between sea and [sic]:

You are buoyant and you drift in the current of the wind. You see, you think, you are a soul in the shifting winds of limbo. The only voices to be heard are those of your mind. You realize that your mind never really forgot anything you ever saw and heard. There in the watery desert with nothing new to look at day after day, your mind supplies you with everything you ever did see, every sentence you ever heard uttered… . You think that you are alive but you have difficulty proving it to yourself. This is when you begin talking to yourself. You talk to yourself so much that you realize that you are sitting down listening with rapt attention to yourself who is standing up and going on and on about the most interesting damn thing you ever heard, and to this day you cannot replicate that monologue as you promised yourself you would. There on deck, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, you thought as you listened to yourself how this would be the most compelling book ever written and that you must convince the fine fellow to put his elegant words down on paper.[v]

 And so he did in [sic], which stands as the first circumnavigation of oceans that Landers would cross many times in subsequent voyages. Yet Landers was not the first artist to see a metaphor for art, creation, and life in solo sailing. In 1975, the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader set out to cross the Atlantic Ocean alone on a boat just thirteen feet long, as diminutive on the swells as the rowboat of Landers’s melancholy clown. The voyage was to be part of an artwork entitled In Search of the Miraculous. In it, Ader declares that the meaning of the artwork lies squarely in its action: the work is the event, the crossing, and the conceptual undertaking. This assertion, treacherous journey as performed artwork, equates the literal action of solo sailing as metaphor for creating art, and it constructs a framework where the outcome of the artwork is determined as much by the mercurial wills of weather, chance, and ocean as by the heroic gestures of the artist. A point made most chilling in the truth that Ader himself was lost at sea during the voyage.

 Ader’s voyage is the conceptual framework underlying [sic]; the undertaking, the action, and the performance are at the core of the work. Like Ader, Landers shares responsibility for the outcome of the work with chance. There was no editing, and the plot was determined by the luck (good or bad) of the events that befell Landers while he was writing. This methodology is conceptual and performative, and it is present in much of Landers’s work from the period. In so many of the drawings, paintings, and videos of the early 1990s, Landers set out to cross topographies of bounded blankness: one page, one hundred pages, a piece of cut canvas, a sixty-minute tape—empty spaces to sail around in, fill, and conquer. As Landers wrote in Daily Reminder 1991, a precursor to [sic], “I see the words and the empty lines and I realize it doesn’t matter what fills them. It only matters that I pass through them, as each page represents a day, each word a thought, it simply states that I was here, then, now, alive and thinking.”[vi] Each of these works is a conceptual constraint to cross a fixed geographic or temporal plane. Once afloat, the passage is a performance; Landers turns himself over to the sea, shares the outcomes with the fates, and leaves the finished artworks as records of these crossings.

Even the image paintings, seemingly so silent in comparison to the text works, stand as accounts of these conceptual crossings. As Bernard Moitessier, one of the other seven sailors in the round-the-world race, wrote, “My real log is written in the sea and sky; the sails talking with the rain and the stars amid the sounds of the sea, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk.”[vii] How unsurprising, then, that Landers’s first text-less image paintings were of the sea. Devoid of words, yet still real logs of epiphanous silences, indescribable events, language failures, and secret things. None of these works are diaries, autobiographies, or self-portraits, as is often misunderstood. They are logs—records in real time of specific crossings with defined boundaries. In the aggregate, these early works amount to a black box of Landers’s first journeys as an artist, voyages that leave the work behind as ship’s log. To read [sic], or any of the text paintings, is to relive the journey through its log, to view the performance as if it is live, to bear witness to the act of creation. And like every log, they bear all the requisite passages of boredom when traversing the doldrums, madness when solitude takes hold, and rare epiphany when staring at the sublime whiteness of the page, like a sailor staring into the depthless infinity of the sky. [viii]

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gilligan

Gilligan: Hiya, Professor. What are you doing?

Professor: I’m making notes for a book. It’s to be a chronicle of our adventures on the island… . I think it’s a book people will want to buy, don’t you?

Gilligan: Sure, I’ll buy one. I’m dying to find out what happens to us.[ix]

— Gilligan’s Island

If writing [sic] is to set out on a brave circumnavigation of uncharted choppy waters, then what is it to read it? Really, the TV series Gilligan’s Island isn’t far off as a fitting answer. Landers (a quasi Gilligan) sets off on a bold three-hour tour, crashes haplessly on some unexpected island (Mykonos), and aggregates mishaps and disappointments while we the readers wonder, “Are we ever going to get off this island?” Seriously, though, Gilligan aside, [sic] is not a book without precedent. In its claustrophobic, stream-of-consciousness, unflattering first-person narrative, [sic] recalls parts of Beckett’s Molloy, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Andy Warhol’s A, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. Indeed, the first line of Rousseau’s autobiography echoes Landers’s voice: “I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.”[x] This goal, to present the life of one man, and through him to define the larger nature of selfhood, is the purpose of each of these works. Although the books differ in their specific definitions of selfhood, as influenced by the epistemologies of their times, they are similar in their portrayals of the immutable qualities of human nature (lust, guilt, confusion, melancholy, loneliness, and love). So, too, with [sic], which stands as an unflinching portrait of timeless humanity—even though it is told by a narrator who can be summed up as a totally 1990s postmodern hero dude.

When Landers specifically broaches selfhood in [sic], it is often in relation to television. In the first invocation of the self, he writes, “I watched a video of myself naked watching TV. As I watched, my image seemed to fluctuate between beauty and horrible ugliness. It’s either true or it’s something my mind does concerning its consideration of the self. Self. What a big word it is and tacky in the way I’m using it.”[xi] The notion of selfhood as mediated through television was practically innate by the time Landers wrote [sic]. After all, it was 1973 when Andy Warhol said, “Before I was shot, … I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life… . Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television;”[xii] it was 1983 when Jean Baudrillard wrote Simulations, giving language to the undercurrent feeling of hyperreality in modern life; and by 1993, meta-narratives and the simulacrum were virtually hardwired into the psyches of youths. Baudrillard himself wrote that “you are born modern, you do not become so,”[xiii] suggesting that artists like Landers and his contemporaries (Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis, Paul Auster), who all wrote metafiction as their first language, were the first generation of artists born wholly inside the Matrix. As Landers describes it in [sic]:

 Somehow I’ve fatefully become an entity who feels he doesn’t exist if not documenting the moment, either by writing, video, drawing or sculpting. I believe this fear is fed by growing up so tightly married to TV, that I somehow reason that TV characters only exist when they’re “on.”… As someone who learned morality from the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family, who only had thoughts as deep as prime time TV would allow, I myself never felt I existed unless I felt I somehow was on TV myself… . The film crew was always there, and with their film rolling I felt secure that I in fact did exist.[xiv]

Thus, for Landers, self is made not in the upbringing, environment, actions, or soul of man (as in Rousseau, Joyce, Beckett, or Augustine, respectively), but in his broadcast, in his serialization as a character on a sitcom with an audience. The self is not real without the film crew, the camera, the show, the script, the stage, the viewer—the context. This notion of television as the new context for identity is perhaps best articulated in George Trow’s 1980 essay “Within the Context of No Context.” In the essay, Trow asserts that television eradicated a crucial middle distance in American life. TV pulled the “grid of 200 million,” or national life, further apart from the “grid of intimacy,” or intimate life, leaving loneliness and alienation for the individual sitting at home alone watching Gilligan’s Island. As he writes, “It was sometimes lonely in the grid of one, alone. People reached out toward their home, which was in television. They looked for help.”[xv] In this widening divide between the national and personal, only characters, celebrities, and products enjoy identity or true selfhood. As he writes, “Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million… . Of all Americans, only they are complete.”[xvi] It is no wonder, then, that Landers, or anyone, aspires to fame. What in Landers’s work was mistaken for egomaniacal narcissism is instead a sincere attempt toward selfhood. Post television, to desire fame is to desire a real and meaningful existence between the widening grids. There is no selfhood otherwise. Thus, Landers hopes for identity in celebrity and sees himself as a wannabe TV character. As he writes, “I in fact only exist in my own mind as a character in a sitcom. I live my life trying to be cooler than Chachi. More drippingly human than James at 16. Sillier than Gilligan. More environmentally aware than Jacques Cousteau. But all I am is a TV character in search of a show.”[xvii]

Landers found his sitcom in [sic]. To write [sic] is to cast his own Gilligan’s Island. It is a proactive attempt to claim the selfhood that television promises (and arguably a truer self, not founded on stock characters or forged backstories). In one clever action, Sean Landers becomes a character, Sean Landers becomes a show, Sean Landers becomes a celebrity, and on an even deeper level Sean Landers becomes a product. Trow writes, “The most successful celebrities are products. Consider the real role in American life of Coca-Cola. Is any man as well loved as this soft drink is?”[xviii] In publishing [sic], a book that claims to be a veritable stand-in for the real Sean Landers, Landers effectively packages himself as an attractive product, complete with naked guy on the cover to rope you in. The book is sold and disseminated. Through it, Landers’s identity is further branded in product placement. Yet, even beyond the book, [sic] has a duel identity as a rarefied art object; [sic] exists as the stack of yellow legal pages on which it was written. These pages constitute an artwork that, when exhibited, is installed in a massive grid, recalling Vito Acconci, Sophie Calle, or Gerhard Richter. The enormous scale of the installation asserts its concreteness and objecthood. Yet, moreover, this contextualization within the valuations of art world, monetary and cultural, declares that the work and Landers are relevant, valuable, immortal, and expensive. To elevate himself to the level of artwork is to become a kind of überproduct, one that only deepens Landers’s claims on a contemporary selfhood: character, celebrity, show, product, and artwork.

This slippage of identity into artwork is familiar from the early 1960s works of Piero Manzoni. He transformed himself and his viewers into artworks, creating contexts for these transformations. In the Living Sculptures, he signed living people, elevating the individual into artwork; in the Magic Bases, he built signed pedestals that viewers could step up onto, literally elevating themselves into artworks. They are slippery works. Does stripping away mediation remove representation from the work? Do these portraits no longer represent their subject in that they have become their subjects? Or is the other way around? Are the people no longer themselves in that they have become their representations, suffering Roland Barthes micro-deaths of subject becoming object? Or both?

This is the delightful, mind-tangling bender of [sic], too. Landers becomes the character, in so doing the artwork, but on an even more metatextual level, the book becomes a portrait of itself, of the platonic ideal of “book.” I feel we’re traveling deep inside a Russian nesting doll, but Landers explains this idea clearly:  

Do you understand me now? I mean there is a reason to write this book right? Need I explain it once more? Do you get it? Every line asks you if you’re enjoying the book, hopes you are, mourns its failure. Just what real books do, I’m just not fucking around you know? I’m not obscuring myself with a fictional character, or a thinly veiled autobiography. I’ve just related the human experience naked. You get it right? That’s good isn’t it? Are you sorry you bought the book? You can tell me. Oh Sean, quit it … sorry… . But don’t you think I might be on to something here?[xix]

 Yes. And not just in [sic], but in all the text paintings. For instance, in a paragraph where an artist might feel pride at the clever turn of prose or nicely painted passage, Landers simply writes just that; where an artist might base a character on a real-life lover, Landers simply writes her in; or in a section of boredom where an artist’s mind might wander to sex, beer, childhood, or dry cleaning, Landers simply literalizes the mental wandering: beer, beer, beer, beer, beer. It’s a simple idea, maybe, but I can say that when it hit me in my own studio, I was utterly humbled. It was an average studio day. I was painting some such representational work, a landscape, maybe. As the painting progressed, I could hear my own inner voice, prattling on as per usual. I’d been transcribing some of Landers’s earliest text paintings that week, and as close to the material as I was at the time, it hit me profoundly: Landers had already made the painting. Not the landscape on which I was working, of course, but the platonic subtextual painting behind this one and every other. Checkmate.

Fast-forward twenty years. What happens? First, we’re still on the island; Gilligan and his buddies never got off. Actually, it turns out that Gilligan’s Island is the perfect corollary for [sic]. In Gilligan, we get a glimpse of the long-term dangers of packaging and characterizing oneself. To write [sic], Landers had to invent a novel with artifice and craft. There is inherent inauthenticity in that. When explaining this sort of posing, Barthes describes that moment of inauthenticity as “a micro-version of death.” This was [sic]. That moment: when the character is Sean, isn’t Sean, is posing as Sean and somewhere in that fracas, Sean Landers, the real Sean Landers, must die. Which means that as he becomes the character of his creation, Landers risks imprisoning himself in that other “Sean.” Take Bob Denver, the actor who portrayed Gilligan. The show ended, but Denver had to play the young goofball Gilligan for the rest of his life. His is a fate Landers portrays in the painting Old Gilligan. Bob Denver is grayed and aging, yet still required to don the absurd costume of his youth, and behind his eyes is Landers, ever winking that the tragedy and irony of Old Gilligan might be his own. How many more reviews, articles, and books will be written on Sean Landers that still portray him as the young Gilligan of [sic]? How many more times will I read slacker, loser, egomaniac, narcissist, sexist, banal, pathetic, sex-addled, “genious”? Come now, slacker? Landers is one of the most prodigious artists of his generation, and he was then. Egomaniacal narcissist? Landers’s work speaks more about his own weakness, fear, and fragility than that of almost any other artist of his generation. Yet twenty years later, he’s still getting squeezed into that old Gilligan costume. Truly, [sic] is a cautionary tale of the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma that is postmodern living. And no, Gilligan never got off the island.

 This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end. 

A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
The word final, superior to all,
Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen; …
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before day-break,
Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word DEATH;
And again Death—ever Death, Death, Death

—Walt Whitman[xx]  

Spoiler alert. At the end of [sic], Landers dies. No, not really, he doesn’t, except in that way that all characters die when a book ends, or in that way people die on TV when we turn it off, or in that way that we all die sometimes, a little every day as we slide into the grave. Yet something does happen. It stops. The voice just stops, at 454 pages, long before even reaching the goal of one thousand pages, at a moment for which, though we may be fatigued, we are not wholly ready. Gone, the way a lover leaves you as suddenly and inexplicably as they appeared. Vanished, leaving only silence. Whiteness. Blankness. Did he throw himself over the boat? Did he succeed? Is he Crowhurst? Knox-Johnston? Ader? Or some other sailor, as yet considered?

I may be the only person who has read or will ever read every word of every Sean Landers painting, drawing, text piece, and scrawled note (and no, I’m not bragging, or I am). And I can say, without hesitation, it is a lot of words. Tens of thousands of pages of writing from a man hell-bent on filling emptiness with words, words, words, and more words. The more I read, the more I wonder: why? What madness is this epic battle against blankness, the deluge of language flooding over so many surfaces, over so many years? Trying to answer that question, it comes to me, slowly, through Landers’s own hinting, slowly like the tide lapping endlessly as the ocean approaches the shore—I know this story: the sailor locked in a monomaniacal battle against whiteness. Even as I write this now, bearing witness to his fixation, offering some possible justification to his lunacy, and immortalizing his journey in my own writing, I know this story. I am rewriting Moby Dick.  

Call me Ishmael. For it is Moby Dick (both the Melville novel and the Led Zeppelin drum solo): in [sic]—the work, his life, and this essay. Landers is Ahab. And he hints at this. In [sic], Landers draws numerous comparisons to Moby Dick. He likens the waiting, the doldrums, the moments of prosaic nothingness to the tedium of [sic]. He writes, “You didn’t skip around ‘Moby Dick’ looking for a whale encounter did you? If you did the meaning of the book escaped you. It’s not even complex, life is tedium.”[xxi] However, it’s more than tedium, and what interests me here is something deeper about the monomaniacal destruction of whiteness underlying this entire early period of Landers’s work. He hints at this in an earlier passage of [sic]:, “Can you tell how influenced by ‘Moby Dick’ I am? If you have any inclination to think of me as something slightly more than stupid, recall the endless tedium of describing knot tying while waiting for the white whale. What is my white whale? Love? Fame? Success? Perhaps it’s simply finishing.”[xxii]

Thus, finishing, filling the whiteness, conquering the blank page is his white whale, and, I’d argue, for the same reason as Ahab. In answering the question of why (why the whale, why the obsession, why the incessant battle against whiteness), I would say the same thing that Ishmael does:

 But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul… . Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?[xxiii]

OK, I couldn’t have said that myself, certainly not better, but it is the right answer to the question of why. Landers, like Ahab, is battling whiteness in the denial of death, of the unknowable, of nihilism and meaninglessness, and of the very postmodern dilemma of disintegrating selfhood that seemingly had us all trapped on that island before. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

In all his work, Landers embodies this position that to go on, to push through, to live, to breathe, to fill the emptiness, and to traverse whiteness is to conquer death. It is the fate of all people to die, to struggle against forces we can neither comprehend nor overcome; yet, by continuing and by immortalizing our passages in logbooks and loved ones, we cheat death, though we still die. It’s what the painting There was a Time … is about. It’s what Landers’s video Dancing with Death is about. It’s what the above-quoted Whitman poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” is about. And it’s what Moby Dick is about (both the Melville novel and the Led Zeppelin drum solo). In the end, though Ahab is pulled under by the whale, he still denies the whale victory in the very act of perseverance against inevitable fate, in his final words (“towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale”[xxiv]), and in his immortality, gained through Ishmael’s telling. (And John Bonham continues to pound the drums though he is high, fingers bleeding, and duct-taped to his drum stool just to stay upright.)

On the final pages of [sic], Landers, too, is pulled under, disappearing before a thousand pages elapses. Yet, like Ahab, he, too, denies both failure and death in his final utterance: “That death may in fact not be an end but a salvation so long as when you die people love you as much as I love you.”[xxv] He had been thinking of his deceased sister, of his love for her, how she now lives on in that love. In that, Landers realizes his own salvation: love. For four hundred pages, Landers had been rambling on about love, begging for it, needing it, from Michelle and Helena. It’s a love story after all. Yet it was always the love of the reader that mattered most. Even his last words, “as much as I love you,” refer not just to his sister, but to his love of You—the reader. In those final pages, Landers asserts that, like Ishmael to Ahab, all it takes is one reader to immortalize him, in heart or in account, and death is vanquished. Secure in that realization at last, the voice goes quiet, the book ends, and he drifts to the bottom of a depthless ocean. Am I that reader? Are you?

I have no doubt that Landers will remain at sea until his death, literal or metaphoric. Just as it was foretold that Odysseus would die at sea, so, too, do I make that prophecy for Sean Landers. Like Ahab, and Donald Crowhurst, and Bas Jan Ader. I can’t say why, but some people just seem to belong on vast and unpredictable waters, where a person is but a single drop in an ocean holding billions. The sailor and circumnavigator Bernard Moitessier said, “You do not ask a seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes. That’s all.”[xxvi] I think about Moitessier a lot in relation to Sean Landers. In that 1968 yacht race, Moitessier rounded South America all but assured of victory. Yet, as he edged closer to London, he turned around and abandoned the race, deciding to sail around the world a second time rather than claim victory. In his mind, returning to London would have meant he had left nowhere only to return to nowhere. Landers, too, has opted time and time again for the path of uncertainty. From the very start of his career to the present day, he has continually thrown his fate onto the mercurial forces of water rather than claiming handy, if hollow, victories. It cannot be overstated how much Landers has staked personally on his works. In [sic], he risked much in writing the book (family, reputation, humiliation, love) and paid dearly in some ways. In his first image paintings, he turned his back on an assured victory in text painting to sail around the world a second time instead. Never returning to nowhere. Landers has made a career of sailing dangerous and uncharted oceans: the Picasso show, the Hogarth show, the aliens, the chimps, the dancing naked hippies. Some of these journeys were epic ten-year voyages of legend, while others ended in tragic shipwrecks, captain going down with ship. Vincent van Gogh is credited with saying, “The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”[xxvii] Similarly, I know that Landers must be aware of the dangers to career and family that some of his works have posed; yet, like all solo sailors, the risks never stop him from sailing on. In his work and his career, there is an uplifting and undying hope that out there on the open waters, there may still be some essential truth about art, life, or self worth risking a watery grave over. You cannot really ask how or why. Some people are just seagulls.

[i] William Meredith, “The Open Sea,” in The Open Sea and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958).
[ii] Excerpted from the painting Sea[sic] (1995). 
[iii] Knox-Johnston quoted in Deep Water, film directed by Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell, 2006.
[iv] Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1994). 
[v] Excerpted from Sea[sic]. 
[vi] Sean Landers, Daily Reminder 1991 (New York: Sean Landers, 1991).
[vii] Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way, trans. William Rodarmor (New York: Sheridan House, 1995).
[viii] Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001). 
[ix] Gilligan’s Island, television series, 1964. 
[x] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (London: Penguin, 1953).
[xi] Sean Landers, [sic] (New York: Publicsfear Press, 1993), 158.
[xii] Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1975). 
[xiii] Jean Baudrillard, America (New York: Verso, 1989).
[xiv] Landers, [sic], 106–7.
[xv] George W. S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997).
[xvi] Trow, Within the Context. 
[xvii] Landers, [sic], 84–85.
[xviii] Trow, Within the Context.
[xix] Landers, [sic], 150–51.
[xx] Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 
[xxi] Landers, [sic], 431.
[xxii] Landers, [sic], 429.
[xxiii] Melville, Moby-Dick.
[xxiv] Melville, Moby-Dick.
[xxv] Landers, [sic], 454.
[xxvi] Moitessier, Long Way.
[xxvii] Vincent van Gog, 

Haters and the Lost Arc

Twenty years ago, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc was removed from the Federal Plaza in Manhattan amidst a wave of right-wing political backlash against subversive art. On the anniversary of the fall of the “Berlin Wall of Foley Square,” we reflect on Serra’s latest show in New York, democracy, David Hasselhoff, and the ongoing debate over federal arts funding in America.

Amongst the pick and sledgehammer wielding revelers who descended upon the Berlin Wall in the early, heady days of Germany’s political unification, there stood a grinning, fedora-topped, photo-op-ready David Hasselhoff. Aided by the idealist sentiments expressed in his synth-driven anthem “Looking for Freedom,” a song that held the number one spot on the German charts during much of the spring and summer of 1989 (and would make countless reappearances in the German media coverage of the Fall), Hasselhoff had come to represent the face of American democracy to the German people. Just as the work of Jackson Pollock had been sent to Europe by the CIA in the 1950s (his improvised drip and stain paintings passed as an artistic analog to personal freedom) here was another American artist (whether we are willing to make claims to him or not) brandished as a weapon in ideological warfare. Or to paraphrase Ronald Reagan: Mr. Hasselhoff, tear down this wall!

Were the Hoff’s signature melodies as favored by the residents of his native country, we could only imagine that the refrain of “Looking for Freedom” would have been fervidly hummed by the folks who worked in the Jacob K. Javits Building and the U.S. Court of International Trade in Manhattan a few months earlier. On March 15th, Richard Serra’s public sculpture Tilted Arc, the so-called “Berlin Wall of Foley Square,” was, after years of controversy and a bitter legal battle, removed from its site on Federal Plaza and, being site-specific, effectively destroyed. Following the decision, William J. Diamond, the General Service Administration’s New York Regional Administrator and the leading advocate against the sculpture, spoke in terms much like those that would later echo throughout unified Germany: the plaza, he asserted, had been taken back from an tyrannical art establishment and was now being “returned to the people.” On that cold winter night in downtown Manhattan, the Democratic process, it would seem, had triumphed over oppression.

A little background: commissioned by the Federal Government as a joint venture between the National Endowment for the Arts and the GSA’s Art in Architecture program in 1979, Serra conceived of Tilted Arc as a critical response to the bland architectural design of the Federal Complex—widely ranked as one of the worst and ugliest public spaces in country—that was to be its home. According to the artist, the work, a gently arcing, 12 × 120 foot long sheet of rust-patinated Cor-Ten steel, was intended to “dislocate or alter the decorative function of the plaza and actively bring people into the sculpture’s context,” thereby reversing public sculpture’s long held role of adorning architectural space and forcing the space of the plaza to be understood “primarily as a function of the sculpture.” In essence, this meant thatTilted Arc stood as a huge middle finger pointed skyward and facing in the direction of the surrounding government institutions whose ideology the architectural plan of Federal Plaza reflected. As it turns out, the people who worked in the surrounding buildings, many of whom were government lawyers, judges and bureaucrats, hated the sculpture; and it’s no wonder why: it was effectively telling them to fuck off every morning on their way into work and then kicking them square in the ass on their way home. Plus, somebody put graffiti on it.

In many ways, the debates surrounding the removal of Tilted Arc set the terms of the now decades-long culture war between the “people” (Agnew’s “silent majority,” which has since quietly morphed into Palin’s “real America”) and an “elite” art establishment that it presumes to be gallingly profane, sexually perverse and generally hostile towards all that is not deemed sacrosanct to its own, self-appointed glitterati. Now, 20 years later, as the German people line up to hear U2 (sorry Hoff) celebrate the end of that other Cold War, we have a new exhibition of works by Richard Serra in Chelsea to remind us of what we lost and a new controversy over the NEA to remind us of what we still risk losing.

For anyone familiar with Serra’s work of the past decade or so, the pair of monumental sculptures currently on view at Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery offers a familiar, if contrasting, set of experiences. Blind Spot, 2002-03, and Open Ended, 2007-08, continue the artist’s self-assumed, Sisyphean task of solving an infinite series of complex formal conundrums with his signature slabs of gently undulating, torqued or folded Cor-Ten steel. From up close, the works’ architectural scale and sloping curves make it supremely difficult to get a fix of their shape and, like Tilted Arc, they aim to command an imposing presence, the baroque grandiosity of which is only mildly tempered by their tuff, bulk-freighter-in-dry-dock materiality. There is a sense of Platonic purity to Serra’s literalist geometry, but, as Clement Greenburg once said of Serra’s most important and influential predecessor, David Smith, it is “geometry that writhes and squirms.” In this case, Greenberg’s phrase also doubles as an accurate description of how your body feels like as you walk through Serra’s works. Particularly in the spiraling Blind Spot, with its coat of velvety orange tarnish, the walls seem to billow, swell and heave is you move forward, causing a disorienting feeling and a sense what is, in reality, a pretty tight space feel like something bordering on the infinite. For an artist often accused of bullying his viewers with brutal he-man heroics and near-Randian artistic hubris (see above), with Blind Spothe has managed to produce a work of exceptional formal and conceptual complexity that manages to make a physically imposing, confining structure dance with precision and grace, making the space seem alternately intimate and sublime.

In contrast with Tilted Arc, Blind Spot and its steely companion, Open-Ended—a brawny pair of nested modular forms that come together to form a labyrinthine pathway, playing tomb to Blind Spot’s womb—are not situated in a critical relationship with their environment, placing the emphasis entirely on the viewer’s response. When not asked to carry a heavy polemical charge in resistance to their architectural surroundings, Serra’s large-scale works can come across as the domesticated variant of his mad-dog public sculptures. Still, by refusing to be ignored (one would never accuse Serra’s work of being, as Ad Reinhardt once said of sculpture, something that you bump into when you back up to look at a painting) the moral thrust of Serra’s project remains the same: by positioning the spectator in an active relationship with the piece, they are made hyperaware of their immediate environment. In a gallery context, this means keying in on your physical encounter with the sculpture and the other viewers who inhabit it; in public, this experience is expanded to include the aesthetic, social and political consequences of the architecture or landscape which surrounds the piece. By these standards, Tilted Arc, which is still considered by many to be the nadir of the artist’s career, was far from a failure. We could only imagine that, if both the artist and the federal program behind the commission would have made more of an effort to promote public understanding of what was, by all accounts, an intensely challenging work of art, Tilted Arc would be around to provoke, antagonize and provide a rusty backdrop for lunchtime picnicking today.

Or maybe it wouldn’t. Following the Tilted Arc hearings, Senators Jesse Helms, Alfonse D’Amato, Newt Gingrich and their right-wing “moral majority” targeted artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and the “NEA Four”—the performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller—in order to characterize all federally funded arts programs as nothing but a symptom of big government and a morally corrupt, culturally imperious left-wing intelligentsia. In the end, the democratically virtuous “little man” got his due, and the NEA got sliced, diced and gutted to such an extent that individual artists were no longer entitled to receive funding. What’s worse, the precedent set by the removal of Titled Arc proved that artists could not trust the government to protect their work from the vagaries of the democratic political process.

Forgetting about the rehashed accusations of intellectual elitism coming from the political right, what is truly disconcerting about the most recent controversy surrounding the NEA—prompted by a conference call wherein Yosi Sergant, the now-former communications director of the program, directed potential grant recipients to create work that promotes the Obama administration’s United We Serve campaign—is that this trust between the government and the arts community continues to take a beating. By essentially asking artists to mount a hipster revival of Socialist Realism, Sergant revealed that the current administration (which is apparently still high on Shepard Fairey dust) does not understand that art can have a social impact without resorting to insipid didacticism—bad news for anyone who is not willing to make agit-prop for the public option. If there is anything to be taken away from the history of the NEA over the past twenty years, it is that all art, particularly that which is federally funded, is political; and the last thing we need is a government-sanctioned army of David Hasselhoffs with tiny chisels. Instead, I would recommend that the administration consider funding art that demands more of its public, and gives more in return. Now that we have a president who, as we recently found out, is at least willing to live with ambitious contemporary art on the walls of the White House, would it be too much to ask for something like a Tilted Arc on the Capitol steps? I think that our representatives could only benefit by being surrounded by art that challenges, and not just superficially parrots, our nation’s democratic ideals. And besides, a daily kick in the ass might just help keep them honest.

Mark Loiacono is an art historian, writer and musician living in Washington, DC. He is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on Andy Warhol’s abstract paintings at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Portrait of the Artist as a Building

The Hunter College MFA building at 41st street is a fleeting landmark of New York’s grittier past, housing a proud group of artists at the forefront of the art world’s future; but like so many other relics of weird Manhattan, it too may soon be gone.

BY CYNTHIA DAIGNAULT

Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building — Oscar Wilde.

If you ask Hunter College Masters of Fine Arts students about their education, their first words are likely: the building. The Hunter Art department has long been coupled with its studio building (a blue labyrinthine eyesore on the corner of 10th Avenue and 41st Street). As per Oscar Wilde, I’m not sure if the union between building and college is more marital bliss or torrid love affair, but given the building’s historic location amidst the porn theaters, nudie booths and sex shops of Hell’s Kitchen, I’m leaning toward the latter. Ruin sounds harsh, but it is now fact more than rumor that the love affair between Hunter and the 41st building is over. The juggernaut of Manhattan development and the paucity of public education funds guarantee the relocation of Hunter’s MFA program to a smaller, more traditional, and more sterile studio building, most likely in an outlying borough, most likely soon (when not if). So, when the program moves to its new home, the 41st Street building will be left without its identity, or in more severe scenarios demolished to literal ruin. Don’t mourn its loss yet. Go visit. Attend one of the myriad public events this fall and reflect on a building that is a marvelous relic of New York past and an MFA program that is a bold model for an art world future.

My mother is moving to New York. She scours real estate ads for apartments. She calls me for advice on neighborhoods. “What do you think of Clinton?” “Clinton” I ask, “where the hell is Clinton?” “40’s. West side.” Ah. Not where the hell is Clinton, but where the hell did Hell’s Kitchen go? I guess it was only a matter of time. First the hookers, then the nudie booths, then the strip clubs, then the traffic in Times Square, and now realtors banished even the neighborhood’s sinister moniker from whence it came. Amidst the whitewashing, the Hunter studio building is a hunkering blue hold-out. To walk there, out the back of Port Authority, past the homeless shelters and dollar pizza stand, is to step over a drunk and into the past, every bit as seedy, smutty, absurd, messy and grime-covered as ever. In fact the growing scarcity of filth across Manhattan makes the studio building’s grime feel positively charming. Walk into the bathroom, and not only are you fairly certain that people have had sex in that bathroom, but it’s also the kind of bathroom in the kind of building that makes you consider doing so yourself, thrashing your own life onto the flesh of mortal sin. In that way, the building represents old New York – a landmark of grime and Grindhouse – one of the last hold outs of Hell’s Kitchen against Clinton, worth the visit, at the very least to pay homage to its resolve.

The other central defining characteristic of the building is that it is wholly public. It is a city building, housing a city college, and as such both democracy and bureaucracy are as endemic to the building as smut. Over the years, the building has housed a diverse range of businesses and services in the additional rooms and floors above the studios. In New York City government building fashion, an uncanny blend of people wander in and out of the building, around the artists, past the studios, over the woodpiles, wet paintings and precarious sculptures. Aggregated heaps of treasure/trash, piled in arrangements that can be neither sturdy nor fire-safe (though here at the western edge of the city, as with laws on the frontier, fire codes seem neither applicable nor enforceable). Truly, it is a building with no delineation between the art and source material, or between art and structural material for that matter. On the studio floors, junk mingles in and out of finished and unfinished pieces. In the halls, crap aggregates: graffiti, abandoned artwork, chairs, trash, tools, pianos, and all the behemoth treasures hauled into the building for whim or exhibition, yet abandoned to roam the halls, studio to studio like ghosts, in deference to their bulk. As Seldon Yuan put it, describing his studio: it’s organized chaos. Just file it all under G. For garbage.

Every few years, questions about the institution of the MFA itself swirl in public debate, often incited by an incendiary article in The New York Times. A few years back, articles circulated about the rising number of MFA art stars getting snatched up by galleries right out of school. This month, Roberta Smith rekindled the MFA debate discussing the current relevance of the degree in the face of real economic downturn. Smith, writing in response to the launch of the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (a free-school for arts education), decries what she sees as the increasing professionalism of art-making. The resulting din of responses descended into the usual oft-repeated blanket statements and assumptions, punctuated by deep emotion and scant fact. In order to ground this discussion in some sort of truth, unscientific though it may be, I have analyzed the ages and graduate schools of the American-educated artists at 20 major New York galleries, to surprising results.

First, in direct answer to Smith, although the number of artists pursuing graduate degrees is growing (as it is in nearly every field of study), the percentage of artists withMFA degrees at galleries remains relatively low overall (30% for artists born before 1960 and between 1940 and 45% for artists born after 1960). Hardly professionalism in the sense of doctors or lawyers where 100% of practitioners acquire graduate education. Forty-five percent is closer to the level of teaching, a profession in which there may be some monetary or educational benefit in obtaining a graduate degree, but by no means are those benefits always guaranteed or requisite. Further, this means that by far the largest group of artists are still those with no graduate degree. The degree itself provides no statistical advantage, and accordingly, no single school carries a statistical advantage. Not Hunter, nor Yale, nor CalArts (which interestingly has more graduates represented by New York’s top galleries than any other graduate school. Surprise.)

So, if there is no advantage, why go to any program, or more specifically, why Hunter? When I asked the Hunter students this question, they cited many of the same answers: the building, the large studios, the time to work and focus, the affordable tuition, the spirit of democracy, the freedom and the filth—in essence many of the same characteristics underlying the nature of the building. Yet still, one of the best answers came from alumna Andrea Merkx who captured the essence of the Hunter MFAexperience in a single quip: at Hunter, you could die in your studio and no one would ever notice. Two-sides. Upside: anything goes. Rogue exhibitions, extra years in the program, free semesters, secret dance parties, rental schemes and good old-fashioned squatting. (So long as you keep a low profile and strategically avoid probing emails). Downside: anything goes. When one really needs help – say when you’re dying in your studio – the same faceless higher-up who overlooks your dance party overlooks your bloody corpse (or botched loans, diplomas, registrations, or funding). No such thing as free lunch after all.

Regardless, the effect of the headless monster is just that. Mom and Dad left for the summer. The babysitter died. A familiar plot? Then perhaps, you’ve seen Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Sure, at first, the lack of hierarchical control incites a bedlam of broken dishes and shattered rules. However, left to their own devices long enough, the kids realize that in order to survive and to thrive they must band together to take care of business in style. Minus Christina Applegate, it’s same story at Hunter. The college is absentee, the professors are a mixed bag, and so the students have learned self-sufficiency unmatched by more organized institutions, out of necessity. They plan their own shows, curate their own artist lectures, form countless groups and collectives, and invent excuses for themed party after themed party. These are tested bonds, to carry through life. MFA candidates at most programs cite these types of bonds as one central end product of graduate school, yet they are arguably stronger between students at Hunter, as with siblings raised in neglect, abuse or adversity.

The force of community forged at Hunter is one compelling argument for the program, despite that Hunter may be the educational equivalent of a ragtag parentless home that no social worker would condone. In fact, this strong sense of community begins forging an answer to Roberta Smith’s recent article as well. In the article, her main point was that in a recession, shifting to a system where a $130,000 education is mandatory is ludicrous. Smith dreams of structures for learning, sharing and building bonds outside of the high-cost capitalist cash-cows of private university MFAprograms (and yes we’re all hopped-up on any capitalist rhetoric right now thanks to the anti-PhRMA speeches). So, in many ways, Hunter is a model for the kind of program Smith is calling for, and has been a sustainable one since the 1920s. A public institution, the college has been offering quality, democratized arts education to working artists for an affordable price since the start. A model program, not just for the high quality of ground-breaking work, but also for its commitment to rational education expenditure. (As an interesting aside on this, following my visit to Hunter, I heard President Obama speak on the new American imperative to save, to buy reasonable things that we can afford, instead of charging whatever luxuries we felt like on layaway or credit. It made me ask the question, in a market where a fancy MFAdegree brings with it no financial advantage or gain, isn’t taking on $100,000+ in debt a continuation of the spend now, pay later status quo that drives the US debt?)

Regardless, one should see the Hunter MFA building in person. Attend open studios and the MFA thesis exhibition this fall, and enjoy a fleeting piece of New York art history, to which there is no peer. Consider the building and the program, the city and the country, their pasts and futures, and contemplate which will stand together in the future as public monuments and which as ruins.

Urban Methology

This week only, the perfect date night: meth lab and a movie

BY CYNTHIA DAIGNAULT

After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

- David Sedaris (from Me Talk Pretty One Day)

This month, the newest addition to the luxury boutiques and condominiums of SoHo is a meth lab. Tucked inconspicuously between Apple, Prada and Trump SoHo, the lab (or more accurately the depiction of a meth lab) is the central room of Black Acid Co-op, an immersive multi-room art installation that marks the return of counterculture to the shopping mall formerly known as SoHo. Black Acid Co-op is the third incarnation of Meth Lab in the Sun, a work by New York artists Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. Deitch Projects reconstructs the work inside its massive Wooster Street warehouse where viewers are free to wander unmonitored through rooms depicting disparate environments of clandestine subculture, as if characters through a tripped-out Kubrick or Lynch film. Black Acid Co-op is essential viewing this summer, and even if we have the recession to thank, Deitch should be lauded for suspending commercial activities this month to present such a significant work. Site-specific in the purest of senses, Black Acid Co-op is culturally significant not only to art but to the city and neighborhood as well, a walking tour through dioramas of SoHo’s grittier past: the Chinatown bazaar, the bohemian den, the warehouse rave and even the contemporary art gallery.

Black Acid Co-op follows a long tradition of encompassing art happenings. Most recently, many New Yorkers will remember Mike Nelson’s Psychic Vacuum presented in 2007 by Creative Time, and indeed, the two works are closely related. Foremost, both share an aesthetic that falls somewhere between rotting ranch house and festering urban decay; and structurally both literalize the cinematic experience of moving between edits or jump cuts. However, despite some surface similarities, the two are remarkably different works. Nelson’s Psychic Vacuum was a presentation of non-specific archetypal space, a psychological experience of mood, emotion, memory and dream. Black Acid Co-op, meanwhile, is an aggregation of specific cultural referents, thus operating in the philosophical and analytic, more than the emotive or psychological. Meaning in simpler terms, Black Acid Co-op is about something specific. It is not about the abstract interiority of an individual’s mind; it is not timeless and spaceless like a dream or feeling; instead it is located in a specific time and context, about culture more than the individual, and as such, Black Acid Co-opexplores specific subjects: Methamphetamine and the Metropolis.

METH
First things first: though it is maybe a taboo or distasteful topic (and this may be why most of its press has ignored or glossed over the subject all together) Black Acid Co-opis a piece about meth. In the first incarnation of the piece, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, the work explored the production, use, logic, dysfunction and aesthetic of methamphetamine and its subcultures. In this current incarnation, Black Acid Co-op, meth has been dropped from the title, rooms added and rearranged, and its referents expanded to encompass the metropolis, yet the drug is no less potent in the work. Architecturally, the meth lab is still at the nexus of the environment. The lab is the central control room for the work, with its tubes and wires running throughout the installation, unifying the entire space. Further, the aesthetic of meth, the logic of the tweaker, is the conceptual unifying force of Black Acid Co-op.

Illicit methamphetamine production began largely in San Diego, making its way east in a reverse Manifest Destiny. The drug only recently crossed the borders of the original 13 colonies, and accordingly in New York its characteristics are still wildly unknown outside of myth and media. As a longtime resident on the West Coast, I can say to anyone who has never lived in a town ravaged by meth that you know a tweaker den when you see one. Slang for behavior most closely compared to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, tweaking is a primary symptom of Amphetamine Psychosis. It is the act of presumed productivity; the building and un-building of machines; the scavenging and rummaging through endless heaps of treasures and trash; the collecting, organizing and archiving of files, papers and junk; a tinkering marked by an undeniable fascination with tubes, cables, wires, lights and cords; the exposing of innards; the rigging of surveillance equipment; the ensuing paranoia; and the clawing, ripping, biting, decaying, lightless, timeless nature of a nonstop-24-hour existence. These, the hallmarks of methamphetamine use, are the forms and structures that unite every room of Black Acid Co-op. Spines manically ripped off books, jars of junk preserved as precious collectables, paint and carpeting picked and peeled with the ferocity of nail-biting and face-scratching. Make no mistake, this is a tweaker den.

Thus, Black Acid Co-op takes meth as its subject, exploring its cultural relevance, but more radical is that the work takes its forms from the chemical effects of methamphetamine on the user. As such, the piece can be viewed along a continuum of seminal and important works both about and derived from the drugs that are their subjects (i.e. psychedelic art relative to the hallucinatory effects of LSD). What is significant about this connection is that despite its prevalence (meth is now third only to marijuana and alcohol in many Midwestern states), unlike every other drug, meth has until very recently been largely unrepresented in popular culture. Black Acid Co-op marks in visual art what is just starting to happen in music, literature, film and television in recent works like Spun, Cookers, Methland, Tweak and Breaking Bad.

The longtime absence of meth from artistic production is as fascinating as it is puzzling. Countless significant artworks have been made about every other prevalent drug, and each has had its decade. In the 50’s (and 90’s) there was the heroin chic of Burroughs, The Man with the Golden Arm, Charlie Parker, Trainspotting and Kurt Cobain; in the 60’s and 70’s, psychedelic art pervaded the entire global explosion of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll with Zap Comix, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and my personal favorite Hypgnosis (please Google the best album cover of all time—Yes’Going for the One); and in the 80’s, coke had its decade with New Jack City, Miami Vice, Scarface and White Lines. Yet, though meth has been around since before WWIIit has remained almost completely invisible in both dominant and subcultural production. In a very unscientific count, from the webpage “the 300 most classic drug movies of all time” only five films involve meth use, and all of those were made after 2001. (No need to even mention how many weed movies made the list, culminating of course with the 2009 sleeper hit – Evil Bong 2).

Such a blatant omission in a culture that loves to tell drug stories begs the question why. And moreover, why are people suddenly penning meth’s stories now? What’s changed? Research revealed two common explanations, which both seem scant and suspect. One explanation for the drug’s longtime invisibility is that there is just nothing cool about meth. Clearly, this is a flimsy chicken-and-egg argument, as I sincerely don’t think there is anything inherently cool about heroin prior to or outside of its storied victims, novels, movies and songs. Another explanation is that meth is so caustic that there was never any room for romanticism. Again, heroin? If we can romanticize the death and decline of nearly every rock star, actor, or beautiful junkie, no doubt there is room for a tweaker or two.

More likely, the explanation for the artistic hush around meth is subtler, something inherent in the drug and its subculture that has kept it off the cultural landscape for so long. Perhaps there is something about meth’s high that discourages users from forging the mythology of their subculture, an inherent lack of productivity, or an output with a bent toward the technological rather than the artistic (computer programming, engineering, mechanics). Maybe to be spun is to be inherently paranoid or secretive, a drug that pushes its users into clandestine societies, undesiring to parade their subculture before the exploitation of the mainstream, remaining instead in covert dens like those of Black Acid Co-op. Or maybe there is a profound shame in the high, contrasted with the megalomania induced by cocaine so obvious in the music of the 80’s, much of which reeks of too many lines off the soundboard and for which one wishes someone had felt some amount of healthy shame. And just as likely the demographics of race, class, and geography have played a major roll in its longtime cultural exclusion, as the drug has never been the choice of the cultural elite.

I posit no answers, but the fact remains undeniable that until very recently meth was the dirty backwoods Midwestern cousin who carries the reputation of being the one controlled substance (along with crack) generally agreed upon as taboo, trashy, destructive, and just plain bad. Why it breaks into the mainstream now is as yet unknown, perhaps the epidemic finally reached undeniable proportions, or Hollywood ran out of material, or it was just its time. Regardless, meth has begun its spread through popular culture, and Black Acid Co-op marks its appearance in visual art. This arrival is especially timely for two reasons. First, the exponential rise of meth’s use means that it will continue to be a clear and enduring fixture of American life for some years to come. Second, and more subtly, with over 20 stories in the New Yorker and The New York Times this year alone about the growing use and acceptance of Aderall and other mind-enhancing legal amphetamines (yes New York, Aderall is amphetamine), no matter what transpires with meth itself, the aesthetic of amphetamine courses through the veins of American culture already. For example, given the prevalence of Aderall among New York artists already, I realize that it is possible that the visual logic of of meth (concretized in Black Acid Coop) subtly structures the city’s artwork already. This may already be the century of Tweaker Art.

METROPOLIS
Rem Koolhaas, renowned urban theorist and architect, penned the ultimate “retrospective manifesto” on the Metropolis and Manhattan: Delirious New York. So appropriately, right around the corner from Koolhaas’ Prada store, the rooms ofBlack Acid Co-op mirror the zones of Koolhaas’ Manhattan, and to pass through them is to experience passage through New York just as Koolhaas described it. Commercial to residential, interior to exterior, crossing the liminal and interstitial zones of hallway, stairway and corridor, the entirety fused by the infrastructures of light, heat and plumbing. Black Acid Co-op is allegory of New York, but as it also stands as an equal and accurate representation of meth as well, the work posits meth and the metropolis as metaphoric. As Koolhaas wrote, “the Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires. The metropolis is an addictive machine from which there is no escape, unless it offers that too…” Koolhaas puts apt words to the metaphor of the city as drug and as user, built on the spun logic of a junkie. It’s not really so far fetched if one extends the metaphor. The hustle, the rat race, the long hours, the OCD stacking of its architecture, the partying, the sex-crazed-drug-induced-late-night-all-hours promiscuous underbelly of the city — the logic of the city is the logic of the tweaker.

This connection of city as drug, city as addict, and the strategy to view New York as the aggregation of a multitude of separate illicit dens of subculture is the central tenet of one of my favorite works about counter culture in the city, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls(which screens this Saturday and Sunday at the Anthology Film Archives). Black Acid Co-op and Chelsea Girls make for a perfect complement and viewing both together would be an epic New York date night. Chelsea Girls is an agglomeration of scantly scripted scenes, ostensibly recorded in different rooms of the Chelsea Hotel (though historically some were shot off-site). As with Black Acid Co-op, each room in the film presents a different sub-culture, a different peek into the underworld of the city. When they are compiled side-by-side (the film is dual-projected) these scenes aggregate into an experience of counterculture and a feeling of urbanity, just as withBlack Acid Co-op. Yet, the truly great thing about the paring is that Black Acid Co-op is unpopulated, an environment without its freaks and miscreants, while Chelsea Girls is largely about the people who might subsist in its strange subterranean dens. (If you do go, stay for the credits to enjoy the single best piece of outro music ever recorded, vintage unreleased Velvet Underground).

I would say go see it now for two reasons (beyond that it’s a great pairing with Black Acid Co-op). First, Chelsea Girls is still requisite viewing for any New Yorker or art lover, especially anyone who thinks they totally understand Warhol. If you haven’t seen Chelsea Girls yet, then you are probably missing the whole picture (though really anyone who thinks they totally understand Warhol is probably missing the whole picture anyway). Second, this weekend is a rare chance to see the film at home, downtown where it belongs. Just as the rooms of Black Acid Co-op nod to the seedy side of SoHo’s past, so too Chelsea Girls revives the gritty downtown of yore. The last time I saw Chelsea Girls on screen, it was uptown at the MoMA. True to the neighborhood, most of the elderly MoMA members left displeased at the content or length before the end of the first hour. Those who remained were the dedicated soldiers of film history (think the Simpsons’ comic clerk) who shushed both my laughter and covert clinking booze (forgive me; it was Chelsea Girls after all). And I kid you not, when I say that the man three rows back asked me after I giggled at some line (it’s a funny movie sometimes, I swear), “Where do you think you are? Downtown?” Where am I, indeed?

So let’s face it, Chelsea Girls is a downtown film. And for now, while New York still has some vestiges of its downtown, seeing Chelsea Girls at the Anthology seems an obligatory New York activity. Really, it’s fitting to watch the film that marked the exact moment when counterculture had its own fifteen minutes from inside the old stomping grounds of its lowlifes. Yet sad too, because writing this, when I imagine actually walking out of the film, given how much the neighborhood around the Anthology has changed, I imagine that I might feel loss. I might wonder, where did all the freaks go? What happened to the Bowery, to the Lower East Side, to SoHo, to Greenwich Village, and to Chelsea? Walking the tidy and gentrified streets of Manhattan these days is like wandering through the unpopulated rooms of Black Acid Co-op. Tweaker den without the tweakers. It’s an emptiness that almost feels post-apocalyptic, except that neither Manhattan nor Black Acid Co-op is actually empty yet. As I watch the average New Yorker, somewhere on a break between brunch and Barney’s, ogling the increasingly foreign environments of slum and transgression, the city, like the artwork, reads as urban history museum, showcasing dioramas of humans no longer seen, civilizations lost to the Visigoths of real estate, I-banking, hedge funds and greed-thirsty mayors. This ain’t rock’n’roll – this is genocide!

Given the systematic gentrification of downtown Manhattan and the undeniable eradication of counterculture from its streets, there is something mournful about watching Chelsea Girls, as if watching field footage of a civilization extinct. This loss of Manhattan’s subculture is identified and decried all too often of late. So the question is not did it go, but where did it go? Let me extend the metaphor of New York’s counterculture as an indigenous jungle population for a moment. When the colonizers came and discovered the tribe on land they wanted for their own real estate plans, what then? Were the natives pushed further into the jungle, across borders north and east (Brooklyn, Berlin)? Were they interned in camps, reservations, human zoos or freak shows (again, Brooklyn)? Are they still here, wandering itinerant, homeless, displaced refugees who lost their Palestine to the conquests of NYU or Wall Street? Was there a sudden disaster, instantaneous and unexplained extinction as with the Mayans or dinosaurs? Or maybe extinction came in the slow and subtle death of enculturation, as when Sitting Bull or Tarzan donned the suit and disappeared into the polite society of the cubicle forever. Or more broadly, maybe the very notion of subculture itself is extinct, as the maw of dominant society finally swallowed even the possibility of a counterculture in the homogeny of boundless heterogeneity.

Maybe I am a nostalgic of the worst kind. Definitely really – the kind who whines about the city that was. So, take this with a grain of salt, when I say that walking out ofBlack Acid Co-op, I found myself hoping that David Sedaris was right – that maybe the congruence of meth and conceptual art truly is the magic alchemy needed to take down polite civilization, at least a little. To tussle the prim and priss of SoHo just enough to make room for a freak or two again. Or perhaps, as with all meth labs, common household and agricultural bi-products might turn so unstable as to explode in a stunning mushroom cloud of scattering pseudoephedrine that annihilates all of SoHo (or at least the transformation of Manhattan it represents) in its scalding radiation and light.

So, make it a date. Whether to claim one more night for the underground or just to toast its extinction, see Black Acid Co-op. Walk across the city past the Bowery to the Anthology. Watch Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. Nico is still as beautiful as ever, and the Velvet Underground are still in their prime. Then pound a whiskey, just for old times sake. Put the Ramones or Blondie on a jukebox. But stick to the side streets, since a walk down the Bowery or Saint Mark’s might destroy the momentary illusion that downtown New York is still there, just as it ever was. And wander aimlessly through a city that for many feels increasingly tame and unfamiliar. Then at last, in the sweltering muffling darkness of New York’s summer, look up at its glowing starless sky and say, at least I am still here.

I’ll be there too, perhaps right behind you, two rows back, one block over or maybe even holding your hand, pulling you forward. Bohemian, artist, and erstwhile reprobate myself, I will walk across the span of downtown, 14th to the Battery, Hudson River to the east, declaring at every block for all who care to listen or not, that though Stanley Bard has been ousted from the Chelsea Hotel, though the grindhouses long left Hell’s Kitchen, though there are women of polite society sunbathing in Tompkins Square Park, and luxury clothes being sold out of the bathroom of CBGBs, we are still here.