[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I was once visiting a modern art museum (it was in fact the same one exhibiting Pollack’s works). One of the exhibits was a piece of canvas that was painted yellow. That was the work of art. Next to it was a plaque explaining the work. The artist had been dying of AIDS. He spent the last few months of his life working on this painting. Every morning he would get up and paint the canvas a uniform coat of yellow. Then he’d let it dry. Then in the evening, he’d sand off as much of the paint as he could. He’d get most of it off but a little would remain each time, so it slowly built up a yellow coating on the canvas. He repeated this every day until he died.
The plaque explained that the artist was trying to communicate a message about something - I don’t recall exactly what - the transcience of life and art or something like that. But when I read it, all I could think was that that man had wasted his last months on earth. He could have been doing something useful or meaningful or fun or entertaining with the same time and energy he spend essentially digging up and filling in the same ditch over and over and over. I tried to sympathize - the man was dying - but all I could think was what a waste of time.
Because all it really was was a canvas painted yellow. The artist, or anyone else, could have achieved the same result with an hour’s work. Everything else was a story about the bizzarely elaborate method this man had devised to paint the canvas yellow. If the painting ever became seperated from the plaque, nobody would even know what it was he had done. The painting itself was unimportant; it was just a prop to anchor the manner in which it had been painted.
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Others have made really interesting comments about this work, and I agree with many, but I think you summed up yourself how I feel about this and other works like it:
To me, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps it is a little misleading to place it in a gallery with paintings that are ‘about’ something beyond their own creation (and therefore understandable like a poem in French would be once you learn the language), but it is obviously linked through its form to the larger context of “painting” in our culture. I haven’t seen the work in question, but from your description, it really strikes me as a heartbreaking communication of an artist facing death, not as an unknown future event but as a daily companion. One could say that we’re all just digging and filling in the same ditch over and over again in the process of living our lives, though hopefully it’s a rewarding and enjoyable ditch.
As I said, I haven’t seen the work, and I sort of feel that I don’t need to. Certainly being in the same room with the physical evidence of the maker’s labor might be an experience unto itself, but the story is a (and perhaps THE) work of art in this case. Another work of art that I haven’t seen, also dealing with AIDS that I dearly love is Felix Gonzale-Torres’ Untitled (Perfect Lovers). As it was first explained to me, the work consists of two battery-operated clocks, set side by side and synchronized. Left alone, they will go along together, but eventually, they will run slow and stop. In all likelyhood, this will happen to one before the other, making the clocks both out of step and dead at some incalculable point in the relatively near future. I was in a studio class freshman year when my teacher told us about this, and after she mentioned that the batteries will wear out, there was an audible intake of breath from the class- though we didn’t know at the time that the work was related to Gonzalez-Torres’ partner’s struggle with AIDS*, we all were touched by the inevitability of separation and loss that even the most perfectly matched pair will face. Here is a PDF that shows you how to make your own version of the work for your home. I haven’t done it, but I think it illustrates the very distinct difference between this very conceptual (yet grippingly emotional) work from the very physical “you have to be there with it” quality of a Pollock. Attempting to unite the two under a single way of understanding is, to my mind, folly, just as it would be folly to try to read Finnegans Wake and Romeo and Juliet, both ‘classics’ of literature in (arguably) the English language with the same goals and criteria in mind.
As far as the idea that the meaning resides in the plaque, to me that is a strength more than a weakness. That work can’t be destroyed- even if the museum burned to the ground, or some asshole art thief’s mother dumped the canvas in the river, the work remains in the descriptions and accounts that have been published, and which you in your skepticism and pity have passed on to us here. To me that is beautiful, and is at least a small way that that crummy yellow slab beats out the Mona Lisa- which would live on in reproductions, but not it its meaningful self if it were destroyed.
*It’s not that the teacher was purposefully avoiding talking about AIDS, we were discussing time-based work, and she presented it as such. I think that a lot of the power of Gonzalez-Torres’ work comes from the fact that it isn’t so tied to its direct subject matter that it loses meaning over time. I think that his work will resonate strongly in the future, even if/when a cure for AIDS is found and it becomes an abstract rather than current and vital issue.
