contemporary monkey

Tom Friedman: funny man

Pubs are probably a fertile incubation space for art. All sorts of unhinged, but nonetheless possibly valid ideas begin life in a pub amongst friends, usually after at least four quick pints. Laced with alcohol, people say the most outrageous things which nearly always require proof of concept outside the fantasy world of your local pub. Proof that must come at a later time, because, well, everyone’s busy drinking and saying rubbish things at the moment. Remind them in the morning.

The artist Tom Friedman, I imagine in my mind’s eye, must be a pub drinker with several demented friends at the ready. The results of his imagination actually do prove something half-baked to be possible. I can imagine Friedman saying, “I’ll bet I can make anything out of styrofoam and a lick of paint.” To which his friends laugh uncontrollably, and bet him even more pints that he couldn’t. Then I can imagine Friedman having a staggering memory, and recalling the next morning his bet about making anything out of “…what was it…oh yeah, styrofoam and pints…wait it was paint. Styrofoam and paint. Right, I’ve got my day ahead of me….”

The results of his big night out (remember, the pub night out part is my addition to the story, not his genuine working habits) can be seen in a London gallery with a wide range of everyday items. When I first read about this in the May issue of Art Review, I must admit my eyeballs nearly floated back in my head. Another replicant from the ready-made moment 100 years ago wants to prove they can re-animate Marcel Duchamp. After reading the materials list, however, my mind was changed forever. You’d never know by looking at it, but what resembles strings, are actually paint fibers. A peeled banana, a breeze-block, a rose, a gavel, pencils, even torn cardboard - all styrofoam. Random objects arranged in haphazard compositions are not so much ready-made, as just-made. Friedman has persevered to construct a paper towel dispenser made of styrofoam that looks more like something out of Wallace and Gromit’s Big Day in the Toilet. Flowing from the mouth of the dispenser is a thin layer of paint made to look like paper towel. It’s a brilliant riposte to any artist who pulls a tin can out of a rubbish bin, calling it art because the ready-made represents man’s inhumanity to man.

Tom Friedman; user of everything

Tom Friedman, I’ve also discovered, is obsessive about finding beginning and end points of art, employing Buddhism in large measures to hunt down these mileposts. Based on his earlier works, he certainly has the monastic patience of a man in solitary. Friedman once started a day off with one toothpick, resolving then to create something more grand, with more toothpicks. 30,000 toothpicks later, his sculpture resembled a splintery galactic explosion. He stopped at 30,000 because, well, the project could go on indefinitely; and really, doesn’t 30,000 get the point across? Personally I would have stopped at about 100 toothpicks because I wouldn’t have thought to purchase the 30,000 to begin with. Also, I can’t imagine a project with 30,000 of anything in front of me. Think of the missed pub time.

Thankfully someone like Tom Friedman exists if for no other reason than assigning him the patience to wait out an idea and jumping on it before the flimsy idea floats off to the lost island of forgotten ideas. The search for the beginning of something; or maybe it’s the end of something else, was a key starting point for him. To Friedman, beginnings and endings can be the same thing. When he says that filling something up is the same as making it completely empty, it sounds like something the physicist Richard Feynman would say. Once when he,  Friedman, not Feynman, couldn’t quite figure out his next move, he cleaned out his studio, boarded up the windows, and painted the whole space completely white, with the intention of determining a new starting point for his art education. It must have been a personal, big-bang moment. The very next day, Friedman began focusing on one object each day in his freshly constructed clean room. On Day 1, a metronome; day 2, a plate; and so on. Each day he asked questions of the thing’s existence. What is it, what’s it called, why does it take up the space it does, what’s it doing here, why am I talking to it…He then asked questions of his relationship with the object as a viewer. He was playing you and me as gallery and museum groupie. For a time, Friedman did nothing but think about the object and himself in this universe of one small white room, like a mini-museum, seeking out his “point A”.  More importantly, hoping it led to something worthwhile, like “point B”. His process reminds me of the end of the film “Castaway” when the Tom Hanks character is literally at a cross roads to his future. The difference is that Friedman has more to think about than simply turning left or right. He’s got infinity ahead of him.

about as useless as a real one

Another of his projects involved a jigsaw puzzle. As he got closer to the end of seeing the final image, he pulled all the pieces away from “interlock” mode, separated the pieces with a few inches of floor space, and laid everything out in grid-like fashion. You couldn’t tell what the puzzle was a puzzle of, until you looked at individual pieces. Only then could you make the synaptic leap to imagine the bigger picture.

Tom Friedman may be my new comedy art hero, even if he doesn’t think his work is supposed to be amusing. But there I am, just me staring at his objects, asking questions like, why is this here, what’s its purpose, what’s it doing near me, why am I laughing?

Art, if you haven’t noticed, doesn’t pretend to know boundaries. I’m pretty sure it couldn’t find them if it had night-vision goggles, taped up with sonar-enhanced earplugs, connected to Scoville Chili Pepper Heat Index tongue extensions.  The common law of physics that applies to everything else we know, anything within the upper limit of the planet’s atmosphere, is just a bothersome, trifling annoyance for art.  Art doesn’t adhere to science, doesn’t care about it, doesn’t bother listening to it.  Or does it?

The other world, Science Inc., seems to play the game nicely.  The unambiguous world of science throws off a division of itself called Theoretical Physics.  Scientists who are Theoretical Physicists are the comedians of their dull, pragmatic, un-humorous industry.  Forget what you hear about popular stage comedians, these wacky revolutionaries are truly our comic geniuses.  They think of bizarre realities, and try to interpret what life would be like inside this unconventional city.  What’s the distance of the British coastline?  Infinite, say theoretical scientist, because the more you magnify the rough edges, the more undiscovered gaps will appear.  How about days with 25 hours instead of the earthbound, rotationally stuck, 24 hours we usually complain about not having enough of.  We could simply ignore the bothersome planetary rotation thing and make up our own arbitrary rules and abide by a new, albeit flaky, order.  We’d get to see fireworks in the middle of the day.

the art of science

Sean Carroll is one such Theoretical Physicist at California Institute of Technology.  What he thinks about, he admits, isn’t science, and some of it isn’t even theory.  It’s just a different direction in which to take the messy business of reality.  His new book, “From Eternity to Here” wonders why it is that we can remember the past, but can’t remember the future.  In space, we can go up or down, left or right, forward and backward, but time is a dimension with a one way street.  The arrow of time, despite what Hollywood tells us, goes only forward.  It never moves toward yesterday.  Even heavies like Newton and Galileo wondered this, and suggested that we could remember the future, if we only knew everything there was to know.  In theory, the events in our half-baked, unhinged blue marble of a planet could be determined because we’d know fully why things happen in the order that they do.  Say you lose your wallet every twelve years.  You’d plan on carrying no money and credit cards in your wallet on the day you were due for a shocker.  On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a shocker because you would have been prepared for it.  Oh this damned warping of space-time is so confusing!  Someone get Michael J. Fox on the phone.

But you see what I mean about the art of science.  Science at least gives the sinister “other” a go.  A close example from the Art Camp is Anne Truitt, who creates minimalist sculpture.  To sum up her work in a brutish and not very kind phrase, think of very colourful, tall-as-a-woman, square-ish, wooden posts.  Art Forum claims that photographs don’t do the pieces justice, but as I try not to listen to the pretension of Art Forum, I’ve included one of her pieces here.  Art Forum also warns of danger when categorizing Truitt’s style as Minimalist, because, well, categories are for doormats like the scientists, and not for the gallant artist. They don’t like leaving their safe houses, these artists.  Struggling onward into the wooly world of science, however, is Anne Truitt’s concept of life as a sculpture.  Not a life as a sculptor, but that which sculpting begets - the mysterious 3D spawn of artistic invention.

pillars of the community

One morning, while standing in the front room of her house, probably wondering, as all artists do, just what the hell she was thinking graduating with an art degree, Truitt was focused on passing shadows as the sun continued its formidable and inevitable slipping into sunrise.  To paraphrase Truitt’s quote from Art Forum, it is we people, as sculptures, who stand firm, while the sun continues forward.  In that sense, we disarm time; and while we’re not subject to it, we are illuminated by it.

OK, a neat trick, you’re thinking, and we should applaud the metaphysical breakthrough for art in escaping its earthly white cube, and into the chilling cosmos of scientific law.  Scientifically speaking, of course, what she said is not true, but it lends itself to thoughtful poetry, and certainly useful to Truitt as a devisor of art.  You can imagine that a stationary person waiting patiently for a bus, might notice more of life, and therefore time passing, than someone running for that same bus, falling down, spilling a double latte on themselves, with the stationary person not helping at all by laughing loudly.  By the way, this didn’t really happen to me anytime, ever.

Imagine you’re floating in a narrow hole in the ground, a mile deep in the earth’s crust.  It’s useless to scream because nobody would hear you.  And there you are, for the rest of your very quiet and still life, getting to know your new neighbor, mother earth.  It wouldn’t be a comfortable way to complete your up to now agitated and anxiety filled life, but if you were promised a hoist back up to civilization after an hour or so, it might be worth the day-long effort it would take to get you down and back up.  Your day would be filled with the earth belching, squealing, screaming, farting, rumbling, whatever earths do when they’re not being paid attention to.  If you’re an environmentalist, it’s your version of swimming with dolphins.  If you’re a monk, it would make your wooden, mountain-top shanty seem like Las Vegas in comparison.  In fact, if you’re a monk, you’d buy a one way ticket.

Doug Aitlen

Los Angeles artist, Doug Aitken has made such a hole.  While you can’t go down it, he makes the trip more convenient by bringing the sonic chat show up to the surface.  Aitken has just completed a five-year project that demands you to make a visit to a sculpture park in the middle of Brazil.  In the same vein as James Turrell, Aitken’s project requires remoteness, a sense of place, and a nice spot to move some dirt.  He’s in luck because a collector by the name of Bernardo Paz has provided him space to do it in Brazil’s Instituto Inhotim.  We mere dreamers, however, are out of luck because the space is a six hour drive from Rio de Janeiro.  Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion is billed as a quiet space on a hill, lined with frosted glass on all sides, presumably to take you out of one world, and into another.  Inside the room is the hole, with a microphone - a really good and brave microphone - dropped one mile down into a concrete-reinforced earth barrel.  The sounds are retrieved, amplified and filtered through room speakers, where, we’re told, the noise never repeats itself.  We’re going on the theory that Aitken isn’t taking us for a ride, and the microphone really is down there.  And it’s really making the sound coming out of the speakers.

The project is such a great idea that it’s unthinkable no one has thought to use the internet as a delivery network.  Earth racket to everyone, anytime, anywhere.  Science museums, to mention the obvious patron, would love this, but it’s equally interesting as art.  Keep the hubbub going 24 hours a day by sealing it inside a quiet room in a gallery or museum.  I’m sure there isn’t money to be had by Aitken’s gallerists to do this, but the outrageous publicity wouldn’t hurt sales for any of Aitken’s other projects either.

Spock, the better days

I’d even settle for a peaceful room in a gallery with limited visitation rights.  The gallery could sort out a queue system where visitors spend 15 minutes in a darkened, sound-baffled room, and we could all imagine ourselves trapped in the great void of nothingness.  Like Spock when his body was shot off into space.  Except Spock was dead, sort of.  You could even send in a hopelessly stubborn child to correct misbehaviour.  Let him scream his complaining little lungs out.  You couldn’t send in Paris Hilton though, because the earth would probably run away.  And then where would we be?  Floating in Spock-like nothingness watching the earth flee the solar system.