Telegrams and Anger: Mass MoCA vs Christoph Büchel edition

It is amazing how quickly you fall back into things. I was no sooner back from our mercifully Interwebs-free vacation on the Adriatic for only a few hours before something on the other side of the world to cause worry. I’ve been following the Christoph Büchel/Mass MoCA standoff from afar. I had covered MoCA for years at the Eagle, and had reported on the opening salvos of this preposterous dust-up. I was at first amused by it all, but now I’m disappointed that the arts world appears to be too far up its own ass to give the museum the full-throated support it deserves. The story is really quite simple, but is unnecessarily confused by people with an agenda to push. Mass MoCA, despite its modest financial resources and out of the way location, has become one of the most cutting edge spaces for large-scale installation works in the world thanks to its cavernous Building 5 and a team of dedicated staffers who move heaven and earth for them (even when they are flops, like the Höller exhibit “Amusement Park” that had been installed before). For this year the plan for the space was the first big North American project by Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, which ran into serious snags as his proposed project ran way over budget. He eventually walked out on the project in a huff, and the rest is litigation. MoCA made the unfortunate decision to open what they had to the public, raising questions about betraying the artists intentions, and sued for violating his contract. It is an unfortunate turn of events – I wish MoCA had just sued for damages for costing them a season they could ill afford to loose and make him pay to clean his crap out of the building himself, but the museum had to do something with its marquee space during the vital summer tourist season. Last week, a federal judge agreed with the museum, and saw past the scaremongering of Büchel’s lawyers about how the rights of all artists are now infringed because, I guess, they’ll now have to sign specific contracts and fulfill the obligations in them. The response of much of the arts community, and the reporters and writers that are supposed to be covering it, has been amazing. Now that I am a private citizen and not a reporter covering Berkshire county, I can admit that I am a great admirer of MoCA and the people that work there. I know what they do and have done, how much they mean to the community where I have so many ties, and how despite its size and reputation, it remains still an experiment resting on a very shaky foundation. So the public pile-on they have had to endure for the sake of this art-world princeling is too much. I saw it first in a July essay by the Boston Globe’s art critic, Ken Johnson, who had the nearsightedness to write that the whole affair “affirms popular perceptions of our most innovative contemporary artists as frauds and charlatans.” Of course, the only honest answer to the question about where that reputation comes from is behavior like Büchel's. Johnson seems to assert that museums should just shut up and enjoy the ride, which seems to me a variation on the sick old adage about what to do if you know you are going to be unavoidably raped. It got worse when Roberta Smith of the Times weighed in, also rising to the defense of those suffering toilers in the trenches of art, who are attacked by an uncaring public and whipped by the taskmasters at non-profit museums who makes them weep blood for their work. “Never underestimate the amount of resentment and hostility we harbor towards artists,” she writes, strings soaring in the background as the camera pans the Sistine Chapel. “It springs largely from envy. They can behave quite badly, but mainly they operate with a kind of freedom and courage that other people don’t risk or enjoy. And it can lead to wondrous things.” And continuing: “In the end it doesn’t matter how many people toil on a work of art, or how much money is spent on it. The artist’s freedom includes the right to say, ‘this is not a work of art unless I say so.’” If we are interested in cute postmodern games about authorship and authenticity, we ought to at least acknowledge that much of the best twentieth century art was supposed to makes us ask just what magic, Olympian power put the crown on the head of the “artist” and made his declaration of “art” more important than my declaration of “bullshit.” (And, when he is not quite so dyspeptic, Büchel himself is apparently big on these sorts of questions. From the press materials for his recent London show Simply Botiful: “Büchel repeatedly manipulates and exploits the perceived power of the social and legal contract, subverting the relationship between artist and audience while insisting on a more active political role for both.” There are moments when the hypocrisy of all this is so overwhelming I have to think it’s actually one big meta-exhibit. If so, I really wish he’d done his homework and screwed around with some money-pile like the Guggenheim). Smith uses very high-minded talk to defend a system that is strangling all those noble and sublime things she is yabbering about. As my former colleague John Mitchell of the Transcript notes on his blog, this is “a piece of NYC art world insider crap… [that] speaks about MoCA as if it were a billion dollar movie studio seeking a final cut rather than a non-profit art museum still working to become self-sufficient.” True. Büchel's supporters have reduced this to a matter of intellectual property, with the assumption that the museum is assuming a role that does not belong to it, for some nefarious, unspoken reason. What to the right-thinking aesthete could it possibly be? Power and glory? I don’t think there is a moment in MoCA’s history that could suggest they are power-mad solipsists. Could it be money? Ah. Contemporary art’s ruling class are the ones that make the fortunes and distribute the crowns for the heads of folks like Büchel: the gallery owners and the elaborate network of enablers that has sprung up to prop up this sad system. Self-absorbed geniuses like Büchel are churned out of the world’s art schools faster than the system can absorb them, and the ones that make it usually have enough sense to keep their ego in check while they’re blowing other people’s money. They don’t know and don’t care where it comes from, as long as it has no whiff of the real world on it and includes lots of encouragement of what a genius they are. That’s how it goes in the “art world,” a sick money orgy with the kind of screwed-up values you’d expect from a multibillion dollar industry, served by groveling arts press that can’t think for itself anymore. It is no wonder so few people give a damn about contemporary art anymore – a pathetic situation which happens to be Mass MoCA’s mission to correct in some small way. This stupid mess has caused incalculable harm to an institution that personally means a lot to me. And as far as I’m concerned that is what, as Ken Johnson might say, makes this a “sad, dumb and shameful” episode.

A moment in Montenegro

Our visit to Europe’s newest little state went well, and was as relaxing as traveling with a 10-month old to visit a family with a two-year old can possibly be. Montenegro is an interesting place, and I think we made it there at a very interesting transitional moment.

The land itself is what I would imagine the northern Arizona shoreline might look like when California finally breaks off into the ocean. Dry and jagged, with sharp bare mountains that fall straight into the sea. The sun is high and intense, the plants are tough and low. The mountains seem to tower over you everywhere – an effect damn near vertiginous after spending several months in the middle of the Eurasian steppe -- and commanding the entire horizon lies the Adriatic, which in color and temperament seemed much like what I always imagined the Mediterranean would look like.

We never really had a chance to get to know the country very well – our Serbo-Croatian is terrible. We stayed near the coast, which as I gather is quite different than the mountain interior. While the inside sounds like a sort of Balkan Scotland, with mountains and valleys and poor soil and fierce clan loyalties, the coast was a cosmopolitan place. It was variously ruled by the Romans, Byzantines, Turks, Venetians, and Austrians. The old towns up and down the coast are really quite stunning. And since about 20 percent of the newborn nation’s GDP apparently is generated by tourism, it is their economic engine now.

Once you are out of the earshot of Russian tourists, Montenegro is one of those places that makes you think, “hey, how come there aren’t more people here?” One day we drove out to a very long stretch of sandy beach just south of Ulcinje, near the Albanian border. The specific spot we went to was charmingly called “Safari Beach,” and featured a rather sleepy little restaurant with a severe wasp problem and almost nothing on its menu actually available for order as it was the offseason already. I took a walk south on the beach and came to its cousin, “Tropicana Beach,” which was completely closed. All the metal furniture, cheap rattan umbrellas, and lifeguard stations had been stacked up good and tight for the winter. It reminded me in an eerie way of Asbury Park, except in this case, it is not a place whose glory days are behind it, but one that is destined to be profoundly changed in the next few years. Reports are that several major overseas developers were interested in the spot, and soon it will soon rival Turkey and Egypt as Russia’s favorite seashore. Montenegro is just discovering it is a tourist destination, and I get the impression that these mountain people were only passingly aware they had a seacoast until just a few years ago. Whether the willy-nilly property sales and hell-for-leather construction schedules will be to the ultimate good seems to me very unlikely.

And it is a bit of a jarring contrast to the region’s recent sad history. This was the first time I’d ever visited a country that my country had bombed in recent memory, and it was something strangely on my mind through most of my time there. Granted, Montenegro was not targeted during the NATO campaign against Serbia in spring 1999. Still, I could imagine American planes flew through those skies, from ships in that sea, over those hills and mountains. The fuel in their tanks, the bombs under their wings, the salary of their pilots, were all paid for by my tax dollar, and were sent on their way by leaders I had a say in choosing.

It made me a little uncomfortable to arrive at passport control with a whole planeload of Russians, as I handed the officer perhaps the only American passport he’d see in a while amid the veritable stacks of Russian ones. What quarrel does my country have with these people? Was it worth it to pick that fight? With all the mistakes that could have, and did, happen? It seems so when you think about why we did it. For years the former Yugoslavia had been a bloodbath of pent up racial and sectarian tension. The bombing was the west’s final effort to show once and for all that this uncivilized barbarism would have to stop.

We stayed in a house on a hillside just up the valley from the village of Dobra Voda, on the outskirts of a Muslim village. From the balcony we could see in the bottom of the valley a mosque, with its minaret topped by a green spire. Ramadan started while we were there, and we could hear the adhan called each night. The Muslims had been there for centuries, the furthest frontier of a civilization that for centuries was the perfect other in Europe’s vision of itself. And what must the people have thought throughout the 1990s when their government sponsored genocidal death squads murdering Muslim men and boys not an afternoon’s drive away from them? What worries did they face when other Muslim countrymen even closer in Kosovo were in danger of a similar threat?

But I digress, here are a few more pics of the view from where we stayed…

September

I always love the start of a new season, and always get good and sick of the old one well before I start to miss it. Living in New England so long is perfect for such a temperament – I love the change of seasons and what each brings. So it is September, and there is no trace of summer around Moscow. The temperature is in the mid-teens, and there is a stiff Eurasian breeze that unmistakably says autumn. The green of the leaves looks worn and tired, and the sun goes down at a reasonable hour once again. The arrival of Russian autumn ought to be particularly morose, however, because it comes with the realization that a whole vast arena of human activity – outdoors – is getting ready to close until May. You see hints of what is to come all around. The double-windows that have spent a few months thrown open to let in the fresh air, but are designed to be sealed shut and well-insulated. You see the little metal fences that mark off sidewalks and roads in the yards, and realize they exist solely so you can tell where the path is on a dark winter day when there are several feet of snow lying around. You realize that those giant radiators – the Russian word for them is “battery,” as in artillery battery – that have sat quiet are about to start roaring again. The experience of seasons is very acute here, and summer is no different. It is like a sort of madness here. The sun stays up until 11 o’clock. Women walk around half naked, people randomly jump into fountains and rivers at the slightest provocation, often with disastrous results. People abandon perfectly good apartments with running water and plumbing in the city to live in shacks on the edge of town for weeks on end. It is all very disorienting. So September starts to feel very strongly like things are getting to normal. There ought to be a chill in the air, and the city feels like everyone is coming home and settling in for awhile. But with all that in mind, my family are going to try to stretch summer just a tad longer with a trip to Montenegro. I’ll write more when we get back…

Kerouac Day

For at least 16 of its 50 years On the Road has been a part of my life, and I’m glad of it, even as he has gone in and out of fashion. There has been a fair bit of hoopla about today’s 50th anniversary of the book’s publication – much of it has been pretty dismal, mawkish stuff about finding enlightenment on the great American road with a saxophone bleating in the background (a phenomenon discussed very well here and here).

When Olga was in New York last month I asked her to bring back a copy because I’d left my famous, weather-beaten copy in storage back home. I just reread it for the first time in a long while, and it was a very interesting experience. It is a work of art that stands the test of time better than I expected. Jack Kerouac has not been well-served by the critics who only saw a social phenomenon, nor by his passionate fans who could not separate the man and his life from his work.

A book like this becomes a sort of thermometer. When you are young and your life is stretched ahead of you the whole thing means something very different when you are no longer. So I found all kinds of surprising things as I read it. Somehow, when you are young, you read the sadness and loneliness that runs strongly through the book in a dismissive, romantic way. Now, I was surprised how a major theme of the book is really frustration and disappointment. All this talk about the novel being about “freedom” is either wishful thinking or rot.

And certainly, forget about Kerouac as the “voice of a generation,” whether for the beats or the hippies or slackers. Time and time again it has been proved that any critic who traffics in such nonsense is fit to be ignored. As a historical document, I think On the Road’s appeal is incredibly limited – it is not about a postwar generation struggling against conformity. That is merely the usual thoughtless stereotypes about the 1950s to which Baby Boomers cling to make dancing around in the mud at Woodstock like an idiot a matter of great historical necessity. And please forget about the book as a celebration of hedonism, the first foretaste of the Me Generation, an invitation to generations of slackers to shirk responsibility and hit the road. And spare me the clever asides about how a writer whose work is about “rebellion” against “conformity” has posthumously been used to sell Gap khakis.

Simply, it is indeed a celebration of America, and what it means to be American. It is about trying to tell a story in a new and bracing way. And it is about friendship, and how strange and exciting it is when you meet the right kind of person.

And there are a lot of important things that are completely forgotten in the Kerouac myth. At the heart of it all is a boy whose family originally hailed from Brittany and arrived in Lowell, Massachusetts by way of Riviere-de-Loup in Quebec. Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac grew up in a tight Quebec-American ghetto, and didn’t even begin to learn English until he was six and they introduced it at the parochial school he attended. He grew up speaking joual, the French patois spoken in Quebec that is what French would sound like without the grammarian glare of the Academie Francaise. So as an immigrant, he saw America as a newcomer would – as Saul Bellow would, for example – and as someone from an oral culture with a deep spoken word tradition, he had a very consciously artless, stream-of-consciousness approach to language (“Did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, defray its rhythmic thought impact?” he asked in a 1968 Paris Review interview.)

Most writers, if they are being honest, just want to be liked. But the kind of big-time celebrity eludes most, and it is perhaps better that way. Devoted fans hobble your career and define you after you’ve died. When celebrities talk about what your work means to them, and teenagers carry around dog-eared copies of your work for a few years, and booksellers have to hide your book near the cash register to discourage shoplifters, you aren’t writing the narrative of your own life anymore. After the hipsters and the hippies got a hold of him, the myths became their own thing. It is infinitely more romantic to imagine him churning out On the Road in a coffee and benzedrine fugue on that famous 120-foot scroll now touring the country than to remember the subsequent revisions his editors put him through, or the countless drafts and sketches he had written before.

Kerouac broke under the pressure of fame, becoming something of a hermit, clinging to his mother, and in a few short years became little different than any other alcoholic from his old neighborhood in Lowell. Indeed, he was more Archie Bunker than Timothy Leary when he appeared on William F. Buckley’s television show in 1968 to explain in a drunken slur that the Vietnam War was actually conspiracy between the north and south Vietnamese – “who are cousins,” he helpfully noted – to get American Jeeps.

By then the myth had completely outstripped the man, and whether or not that will continue remains to be seen. The book can seem a bit mawkish, especially now when most prose is polished, and most dreams of literary stardom are more modest. For some, it is more an historical document rather than a work of art, especially after irony and sarcasm became the default position of hipsters everywhere.

And here is one more thing to keep in mind, that no matter how closely the life informed the work, they are really separate things. I personally think in my heart that Kerouac was a decent guy, and there is enough anecdotal evidence from friends and fellow-travelers to suggest that Kerouac was a plain decent guy. But when it comes to the work, it just doesn’t matter.

I think about Kerouac’s peculiar relationship with poet Frank O’Hara. They shared a number of close friends – Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers – and yet they did not get along. It is easy to see why considering their personalities. Kerouac was a painfully shy working class guy, insecure around well-educated people, and prone to getting dangerously drunk to offset his shyness, especially when he was in New York. O’Hara was the quintessential cosmopolitan, a complete creature of New York and its catty gossip and hierarchies, and likely to start an anecdote about what Jack said to Barney at Joan’s place in Southampton the other night and end with a quip about Darius Milhaud. Their relationship got off to all sorts of bad starts. Once a drunken Kerouac stumbled into one of O’Hara’s readings and, for whatever reason, began heckling him, shouting “you’re ruining American poetry, Frank.” To which Frank retorted, “that’s more than you ever did for it.”

But Frank had some good words for a few of Kerouac’s books. Not surprising, both were interested in finding a new way of spontaneously expressing observations and emotions, though in wildly different ways. Word got around their very small circle about what Frank had said, and one night, at the legendary Cedar Tavern on University Place in the Village Kerouac spotted Frank and went over. “What’s the matter Frank, I thought you didn’t like me?” Kerouac asked. “I don’t like you,” Frank replied. “I like your prose.” Kerouac was reportedly very happy with this response.