The Clock

If I was in New York this weekend, I’d be going to see Christian Marclay’s video piece ‘The Clock’ at Lincoln Center. I watched about an hour’s worth last summer at the Venice Biennale, and even though I’d read about the central conceit of the piece several times–Marclay collages 24 hours worth of film, with a clock or some explicit time cue in each fragment, so that you move in real time through the history of cinema and through a patchwork meditation on time’s meaning and passage–but somehow I still experienced that shock of recognition, the uncanny sync of the time on my wrist and the time on the screen. The piece is a miracle of editing and a weirdly intoxicating experience. As the screen faded out a very young Denzel Washington and then faded in Paul Newman it struck me how much our time is the time of celebrity; the faces of certain actors bring back entire phases of my life, like a Proustian madeleine consisting of dated haircuts and half-forgotten names.

I have this bad habit of being prematurely elegiac (umm, hello new Mirror?). That means that even though it is still July, I already have a bloodhound sense of summer fading. Really, I’m happiest in the period right before the summer solstice, when we haven’t yet reached the very longest day. Everybody tells you that when you have children time passes more quickly, and what I remember best about Zadie Smith’s article on ‘The Clock’ from last year is her envy at all the childless gallery-goers who can stay and watch all night. Time passes faster now.

I’ve also been watching a lot of Louis CK, who is the Rembrandt of comedy in that his great subject is aging and the decay of  the flesh. He talks about his kids all the time, and their innocence and youth is the counterpoint to his cynicism and age. B. turned ten this year, a thing I cannot say without incredulity. Youth belongs to him, but I don’t mind. A friend of mine just bought a house with a running track behind it. He says he is going to run there with his daughter. She’s small now, and he’ll give her a head start, so that they reach the end of the track at the same time. As the years go by the gap will narrow, until she gives him a head start because he can’t keep up with her.  Being a parent means you kind of like it when your children eclipse you. Look, they’re passing us already.

But sometimes it’s just good to feel like time is standing still, so after I saw ‘The Clock’ during my imaginary New York weekend I would head over to see the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the Whitney. I’d never heard of her when I stumbled into a mirrored, dark cubicle in the basement of the Louisiana museum outside of Copenhagen last spring. Colored lights hung from the ceiling, and they were reflected in endless recursion in the mirrored walls and the shallow pools on either side of a narrow walkway. In all that light, my body was the shadow. The piece is called ‘The Gleaming Lights of the Souls’ and it is at once melancholy and exhilarating. I stayed in there for a long time, and people kept stumbling inside, taking a deep breath, and standing in wonder. There’s a similar piece at the Whitney, called ‘Fireflies on the Water.’ Apparently the Whitney has a strict one-minute rule about staying in the cubicle, which is too bad. No one should interrupt you while you’re communing with infinity.

Art/ Kitsch/ Kids

I’ve been trying to take my boys to art events and exhibits around town, even though I know that the result of my cultivation of their taste will be their rejection of my own. It’s starting already; I was telling them a bedside story and B. interrupted a minor but pivotal plot point (lost parent; hidden talent; birthmark) by saying, “that always happens in stories like this one.” I was stung, truly, though I wasn’t trying to be original: I was just trying to get them to go to sleep.

At FIMA the proportion of kitsch to art was high, though the kitsch had a Dali flavor (Nabokov on Dali: “Norman Rockwell’s twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood”). They had a small gallery set up just for children. Artists contributed small paintings, on sale for ten dollars each. The idea was that the children would choose a piece of artwork on their own, without parental interference or pressure. I wasn’t allowed inside and I couldn’t believe that I was sending my children into a closed room with strangers, to be given juice and candy and balloons. Art is dangerous.

We also went to the ZOO exhibit at MAC, though I probably should have waited for a time when the boys were less heat-stroked and loopy. I wanted to see Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, gaudy and contextless and lovely. These are golden copies of the animal heads designed by two nineteenth century Jesuits who lived in China and created a fountain/water clock to decorate the old summer palace outside Beijing, importing baroque design to an interpretation of the Chinese symbols. In 1860, the palace was destroyed by French and English soldiers and the fountain looted. The Chinese government continues to try to repatriate the stolen heads, which have become symbols of cultural appropriation, ownership and legitimacy.

Ai Weiwei is one of those artists who has become heroic under the pressure of the Chinese regime. He has a populist canniness and a willingness to follow his art out to its spiraling conclusions. In 2010 Weiwei had artisans in Jingdezhen hand-fire and paint one hundred million sunflower seeds, which carpeted the floor of the Turbine Hall at the Tate in London. The seeds evoked the tension between craftsmanship and mass production, celebrity art and anonymity, the history of porcelain in China and the history of hunger, fragility and multiplicity, art and oppression (in the original exhibition, people tread on the seeds until the ceramic dust was declared hazardous and the area roped off). But each was a little miracle, a bit of trompe-l’oeil that you could hold in your hand. Here is Weiwei describing the evolution of the piece:

“When the seeds began to show, people started to ask: Can we have some? I responded very casually, ‘Whoever wants some, just give me an address and I’ll send them to you.’ We received about a thousand requests. And, since then, it has become a kind of movement. We’ve sent out several hundred thousand. This is amazing. They call it the ‘Sunflower Seeds Party.’ The party can be read as a party or a Party. And young people love it. They say, ‘The girl at school I loved for so long, and I could never really speak to her, I made an earring out of a seed and gave it to her.’ Another one said, he gave it to his parents. One said the seed will be the first gift to my unborn kid. And someone else said, by the year two-thousand-and-something, the seeds will have life coming out of them. They call them seeds of freedom. It’s very interesting that people need something to carry their fantasy.”

The boys liked the zodiac heads, and they loved the fountain outside, where Trevor Green installed a urinating monkey with a serpentine neck. After that, L. kept asking me if he, too, could pee in the fountain. That seemed an oddly appropriate response. The guard looked at us nervously, as if he was enacting the  contrast between irreverent art and the hands-off, breath held reverence expected of audiences of contemporary art.

As we left, we stopped to watch the Weiss and Fischli film The Way Things Go (1986). The film documents a giant Rube Goldberg machine, constructed in a large industrial studio, with components made of junk, foam and fire. The boys narrated the entire thing as though it was a sports event, anticipating each new step in the chain reaction. The thing about Rube Goldberg machines is that they are useless; their uselessness is constitutive. The end result has to be vastly disproportionate to the effort expended, so that they really are about process, not product, life as one damn thing after another. This one is so long that it’s actually boring and digressive and feels random, for all of its design. It helped me articulate what I hate about Ted talks; they are so damn teleological, in their tight, fourteen minute frames. All struggle is retroactively justified, all action is purposeful. There is no space for boredom, no time for uselessness or idleness or epistemological wandering. The Way Things Go is like a Ted talk for melancholics who don’t believe in destiny but retain a sense of wonder at the sheer, unproductive fecklessness of life. I could have watched it again and again.

A lake is a lake is a lake

Why is looking at water so refreshing?

We’ve been camping on this lake for the last few years. I almost missed the trip this time; on the day of our departure, I came down with the stomach flu, which was like being wretchedly out of focus with myself. But I felt well enough the next day to come out and join the boys. I was hollow and glad.

Have you ever noticed that for anyone who has waterfront property, their lake is the lake, as if there were no other? The lovely thing about public parks is that they inspire that feeling of ownership among everybody who uses them (thank you, Teddy Roosevelt). This is our island, our lake. We claimed it by walking its perimeter.

In the campsite beside us was a man holidaying with his family. His father had once been a park ranger at the site; his mother had been pregnant with him there. When she was ready to give birth, she had to take the boat back to the mainland. On the ferry I met a steelworker who said he’d been coming for thirty years. He had a small boat that he dragged on a trailer all the way from Michigan. He said that last summer a large boat had nearly sunk him, right beside the island. He’d driven the boat back as it was sinking, the throttle underwater, between his knees. It was his lake, too. After all, it had almost killed him.

We were there for the fourth of July. I went looking for fireworks in the dusk. All around me, fireflies flared in and out, bursting into flame and dying into darkness. I could hear the fireworks but I couldn’t see them; they were blocked by the treeline and by the curve of the shore. I’d given up and was heading back to camp when brightness caught the corner of my eye. I cut through the woods and to the beach and caught those gorgeous, spendthrift explosions, doubled in the mirror of the black water. Yes, I know that the fireworks were not for me. During the day there was an actual watermelon eating contest. All we did was swim.

I took Nabokov’s Pnin to the beach. It is a perfect bagatelle, about a Professor of Russian who is mild and dreamy and feckless and unsuited to the world. The book was written as a series of separate sketches for The New Yorker, but there is something graceful and elliptical about its rambling. One chapter is set at a country house that hosts a catch-all of Russian refugees and emigrants every summer. The chapter ends like this, with a dying fall:

“On the distant crest of the knoll, at the exact spot where Gramineev’s easel had stood a few hours before, two dark figures in profile were situated against the ember-red sky. They stood there closely, facing each other. One could not make out from the road whether it was the Poroshin girl and her beau, or Nina Bolotov and young Poroshin, or merely an emblematic couple placed with easy art on the last page of Pnin’s fading day.”