Art... and Politics

I'm guessing you get pretty bored with all the political stuff, Bush. So do I. Hearing the same old gripes and moans day after day. So I trust you'll have no objection if we change the subject once in a while. For me, at any rate, it's all one subject. It's all about learning to be conscious, learning to pay attention, learning to be alert to everything life has to offer. It's about learning to act rather than react; to determine the course of my life at every moment, rather than allowing myself to be swept along by the great wave of unconsciousness that seeks to engulf us all. It's about learning to become more fully human.

That's what is important to me about art, Bush. It's what is important to me about writing. It's why I insist on the two of us having this daily conversation: simply to stay conscious. To not let things slip by, out of habit, out of bias, or prejudice, or unquestioned beliefs and assumptions, surrendering to the seductions of unconsciousness. We have to keep asking questions. We have to keep pinching ourselves, to remind us to wake up.

So if we decide to talk about art today, we may be changing the subject, but we're still talking about the same thing. Here's Tara Donovan, artist. I saw her work yesterday at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles. Tara Donovan sees the same things we see every day--rather, things we no longer see because we have grown so used to seeing them that they've slipped below the level of consciousness--and asks them to behave in different ways, to reveal themselves to us in such a way that we can once more see them, and be awed by them.

I'm talking here about the simplest things, Bush. I'm talking about pins, and toothpicks. About styrofoam cups, and plastic drinking straws. About buttons. And pencils. And tar paper. Tara Donovan takes a hundred zillion pins or toothpicks and conjures them into big cubes, waist high, held together by nothing more than their own weight and gravity. We stand in utter amazement at what a pin can do and be. A toothpick. The sheer magic of their presence, as she has revealed it. Or she takes thousands of styrofoam cups and creates great sensuous, squishy, backlit clouds of them, suspended over our heads in a vast gallery space. We walk beneath them, tickled pink by what she has made of them. Their unsuspected capacity for beauty.

She makes a whole environment of stalagmites of glossy pink buttons. Or stalactites, I always forget which of them stick up and which drip down: these are the ones that stick up, like tall drip sand castles. In one huge gallery space, set apart, she heaps huge sheets of tar paper, layer upon layer of them, one atop the other, until they lose their thinness and their flatness and get bumpy, undulating in ever-growing black waves, until the whole mass, waist high and higher, feels and weighs and smells like a thirty-foot square section of peat bog, or black ocean.

This is what an artist does--at least as I see it, Bush. She--he--makes it impossible for us to let things slip into unconsciousness ever again. The joy of Tara Donovan's work is to turn the most humble and forgettable of objects that surround us in our daily lives into something beautiful and unforgettable. She transforms. She waves a wand (a wave that takes her hours, and days, and weeks, and months of labor!) to make sure that we wll never see these things in quite the same way again.

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A footnote: Sorry, Bush, I can’t help it. You made me do it. Just when I thought I could get through a whole day without you thoroughly pissing me off, I cach a glimpse of you on the television, urging the Senate to "put aside politics" and approve the nomination of your Bolton. What is "political" about questioning the qualifications of a man who has expressed open contempt for the organization in which you're proposing he should represent this country? What is "political" about questioning your judgment in nominating as a diplomat a man whose understanding of diplomacy appears to be bully tactics? Whose record of personal relations appears to be willful abrasiveness and arrogant dismissal of the views of others? It's another of your in-you-face, bascially fuck-you nominations, Bush. Sorry about the language, but I can’t find a better way to say it. Politics, anyone?