Public Service

Since the Primitive's art creates a dialogue with the garbage that winds up at this end of the Woonasquatucket, I thought it would be instructive to revisit the anti-litter genre of PSA, from the classic instance (with an appearance by the Indian Dandy) to a newer one by David Lynch.

Primitive Spotted?

Weekend Primitives

After little sign of the Primitive all week, a tin foil chalice appears. Simple, catching the sunlight, it also has alchemical intensity of emblem and archetype. This is clearly the work of our Primitive. However, it seems that some weekend primitives have taken over the space. Their address is more confrontational, humorless, almost a challenge. I might be a little paranoid, but I am seeing little aggressive jabs at my attempts to track the Primitive, like plastic bags of dog poop on rock pedestals. Or attempts to compete for attention, as in a graffito on a picnic table "escape your prison": a bit of vulgar gnosticism. Just as the art eye is expanded by reflecting on the Primitive's intervention, so the critical eye now finds criticism everywhere now that the blog has been up for a week. I'm finding comment boxes in the branches, feedback on the top of overflowing trashcans. I cross paths with an androgynous skinny kid taking distressed Polaroids and leaving them behind. That's the spirit, but this is not our Primitive. I take a shot of one or two of the Polaroids anyway. I am tempted to take pictures of the dog crap, thinking it might serve a future purpose to prove a visual point. Or maybe there is some clue encoded therein. But no. It's just litter. Pick it up, you schmoe.

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Shared Metaphysic

Context: The Providence River walk is bloated with monuments and city-sanctioned public art. The hodgepodge is almost endearing, encapsulating the full spectrum of possible modes--from neoclassical war monuments to minimalist structures to "fanciful" art-cow-esque interventions to fluxus anti-sculpture. There is also the River Fire--which perhaps deserves a entry of its own--a happening which, through its institutionalization, channels primal energies more in the fashion of a football bonfire than an art installation. We see weird mixes of the utopian and the memorial impulse, as with signs promising future monuments. Notice how a Holocaust memorial's future site is announced with the solemnity regularly reserved for the opening of a new Denny's. The memorial impulse captures all surfaces, even the paving stones. Because of its ubiquity, one wonders upon the story behind a simple greyish box: what morbidity does this immortalize? However, it is only an engineered enclosure or rather "The Engineered Enclosure"(tm). What does it enclose? Mystery enough for art lovers. There are more modernist structures, my favorite of which can be described as Richard Serra-lite, composed of rusted metal, with a sun roof. What is interesting about this piece is that in a public space, it provides an intimate hideaway; its surface has become a communications network for graffiti artists and others. Just a nose or two above drowning in art-cow tackiness is the man in the river, who floats just a stone's throw from the metallic cock-ring of pain. It's a fine line between sanctioned whimsicality and true mischief. But it's a line that is discernible between the floating man and some ceramic tiles that are attached to random points on one of the small bridges that cross the river. On the surface, they seem innocuous, in the style of fairly typical subway art. But a closer look at they way they are attached to the bridge reveals a shoddy workmanship that would not accompany contemporary city art. Checking their website (included on the tile), one finds that it is a situationist-inspired spontaneous intervention. I think their subversive intent is lost, however, on the casual observer. No, I prefer the blithe junkiness of the Woonasquatucket Primitive after all.

To explain his resistance to public art that reflected communal desire and harmonized with the space in which it was built, Richard Serra pointed out that "there is no socially shared metaphysic" (qtd. Finkelpearl 35). What the hodgepodge of structures on the River Walk reveals is that indeed there is. Everybody loves a miniature golf course.

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Dump, Cosmos

Salient Feature #4: Indistinction of garbage and art.

"The whole world, everything which surrounds me here, is to me a boundless dump with no ends or borders, an inexhaustible, diverse sea of garbage. In this refuse of an enormous city one can feel the powerful breathing of its entire past. This whole dump is full of twinkling stars, reflections and fragments of culture[.] . . . [A]ll forms of packaging which were ever needed by man have not lost their shape, they did not become something dead when they were discarded. They cry out about a past life, they preserve it. . . . The feeling of vast, cosmic existence encompasses a person at these dumps; this is by no means a feeling of neglect, or the perishing of life, but just the opposite--a feeling of its return, a full circle, because as long as memory exists that's how long everything connected to life will live."
--Ilya Kabakov, "The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away"

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Indian Dandy

Salient Feature #3: Aboriginal markers. In his Histoire Extraordinaire: Essay on a Dream of Baudelaire, Michel Butor points out that Poe's anti-Americanism, admired by Baudelaire, is deeply American. Notions of democracy, system, and reason are replaced by the sensibility of "Indian dandies" (131) whose knowledge is "encyclopaedic," attuned to "the primitive American substratum" (129). The Indian dandy is a flaneur of nature, capable of responding to it in toto rather than be "confined in the infinitely petty regions of specialization" (130). Such is the method of our primitive dandy, who leaves us with postmodern signs of the aboriginal without referent; s/he plays the primitive but is not content to remain "naturally" one (since s/he makes do with plasticated detritus as much as s/he does with bird feathers and string.) The signs left are not as subtle as the broken branch left by the trailblazer, but they come close, existing as they do at the margins of attention. Again note how a mere twist and knot of plastic holds us to an artistic address. We can only guess at the source of this specifically American creativity. For if we try to peg it too squarely, we fall into the trap that Poe warns against in "The Colloquy of Monos and Una":

Man, because he could not but acknowledge the majesty of nature, fell into childish exultation at his acquired and still-increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked a God in his own fancy, an infantile imbecility came over him. As might be supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with system, and with abstraction. (610)

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Snow Thing

Is the handiwork of the Woonasquatucket Primitive hidden by the recent snow? Or do we see its nothing more? I'm reminded of the discussion of a Wallace Stevens poem in a recent essay by Nilima Rabl and Samuel Frederick in SubStance ("Dividing Zero: Beholding Nothing"):

"the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"

They go on to write that Stevens is detailing an impossible point of view, in which the perceiver becomes a chilly cipher in the face of nothing. Only thus can one perceive nothing fully. It is a stance which stands against interpretation and encourages a "re-experience . . . [of] the world": "His 'mind of winter' allows him to behold his surroundings without the impulse for appropriation, without a desire to hold them for more than the instant of the beholding glance" (73). Perhaps the Woonasquatucket Primitive's scribbled pilgrims with their empty eyes are snowmen--even though they appear at all seasons. Afterall, Stevens' "mind of winter" seems to be timeless; there is no need to wait for snow to cultivate a mind that looks upon nothing "without thinking of 'misery.' " They continue: "Instead, what the snow man 'beholds' is an emptiness that is also a plenitude--just as the snow man himself is formed of ciphers, shapes that would usually circumscribe the emptiness they signify, but which in this case are full, filled with snow" (73). Are things hidden by the snow? No. Sounds ring out fuller, objects stand out more starkly, like glyphs of a giant book. But nobody is reading the book, and there is nothing to read, since we have suddenly become a black word, inching along, paying attention in an ambiguous tale.

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Blood Lines

Salient Feature #2: Drawings in blood red scrawl. Pilgrims, witches, familial groupings, mohawked outsiders. A grim memorial to the colonial era, perhaps, or the evidence of a more contemporary communal, family, or personal trauma kept at bay through referencing a deep past. However, they convey sadness only retrospectively. In context, they are hopeful and welcoming if only because they punctuate the mostly fanciful interactions of this absent hand, and stand out from more typical trash. One thinks to unlock the mystery of their arrangements: big pilgrim, little pilgrim, big pilgrim, little pilgrim--nostalgia for parental guidance, regret as to its failure, or something darker? I don't think I want to consider the most representational aspect of this intervention as the cipher to a narrative . . . the "why" of this art. Not yet. If anything, like schizophrenic drawings--which they may very well be--they convey the energy and assurance of an alternative order (which distinguishes these from the drawings of children--who might not have the same sense of cosmology and purpose). I am always tempted to take one of these when they appear. They are the most "collectible" and most obvious sign of the artist. But I resist, even when I say to myself, "It's about to rain/snow anyway. This will be pulp by morning." Because, the more pulpy and damp they are, the better.

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Knot Here

Salient feature #1: This installation, which has mutated for at least the 9 months I have been here, sometimes fades into the ostinato of plastic bags and pigeon splatter that already decorate the river walk. One of the most prominent thematic elements of it is the knot--degree zero of artistic intentionality, but with a rich history that Peruvian princesses, Lacanian topologists, boy scouts and old salts can understand. These, and other similarly adventurous sorts, are perhaps the ideal audience of this work, even though it appears smack in the middle of a major lunch hour promenade (this is not the "road not taken"). Some might be hard pressed to call it a work. Is it knot-art, or not-art? If anything, the opening of this blog might officially make it, at least, not-not-art, but whether art is sanctified by any critical apparatus is a knotty issue. If anything, the knot points to some kind of presence and attention to space: "I was knot-here." While walking thru the detritus of this ever-changing but dependable collocation of speaking garbage, one reflects on presence-absence. The invisibility of what is right in front of you is a theme. The artist could indeed be one of the many homeless people one sees camping out here in the shadow of Brown, RISD and the financial district. Or it could be a disaffected Brown or RISD student. Or both. Or maybe it's someone who already has had something in the Whitney. Whatever the secret to the mystery, this blog will document the fluctuations of the piece as I see it, and provide a space for dialogue with this intriguing intervention in public space. Holding onto the world with a language of nots . . .

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