The Transfiguration of Obsessions
Should we be more embracing of our respective gentle madnesses?
Jenny Perlin, Still from Perseverance & How to Develop It. 16mm film, b/w and color, 15 minutes, 2003
Many years ago, I had the chance to host Callie Angell, the authority on Andy Warhol’s films, to give a lecture on Warhol’s Screen Tests. She worked at the Whitney Museum where she was an associate curator working on the Warhol Film Project. She also was the author of the Andy Warhol film catalogue raisonné. For decades she was the authority on the subject until her untimely death in 2010, which was reported as a suicide. In conversation over lunch that time, she told me about her research which included, among other things, spending time opening Warhol’s hundreds of time capsules —Warhol’s conceptual project consisting of filling cardboard boxes with random things, sealing and dating them. She would open each box, review and document their contents. “It is kind of depressing”— I remember her saying, mentioning how the boxes would contain basically Warhol’s trash of the day: things like a pair of dirty jeans, an old receipt from the dry cleaners, cigarette butts. I pictured her in my mind in a dark basement of the Whitney, alone, silently and methodically reviewing films and documenting those boxed items every day for years and years. I thought: not that they are without interest, but devoting one’s whole life to studying these pieces? Also, dedicating years to an archaeological analysis of things that Warhol made so casually and almost by accident like those time capsules, as well as those screen tests where he would sometimes turn on the camera and just walk away?
Keeping all these intrusive thoughts to myself, I only asked her what had initially interested her in Warhol’s films. She replied that she felt she had not really been part of the 60s despite that being the decade of her teenage and young adult years (she had been born in 1948). As a result, she had devoted her professional life to an exhaustive study of that decade, opening time capsules in the basement and watching screen tests.
She was of course great at it. But I couldn’t explain that powerful motivation for that kind of research without seeing it, at least partially, as something that motivates artists and researchers alike, something that one can rationalize but perhaps is never able to understand completely: an obsession.
As we know, obsessions can be of many kinds, from OCD and other more severe conditions that stem from anxiety to much milder forms. The kind of obsessions I have been thinking about are not the extreme kind, but rather the ones that appear to be mild compulsions, and more particularly, those that find an outlet in a particular activity. I happen to subscribe to Bibliomania, for instance, what Nicolas A. Basbanes has referenced as “A Gentle Madness”. The subset of that subset of mild compulsions that I want to say something about here concerns artists, curators, and art professionals in general.
When we consider the history of any period of art and try to find the explanation for why certain artists worked the way they did we naturally look at large historic events like wars, social and political movements that can help offer insights on the cultural moment. In this sense the emergence of psychoanalysis, for example, helps understand Surrealism, the social revolutions of the early 20th century help explain Social Realism, the exponential rise of consumer culture and advertising in the 1950s and 60s help explain Pop Art, and so forth. These are certainly important and real events that historically had a cultural impact and response that must be studied, although we can’t allow ourselves the determinism of specific historic events to explain every artwork. Similarly, professional art historical research dictates that, as we focus on the specific work of each artist and zoom into their biography, we need to be careful not to generalize or overprescribe a reading based on whatever element of that biography we believe is dominant. As an art educator I know full well what the romantic pull of the biographical narrative is for interpretation — a pull so strong that it becomes very easy to make biography the central and only lens through which to understand a work (Van Gogh being the classic case). But by the same token, and certainly while historic events impact an artist’s life and output, equally or more important are events and circumstances specific to that artist, writer, curator or thinker that help explain things around their worldview or their fixation on a particular idea or practice. It is all part of the context. So, while art history is not the history of obsessions, certainly individual obsessions can shed light in a lot of that history.
I recall my revered art history professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Robert Loescher, from whom I learned a great deal (and who I have also mentioned before in this column). He was a brilliant lecturer, with masterful elocution and narration skills, and a baritone voice that immersed you in a documentary of art in every lecture. His lectures were cinematic and intellectual experiences— and they were colored by his obsessions. Bob was an out gay man who in the 1950s and had experienced the dominant climate of homophobia in post-war America. Whether or not for that reason, sexuality was a really important subject for him and it appeared often in his lectures, from his history of Mesoamerican Art ( he once showed us slides of the Atlantes de Tula in Mexico, arguing that the sensual curvature of the butt of the warrior sculptures was proof that there were gay Toltecs), to his general art history surveys (he delighted in talking about a chamber in a Spanish Royal Palace full of provocative nude Baroque paintings, mostly now in El Prado, which he claimed was secretly referred to at the time as the “sala de masturbación”— something I never was able to assert if it was true). He also reflected on the topic of course in his contemporary art talks. On video one can watch a lecture Bob once gave on the topic of “Sexuality and Homosexuality in the Art of Roger Brown”, the famous Chicago Imagist artist. In that lecture he concedes in his introduction that Brown himself hated the gay lens being used to understand his work, but then goes on to make a convincing case for the presence of those aspects in his paintings which include references to gay life in Chicago, the AIDS crisis, and the subject of gay cruising in parks at night.
Bob’s various obsessions —which included food, of which he was very fond of, and particularly Mexican art— were the basis of his performative lectures and surveys. The structure of those lectures, which included the objective presentation of information and historical references, then a zooming in of examples, and then the entertaining editorial remark colored by Bob’s own biases (such as those Toltec butts). His medium was not the dry academic presentation, but an art historical approach with a running commentary that even if one did not share its views, made the connections to the material lively and communicated the point that art is, after all, about interpretation.
It is true that the overzealous centering of a topic can be both unnerving (specially to those who are not obsessed with that topic) but also revealing. The examples abound in art and in literature. Borges, for instance, seems to me to have been quite an obsessive. In addition to his encyclopedic literary knowledge, he also had specific interest in thinkers and writers like Swedenborg, Stevenson, Cervantes, and others who he constantly referenced in his texts, interviews, and lectures. Using an analogy from a past column: obsessives are hedgehogs – individuals who know a lot about one single thing, instead of many things. It would be impossible to be obsessive about everything.
So how are obsessions expressed in the art discourse? Sometimes they seem to come from a need of compensating something that one feels is missing (which is what seemingly motivated Callie Angell), the importance of asserting an aspect of someone’s identity that had been repressed by oneself or others (in the case of Loescher’s interest in sexuality). And of course, art practices that are obsessive in themselves, which I feel we are familiar with, including ritualistic performances, serialism, and even seemingly unhealthy and even creepy fixations on certain subjects (such as Joseph Cornell’s obsessions with ballerinas) most of which have been written about by others.
And then there are also those art works about obsessiveness— a category in it of itself.
Back in 1999, artist Jenny Perlin asked me whether I could be part of a film she was putting together. We both had recently moved to New York from Chicago, and we shared similar interests (perhaps obsessions?) with obscure topics. She had found a series of self-help books from 1915 titled “Perseverance & How to Develop It” and had decided to make a short film out of that material. She asked me to do a scene biting my nails. We shot the scenes in the old Whitney Studio Program building, between Walker and White streets. We did a lot of takes as I recall in the dusty stairwell of that building. When the film was finally released, several years later, it made several rounds in the art film circuits and I often heard from people who had seen me on screen in festivals in places like Berlin and elsewhere. This was the extent of my career as a film actor.
I asked Jenny a few questions about this film. She explained how that book had fascinated her: “I loved the idea of having a manual to develop a characteristic like perseverance and thought the exercises in the book were absolutely bizarre.” The perseverance exercises in the book were indeed strange: “Counting grains of rice over and over, unraveling knotted balls of yarn (and then re-knotting them when you were done), doing finger exercises to develop manual dexterity—it seemed crazy at first. Then I started thinking about what other kinds of things people were being asked to do when the book was written, like get ready to go work on the assembly line, like start to live in a regimented formation, like go be soldiers in the Great War. But it also coincided with Freud's theories of depression.” In the end, Perlin concludes, “the book was teaching how to hide idleness of mind (which in a Judeo-Christian philosophy leads to all kinds of devilishness). You gotta work. And success will follow.”
I asked Jenny if she considers herself an obsessive. She replied: “Dare I say—passionate? Enthusiastic? […] Now my obsessions tend more towards ideas, books, language, and of course I guess if I'm still making art now, decades later, that's an obsession for sure. Because I don't think you can sustain a practice without some of that ingredient.”
What I have often wondered over the years is not about how much artists are obsessive, but how we don’t allow us to be obsessive enough as we endeavor to fit into the demands of the professional art world. This might be a counterintuitive idea, given that one might think that artists are indeed expected to be obsessive— which I would argue is true, but up to a limit.
I first thought about this back in 2005, when I saw the exhibition Obsessive Drawing, curated by Brooke Davis Anderson at the American Folk Art Museum. I was struck by the laser-focus obsession by each artist in some of these works, which included drawing infinite and minuscule details in a small paper surfaces over the course of years of labor. I remember thinking at that time how self-taught artist (sometimes called “outsiders”), functioning externally from the temporal parameters of the art world, could make things that would be inconceivable for a professional artist. How could I, for instance, spend ten or fifteen years doing a single work? Even in exceptional cases, like Jay De Feo’s painting The Rose, the painting was an 8-year legendary endeavor, but by no means her only work. In the brand of obsessiveness in the Obsessive Drawing exhibition, the idea of arriving at a final product seemed secondary; on the contrary, I often wonder if in these cases process can sometimes be so central that reaching the end can be more of an inconvenience.
In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Arthur Danto writes: “Art is the kind of thing that depends for its existence upon theories: without theories of art, black paint is just black paint.” We might build on Danto’s point to say this about the topic at hand: without art works to document and provide an outcome to the mental and emotional process one has undertaken; obsessions are nothing but obsessions. However, as they might matter more to the individual than the works they generate, art works might not be more than an incidental event in the context of a rich, and individual obsession that can by itself never be satisfied, nor ever successfully taken out of someone’s system. Art making in this sense becomes a necessary, but ultimately permanently futile, exorcism of our obsessions.
Thank you for dedicating an article to the acknowledgment of obsessions!!!! “Gentle madness” is such a compassionate and validating description. I think “passions” is a closely related term to this topic as well. I have often analyzed my earliest memories as a child, wondering if I chose the artist’s path not because I loved a particular craft for its own sake, but because there was no other way to both nurture and exorcise those obsessions which otherwise threatened to obliterate me.