The need to turn everything into art
this article became very black & white in photographs very fast (how arty)
I didn’t write a piece for here last week but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t writing. For the first time in a long time, I felt a strong urge to write something fictional and after being sent home early from work one night, decided this would be the perfect time. I wrote and wrote and wrote and a few days and drafts later had a script for a short film clocking in at around 20 minutes. I hadn't written in such a flurry, especially something fictional, for a while. But despite being fictional, the thread of the script was loosely based on reality, of things that I’ve experienced and things that from these experiences, I imagine could or would happen. Although fictionalised and imagined, they materialise from something very real that I felt while writing it. While doing it, it made me think about how much we put into the things we make, what parts we put in, and how, when other people are involved in those parts or experiences, how much do we share?
It makes me think initially of performance artist and recent skincare company founder, Marina Abromavic; abused by gallery visitors, living in galleries for 12 hours and sitting at a table facing the public for a few hours less than this, she explores notions of connection, authority and moral action through her work. One piece, however, sticks out for me or should I say, a series of work tied together by a relationship; earlier to Abramovic’s extreme success, she collaborated a number of times with artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known professionally as Ulay. The pair would initially perform in a number of villages and towns across Europe with performances relying heavily on both physical and mental tension. They once tied themselves together by their hair for 17 hours and in another, more famous piece, Rest Energy, placed themselves on either end of a bow and arrow; it can now be found scattered across Pinterest, Instagram and on postcards in people’s bedrooms with Ulay drawing the bow, holding the tension of both the arrow and the audience, ready to release at any point and kill Abramovic in an instant.
The arrow was thankfully never released and their collaborations only escalated to their final performance together, The Lovers. What began as a journey walking from either end of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle and get married became riddled with the uncertainty of time and the practicalities of a Chinese visa. In 1988, after five years of dreaming, thinking and conceptualising the piece, they performed it; however, time had done its work and the two were no longer walking towards a life together but a life apart. With Abramovic leaping towards the acclaim they had both recieved and Ulay turning away to a hermetic artistic life, this fracturing was unsolvable and as a result, cut a jagged line down their ‘two-headed body’, severing their future together.
Time moves on, as it always does, and in 2010, Abramovic performs The Artist is Present at MoMa. She sits in silence for eight hours a day at a table where visitors are welcomed to sit with her; on the opening night, she encounters a familiar face. She opens her eyes to see Ulay sitting across from her, twenty two years after their ‘separation’. It’s said they hadn’t seen each other at all during those twenty two years. I beg to differ.
This series of work from Abramovic and Ulay makes it very difficult for me to ‘believe’ their relationship which in turn makes it very difficult for me to ‘believe’ their work; I think that’s how I measure art, or more specifically performance art. On the belief I have in it, in how truthful, how genuine the belief a person had in an idea, a vision, a feeling that they created something from it. In relation to Abromavic and Ulay’s work, it became the belief they had in their relationship.
How do you separate your life from your work? Where does the line end? Why feel the need to mix the two and face the consequences of this collaboration? Something so typically private, now accelerated into stardom and because of its nature, romanticised, into different film tropes. Lost lovers, right people, wrong time, when the circumstances that surrounded them were separations on the views of their performance. Why make something so typically private so theatrical? Why risk it?
Featuring ‘real’ relationships in people’s work is not uncommon. To be called ‘art’ feels like a romantic elevation; to be seen in such a framed, and given art’s hierarchy, perfect way. To be photographed or painted and called ‘art’ is a whole other deal. However, this elevation of your partner has its consequences within Masahisa Fukase’s photographic work. With his childhood spent helping his father wash prints at his photo studio, Fukase would spend the rest of his life dealing with a compulsive need to document. Continuously taking photos of his whole life, the ultra-documentation of his life fractured his relationship with his wife, Yōko Wanibe, most of all. Throughout their relationship, she felt a:
“suffocating dullness interspersed by violent and near suicidal flashes of excitement. He has only seen me through the lens of a camera, never without … what he saw through the lens was not me, but nothing other than himself.”
Why do we document our lives the way we do? How far do we go and why? Why do we need to remember? I have so many questions that I can’t answer and probably won’t for a while. Something is stuck and I need to get it moving.
Despite these disagreements leading to their divorce through this process after realising they were ‘together solely for the sake of photography’, Yōko continues to champion his works within galleries now long after their separation and Fukase’s death. Both Fusake and Abromavic sacrificed relationships for their art; how noble! Perhaps, like Abromavic’s want to pursue performance art within such prolific galleries, Fukase’s view on making art differed him from his partner.
However, this would only be continuing a glamorisation of relationships within art; Fukase was known alongside his photography, to be abusive in his relationship towards Yōko. This lead into the photograph, documenting someone even when they don’t want to be, for the sake of the photograph. The notion of being ‘elevated’ through a photograph becomes less pleasant then and more threatening. Perhaps he wasn’t trying to elevate her but in trying to deal with this ‘compulsion to document’, he exploited one relationship to make way for another in his relationship with his practice. With this in mind, it feels he used her as an excuse to soothe this ‘compulsion’, the closest person to him, the most personal and seemingly closest part of his life. One day he reeled the film roll in, looked up and didn’t see her there anymore standing on the other side of the lens. What a waste for the sake of art.
I recently watched Alex Garland’s Civil War. For those who haven’t seen it, it follows an imagining of a civil war within current American politics through a group of journalists travelling across the country. Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeney play as photographers on differing sides of their careers within war photography; whilst trying to capture the supposed final days of the war, multiple people die throughout, as would be expected, capturing people dying or close to dying, not knowing whether they are an observer or a participant. It ends and I am still struggling with the same questions I had going in; how far would you go to achieve the perfect photograph? What authority do you have over what you make from others lives even when they intertwine with your own?
I think the reason why I struggle with writing fiction before is because I felt as though I was never writing from a genuine place; a lot of the things I wrote about, like anyone who writes fiction, I haven’t experienced directly. I felt I was lying, cheating anyone who would read it into thinking I had directly experienced these things whilst simultaneously being terrified about writing things I had experienced at the expense and worry of upsetting the people the work might feature. I was worried about risking being ‘wrong’ about experiences, about people. My relationships with others, my partner, my family, my friends are the centrepoint of my life, not my work. Writing is primarily a vehicle to have a relationship with myself and through this fostering, have relationships with others I suppose.
But I whilst I haven’t experienced everything I write about it, I have felt the experiences. I am slowly finding that this is the origin that a lot of writers find themselves in; you channel these feelings of an experience into something much larger and longer, navigating what the future of this might be, all your hopes paired with the reality of what will most likely happen instead. At a very basic level, you could take the feeling of an experience where you reluctantly ate a food you didn’t like when you were younger and channel that into a blip of a story where aliens feed you disgusting ooze. Similar feeling, different content. This, as a result, casts fiction into something non-fictional, teetering between the two which I think is why I find it frustrating when people talk about how a film didn’t feel ‘real’ enough. Are feelings not ‘real’ enough as a form of creative navigation anymore?
In Perfect Days, the main character, Hirayama speaks rarely. But, when he does, with all his Wim Wenders Wisdom, he says this:
“The world is made up of many worlds; some are connected, and some are not.”
The idea of reality is fractured into 8 billion people’s view of it, not one is the same; the idea that something feels unrealistic to you, for me, feels like it doesn’t fit ‘truly’ into your world view. It is another person’s view, parading as your own. The expectation that life should be documented down to a tee, to it’s every detail is what exacerbates these fusions between life and art, relationships and work where the labour of making work intrudes on and overrides the emotional labour of making a relationship. Although Fusake was making work in the 1950s pre social media, the compulsion to document is rife now, curating our lives to an outward view instead of an inward one, where documenting has now become a form of experiencing something, again and again and again. Why feel the need, why fall into nostalgia of something you barely experienced?
‘Real’ life in all of it’s laws and legalities finds a way into the romantics of art eventually; Abramovic was ruled as having to pay Ulay $250,000 who died a few years after the settlement. Why is something like this deemed less significant than the other shared parts of their relationship? I feel the parts that remain vaguely undocumented are done so because they are messy and complicated. They are relationships conveyed through boring, conventional, unromantic things. They are concretely ‘real’.
I felt for so long that everything I did had to be turned into work to the point where I would go to places or do something purely for a story; this felt disgenuine for me, it felt unreal. I’ve since tried to resist it, trying to stop experiencing for the sake of this never ending cycle of producing work and doing it just because I want to do it, that that is enough to want to go for a walk, not to go on a walk to take photos. But staying in the present is extremely hard, to do something without any means of productivity but to just do it for the sake of being there; when I think of the present, I think of nature or more specifically flowers and trees. An age old stereotype that doesn’t actually ground me here but in the repeated motif found in films where the protagonist is ‘present’, looking up at the trees becomes a meditation on nature and a meditation on the self and blah blah blah. It is as simple as that it seems but also 'simply’ it doesn’t work for me.
Not everything has to be turned into art or photographed for it to have value. ‘Needing to have reality confirmed and experienced enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.’ (Susan Sontag, On Photography). But that doesn’t mean everything also can’t be art; Abromavic collaborated with Ulay, chose to pursue and end their relationship in a very public way. Despite Ulay’s rejection of the material art world, he eventually settled in court for $250,000 as payment for their collaboration, for the work they did together. Could all of this been avoided if both had just pursued the same path originally? It makes me sad I think, that’s why I feel so conflicted and so angry at it. What if they had something really special and chose to sacrifice it for something as stupid as art? Or Fusake who sacrificed relationships for his ‘compulsive’ pursuit to document, for art?! What a waste, but also what do I know? I’m only 24 and am luckily at a point in my life where the relationships I do have with others feel monumental enough on their own without risking them as part of what feels to me, is an artistic experiment.
It makes no sense to me, I love creating but I don’t think I could sacrifice the relationships I’ve built for it; even if it goes undocumented, emotional labour is as important as artistic labour or any other labour. But on the other hand, the need to document or turn your life into ‘art’ can be an important exercise and perhaps that’s what I’m missing out on, that’s what I’m truly scared of pursuing. Writing about it here as an essay feels like I’m using this format as a means of avoiding the very thing that Abromavic has been somewhat brave enough to pursue; to risk vulnerability in what you make.
I really enjoyed Perfect Days. It follows, Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, Japan who outside of his work leads a fruitful life in his flat laden with shelves of books, old cassettes and plants he grows from the shrine he eats lunch at everyday. I risk very little in the writing I do here; I reference my own life at times but censor other parts through criticisms of artists, films or music. I try and enhance my life with these things as Hirayama does but end up silencing the parts of myself that are just there to feel and experience life for what it is without the aid of any other art or music to accommodate it.
It seems like an endless cycle that I won’t find out until I try it myself. Hirayama and I flat share in a museum of romantic artistic relics. But the contract renews soon and I don’t know if we have it in us to sign for another year. I keep thinking about finding another flat, somewhere else with less belongings to idolise and criticise, somewhere with less places to hide.
Perhaps I’ve been mislead, perhaps risk is not that important in art. But then again, risk has been what’s built my relationships into what they are today and if this is what risk produces, I’m going to start trying to do it more with myself and my work.