Talking the Talk, from the Right Distance
Last night, I watched the first episode of Art21, which featured a bit on Louise Bourgeois—and then this morning, found David Byrne tossing out an aside about her in Bicycle Diaries. I love that sort of coincidence. But it was one of the artists Byrne didn’t mention, Bruce Nauman, who had me putting show and book together.1
Prior to the Art21 episode, I’d heard Nauman’s name, but knew nothing about him. Lo and behold, there was a totally average-looking guy running a New Mexico ranch part of the time and working there in his studio the other part. And the art wasn’t the sort of cowboy stuff you might expect from a rancher: sculptures of buffalo or paintings of drovers getting a herd from one place to another. His video installations might indeed have featured some post hole digging or horseback riding, but heritage celebrations they were not—and his stairs to nowhere would have been, among the ranchers I grew up with, at best tolerated as the quirks of the screwball down the road. Here this everyman was in a little burg outside of Santa Fe, a known and respected presence in contemporary art. Of course, Nauman went through art school and worked in a number of cultural hotspots with a number of important people before life on the ranch (and then Santa Fe’s no stranger to artists); plus, he’s represented by a few galleries in different cities—so especially in this so-called interconnected age, he hasn’t exactly exiled himself from markets or communities that keep artists in the loop and alive.
But I’ve wondered before how this works: whether the only way to be “successful” when you’re rooted in a location outside all the action is to have established the right connections in those hubs, and then either gone back to or found the distant place you’ve decided is where you belong. That seems to have been the trajectory of Georgia O’Keefe and Agnes Martin, both eventually ending up in New Mexico; Ted Kooser never seems to have really left the Midwest, but poetry feels like sort of a different scene than art, which really requires an audience to be where the work is geographically located to enjoy it.
In any case, Byrne comes in here when he relates dropping in on an arts center that has on view the work of a group of “outsider” artists. He wonders just what outsider is really supposed to mean, proposing that maybe it’s less about access or education, and more about the artist’s lack of “perspective on their work that we expect a professional artist to have… at least have a sense of how their work fits into the world at large, or into the art market, and can fake the talk pretty well.” That involves the assumption “that the work of a professional artist is slightly separate from the artist as a person.”2 In other words, you can enjoy the piece in front of you without knowing anything about who made it. This separation between person and work, Byrne thinks, isn’t present for outsider artists, who supposedly don’t have much or any “objectivity about [their] own work”—and what that lack of objectivity really entails or means is a lack of “[s]ocial functionality,” never having grown into the ability to “function well enough socially to be accepted as ‘normal’.... The poor outsider never learned or mastered those social skills.”3
If this is the case, then unsurprisingly, (a large) part of what might allow Nauman or any other artist to dwell outside an established cultural mecca and still be relevant is their ability to play the game well enough to be able to do their thing, wherever they choose to do it. It makes a lot of sense, but it also causes me wonder where I might fall along that spectrum. Because I can play the academic/professional/real writerly game for a brief while, but then have to flee, as quickly and recklessly as possible, lest I self-immolate. In other words, I think I’m pretty low on the sort of social functionality, not in possession of enough community-player spirit, needed to be considered an insider. And then it’s also not as if I’ve completely exiled myself; although unaffordability and maddeningly thin walls drove me out of the city, twenty minutes on the commuter rail will get me back to events or duties with no problem. But those twenty minutes might as well be twenty hours, where the drastic change in culture is concerned, whether said culture deals with transportation or aesthetics, leisure activities or interests or openness to newcomers. I don’t fit in in this place that’s now technically my home; if I were able to, I’d leave.
So that last acknowledgment about where I sleep and eat and work and pay taxes had me thinking, too: the ability to fake the talk when called for might not be the thing in itself, at least for some of us. After all, it’s not that you have to maintain that functional mask all the time, beyond the occasion—a meeting, a gallery opening, a reading—that calls for it. Maybe the more important consideration is that, once it’s not required, you’ve got a place to hang that mask, a space where you really feel comfortable enough to settle in and let your face and your voice and your arms do whatever feels natural. It’s that comfortable settling that then gives you the strength to put the mask back on when demanded. So I understand these artists who need to be away from the clamor in order to do their work, and I understand how they’re not necessarily considered outsiders for claiming that quiet(er) space.
How far away can you realistically get, though? Wherever you are, so much of contemporary US life involves being able to talk the administrative and bureaucratic talk needed just to secure the basics—some form of income, healthcare that’s even vaguely adequate. And that sort of talk never ends, so that your painful default may just become a display of the mask of efficiency and self-reliance that pushes you farther and farther from what you think you’re really supposed to be doing with your life, or from how you’re supposed to be doing it. Even at home, then, unless you go inside and completely shut out the world and any view of what the Joneses are doing across or even on the street, and how they’re looking while they do it, you’re bombarded with messages and gestures insisting you get with the program and be normal. And for many an artist or writer or poet (or representative of any vocation or interest unaligned with reigning concerns), getting away from that constant reminder that there’s something weird about your thoughts and desires is just as poisonous, and is in fact supportive of, the internal editor that ceaselessly makes you second guess a phrase or brushstroke or even your larger belief in yourself. So I also understand how being able to get together, and easily, with other oddballs—not necessarily at the scenes to be seen at or with the funders or insiders who can get you somewhere—is just as essential as comfortable seclusion.
Those are the thoughts for today, at least, when rain is forecast to come in and stay, forcing both squares and straights to keep eyes out for rising water. Or for this outsider, finding a cozy corner and reassuring myself, via more reading, that the loonies have been and will continue to be around, even if I’d have to travel a good distance to find them.
1. “Identity,” Art21, season 1, episode 1, September 28, 2001, https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s1/identity/.↩
2. David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries (Penguin: 2010), 233.↩
3. Byrne, 234, 235–36.↩