The Artist’s (Emotional) Model
Scattered notes about using, and fighting with, feelings.
1)
Aristotle once wrote that in order to move passions in others one needed to be moved oneself; this was a principle that, in turn, Konstantin Stanislavsky made a central tenet of his “method acting” system. As actors (and I had to study this technique when I played my first character at a small theater in Chicago many years ago) one has to draw from the memory of a given emotion in order to portray it authentically onstage. But the “method” was precisely a way to use emotion, not to be used by it.
Method acting is only one of the various approaches to deal with emotion; those who are technically inexperienced (usually beginners or amateurs) and let themselves be consumed by emotions often lose the balance and separation between the emotional authenticity of the delivery with the technical mastery of the material. Amateur artmaking in all its genres is based the encouragement and permission to express oneself through art— and that self-expression means to freely express one’s feelings. But as one begins to make art as a profession, one realizes that one should be wary of emotions. Our job really is to engineer things and experiences that cause emotion, but this engineering work must be an unemotional process.
2)
I have often thought about this specially because of my friendships in New York with various minimalist, post-conceptual and institutional critique artists who became artistically active in the 1970s— a time when there was a particular distaste from the romantic image of the artist projected by the AbEx generation, which prompted the following generation to work in ways that completely extracted the personal. I once noticed, visiting the house/studio of one of them, how this artist’s living environment—just like their work— was almost completely devoid of any personal touch: all the furniture was austere, office-like and nondescript; the bookshelves looked more like the bookshelves of an archive. There was not a single thing in the house that looked like having sentimental value, such as an old family photo. To this day it is hard for me to know if the decision of living like this constitutes a conscious effort to banish personal emotion or if it is really a natural, unexamined condition. It likely is, I concluded, a combination of both. I admire that position because in my case it is hard to banish emotions: I often struggle with responding to how I feel and am cognizant of the fact that some of my work can be seen as sentimental.
3)
The ability of an artist to cause emotion while presenting a sober, dry, and impersonal environment is one that many artists seek, not always successfully. A master in this approach, I would argue, is Janet Cardiff. Case in point is the famous 2001 work by Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Forty Part Motet, based on a 1540 choral work by Thomas Tallis titled Spem in Allium (“hope in any other”). The piece, which consists in the austere arrangement of plain speakers in a bare room with each speaker reproducing an individual singing voice, is mesmerizing and powerful. I remember Bures Miller commenting in conversation once that when the piece was produced the technology to make it happen (the program that allowed each speaker to reproduce a single singing voice and allow all tracks to synchronize) barely existed then. Cardiff and Bures Miller excel at presenting inanimate objects that produce visceral reactions. Another example is Killing Machine from 2007, which refers of an execution apparatus mentioned in Franz Kafka’s The Penal Colony. Visitors are invited to press a button in a darkened room with a dentist chair enveloped in a cage and surrounded by menacing robotic arms with protruding knives; the button triggers the arms to descend onto the chair to perform a violent butchering of the imaginary body in that chair.
4A)
My wariness toward the rule of emotions goes back to 1991, when I made my first trip to Europe. That year I was a back-packing art student with an Eurail pass and spent some time in Paris. I had studied French the year prior and had a basic level of French that allowed me to manage through France. Like any other art student, I spent many days at the Louvre. There I encountered The Burial of Atala, a 1808 painting by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, which memorializes the novella Atala by Chateaubriand — a tragic romantic story about a white woman who falls in love with an indigenous man. At the time, being so young, I could not see the colonialist fantasy of the 19th century story but only the romantic narrative: I had just been through an unrequited love situation and heartbreak that had caused me great sorrow and anxiety. I spent a very long time in front of that painting, trying to remember the story in the novel (there was no internet then, so one was left to one’s own devices when trying to recall things).
At the youth hostel I was staying in Paris, I met an Italian fellow student traveler whose name I have now forgotten — I will call him Gianni. We ended up doing some sight-seeing together that week and had long and intense conversations at the hostel— as it often happens in these unusual circumstances, we struck a semblance of a friendship, even while we would never see each other again after this trip. One night at the hostel Gianni told me that he had been trained in hypnosis techniques and offered to hypnotize me. Somewhat skeptical that he could do so, I agreed.
5)
In the spring of 2001 I was invited to do a solo exhibition at INTAR, a small but important gallery for Latin American art that was part of the organization of the same name, created by the late theater director Max Ferrá. The gallery, which is now defunct, was where, in the 1980s, Félix González Torres presented one of his first solo exhibitions in New York. In the late 90s, when I arrived in New York City, I had witnessed the epicenter of the dot-com bubble, with the fast overdrive distribution of venture capital onto the online world and a culture of velocity and avid consumption fueled by that easy money, all of which came crashing down in 2000. I had been reading at the time an article about ecstasy (which was a dominant drug of choice in rave culture and acid house parties in the 90s) and the desire to achieve a state of spiritual plenitude, a blissful numbness that, while a hedonistic act, represented the vacuous frivolity of that time. I produced an installation with objects that represented volcanoes, with the projected names of volcanoes around the world onto the wall of the gallery. As Franklin Sirmans wrote in the catalogue essay for that exhibition, the project pointed to the fact that, “to have everything may be to feel nothing.”
4B)
Gianni took me through the hypnotic process as I laid down in a bunkbed and closed my eyes. As I mentioned before I was skeptical about the power of hypnosis, but before I knew it I was being guided by his voice. He started asking me to visualize a path and tell him where I was going. I found myself back in the Louvre, walking by myself down its darkened galleries. My steps took me right in front of Girodet’s painting, The Burial of Atala. I sat down to contemplate the painting and started telling Gianni what I saw. As I was describing the image of the burial of this young woman, I started reflecting on how the image represented not only loss, but the impotence before rejection and the abandonment we feel when we are overpowered by destiny. I spoke for a long time, elaborating on the subject of loss and abandonment. At some point, I was overcome with tears.
At that moment, another student walked into the common bunkbed area and turned on the lights, and I was abruptly awakened.
After that experience, I realized I no longer wanted to ever be in the “hypnotized” chair. I wanted, instead, to be the hypnotizer.
6)
My exhibition opened in the summer of 2001; I traveled to Europe shortly after that. There, I continued writing about numbness, arguing that as artists we were complicit in creating forms of escapism instead of work that was rooted in real issues. I felt that conceptual strategy was quickly becoming a new mannerism.
A few weeks later, when I returned to New York, the World Trade Center towers were struck by two planes.
What followed, as we know, was trauma, and the US invasion of Iraq. How could art respond meaningfully to that moment?
The answer was then, as it has always been, not to respond emotionally but to learn from, and use, emotional models as a medium: not to represent, but to act, not to story-tell, but to provoke storytelling. The spirit that dominated then was not to symbolically represent But that is another (emotional) story to be told at a later time.
I haven’t even finished reading it yet, but I just wanted to say that this looks absolutely fascinating.