Waters’s faves cover the map or, to put it differently, map his hybrid values, his “taste.” Taste is now a dirty word; theoretically, it’s near untouchable. Still, everyone has it and displays it, whether or not they think they do. Over and over in his art and these essays, Waters deftly shoves our noses in it. He’s a high-fashion hound whose idol is Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons: “I genuflect to Rei’s destruction of the fashion rules.” He collects art by Moyra Davey, Mike Kelley and Cy Twombly, no outsider artists, and calls their work his “roommates.” But the high-style-and high-art-loving Waters is also a devotee of certain amateur or “outsider porn” moviemakers—without whom, he writes, “I could never have had the nerve to make my movies. . . . Am I a pervert for loving the work of Bobby Garcia and David Hurles? Well, yes, I guess. But a healthy one.”
Waters complicates and flouts the boundaries of taste, but there’s no disingenuousness in his assault on all guises of high-mindedness. “Parents should understand that their young kids are not like them and need to have the privacy to fantasize both their good and bad desires,” he writes. Voilà: the youthful, healthy pervert. He suggests, from his upside-down perch, other alternative moral positions: “Zorro tried in her own misguided way,” he writes of the angry stripper’s mothering, which even psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott might not have found “good enough.” Happily, the word “transgressive” doesn’t dot Waters’s essays. One, calling it so doesn’t make it so; two, transgression happens when you don’t know it; and three, he isn’t merely reactive to society’s dictates. He does what he likes and embraces his contradictions. So he sports a black Maybelline-pencil mustache and wears Comme des Garçons, but his manner can be as folksy as Will Rogers’s, and like that midwestern stand-up comic, he’s partial to truthfulness, good-natured subversions and self-deprecation. “The DJ . . . honors my presence by playing Eminem’s ‘Puke’ every time I come in the door.”
Waters layers his narratives with fantastic concoctions, but he tells us in the chapter titled “Leslie” that he learned the hard way to discern for himself the fault line between reality, which Timothy Leary once defined as an opinion, and the uses of make-believe in his art. Leslie is Leslie Van Houten, one of the “notorious ‘Manson girls,’” who was nineteen, in 1969, when she participated in the murder of Rosemary LaBianca on the orders of the insane, charismatic cult leader Charles Manson. Van Houten has been in prison since then and is now over sixty. Waters and Van Houten became friends, first because of Waters’ fascination with the Manson cult, but through knowing her—she lives with great remorse for her crimes—he reckons with his own conscience: “I am guilty, too. Guilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest feeling for the victims’ families or the brainwashed Manson killer kids who were also victims in this sad and terrible case.”
Any half-sentient artist or writer will recognize this aesthetic and ethical Maginot Line. What is crossing the line? Whose line is it anyway? Should it be crossed, redrawn—and if so, in what way? Waters doesn’t proscribe behavior or approaches; the reader can infer from his questions and choices that he continually negotiates art’s ambiguous terrain. There are no rules; there’s self-rule in art, which is its freedom, and a slide rule for one’s mutating sense of good, bad, right, wrong. Inside this collection resides a unique version of art criticism and artistic self-criticism. “Who’s the real extremist,” he asks, “Johnny Mathis or myself?”
“Tennessee Williams saved my life,” Waters announces, calling the playwright his “childhood friend. . . . I never met Tennessee Williams. . . . Nobody has to meet [him]; all you have to do is reread his work. Listening to what he has to say could save your life, too.” Art can save lives. There it is, a claim assiduously avoided in our wary art world, so the notion just might refresh and comfort the jaded, even though it jars with experience and reason. Waters doesn’t shrink from absurdity—he rambles around in it. “Sometimes,” he says, “you have to lighten up.” Waters thinks funny. Even when he’s arguing that Van Houten deserves to be paroled, he can’t help but relieve the gloom: “Initially both my mother and Leslie’s were nervous about our friendship. ‘Does the Manson Family have to have our address?’ my mother moaned when I once had a letter sent there.”
Waters is a reluctant ethicist, owing to his overwhelming sense of the ridiculous. He takes the piss out of himself often, but he can’t stop offering help. In Role Models, there is actually a guide on how to love your misbegotten self. “Cult Leader,” the last chapter, reveals Waters as the anti-Dr. Phil for our time. He declares: “I’m so tired of writing ‘Cult Filmmaker’ on my income tax forms. If only I could write ‘Cult Leader,’ I’d finally be happy. Would you come on a spiritual pilgrimage with me?” If you do, reader, here’s a sample of his ecstatic dicta: “A filth movement . . . to the final Armageddon of the elimination of the tyranny of good taste.” “You’ll need a uniform. A habit. A ‘fallen angel’ look to intimidate yet attract.” “Damaged people make the best warriors.” “What you don’t see is always sexier.”
John Waters, cult leader, hopes to encourage sexual fantasies, to have his followers feel no shame, take risks and die by “spontaneous combustion.” Anyone who reads this collection, highly recommended for all sorts of minds, dispositions and school libraries, would do well to join.
P is for Points of View
Point of View
Tennis, with actual winners and losers, contents me and other workers in fields of indeterminacy—artists, musicians, writers—where first prizes declare arguable standing. Choosing sides is often wrong but not in sports. In this year’s US Open, Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal as if Nadal were an ordinary mortal. I was torn between them, and miss that action. Fortunately, since art can be long, sports short, I’m absorbed in Diane Arbus: A Chronology, 1923–1971 (Aperture, 2011), a book of her beautifully written diary entries, letters and work notes.
Sides formed early about her enigmatic, brilliant photography. At home, Arbus’s photographs upset my father, viscerally. I experienced them, as an adolescent, the way I did Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915)—identifying with uncanny strangeness, fascinated by what I didn’t understand. Some of what Arbus had imaged—people once referred to as “freaks”—was usually kept from sight. In the 1960s, families still institutionalized their “mentally retarded” or “insane” relatives. Various art critics and civilian viewers over the years have thought Arbus cruelly exploited unsuspecting subjects. Some felt she went slumming.
There are English words whose definitions confound definition. Words such as “exploitative,” “ambitious” or “pretentious,” when applied to art and writing or their creators, form blurry impressions, subjectivity shaping them. Mindful of Virginia Woolf’s dictum, in her 1937 essay “Craftsmanship,” that “words don’t live in dictionaries, they live in the mind,” I know recourse to a dictionary definition won’t clarify much that is significant to me. Words live in usage, with connotations.
Lewis Hine, among other documentary photographers, pictured desperate people in desperate conditions. His photographs presumed what I’ll call a “benign-looking contract” between viewer and viewed. “We” viewers were expected to feel sympathy for “others” and their stricken lives. Specific assumptions shaped the spectator as well as those imaged. Hine’s subjects existed primarily in one dimension, which might indeed overwhelm other aspects of their lives, but it was likely only one way they saw themselves. Still, Hine had a specific purpose in shooting them as he did: to expose terrible poverty, appalling slums. I can’t imagine that he was grilled about intentionality then.
Any discomfort I experience looking at a Hine feels simpler to explain than my discomfort with an Arbus, because her purpose was various, ambiguous, dimensional. Deprivation, lack or difference in her work, which encompassed many living situations and conditions, is generally psychological, cultural and physical, often genetic. There is no consensus about—and in looking at
—the characters she pictured. No consensus in part because how “normals” perceive “stigmatized” people, and vice versa, is an ever-evolving process. (See Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 1963, which Arbus read.) Goffman called these interactions “mixed-contacts.” There was also no “social-looking contract”—my term—codifying how viewers should look at her photographs. Still isn’t.
“Someone told me it is spring, but everyone today looked remarkable, just like out of August Sander pictures, so absolute and immutable down to the last button [. . .] all odd and splendid as freaks and nobody able to see himself, all of us victims of the especial shape we come in,” wrote Arbus in 1960, in a note to her friend, the artist Marvin Israel. Arbus recognized the precariousness of her interests and knew her terrain was treacherous. Curiosity, identification, fear, discontent with her upper-middle-class origin, and fascination with what she was not, caused her to seek and embrace difference. Her characters aren’t posed in shadows. They look directly, baldly, at the camera. Her photographs don’t take a recognizable side: she is not moralistic or judgmental. Her most infamous or celebrated images reside in the interstices of ethical positions, since the eye of a wavering beholder is also a judge.
A viewer might be thrown contending with Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. (1967), girls who are common or normal and also different. Or, by Arbus’s representation of an upper-middle-class white family in their suburban backyard, A Family on the Lawn one Sunday in Westchester (1968), which appears to have landed in The Twilight Zone—“nearly like [Harold] Pinter but not quite” she writes in a letter. Or, by A Jewish Giant at Home with his Parents in the Bronx, N.Y. (1970): giant man and parents stand in the living room of a small apartment and compose an unbalanced image, one that also upends the nuclear family and makes it “other,” even perverse.
Risking ambiguities, Arbus vigorously subverted the subject/object position, shoving the viewer onto her soft ground. She interrogated looking, aggressively, and made looking itself controversial.
A naked gaze forced the viewer’s look to rebound onto itself, which may not make a pleasant picture. Consciously, unconsciously, viewers hold points of view and attitudes about what’s pictured. If it is hard to look at or turn away from an Arbus photograph, it may be because viewers experience unwanted or unclear impulses—disgust, loathing, fascination. Arbus’s photographs work with and against self-disguise.
Art-conscious characters know that, early in the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp threw the seminal art screwball, but his work provoked a mostly sectarian response, testing institutional limits and aesthetics. Arbus’s photographs ripped up the “benign-looking contract.” There is no social contract anymore.
Do “others” see themselves as “other”? No, she or he is not marginal in his or her life. And, whoever “they” are, they probably view and shoot too. Anyone can “exploit” anyone on TV, and many do. So, “willing” or “unwilling” participation begs new ethical definitions. There’s power, advantages . . . I’m longing for an elastic dictionary. Fortunately, it’s football season in the US. But the concussions suffered in that game . . .
Decade-ism
In work and love, people get boxed in, edged out, ruined; others find acceptance, win prizes and are vied for. A few are venerated, even adulated. True meritocracies are rare. Talent aside, whatever it is, human beings, like other animals, favor their own, cautiously adopting outsiders, especially those who will keep treasure close. A sociologist once told me that the only outcome your college statistically and reliably predicts is your marriage partner.
Our aggressive species has its survival methods, which usually relate to competition. Class, race, ethnicity, religion, sex: These categories for exclusion and inclusion were long ago transformed into naturalized or so-called civilized mechanisms. Snobbery persists based on these dubious categories. Self-described snobs, necessarily deluded, sit on top of this survivalist heap, priding themselves on their taste. “Taste,” in this instance, connotes “good” but everyone has taste or preferences. “I prefer not to,” declared Bartleby. He had no taste for copying anymore.
Calvin Tomkins’ book, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (Badlands Unlimited, 2013), is my latest friend. Tomkins met Duchamp in 1959 to interview him for Newsweek magazine; over time, the art critic and artist became friends. Of Tomkins’ many books, two earlier publications are on Duchamp: The Bride and The Bachelors (1965) and Duchamp: A Biography(1996).
Duchamp talked to Tomkins about taste: “Taste is an experience that I try not to let into my life. Bad, good or indifferent, it doesn’t come in. I’m so against interior decorators . . . You don’t have to be happy or unhappy about it, you see? . . . Taste can’t help you understand what art can be.”
Taste is a five-letter word no one discusses. Mentioning it, I notice friends and colleagues look at their menus or their nails. Mumbling begins, then silence. I’m not kidding, completely. People like to believe their sensibilities, approaches or attitudes have been educated, nurtured or expanded beyond mere taste, “bad, good or indifferent.” It is also a matter of taste not to appreciate taste.
Duchamp distinguishes between the “onlooker” and the artist. “The priority of the connoisseur or whatever you call him isn’t to speak the same language as the artist [. . .] But don’t say the artist is a great thinker because he produces it. The artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, ‘You have produced something marvelous.’ The onlooker has the last word on it.” Duchamp holds that these formations—artist and onlooker—perceive the same object differently, having very different aims. But the onlooker will determine the worth and fate of the art(ist).
Conversations among artists and writers about work often center on “how to make it work.” Craft, materials and considerations of space regularly come into discussion—work talk. Periodontists see diseased gums, wherever they are, just as musicians and composers hear with other ears.
I regularly question my preferences. Why I like or dislike writing, a photograph. I don’t trust experience, even if it has shaped me; I don’t fervently trust what I think or believe, while I believe it still. A pox on absolutes! I could trace a genealogy of what I think and like, which is, to some extent, what I was exposed to, taught, made conscious of, and decided not to be or accept. Tendrils of difference and objections sprouting rebellions and self-discoveries—I could list them. But I couldn’t create an order for my character, and hold it/me to a neat line. (When I learned to write, I wrote fast, not on the lines, only below or above.)
My preferences change and change again. Once I believed, doing studio painting with Ron Gorchov and Doug Ohlson, that the figure would never return. Once, involved in showing and making experimental films, I believed Hollywood movies were uninteresting. One night, watching a structuralist-materialist black-and-white film of its celluloid grain, I asked myself: “Why am I watching this?” Like Bartleby, I preferred not to, anymore. Whatever I’ve “renounced” resides somewhere, pinging and ponging, because ideas live on, more or less alive in different moments. Being for or against something now is less interesting to me than understanding what it does, how it does it, and why it’s being done.
Which brings me to the art world’s obsession with decadeism. The so-called literary world stores much less faith on periods of emergence. The new is treasured more in visual art than in writing; the literary world is backward in so many ways, and I will not count them. But a first book comes out in 1991, say, and the year stops being of interest, with the next book, whenever it comes out, which counts more, and then the next. A writer is thought to mature, even to write better and know more. The actual age of the writer matters today as a form of “branding,” but the brand becomes old, just as the writer will.
Artists get pinned to a decade. It’s as if time had stopped, the artist suspended in it. Artists think in and through their work, during all the decades after the one in which they debuted. If humans weren’t perverse,
in Postmodernity the “post” would become valuable.
People now live so long, many past 100. Extended middle and old-age pushes youth further and further back in time, making being young really a thing of the past. Something interesting could emerge from that.
Q is for Quiet
At the Microphone
At a conference called “Schizo-Culture,” held at Columbia University in 1975, the speakers were magnetic and illustrious: William Burroughs. R.D. Laing. John Cage. The audience—graduate students, artists, writers and freelance intellectuals. Later on, “Schizoculture,” organized by Sylvère Lotringer, would be billed as the conference that launched French theory in America.
The gathering took place in a lecture hall or auditorium that seated about 300 people, a raucous, animated group, who heard, for instance, about psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and were told that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” R.D. Laing said that graduate students were the most depressed population in any society.
All day, men—no women—took the microphone and spoke. There was always a buzz in the audience, whispers, an audible hum of excitement. Then it was time for John Cage. He walked onto the stage and began to speak, without the microphone. He stood at the center of the small stage and addressed the crowd. He talked, without amplification, and soon people in the audience shouted, “We can’t hear you, use the mic. We can’t hear you.” John Cage said, “You can, if you listen.” Everyone settled down, there was no more buzz, hum or rustling, there was silence, and John Cage spoke again, without the microphone, and everyone listened and heard perfectly.
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Page 17