I don’t think that I’m ever going to write this, mostly out of laziness but also because it’s really hard to explain to someone how, yes, you wrote about how his or her artistic practice has a distinctly genocidal je-ne-sais-quoi (or «je-sais-quoi,» I guess, if one assumes that a person must know what he or she is talking about, if they went so far as to write an essay about it, which would be incorrect) to it, but you didn’t mean “genocide” genocide, and it’s not really such a bad thing, anyway.
The title, which fell upon me like inspiration or a piano as I walked home from the grocery store this evening, is this:
Cell Block Tango: Performing Sincerity and the Genocidal Impulse of Relational Practice
For starters, the astute reader may ascertain from that title the identity of one of the artists who would be a central subject of this, the writing that I’m probably not going to write. I’m not going to name her here, because this is not a hill I’d especially like to die on, and Google is some serious shit. She’s a fairly prominent figure in Canadian art, and, I’m sure, a lovely woman with nothing but non-evil, non-genocidal intentions. But she was responsible for a performance here in Windsor that directly caused one of the most severe panic attacks I’ve ever had (bear in mind that placing an order at a restaurant is sufficient to cause a panic attack for me), and I’ve been trying to figure out for nearly a year why, even after I was again able to breathe normally, the premise of that piece remained problematic for me. (The piece was an unannounced tango lesson, billed as a regular artist talk).
The second thing that should be mentioned is my personal and probably-irresponsible usage of the word “genocidal.” When I refer to “the genocidal impulse,” I’m not talking about a literal urge to kill thousands of people. That is, I’m not talking about “genocide” as an act but rather as the wish, which I see as foundational to much of social interaction, that a certain class of persons did not exist. I’m also operating on the assumption that the act of representation is borne out a desire to delineate, control, and so negate the object of representation. In this construction, Prop 8 was and is genocidal, the North American foster care system is genocidal (and here the Uhuru movement agrees with me, though I think we’d differ on the matter of extent), voting Democratic in the 2008 election was genocidal, class pictures are genocidal, demanding that the members of one’s wedding party wear a particular color is genocidal, and it only gets more ridiculous from there.
Basically, what I’d want to write about is how relational artistic practice, in all its interstitial, interactive, “democratizing” (frequent) feel-goodery, is ultimately about an artist wanting to eradicate their audience through inclusion (which may be voluntary or not) in the work of art. When my actions become someone else’s artwork, they cease to be fully my own actions; when my subjective experience is coopted by someone else’s artwork, my own subjectivity is jeopardized. It’s not an evil thing, but it’s interesting (to me, anyway).
It may also help to know that this imaginary essay would be part of an imaginary collection of essays called Art Ruins Everything (I really need to cross-stitch that sentence onto a sampler to go on my studio door), and the take-home message is this: I should be an artist and not an art critic or theorist, because, barring the improbable appearance of a scrap of sensitivity in my person, I would invariably become the Kathy Griffin of Art Criticism. This idea is hugely appealing to me, and that it why I should see to it that it never happens.
In other news: Celine Dion is playing the casino![!!] There were five or six billboards between Ohio and here, and I got into town super-psyched about being able to witness the insanity firsthand. But tickets cost $230! $230 Canadian, but still! I feel that, since a section of my thesis support document is going to be about Celine Dion, I should be able to get the school to foot the bill for my ticket.
I’ll report back on that one.
cam not-infrequently says to me something along the lines of, “I don’t think even you know if you mean what you say, most of the time.” I would suggest that everyone read Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors for a number of reasons, but know this: cancer doesn’t “mean” anything and neither do I.