Jennifer Doyle is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire and co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol, also published by Duke University Press.

HOLD IT AGAINST ME

difficulty and emotion in contemporary art

By JENNIFER DOYLE

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5302-7

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………..ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xxi1 Introducing Difficulty……………………………………………12 Three Case Studies in Difficulty and the Problem of Affect……………283 Thinking Feeling: Criticism and Emotion…………………………….694 Feeling Overdetermined: Identity, Emotion, and History……………….94Conclusion: “History Keeps Me Awake”…………………………………126Notes…………………………………………………………….147Bibliography………………………………………………………183Index…………………………………………………………….193

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCING DIFFICULTY

Critics have limits. Our faculties break down when an artwork reminds us ofsomething so painful, or makes us so mad, or is something we like so muchwe struggle to write about it. Or when we are tired and having a bad day.There are whole genres certain critics just don’t get (for Adorno, famously,it was jazz). Critics can be tone deaf; we can miss the pleasures others take,ignore the irritation that others feel. We can be willful and stubborn, blindto the dwindling relevance of those artists we love and indifferent to theemergence of new practices we don’t understand. We all have limits that lookpretty uncritical from most angles, and we rarely know these limits until weencounter them.

I begin this chapter with a story about hitting my own wall. In the fall of2007, I booked and then failed to make an appointment for a one-on-one performanceencounter with the English artist Adrian Howells. I had also madean appointment that day at a beauty salon for a cut and color, far too close tothe timeslot I’d arranged to see Howells’s performance. My hair was covered ina mud of dye and wrapped in plastic when I looked at my watch and realizedthat I needed to be across London in an hour, and it would take at least thatto get there. I flipped through magazines, doing the math in my head. Anxietyrose like a tide in my throat as I realized that there was no way I was going tomake it there. I dug the phone out of my purse and called to cancel, without,however, leaving enough time for another person to take my place.

It was a careless and ordinary mistake. But the nature of Howells’s performanceand my reaction to missing the appointment suggested that somethingmore was in play. Howells’s work maximizes the possibilities of what he describesas “accelerated intimacy.” He has explored the contours of confessionand autobiography in performances that rehearse the most painful and embarrassingmoments in his history for small audiences, and sometimes audiencesof one. In Held, Howells invites his audience into three twenty-minute scenes.First, they sit at a table, drink tea, and chat. Then they sit together on a couchin front of the television and hold hands. Last, they go up to a bedroom, liedown together, and spoon (fig. 3). Participants respond to this performancedifferently. Some are ill at ease and on their guard; some make themselves rightat home. One person fell asleep. When Howells stages a performance like this,he sees perhaps six people in a day. As one might imagine, these appointmentsare hard to come by. I felt the full weight of this; by screwing up the appointment,I prevented another person from seeing his work.

Later that day I went to the venue’s address to meet friends who had honoredtheir appointments. I held in my hands a small gift of cookies, broughtto convey my apologies to the artist. Howells had just finished up for theday when I got there. I wanted to be simply apologetic, but instead I foundmyself fighting back tears—and, worse, failing to keep them in check. Wedrank tea and ate the cookies. I was embarrassed and self-conscious that myaffect risked expanding into a selfish display of abjection: shame mounted asa kind of counterattack.

Howells was sympathetic and warm. Looking at him through my tears,I felt even worse. My emotionality was well out of proportion to the circumstance.My friends and I walked back to the train station. As I listenedto them talk about their experience of Held, I tried to come to terms withthe fact that I’d subconsciously sabotaged my appointment. I’d been lookingforward to it all week, had been careful to make sure I got the timeslot, andthen scheduled a pointless event right over it. Clearly the whole idea of Heldchallenged me. Apparently I couldn’t inhabit the structure of that encounterwithout being overwhelmed—by what, though?

I was afraid of what might happen, of how it might make me feel. I thinktoo I was equally put off by its artificiality—not that my own feelings wouldbe inauthentic but that they would be delivered within a temporary architectureof intimacy. What happens at the end of the appointment? I wasattracted enough to the idea to schedule the appointment but disturbedenough that I made it impossible for me to honor it. In doing so, I subconsciouslypreempted the betrayal I expected, for the experience of Held wouldfeel either very empty and disappointing or very full and disappointing. Ihad reacted badly to what Jon Cairns describes as the “confusing contextof ‘staged’ intimacy” in which Howells works. His medium is the affectivedensity of the interaction between artist and audience, and even a failure likemine should be understood as part of the work’s performative field. By failingto make the appointment, by failing to cancel in time to allow another personto take my place, and then by trekking down there anyway to solicit hisforgiveness, I managed to extract the caretaking that Howells offered withinthe boundaries of Held but outside the boundaries of the event. I insisted ongetting what I thought the artist had promised me, but on my own terms,and after blowing him off. (Of course, behind this self-analysis are years oftherapy. The responsibility to each other’s time is one of the first things oneworks through with an analyst, especially if one has missed an appointmentor is habitually late.)

Until that day I had considered myself a seasoned spectator to some ofthe most challenging forms of performance. When we think about challengingperformance art, we generally mean not the domestic normalcy cited byHeld but what is often described as “extreme” performance involving violencetoward the body and sexualized forms of display. Familiar with this kind ofwork (e.g., the work of Ron Athey, Bob Flanagan, Franko B, Kembra Pfahler,Kira O’Reilly), I had come to assume that there was nothing I couldn’t handle.

I would say, in fact, that prior to this experience I was cavalier about myown limits and dismissive of others’, as if it were a moral failing to be averseto the sight of blood or be uncomfortable with the idea of live performancesengaging in acts that look (and sometimes are) sexual. Howells showed mehow deluded I’d been: the mere idea of certain kinds of performance provokedin me a defensive need to assert control over my place in the picture.As a spectator to performance art, I might have a high tolerance for blood,nudity, and noise, but I seem to have a lower tolerance for work engaged withmore ordinary forms of relational intimacy, for the things that “feel” like lifeand therefore cut too close.

* * *

This book is an experiment in thinking about the difficulty that many of ushave with some forms of contemporary art and the centrality of emotion tothat kind of difficulty. Emotion can make our experience of art harder, butit also makes that experience more interesting. It may make things harderbecause the work provokes unpleasant or painful feelings. It may also makethings more complicated; an artwork might provoke contradictory feelings,and it may provoke in the viewer feelings that are at odds with the affectiveculture of its context. Emotions themselves are very complicated. They canbe impossible to stabilize. For example, none of the following questions iseasy to answer: Does a feeling come from inside the spectator or from the artwork?Does an artwork represent feeling? Whose: the artist’s or the viewer’s?Does a work make feelings? How?

The setting for our encounters with art can make thinking about our feelingsespecially confusing. For all the ways that emotion animates the way wetalk about art—being “carried away” or “moved” by the beauty of a painting,for example—it can be hard to have intense feelings in museums when thosefeelings go against social protocol. In an art gallery, anger, tears, arousal, andcertain kinds of laughter may appear to signal the disintegration of composure,naïveté, and a lack of class. In such spaces, as much as we are encouragedto be moved by works of art, we are also encouraged to remain cool. One ofthe primary disciplinary contributions of cultural studies to the study of artand literature is its observation that questions of aesthetic judgment are questionsof taste and that they are historically and socially conditioned. Theyreflect and reproduce the values of a class. What you enjoy, how you enjoy it,and how you express that enjoyment can reveal a lot about who you are andwhere you come from. For this reason, few places will make people more self-consciousof their reactions than a museum or an art gallery. Museums andart galleries are like schools: they are spaces in which we encounter culture,usually on someone else’s terms. Many find themselves at odds with a worldin which appearing to be cool and aloof is the mark of sophistication. Manyof us feel weird and ill at ease before we even cross a museum’s threshold. AsJennifer González writes, “The museum as a whole, as an ideological home,does not welcome us equally.”

Thankfully, museums and galleries are not the only grounds upon whichwe encounter art. Many artists project their work into completely differentsocial spaces, in no small part because they want to avoid the affective protocolsof official culture. Festivals, underground music venues, city streets,fields, deserts, and private homes can all be more generous in terms of therange of affects they will accommodate. The mood of such contexts is veryimportant to how we experience works of art, for understanding how thoseworks can develop and how their meanings shift as they migrate from onesocial context to another. Some artists choose to work from the edges of thesocial spaces of art-making; as practitioners of challenging art, they know alltoo well the difficulty such work presents to schools, galleries, and museumsand so work happily in alternative venues. As critics, what are our responsibilitiestoward work that quite literally takes us out of our comfort zone, andtoward the audiences who seek out these experiences?

Hard Feelings

I was caught off guard by my reaction to Held not only because I am a regularat performance art events that people might characterize as extreme butbecause I am also an avid consumer of cinematic melodrama (Stella Dallasis one of my favorite movies) and nearly all forms of novels that demandemotional investment from their readers (from the sugary Little Women tothe grim Germinal). In general, I love a good weepie like Now, Voyager, andI eat up the stark realism of a film like Matewan. Perhaps it’s the professor inme (always looking for the teachable moment), but my reaction to the ideaof Held made me reexamine how I thought about the emotionality of suchwork. Previously I’d approached emotion as something that cuts across mediums;for example, I thought of a sentimental pop song as like a sentimentalnovel or film, as if sentimentality were a thing in and of itself, which a textmight embody and communicate.

The sentimentality deployed within Howells’s performances has its ownparticular challenges. Much of his work has evolved around a feminine personanamed Adrienne. In An Audience with Adrienne (2007), for example,Adrienne invites people to watch home movies with her and to talk aboutepisodes from her life that participants select from a café-style menu. Audiencemembers may be invited to share their own stories. Reviewing thatwork for The Guardian, Lyn Gardner explains that the “unthreateningrealm of the domestic” offers the viewer-participant “a direct conduit to ourown childhoods, the episodes we recall with pin-sharp clarity and those webury somewhere deep inside and try to forget.” The coziness of the domesticspace is a lure; as any student of sentimental fiction knows, homes arehaunted. Howells invites his audience into a queer space of intimacy whoseedges are shaped by failure and isolation. (What domestic scene isn’t?) Helddistills the autobiographical exchange of his other projects to the act of simplykeeping company.

There is something jarring about the idea of Howells receiving visitors forHeld, as if this home were a bordello offering not the sexual excitement ofthe mistress but the grounding companionship of the wife. He may use theinnocence of domestic normalcy to frame your encounter with him, but thisvery slight shift in the most banal scene of intimacy (from that of a romanticcouple to that of an artist and his audience; from that of straight romance toqueer domesticity) exposes just how loaded, how overdetermined that sceneof domestic intimacy is for many of us. Cairns therefore describes the artist aspracticing an ambivalent form of intimacy—a fundamentally queer occupationof domestic, personal, feminine, and reproductive scenes in which sitesassociated with privacy and safety become instead scenes of exposure. LaurenBerlant describes these kinds of spaces as “intimate publics”; Tavia Nyong’ouses the term extimate to suggest how they can fail, leaving us feeling morealone than ever.

If we expect such a performance to be easy on the spectator, it is becausewe’ve already coded these terms (privacy, domesticity, the personal) as wellas the feminized labor that defines them (nurturing, supporting, caring) assuch. My failure as an audience for Howells forced me to take notice of thecontingency of difficulty and consider the place of affect and emotion in aconversation about what makes a work hard for one person and easy for another.Those contingencies pertain not only to the person (and his or herhistory) but also to that person’s conditioning as a viewer, reader, and audiencemember.

Comparing different forms—novels, music, films, and visual art—onemight ask why we are prepared to accept the value of feeling bad when weread a novel, for example, but are less prepared to do so when we go to amuseum. Why is it easier for us to watch an upsetting movie than it is tokeep company with contemporary art that makes similar emotional demandson us? Why should the idea of attending Howells’s performance be moreunsettling than sitting through a movie like Secrets and Lies (1996) or SteelMagnolias (1989)? Most of the works of art I discuss in this book ask farless from their audiences in terms of time and emotional investment thandoes a feature length-film. (Held, for example, is relatively long for performanceart, and lasts an hour.) Similarly, why is it easier for many of us to readan upsetting novel than to attend a performance event in which our comfortzone is being challenged? When I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road(2006)—a painful postapocalyptic nightmare in which refugees wander abarren planet, surrounded by starvation, rape, and cannibalism—I felt likesomeone had ripped out a piece of my soul. Typical for the author, its flatlynarrated portrait of a world of extreme violence is also a deeply sexist novel inwhich women figure as dead weight, objects of rape, or emptied-out symbolsof salvation. Finishing it was (for me) an emotional chore. The Road won thePulitzer Prize, Oprah selected it for her book club, and it was made into afilm starring Viggo Mortensen. As readers and filmgoers, we are, apparently,eager to suffer. Contemporary art presenting its audiences with challenging,urgent, but far less cruel images, on the other hand, tends to provoke moraloutrage, even when it asks far less of us than do these other genres. So whenI ask, “Why is it harder?,” I am referring not only to our individual reactionsto the idea of certain kinds of works but also to the social contextsthat frame those reactions. Try contrasting the reaction to Chris Ofili’s HolyVirgin Mary (1997), Ron Athey’s Four Scenes in a Harsh Life (1994), or DavidWojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly (1986–87) with the celebration of McCarthy’snovel or the laurels awarded the artists behind difficult films. Thinkabout it: it takes days to read a novel, and a feature-length film like Lars VonTrier’s bleak Dancer in the Dark (2000) demands far more from its audiencethan does looking at Ofili’s work or watching an Athey performance or ashort film by Wojnarowicz. Maggie Nelson describes that director’s crueltyas both unforgiving and self-righteous: “Von Trier’s cruelty does not lie in anycapacity to strip away cant or delusion, but rather in an ability to constructmalignant, ultimately conventional fictions that masquerade as parables ofprofundity, or as protests against the brutalities of the man’s world in whichwe must inevitably live and suffer.” Thus this kind of work accrues culturalvalue not in spite of its cruelty but because of it: it rationalizes the brutalityof the status quo. It presents “the way things are” as realism, as insight, whenin fact it is pure ideology. If people have reacted to work by Ofili, Athey,and Wojnarowicz as if it represented the absolute limit of the tolerable, it isbecause that work bucks against those conventional narratives regarding thebrutal, the abject, and the obscene.
(Continues…)Excerpted from HOLD IT AGAINST ME by JENNIFER DOYLE. Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.