—The art world—
I'm in graduate school working on an MFA. It's a difficult two-year program that is taking me five years to complete. That means five years of constantly being told your art doesn't work. That is complete nonsense, but they do a great job of shaming you and making you feel foolish until you get a thick skin or at least an angry attitude. Or you walk around life in fear like your instructors do.
But what if your art really doesn't work?
This summer, I attended an opening reception with some friends and we stood staring at a sculpture trying to figure out if it was meant to portray an object that might be motorized, or if it was, in fact, mechanical but broken. We finally determined that it was broken and we decided that the motor—it looked like it had been salvaged from an old barn—was probably a bad choice. The fact that it was not working didn't stop the organizers from praising the artist during the award presentation. I saw another mechanical piece break down during the reception, but that artist was able to fix it quickly.
I've seen kinetic and multimedia art work fail to work a number of times. Once, at a major museum, a friend and I stared at a piece by an international artist for a minute or so before, knowing the artist's style, I finally said, "it's not turned on."
Most artists, I think, want their work to come off well with the audience. We want the work to resonate and we want the viewer to "get it." But broken mechanical art doesn't succeed, and I wonder how that makes the artist feel. Once, I did an installation piece with sound, and it worked. But I would be very wary of doing anything mechanical because I've seen how often the work breaks down.
When I was a security guard at a museum, we had lots of mechanical art works, since we were a "contemporary" art museum. And on a number of occasions they stopped working. For a while, zoetropes were popular. One of our exhibitors had made one with an old record player and it broke almost immediately. Our policy was to contact the artist and ask what to do. Surprisingly, this artist didn't seem to care, or couldn't do anything about it. So it just sat there with no explanation and patrons would stand and stare and try to figure out why contemporary art mocks the audience. Sometimes I would walk up to the visitors and softly mention to them that it was broken, and that was a very satisfying thing for them because they could dismiss it and move on to the next incomprehensible object.
I think we were discouraged from telling patrons when works weren't working, but we were definitely instructed to mind our own business when we had a major piece that never worked at all.
Instead of creating the piece himself, the internationally famous artist designed it on paper and sent instructions for building it. I don't recall who did the fabrication, but it was essentially a space that one person at a time could enter to experience a subtle effect of light. But the lamp was pulled out of alignment by the rigid foam material that surrounded it, causing the viewer to experience nothing at all. As security guards, our job was to line people up and give each of them two minutes with the art. We had people waiting two hours to sit in a box in which nothing happens, which was not a result the artist would have desired.
The art became, for me, a piece about authority and trust and manipulation as I, a uniformed representative of culture, queued unwitting victims to experience nothing. It also seemed to say something about how we no longer feel able to question art. It was the cliché about the emperor's clothing. And, unfortunately, it was impossible not to think of Nazi death camps, which only became more unsettling by how incomparable the original and the analogy were. The museum refused to listen to the guards, who knew to a nut and bolt what the problem was. They refused to fix it, to acknowledge it, or even to contact the artist, as far as I knew.
The piece travelled to other venues and was reviewed in Art in America at the last stop. The reviewer said that sitting in the space was somewhat meditative. That's all he could come up with. He didn't know it was broken either, or wouldn't say if he suspected it was. The art traveled the country with people lining up to experience absolutely nothing and then speculate on what the meaning could possibly be. I wonder what Duchamp would have to say. It was interesting when a visitor would exit the installation and tell the other visitors still waiting in line that it was "cool." Their experiences were all different from each other, and sometimes very specific: "I saw centipedes!"
