The Road of Excess. Ingrid Winterbach
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It’s the beginning of July. Still autumn in the Midlands. They drive past land that is stripped bare, poplars with yellow leaves. A tree with flaming leaves. Black veld.
For a while, Jimmy remains silent. Aaron wonders: in what language does Moeketsi think? His notebooks are in English. Was his mother tongue crowded out by exposure to a variety of European languages? Or do comforting Sesotho words still come up in his mind as he looks out, straight ahead, the camera now on his lap? What thoughts are unleashed in him by the passing landscape? What comes up to the surface? What losses? What longings?
So how does he read the international art scene, Aaron asks Jimmy.
Jimmy laughs softly. His womanly breasts jiggle.
“The name of the game is money, my friend,” he says. (Aaron objects to this mode of address.) “Where there’s art, there you’ll find the spirit of the times. The Zeitgeist. That is to say: the world market. Private collectors in their corporate jets pitch up in their hundreds at the doors of artists. They bid at the biggest art auctions in New York and London. Push the price of contemporary art up fucking sky high. These prices are way, way out. Astronomical. The market’s hysterical. Whoever can profit from art, does so. They’re doing it, and they’re doing it big time, my friend. No holds barred. Don’t even try to understand the art market. It’s haywire. Been like that for a long time already. Hysterical. It’s international, it’s big, it’s crazy. If you think there’s a difference between art capital and ordinary capital, think again. Don’t kid yourself. Both are subject to exactly the same laws. The laws of money run the art market. Stuff aesthetic considerations! Artists, dealers and galleries, collectors, buyers – individual as well as corporate – auction houses, art consultants and advisers, art investors, museums, art fairs, biennales, international art forums like Documenta and Manifesta, you name it – each has its own role. It’s competitive. It’s a jungle out there!”
Jimmy takes a deep breath, tearing harder at his thumb nail.
“And everyone’s targeting the young artists. A mad clamour for young talent. Everyone wants to discover the next Warhol, the next Basquiat. The collectors are like vultures. They sit there like paedophiles, watching the kids at big art schools. Who’s the next genius about to pop up? The art market’s driven by an influx of younger buyers and collectors. Prices in the Old Masters category are not rising at the same tempo as sales by younger artists.”
The nail finally rips.
“Each new big art event follows on the heels of the last: the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Sculpture Projects Muenster, Art Basel. From one centre to the next, art moves at the speed of light – New York and Berlin to Shanghai and Tokyo. You name it. All the places with money. All the cities where there’s big capital. Although, America remains at the top of the world market for contemporary art sales; more than half of all sales happen there.”
He starts on the next finger.
“And anything goes. Art’s no longer alternative. The diversity of possibilities is endless. Anything can be justified: figurative, abstract, New German Painting, performance, video, kitsch. Any bloody genre or style. Any aesthetic approach. Any political or societal or what-have-you point of reference. Take your pick. It’s the era of diversification of production and distribution, my friend. There’s no consensus about what’s important, or what’s setting the trend, what’s left-field, or what’s pioneering any more. The prevailing taste in the art business is the taste of the dudes who prevail. Any Tom, Dick and Harry with enough capital, a big enough infrastructure and staff can construct his own standards, each in his own niche or network. Take Roger Buergel and Robert Storr, the directors of Documenta or the Venice Biennale, for example. They’re both heavily into political aesthetics. The director provides the overarching concept. If he chooses a concept of politicised aesthetics, then that’s the name of the game in that context. Then that’s the cutting edge. There’s no agreement about what’s important or what’s at the forefront or what’s avant-garde. Where are the great art debates? Dead. Non-existent.”
“And you choose video as your medium,” Aaron says.
“Yep,” says Jimmy Harris. “Video has come a long way, my friend. It’s come far since the sixties. Nowadays it’s serious stuff. Head-on. Angst-free. A cool take on contemporary life. Without the aesthetic baggage of painting. From the beginning it was associated with television and newsreels, so it arrived without aesthetic expectations. It’s free to explore, man – freer than any other art form. Painting comes with too much aesthetic baggage. In painting you can hardly move your arse any more. If you try, you bash into some constraint or other. Artists like Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas and Nam June Paik opened up a new chapter in art history with video. They paved the way, man!”
“And painting is dead?” Aaron asks.
“Painting’s not dead. Painting can always still be justified. But it’s heavily burdened, ruled by the tyranny of the object, the precious object. Painting’s okay, but video’s showbiz. You can improvise and edit like crazy. Video’s got scope – it’s got anarchic scope. It’s way more polished and self-contained than it was in the beginning.”
Jimmy’s otherwise pale-green cheeks are now blush-red.
“It undermines the preciousness of the object. It fucks the boutique market right up the arse. Exactly where it needs to be fucked. Video can make art do things that objects like paintings can’t. It makes new audiences, new routes. Variation lies in the degree of digital engagement. It’s all about speeded-up production and marketing. A mind-blowing mix of pop fantasy and neo-tribalism. It’s cool, it’s unfazed, it’s zany. It’s virtual-utopian. It engages with the attention-deficit internet culture. People like Ryan T, Kalup Linzy, man, they’re taking video to new heights. And lengths. Feature-film lengths. Radical. Serial soap opera stuff. High art and low art, my friend. The boundaries have collapsed.”
“Attention-deficit culture. How inspiring,” says Aaron.
“Take it or leave it,” says Jimmy.
“I’ll leave it,” says Aaron. Thinking about Masaccio’s cool orange shadow in The Healing of the Blind Man. The first-ever depiction of shadow.
Jimmy shrugs. Softly, Moeketsi laughs in the back of the car.
“Thanks for the information,” says Aaron. “Now I know.”
Jimmy takes out a little notebook and starts scribbling in it. Moeketsi turns his round head with its soft black cheeks to the left; looks out the window. What’s he thinking, Aaron wonders once more.
“Deathworks,” Jimmy says, putting the notebook away. “It’s a term coined by the sociologist Philip Rieff. Artworks that celebrate creative destruction. Rieff was especially interested in artists who use their bodies as works of art – the more masochistic and repugnant, the better. Someone like Chris Burden, who shot a bullet into his own body and documented its effects – cool man, head-on.”
Jimmy Harris stares out ahead, reflectively. Works on the nail. Words, he says. At the moment he’s working with words. Combining video and words. Isolating and investigating their ideological load. The word “death”. And “destruction”. “Downfall”, too, Untergang. The word as a form of linguistic repression. That’s what interests him at the moment. The linguistic and political reality of the word – an act of reading constructed through the act of naming. The authorial deed. The intention of his new piece is to destabilise the locus of this authorial act, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalise it. The ideological load of the word “destruction”, the word “death”, says Jimmy. That’s what interests him.
What the hell do you know about death, Aaron wants to shout out aloud. With screaming brakes he wants to bring the car to a standstill, pluck Jimmy right out of the car, shake him by the shoulders until his teeth rattle, and say to him: What do you know about death, you fucking Martha? Have you ever heard Death moving about in the room next door? Have you heard him unpacking his shaving kit in your bathroom?
At 3.30 that afternoon he