Honest Work
The Long String Instrument, for all its magic, mystery and wonder, risks facing the pithy scrutiny made inevitable for brave artists who operate in high planes of existence. A woman at Frieze, is like a joke headline. Hence some irony: the world of fine art is comically low in social caliber despite its intellectual pretension. Artists here must navigate the existentialism of fine arts spaces where identity is thought to be irrelevant until it’s the only thing one can talk about. So yes, additionally brave is it, of women to make work for their peers in that specific space.
Members of the audience to Ellen Fullman’s performance emerged out onto a small lower Manhattan alley from a crowded Artists Space performance basement and made informal congress about the exquisite 50 minute performance. Over cigarettes and fresh air, one could overhear commentary that verged on diminishing but always deferential. “I saw this like twenty years ago and it’s the same…which is good!” “Did you see her shoes? They looked comfortable.” Whenever work like this goes unscathed, there is reason to celebrate. After seeing the Laurie Anderson survey at the Smithsonian, one friend was quick to share gossip about her office manner. Around grad school, a boyfriend loved to say loudly that he didn’t buy Pauline Oliveros’s shtick. One risks being perceived as crying gender wolf when calling attention to critique of these three artists because of the particularly genderless aspects of their discursives—Fullman’s soundscapes, Oliveros’s deep listening, Anderson’s electronic storytelling—and yet if gender were not a factor, one wouldn’t also constantly hear surmising about their validity. Congratulations to women in the arts, for being mostly beloved, I guess.
The Long String Instrument by Ellen Fullman is self-explanatory (it is a long, string…instrument), but it surely requires attendance for full comprehension. A long uncanny drone of polyphonic tones rubbed into existence through Fullman’s slow walking movement—back and forth between long metal strings strung taut across a vacant span. In its most recent iteration, spun in an arts space with walls approximately 30 yards apart.
Richard Serra has a piece in the private estate of Katherine and Keith Sachs—two big impenetrable metal walls facing each other about 100 yards apart in parallel; meteoric and geometric cursors on an always perfect green lawn. The string instrument is a would-be contradiction, or contraction, of that piece. Serra sucked. Another gendered set of observations were made especially when he passed away recently. Too masculine, so toxic.
There are so many things to say about our arts heroes that have to wait until they are, really and truly, totally out of earshot.
I broke out in aggressive hives while at the Jandek show in Chicago, and didn’t get to see the whole performance but the audience was abuzz with the exact opposite kind of anticipation for him as was held for Ellen Fullman. Full of anticipation, halting breaths, a sense of glee, and zero distance from the person now attached to that signifier. Jandek is supposedly one persona but in actuality a cypher. The Chicago cypher was lovely, whimsical, cheerful. Because of the hives, however—and also because outsider art sometimes bewilders me—I sped out of the venue pained. The joke now is that Jandek gave me hives, but that can be interpreted as evidence of either irritation or excitement.
Audience demography is an important detail of live performance. The identity of that corpus may be also be colored by factors such as the group’s mood, social context, atmospheric environment. The gleeful men seeing Jandek for the first time in his long career. The solemn art critics seeing The Long String Instrument for the second time in twenty years. The women who bring other women. The women who are brought by men. Gender queer non-conforming non-gatekeepers assuring passersby they are heading in the right direction. Just go downstairs. Serra’s immovable edifice. You may touch it. The space we give stubborn art, the capaciousness of obituary as commentary. Old artists and their young interlocutors.
Invoking gender in the sexed art world is obvious. Articulating gender in the un-sexed art world is jejune. The factors only mattered as factors on the verge of becoming, and that absolute beginning—the birth, the assignment of identities—is only possible when we are all being absolutely honest.
Ellen Fullman’s String Instrument brought incredible peace to the listening room, and may be the most honest work shared in rarified air of high (and too often ironic) art.
