WRITING
Play Is a Dirty Word (Excerpt)
Lecture, Mason Gross School of Art
Rutgers University
Play Is a Dirty Word (Excerpt)
Lecture, Mason Gross School of Art
Rutgers University
2006
Play is a dirty word.
From 1995 to 1998, west coast photographer John Divola worked on a series of photographs of isolated houses in the desert in the Morongo Valley in Southern California. In his introduction to Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert he writes, “As I meandered through the desert, a dog would occasionally chase my car . . . .Sometime in 1996 I began to bring along a 35mm camera . . .” Of the artwork for which he is now internationally recognized, David Shrigley said: “I didn't think of my drawings as Fine Art until quite a long time after art school. . .” As Shrigley found application for his drawing style in the established fine art domain, John Waters broke from the popular medium of movies to the gallery setting with Director’s Cut, a collection of “re-directions” or “little movies,” photographs taken of films as they played on his television screen, which he then reworked into shortened footage rife with his own commentary. Divola’s photographs of dogs were taken on the way to his scheduled shoots; Shrigley did not initially consider his drawings publishable. Waters’s “re-directions” were pet projects devoted to a private interaction with pre-existing film imagery: “I took my ‘little movie’ photographs for years without telling anybody.”
The projects referenced here, Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, The Book of Shrigley, and Director’s Cut, could be said to amount to no more than photos of dogs, doodling and a re-mixing of antiquated movies. Yet the works yield insights into the nature of our existence and the rituals we employ to engage with and interpret our world, be it immediate, assimilated, or simulated. Divola, Shrigley and Waters articulate varying degrees of self-consciousness within the act of observation, of seeing, of visual communication not simply between artist and art viewer, but between the artist and his subject. Waters confesses, “I never watch a movie I love a second time around because I’m always afraid I’ll be disappointed.” Shrigley says, “I have always kept a notebook to make drawings in ever since I was a child. I never really thought of it as art, it was more like keeping a diary.” Divola writes: “Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic.”
The self-awareness that each artist attaches to his project is held in check by a force of spontaneity engendered by an engagement with a living other, an intuitive process, or the development of a virtual field. Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, The Book of Shrigley, and Director’s Cut embody forms of play: Abandon, absurdity, irreverence, wickedness, wantonness, feral-ness. While depicting playfulness, they also constitute in and of themselves playful acts.
In the case of each of the three artists whose work is presented here, none considered these particular projects central to their focus at the time of their inception. These were peripheral projects, ancillaries to intended projects, to the work “at hand”.
John Divola writes, “The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present.” Silence was a desert playground for the musician John Cage. On August 29, 1952, he debuted the score 4’33” in which a segment of concert time was allotted for any chance sounds that might occur. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds, 4’33” captured the ambient noise of an open air concert hall in Woodstock, New York. In the three unscored movements, the audience heard the wind in the trees, the rain on the roof, the occasional turning of the pages of the blank score and, during the final “movement,” the sounds of its own disgruntlement. Cage referred to 4’33” as “listening to a period of time when there aren’t any sounds being produced.”
The concert supported the Benefit Artists Welfare Fund and was attended by an audience open to contemporary art and the avant-garde. Yet the audience did not share Cage’s willingness to engage a moment, a short passage of time, with a minimum of intention. As Cage explained, "The essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention." Cage operated within the convention of a concert setting, but opened the moment to chance. Of his experiments with the I Ching he said, "If you use, as I do, chance operations, you don’t have control except in the way of designing the questions which you ask. That you can control. I mean you can decide to ask certain questions and not others. But if you use chance operations, you have no control over the answers, except the limits within which they operate."
In explaining the audience’s discomfort with 4’33”, Peter Gutman alludes to a basic human need for “the familiarity of repetition.” Cage inverted the familiar setting of a classical concert by introducing a seeming silence where the audience expected orchestrated sound. In fact, Cage did not consider 4’33” silent. Rather, his composition argued against the very existence of silence. In 1951 he had entered an anechoic chamber to experience the complete absence of noise only to discover the resonant sound of his own nervous and circulatory systems: “Try as we may to make silence, we cannot.” In a 1991 interview with Joan Retallack he elaborated, “[S]ounds take place whether or not you make them.”
In Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, the desert is the setting, John Divola’s presence is the constant, the dogs are the variable. Divola and John Cage both engaged a form of play that invites variation. Gutman claims that Cage’s dialog with the idea of silence constitutes a “rekindling of experience with nature.” Cage himself refers to it as a withholding of intention. The influence of Zen Buddhism played a dominant role in Cage’s artistic development. Relevant to both Divola’s portraits of dogs and Cage’s 4’33” is Cage’s statement: “I don’t think that the apollonian and dionysiac are in opposition. I don’t think that the notion of ‘being in opposition’ is beneficial to our society. I think that the opposites must come together.” Art implies structure, even in its loosest manifestation. Writing in 1997, Allan Kaprow notes,
For John Cage, an experimental action in music was one whose outcome couldn’t be known in advance. . . .Musical and nonmusical sound (“noise”) were equally welcome, along with their unpredictable arrangements. But, for the most part, Cage’s experimental music was still music and took place in the concert situation. Art was automatically affirmed despite Cage’s commitment to the stuff of life.
Cage used the concert tradition to present a passage of unstructured time. Divola documented and edited his spontaneous exchange with a living, non-human otherness. Both works loosen their attachment to the Apollonian, but bar against a fully Dionysian experience.
A periphery implies a center. With Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert and 4’33”, Divola and Cage make frontal a peripheral experience. Divola makes an unexpected game of chase a central preoccupation. Cage composes the sound that surrounds him. Both flirt with futility: Divola acknowledges the “hopeless enterprise” of capturing reality photographically; Cage understood that so long as his nervous and circulatory systems operated, so long as he lived, silence would elude him. The peripheral and the futile are not, however, the subject of their art so much as they are subsets of play.
"The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present." -John Divola
In Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, the sense of play stems from Divola’s willingness to play along with the unexpected. With his camera, he documents a game of chase in which he actively occupies the role of prey: "No one sneaks up on a dog in the desert. A dog can hear your car coming for several miles and will see you coming almost as far away. By the time you arrive he has developed a level of anticipation." Divola describes the game as "a visceral and kinetic dance" that eludes conclusion: "Here we have two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise." Enjoyment lies in the exchange.
A sense of immediacy fills each photograph. The pursuing dogs do not engage the camera, but the larger machine, the car. Divola knowingly intrudes on their territory hoping to catch them, as they hope to catch him, in an instant: “With one hand on the steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film.” Critic Mark Johnstone writes, “Like any other photographer, Divola operates within the limitations and abilities of his equipment. There is a certain kind of displacement of the world by imaging it through a camera, one that is judged after exposure.”
With his camera, Divola becomes an equal in the game. Johnstone writes, “. . .a photograph has an unprecedented, unique and direct connection to the world as an indexical sign of physical traces much like that of a fingerprint or footprint. . . . [I]t is a referential form of representation and is removed from experience itself.” Long after the dogs are called in for the night, Divola plays on within the realm of imagery.
From 1995 to 1998, west coast photographer John Divola worked on a series of photographs of isolated houses in the desert in the Morongo Valley in Southern California. In his introduction to Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert he writes, “As I meandered through the desert, a dog would occasionally chase my car . . . .Sometime in 1996 I began to bring along a 35mm camera . . .” Of the artwork for which he is now internationally recognized, David Shrigley said: “I didn't think of my drawings as Fine Art until quite a long time after art school. . .” As Shrigley found application for his drawing style in the established fine art domain, John Waters broke from the popular medium of movies to the gallery setting with Director’s Cut, a collection of “re-directions” or “little movies,” photographs taken of films as they played on his television screen, which he then reworked into shortened footage rife with his own commentary. Divola’s photographs of dogs were taken on the way to his scheduled shoots; Shrigley did not initially consider his drawings publishable. Waters’s “re-directions” were pet projects devoted to a private interaction with pre-existing film imagery: “I took my ‘little movie’ photographs for years without telling anybody.”
The projects referenced here, Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, The Book of Shrigley, and Director’s Cut, could be said to amount to no more than photos of dogs, doodling and a re-mixing of antiquated movies. Yet the works yield insights into the nature of our existence and the rituals we employ to engage with and interpret our world, be it immediate, assimilated, or simulated. Divola, Shrigley and Waters articulate varying degrees of self-consciousness within the act of observation, of seeing, of visual communication not simply between artist and art viewer, but between the artist and his subject. Waters confesses, “I never watch a movie I love a second time around because I’m always afraid I’ll be disappointed.” Shrigley says, “I have always kept a notebook to make drawings in ever since I was a child. I never really thought of it as art, it was more like keeping a diary.” Divola writes: “Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic.”
The self-awareness that each artist attaches to his project is held in check by a force of spontaneity engendered by an engagement with a living other, an intuitive process, or the development of a virtual field. Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, The Book of Shrigley, and Director’s Cut embody forms of play: Abandon, absurdity, irreverence, wickedness, wantonness, feral-ness. While depicting playfulness, they also constitute in and of themselves playful acts.
In the case of each of the three artists whose work is presented here, none considered these particular projects central to their focus at the time of their inception. These were peripheral projects, ancillaries to intended projects, to the work “at hand”.
John Divola writes, “The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present.” Silence was a desert playground for the musician John Cage. On August 29, 1952, he debuted the score 4’33” in which a segment of concert time was allotted for any chance sounds that might occur. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds, 4’33” captured the ambient noise of an open air concert hall in Woodstock, New York. In the three unscored movements, the audience heard the wind in the trees, the rain on the roof, the occasional turning of the pages of the blank score and, during the final “movement,” the sounds of its own disgruntlement. Cage referred to 4’33” as “listening to a period of time when there aren’t any sounds being produced.”
The concert supported the Benefit Artists Welfare Fund and was attended by an audience open to contemporary art and the avant-garde. Yet the audience did not share Cage’s willingness to engage a moment, a short passage of time, with a minimum of intention. As Cage explained, "The essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention." Cage operated within the convention of a concert setting, but opened the moment to chance. Of his experiments with the I Ching he said, "If you use, as I do, chance operations, you don’t have control except in the way of designing the questions which you ask. That you can control. I mean you can decide to ask certain questions and not others. But if you use chance operations, you have no control over the answers, except the limits within which they operate."
In explaining the audience’s discomfort with 4’33”, Peter Gutman alludes to a basic human need for “the familiarity of repetition.” Cage inverted the familiar setting of a classical concert by introducing a seeming silence where the audience expected orchestrated sound. In fact, Cage did not consider 4’33” silent. Rather, his composition argued against the very existence of silence. In 1951 he had entered an anechoic chamber to experience the complete absence of noise only to discover the resonant sound of his own nervous and circulatory systems: “Try as we may to make silence, we cannot.” In a 1991 interview with Joan Retallack he elaborated, “[S]ounds take place whether or not you make them.”
In Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, the desert is the setting, John Divola’s presence is the constant, the dogs are the variable. Divola and John Cage both engaged a form of play that invites variation. Gutman claims that Cage’s dialog with the idea of silence constitutes a “rekindling of experience with nature.” Cage himself refers to it as a withholding of intention. The influence of Zen Buddhism played a dominant role in Cage’s artistic development. Relevant to both Divola’s portraits of dogs and Cage’s 4’33” is Cage’s statement: “I don’t think that the apollonian and dionysiac are in opposition. I don’t think that the notion of ‘being in opposition’ is beneficial to our society. I think that the opposites must come together.” Art implies structure, even in its loosest manifestation. Writing in 1997, Allan Kaprow notes,
For John Cage, an experimental action in music was one whose outcome couldn’t be known in advance. . . .Musical and nonmusical sound (“noise”) were equally welcome, along with their unpredictable arrangements. But, for the most part, Cage’s experimental music was still music and took place in the concert situation. Art was automatically affirmed despite Cage’s commitment to the stuff of life.
Cage used the concert tradition to present a passage of unstructured time. Divola documented and edited his spontaneous exchange with a living, non-human otherness. Both works loosen their attachment to the Apollonian, but bar against a fully Dionysian experience.
A periphery implies a center. With Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert and 4’33”, Divola and Cage make frontal a peripheral experience. Divola makes an unexpected game of chase a central preoccupation. Cage composes the sound that surrounds him. Both flirt with futility: Divola acknowledges the “hopeless enterprise” of capturing reality photographically; Cage understood that so long as his nervous and circulatory systems operated, so long as he lived, silence would elude him. The peripheral and the futile are not, however, the subject of their art so much as they are subsets of play.
"The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present." -John Divola
In Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, the sense of play stems from Divola’s willingness to play along with the unexpected. With his camera, he documents a game of chase in which he actively occupies the role of prey: "No one sneaks up on a dog in the desert. A dog can hear your car coming for several miles and will see you coming almost as far away. By the time you arrive he has developed a level of anticipation." Divola describes the game as "a visceral and kinetic dance" that eludes conclusion: "Here we have two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise." Enjoyment lies in the exchange.
A sense of immediacy fills each photograph. The pursuing dogs do not engage the camera, but the larger machine, the car. Divola knowingly intrudes on their territory hoping to catch them, as they hope to catch him, in an instant: “With one hand on the steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film.” Critic Mark Johnstone writes, “Like any other photographer, Divola operates within the limitations and abilities of his equipment. There is a certain kind of displacement of the world by imaging it through a camera, one that is judged after exposure.”
With his camera, Divola becomes an equal in the game. Johnstone writes, “. . .a photograph has an unprecedented, unique and direct connection to the world as an indexical sign of physical traces much like that of a fingerprint or footprint. . . . [I]t is a referential form of representation and is removed from experience itself.” Long after the dogs are called in for the night, Divola plays on within the realm of imagery.
