Conquest of the Useless

Art is Useless, WTF

I hung out at Hungarian last night with Tyler and his friend Ron.  He met Ron at the coffee shop and the two of them are scientists, Ron is an out of work physicist who has a two year old child.  I think her name was Sylvie and she slept the whole time we talked.  Ron is an incredibly informed person with a great memory, focus, and ability to organize his thoughts.  However he had such a strong personal sequencing to his logic that he would skip over, rather than submerge himself in, the structures of comments that Tyler and I made.  It was a minor character flaw next to his immensity and I felt embarrassed that I had to monitor my frustration at him being a hit or miss listener.  He was a huge person, inspiringly driven and, above all, crafted by years and layers of education.  He didn’t seem to have a lot of respect for the humanities, preferring to ground himself in the objective truth (mapping) of science. The experience really shook me, and caused me to call into question my devotion to the arts.  I half listened, head downturned in prayer to the writing of Robert Smithson.  Smithson’s personal narrative of time and space collapsing into points, aesthetic science.  I would drift into the conversation of Ron and Tyler, the function of neutrinos, back to Smithon, mirrors are masterpieces, voids delivering perfect form.  Walking through to the other side, to look back from a new perspective, displaced. 

The Talking Heads movie title ‘Stop Making Sense’ was pulled from a song about losing sight while growing old, but it's also a a catchphrase for the liberating gateway of all art.  Loving art is loving storytellers, without facts.  It makes me feel frustrated to tears.   I am devoting myself to things that are ends in themselves, a toolbox of instruments that function for a physical or mental transformation without the need to be correct.  All art is partially pretty, decorative.  Frivolous like a flower, transmitters, mystic, secreting energy, but without practicality, perhaps a devotion to being useless.  I want everything to be polished but ripe with intention.  More intention than material.  Give me money and technology, make me professional, so I can say things that should reach the eyes of others.  The church of public attention.  The symbols of mass devotion.  Guide in a useful way.  The flute master leading the rats from the sewer to god only knows where, a delusion that is constructive?  A death of their rationality, an escape?

 Robert Kelly:

  Art needs to prove

                    only what is not the case.

                    Proof of what is not
                    yet the case.  Control

                    the future.  The uncanny

                    feels around your heart.

                    Stalin on the Black Sea coast

                    stared south through mist

                    remembering homeland music.

                    A tear in his eye.  Seagull cry.

Then I knew the stars had come

                    take up their places on the grid

                    53^rd St and Fifth Avenue, Sixth

                    Avenue and 8^th Street, Bleecker

                    and Macdougal, Lenox and One

                    hundred twenty fifth, we know

                    the places where they shone

                    when there was still nighttime

                    in the old city.  The meek angels

                    stood among us and taught us

                    to reason and to rhythm and to sing,

                    every number was a friend then

                    and every friend was full of honey

                    and everybody loved us, every

                    body told us what we had to do.

                    At last you know (the bird said)

                    what the mind thinks

                    is not what thinks the mind.