More Articles...
Print
Karsten, What are You Doing?
by Roger WhiteCentral Park, the intersection of a path through the Ramble and the 79th Street Transverse Road. Afternoon. WHITE approaches from the east, KREJKAREK from the north. Krejkarek holds one end of a blue ribbon; the other is tied around the tail of a lobster.
WHITE: Karsten, what are you doing?
KREJKAREK: I’m taking my lobster for a walk.
WHITE: You can’t do that.
KREJKAREK: Nerval did, in the Palais-Royal.
WHITE: Won’t it suffocate?
KREJKAREK: [reaches into his tote bag and pulls out a plastic spray bottle] Saltwater. I spritz him every few minutes and he’s fine.
WHITE: What is the meaning of this?
KREJKAREK: I’m interested in time.
WHITE: I don’t get it.
KREJKAREK: Do you know how long it takes a lobster to walk from 57th Street to the Great Lawn?
WHITE: No.
KREJKAREK: Neither do I.
WHITE: Is this a piece?
KREJKAREK: Yes and no.
WHITE: Do you consider it a political act?
KREJKAREK: If there is a politics left to art, it is the politics of time. The failure of utopian thought was to frame the problem in terms of space. We need to think uchronically. I will follow this lobster into a different modality of temporal experience. New possibilities for action may arise.
WHITE: This disturbs me.
KREJKAREK: Please explain.
WHITE: I’ve just come from the Biennial, where most of the art was time-based. I had an hour and a half to see the show. All I saw were empty rooms with Xeroxed notices telling me I’d missed the art.
KREJKAREK: That’s an exaggeration. Why didn’t you plan your visit better?
WHITE: Who has the time? And durational art makes the situation worse. Only the leisure class can experience it.
KREJKAREK: This smacks of resentment. Why not examine your commitment to the object?
WHITE: Art encodes the expenditure of time, for appropriation by those who already have too much. Is it any wonder that Christian Marclay’s The Clock is the most popular art film in the world?
KREJKAREK: Roger that’s reductive, not to mention boring. You’re just cheesed off because you’re a painter. Critique also reiterates the logic of the dominant order. What matters is to keep moving. If you can’t accept that then you will never understand contemporary art. Look. It’s a beautiful day. Come to the Great Lawn with me and my lobster.
WHITE: I can’t, I have to go. I’m on a deadline.
KREJKAREK: Your loss.
WHITE: Yeah, probably.
They walk away.
Contributor
Roger WhiteROGER WHITE is a painter and an editor of the journal Paper Monument.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Life as a hologram: Lee Breuer
by Avinash RajendranNOV 2018 | Theater
“It is an attempt,” he says, stealing breaths between mouthfuls, “to understand what my life would be like as a cubic entity, not a linear entity. An attempt to see this confusion from different perspectives, like it is a hologram that I can walk around.”
Carousel—Talent Transcends a Prickly Book
by Susan YungJUNE 2018 | Dance
In Carousel, the stage is often crammed with props such as wooden pallets, lobster pots, and clambake detritus, leaving little space for the dancers. But Peck guides the action vertically by inserting jumps and spins; arms and legs make variegated shapes to add visual interest.
Marilyn Lerner: Walking Backward Running Forward
by Jessica HolmesOCT 2018 | ArtSeen
The music hits you as you walk through the door of Kate Werble Gallery, where Walking Backward Running Forward, a new show of work by artist Marilyn Lerner, is on view.
GEDI SIBONY:
The King and the Corpse
by William Corwin
MAY 2018 | ArtSeen
The King and the Corpse is a room-within-a-room and fills the main gallery to such an extent—from floor-to-ceiling with a walk-able, but not too capacious path around—that it’s impossible to get far enough away from the sculpture to gauge its true nature as a structure. It’s all sides and angles, but no sense of a whole.
RSS
