White Trash and the Munchausen Docent

[imomus]

Although my ArtFacts ranking shows the beginning of a slow but sure slide towards obloquy and obscurity, I'm still -- I'll have you know! -- within the top five thousand most important contemporary artists (4055, in fact, down from 3268 last November) in the world. I'm still doing kooky performances, possibly somewhere near you.



One problem -- one change, anyway -- may be that I've taken to performing my trademark "unreliable tours" outside officially-recognised art venues. And so we get the weird situation that when I sing Momus pop songs at the Vienna Secession or MUDAM in Luxembourg, the art venue pop concerts bump my ArtFacts ranking up a few notches, but when I do performance art like the London-as-Tokyo Tour or Hieronymous Proctor's Ghost Library Tour, the non-art venues (London's South Bank esplanade and Richmond Library, respectively) ensure it's not considered an art world action.

I'm not complaining -- art is defined as what happens within recognised art world areas, and if we started calling other things art there'd be a big mess. Meanwhile, I want to outline my next two performances, which happen on the monied margins of respectable art world status, at commercial art fairs.

Between the 30th of October and the 2nd of November I'll be occupying an apartment in Mitte for four days as part of Bridge Berlin, which runs alongside ArtForum Berlin. My piece for Bridge is called White Trash, and is based on a Click Opera entry from three years ago, Ask the Rice, which explored Hisae's "Shinto" belief that rice spoken to nicely takes longer to decay than rice roundly and profoundly insulted.

I'll spend four days in an open Mitte apartment -- next door to legendary Berlin pseudo-Chinese yuppie food joint White Trash Fast Food -- conducting an experiment to see whether this is, in fact, the case, by shouting obscenities at one tub of rice ("white trash!") while flattering another. I'll also be praising to the skies the art world folk who come into the apartment (located amongst gallery apartments) in order to set off a rising spiral of benign energy -- or just boost the art world's already-high levels of self-esteem and exacerbate the current nice criticism crisis.

There's tons more to explore in the White Trash performance -- I'll make the apartment over into the kind of "didactic environment" I enjoy so much (school science posters will show rice going through alternative life cycles of enhanced self-worth and crushing, semi-suicidal self-hatred), and I'll be able to contrast Eastern and Western approaches, not just to criticism (orthodoxy versus orthopraxy) but to the idea of the soul contained in matter (animism) and the location of the ego (in the West self-worth is supposed to come from the self, in the East it's the opinions of others that matter). I'll transform myself into a "plant praise shaman" surrounded by "plant spirit technicians" in white lab coats. A white trash green giant exploring the world outlined in my song Lord of the Fields.

My second performance happens in Vienna on the 19th and 20th of November. During Vienna Art Week the galleries of the city's first district synchronize their openings, and I'll be moving from one to the next giving an unreliable tour guide performance in the guise of The Munchausen Docent. A docent is an art museum guide, and Munchausen Syndrome is the compulsion to tell lies in a medical context.

Comments

[wisemonger.livejournal.com]

"I'll spend four days in an open Mitte apartment -- next door to legendary Berlin pseudo-Chinese yuppie food joint White Trash Fast Food -- conducting an experiment to see whether this is, in fact, the case, by shouting obscenities at one tub of rice ("white trash!") while flattering another."

I just spat my tea out with laugh. Thank you ;)

New Outr Age

[(Anonymous)]

Glad to see you are embracing "new ageism" with wide open arms. What took you so long?

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

In Holland a docent is a teacher, but oh well.

The skirt is pretty, but the turd hair is really not the way to go if you've got an oval face.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I know you prefer my Bolanic Afro, Electricwitch, but this performance requires a "shamanic mullet"!

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Yeah that afro looked good. I approve of mullets too, but it needs moar hair in the back to be really mullety.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Needs moar party in the back, Momus. Trust me, I know mullets. My sister had one.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

In my region of America a docent is a small, albino tree squirrel famous for its piercing blue eyes. This is where we get the terms - "fast as a docent" and "tell it to the docent." Roast docent is still considered a delicacy in some of the more backwards parts of Tennessee and Alabama. Native Americans including the Cree, Choctaw and Navajo considered the docent to be a "guiding spirit" and it was forbidden to eat them. Recent ethnomethological studies have claimed (and I am not in full agreement with this mind you) that this led to the docent population explosion in the late 1700's, hence the prevalence of so many mountains in the Appalachian range called "White Mountain."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

^^^^^ CAUTION: UNRELIABLE NARRATORS CROSSING ^^^^^^

[(Anonymous)]

Momus,

Everyday you reassure me...I simply thank you...

Grow Up

[(Anonymous)]

Get a job. Procreate.

Re: Grow Up

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

Grow up. Get a job. Procreate.

That's an awful idea.

Greyface's Revenge

[st-ranger.livejournal.com]

Ugh.

[glowingwhispers.livejournal.com]

Do you follow the Austrian group Monocrhom and boingboing.net? Exciting stuff, in my mind.

Why is it a mess when art leaves art galleries?

[(Anonymous)]

Or one man's mess is another's test. Surely the notion that "anything placed in an art space is art" is sanctifying gallery owners, surrendering facilities of judgement, and could breed a generation of little Brian Sewells, sick of context minus content. I imagine creative people would occasionally resent feeding the playpark 'art world', as an institutionalised engine, and want the thrill of taking matters outside, or even seeking intimacy, privacy.

Re: Why is it a mess when art leaves art galleries?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Sociological definitions of art -- by which I mean collectivist and contractual ones -- are crisper and clearer than metaphysical or existential definitions. Art is whatever legitimated people in the art system say it is. Though slightly permeable around the edges (the illegitimate -- in the form, say, of amateur or student-run spaces, has a kind of punk legitimacy of its own, and the academy needs to keep annexing bits of the non-academy), it's the only definition that works, really, because it acknowledges that art doesn't exist in a vacuum, or come out of isolated individuals (Romantic mythology notwithstanding -- and even that's collectively generated, cf the Van Gogh industry). And it dodges the whole tedious "what is art?" question entirely. Art can be anything, but to be art it has to enter, at some point, the art system as we know it.

The problem with Sewell is that he thinks art is something that exists timelessly and context-free, and he thinks that today's context is out of step with this true, timeless art. Obviously it's Sewell who is out of step. He survives only by being in step with the readers of newspapers, the ones baffled and resentful of contemporary art. (There are fewer of those every year, though.)

You can't have context minus content: context is always going to be a form of content in and of itself, though clearly not the only kind of content.

Josef Beuys' "everyone is an artist" has always impressed me the same way John Cage's "every sound is music" does. "Nice try," I think. But at a certain point even the most hardcore Cageian slams the window shut or switches off the radio. Daughters of the Lonesome Isle (http://www.hdtracks.com/index.php?file=catalogdetail&valbum_code=022551007024) just doesn't sound the same with Metallica drowning out its intelligent fragility, its probing ambiguity and tiptoeing sense of doubt.

Re: Why is it a mess when art leaves art galleries?

[(Anonymous)]

I guess I like the idea there's a John Cage out there doing it for no-one, the resonance of his own crazy kitchen. He's been on "I've Got A Secret", maybe you could pop up as Unreliable Quiz Contestant on "Countdown". Would it make ArtFacts?

Re: Why is it a mess when art leaves art galleries?

[akabe.livejournal.com]

>>Sociological definitions of art -- by which I mean collectivist and contractual ones -- are crisper and clearer than metaphysical or existential definitions.

aren't you simply spelling out the end of art as we know it (since the 19th century) ?

Re: Why is it a mess when art leaves art galleries?

[akabe.livejournal.com]

and speaking 19th century it's rather complex in the sense that the 'romantic' mindset that gave us the myth of the artist as free agent somewhat outside it all is the very same one that has shaped the views of history, archaeology, museomology, science, revolution, whatever we still hold on to.
in this sense you could say that the world prior to that was not unlike say myspace - with different but neither less nor more stronger powers behind - (a pyramid would go to entropy at the same speed or faster than the house near it.) i think a thorough, thoughtful, respectful eveluation of the whole 'romantic' thing is one of the best things we could do at this point in time.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

I've had been going on and about trying to figure out what that post on talking to rice was named. It is one of my favourite Click Opera entries.

Speaking of food and spirituality. Have you heard about Masanobu Fukuoka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka)? Most interesting farming techniques I've ever heard about!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of him, but yes, very sympathetic. And very sane.

[fruitdrops.livejournal.com]

Although my ArtFacts ranking shows the beginning of a slow but sure slide towards obloquy and obscurity, I'm still -- I'll have you know! -- within the top five thousand most important contemporary artists (4055, in fact, down from 3268 last November) in the world

It suprises me that you think a ranking system like that is legitimate. Maybe the word "important" bothers me, when it should really mean "known" or "exposed" artists instead.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm probably being as tongue-in-cheek about "important" as I am about "obloquy": verbal abuse of a person or thing; censure or vituperation, especially when widespread or general.

1967

[(Anonymous)]

er.. ArtFacts marks you up as having been born in 1967... i guess it is not true.

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

I love this.