I Think I'm Dumb (Part II) - Matthew Stadler

April 1998
T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

`Pacific Northwest Urban Writing`

YES, MORE "I THINK I'M DUMB"

SO WHAT? Well, as promised, some general conditions of life will be made to follow from these experiences of mine. And remember, these are just words. Living amidst bigness brings on a feeling of dispersal - the location is no longer fixed, which leads to a failure to perceive scale or any fixed relation, which also nurtures a kind of multivalence (places which might have had a single identity and a single use elsewhere suddenly have many identities and uses); it leads to a blurring of hierarchy and boundaries; it leads to amiable forgetfulness, which is at once the greatest blessing and greatest curse of being spaced-out (and, I might add, this forgetfulness is due to slowness, not speed - life simply drifts amongst big structures, ideas billow and collapse); and bigness leads to a disturbance of trajectory or direction (which, like the size of a building, is only perceived from a distance, for example a critical distance).

These abstractions have become visible to me in certain ways. There rarely seems to be a single neighborhood which is the location of 'the cultural scene' like New York's SOHO district was or the East Village. Cities on the West Coast of the U.S. do have that kind, but not that degree of urban specificity. Marketing mechanisms will often create a name to mask the reality of diffusion and dispersal (and then, by gum, sell real estate). They'll invite you to artsy Santa Monica, or to come buy a loft in bohemian Bell Town, in Seattle, but really these are attempts to create a location where none actually exists. The declaration is itself proof of the absence of what is being named.

My friend Larry is a curator in a museum in Berkeley and sometimes we'll go and look at artists, and Larry was in Los Angeles to visit Charles Ray, who is a fairly interesting LA artist, and I thought, great, let's go to the artists' neighborhood, to the lofts maybe downtown. We ended up on the endless freeway to the San Fernando valley, and out in these weird tract houses there was this nice two-story house where Charlie Ray lived next to some satanic Led Zeppelin fans, but I think he's moved now. Our next visit was in Santa Monica, several hours away, that is 'about an hour away' (but Larry isn't a very good driver), in a strip mall, in a gallery that was between a laundromat and a Thai restaurant. So, you never know where someone might live, or, if you are somewhere, you really don't know who might live there.

You never know where new work might happen.

Why was the art gallery stuck between the Thai restaurant and the laundromat? Very often these days, the laundromat is the gallery-performance space-bar-cafe-bookstore. To see what visual artists in Seattle are doing, you can't look in the yellow pages under 'gallery'. (Better to check the 'WEB-Crawler' under 'Art AND Seattle'.) You'll miss the bulk of work that's hanging in cafe's and in bookstores and laundromats. (Why have laundromats become popular for theater and visual art?) Sometimes, it's just in somebody's house. These places are dispersed and unpredictable. This condition is abetted by the fact there is no centralized critical apparatus. If you want to read about work, you don't pick up the daily newspaper, nor Seattle Magazine. You won't find much information about Seattle artists in any mainstream media there. You may find it, instead, in a xeroxed pile of pages that is stuck in a magazine rack at the tattooist, in a local store, in a laundromat, or webbed on the Internet or in a tabloid weekly (who knows which one it will be this week). Maybe it'll be in one of those xeroxed 'zines that come out whenever someone has money. This is a condition which is happening nearly everywhere, but it is epidemic in Seattle, and consequently there is not centralization to critical discourse.

As a result any hierarchy of cultural production falls apart in loose and sloppy ways. You can't really know what is broadly 'important' because there's no consensus or authority to make anything 'broadly important'. There is no venue to sanctify it, and no critic to anoint it. The kind of hierarchy that still thrives in New York, for example (where there are still regular sightings of 'the next big thing') has entirely collapsed where I live. Consequently, for any cultural production form in Seattle to gain importance, it must be 'discovered' somewhere else (Gary Hill in Europe and Japan, 'grunge' music by English journalists, Raymond Carver by New York publishers and critics).

THIS FRUSTED ME WHEN I first moved back from New York after ten years away. Nobody cares at all about quality in Seattle, I thought, there is no rigor or discernment. It was upsetting to be removed from the talk and critical dialogue which made events in New York always seem so momentous. But after three years back in Seattle, it became clear there was a lot going on which I didn't notice at first because I was only attuned to the noise and hype of New York's loud, constantly amplified cultural discourse. Which reminds me of another West Coast artist, John Cage (who began his collaborations with Merce Cunningham and his work with prepared piano when he was a teacher at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and then continued that work with Lou Harrison in Oakland before moving East). Cage was speaking in a sizable auditorium without a microphone, much to the dismay of some people in the back, and one man yelled, 'Use the microphone, I can't hear you.' And Cage said, 'If you listen, you will hear me'. The multivalence I mentioned happens in part because the locations of work are multivalent. Beyond the laundromats, I want to plug a series of readings I help organize in Seattle, the Rendezvous Readings, which are these, well, parties really, where we invite writers we totally admire to come to Seattle and read at this party or whatever it is. It takes place in an ex-mausoleum that a theater director named John Kazanjin turned into a theater-bar-gallery-cabaret (the cabaret is where we have the readings) and this sort of arrangement is fairly usual, an organizational corollary to the hodgepodge of 'zines and other cheap xeroxed publications which circulate within a city (though usually you can get, say, LA or Groningen 'zines in Seattle or in New York - there's always a number of places to get 'zines, and usually they have a bundle of from elsewhere). These two facts - the dispersal places where work appears and the dispersal of commentary and dialogue about work - I think are the most powerful manifestations of the shift that interests me.

And last, critical discourse is getting plainer and dumber. I went to see Gary Hill talk about his work. He grew up in California and was a surfer. A lot of his new work has to do with surfing. He was being interviewed by a poet named Robert Mittenthal who wanted to talk about some of the ways Gary Hill investigates language, the way language falls apart into gestures and sound, in a number of his videos, and after a long elaborate theory-laden question, Gary Hill answered with a slack-jawed, soundless empty mouth of air. He just stared at Mittenthal with his mouth open. Now that's truly dumb! A lot of art catalogues and curatorial essays are getting purposefully plainer and dumber. This kind of duh-brainy, anti-jargon can sound really brilliant (like it does in the book and art criticism of Dennis Cooper and in Dave Hickey's luminous essays, he lives in Los Vegas), but it also effectively refuses to engage with the hostile questions that a more elevated discourse dwells in. So, for instance, Hickey can go on and on about the great orange glow of the Sunset Strip (when discussing Barnett Newman), rather than having to dick around with color theory. (My talk today is another example). More importantly, this is reflected in the spaced-out style of discussion that surrounds new work.

To describe these off-hand habits as a 'style' does some violence to them, but typically one (maybe the only) question is: 'What's happening?' And this is an important and incisive question, as incisive as the more impressive ones (like Robert Mittenthal's) that may be couched in an elevated vocabulary.

'What's happening?' is a sufficiently dumb question to allow many kinds of responses and it focuses, tellingly I think, on action, on doing - the cultural dialogue and the manifestations of work are not articulated in critical language or in commentary so much as they just happen: they're done; they are what's happening.

Amidst bigness, there is a return to anonymity, too, people not signing work, or using proliferations of false identities, as well as a flourishing off-the-cuff, completely unprogrammatic collaborative spirit. Most 'zines and performance-spaces are little more than the loosely organized 'collaboration' of a shifting group of writers and artists. Or as another example: Dodie Bellamy's accumulations called 'The Letters of Mina Haker' - sort of a collaboration with her own demons - which make up her early fiction, and also her exchanges with Sam D'Allesandro (published under the title 'Real'), or Kevin Killian's occasional plays, drawingroom operas really, starring whichever writers/artists are hankering for a turn in the spotlight (or the bathroom light, as these evanescent dramas play as often in the same peculiar spaces I described earlier, as in 'real' theaters and museums). The plays mix Killian's art/writing world with the high melodramas of Hollywood and US tabloids, plus a variety of academic theory-wars. The confounding multivalence I spoke of before isn't, in these cases, just a feature of venues and critical organs, but of 'artists' and of the works of art themselves.

To connect this to some of the language used elsewhere in this conference (Jeffey Kipnis') perhaps the situation I describe - wherein work is independent of any 'authoritative' critical dialogue, work is sufficient merely as activity - is an example of intensive coherence. The proximity of different properties does not answer to an extensive coherence (of any kind that might be brought to bear by critical dialogue or any set of delimiting or determining programs). This work, rather, emerges out of an almost organic proximity.

Which reminds me that such an intensive coherence is in danger of being crushed, or just not seen, because so many of our programs for inquiry here and now are critical programs, ones which move forward by building a grand and commanding distance which will then allow the imposition of an extensive coherence, of a scheme or system. We will seem to be reaching for exactly that - as if the only question worth asking is how to encompass this all? How can we connect the particular inflection of Bernard's vector to the exquisite surface that we've seen in Jan van de Pavert's video - where is the larger, more abstract extensive coherence? The spaced-out culture that I value is shy and dumb about theory. It establishes connections simply through proximity, and proximity has already happened here today. The editors were wise to refrain from directing the participants toward a programmatic coherence. They simply gave us a word and a room (now a magazine). They asked us only to come and be in the same place. This leaves all of us with a much more confused residue, but a residue that is perhaps richer and more subtle in its material. Maybe it can help each of us move forward in whatever perverse direction we're drifting toward, and there are a lot of them. My experience, amidst the big, suggests that if we focus on proximity and situations in which work is simply allowed to exist in juxtaposition - arrangements made with some kind of tenderness - we can support the productivity and the robustness of this community, by which I mean anyone we happen to be with. I think in the midst of this march towards 'Bigness' with all of its talk of regimes and programs and teams that we should stay dumb, we should preserve the evasiveness which helps protect that which is shy and quiet, that which will not defend itself, that which will not bother to engage with the questions asked by a hostile paradigm. This delicate sub-fauna is native to the grave of giants outlined in Rem K. [Koolhaas], but too many gardeners could be a problem.

This talk originally appeared in Wiederhall (Dutch architecture mag), Fall 1994.

© The Raven Chronicles 1998

	April 1998		T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

	`Pacific Northwest Urban Writing`		YES, MORE "I THINK I'M DUMB" SO WHAT? Well, as promised, some general conditions of life will be made to follow from these experiences of mine. And remember, these are just words. Living amidst bigness brings on a feeling of dispersal - the location is no longer fixed, which leads to a failure to perceive scale or any fixed relation, which also nurtures a kind of multivalence (places which might have had a single identity and a single use elsewhere suddenly have many identities and uses); it leads to a blurring of hierarchy and boundaries; it leads to amiable forgetfulness, which is at once the greatest blessing and greatest curse of being spaced-out (and, I might add, this forgetfulness is due to slowness, not speed - life simply drifts amongst big structures, ideas billow and collapse); and bigness leads to a disturbance of trajectory or direction (which, like the size of a building, is only perceived from a distance, for example a critical distance). These abstractions have become visible to me in certain ways. There rarely seems to be a single neighborhood which is the location of 'the cultural scene' like New York's SOHO district was or the East Village. Cities on the West Coast of the U.S. do have that kind, but not that degree of urban specificity. Marketing mechanisms will often create a name to mask the reality of diffusion and dispersal (and then, by gum, sell real estate). They'll invite you to artsy Santa Monica, or to come buy a loft in bohemian Bell Town, in Seattle, but really these are attempts to create a location where none actually exists. The declaration is itself proof of the absence of what is being named. My friend Larry is a curator in a museum in Berkeley and sometimes we'll go and look at artists, and Larry was in Los Angeles to visit Charles Ray, who is a fairly interesting LA artist, and I thought, great, let's go to the artists' neighborhood, to the lofts maybe downtown. We ended up on the endless freeway to the San Fernando valley, and out in these weird tract houses there was this nice two-story house where Charlie Ray lived next to some satanic Led Zeppelin fans, but I think he's moved now. Our next visit was in Santa Monica, several hours away, that is 'about an hour away' (but Larry isn't a very good driver), in a strip mall, in a gallery that was between a laundromat and a Thai restaurant. So, you never know where someone might live, or, if you are somewhere, you really don't know who might live there. You never know where new work might happen. Why was the art gallery stuck between the Thai restaurant and the laundromat? Very often these days, the laundromat is the gallery-performance space-bar-cafe-bookstore. To see what visual artists in Seattle are doing, you can't look in the yellow pages under 'gallery'. (Better to check the 'WEB-Crawler' under 'Art AND Seattle'.) You'll miss the bulk of work that's hanging in cafe's and in bookstores and laundromats. (Why have laundromats become popular for theater and visual art?) Sometimes, it's just in somebody's house. These places are dispersed and unpredictable. This condition is abetted by the fact there is no centralized critical apparatus. If you want to read about work, you don't pick up the daily newspaper, nor Seattle Magazine. You won't find much information about Seattle artists in any mainstream media there. You may find it, instead, in a xeroxed pile of pages that is stuck in a magazine rack at the tattooist, in a local store, in a laundromat, or webbed on the Internet or in a tabloid weekly (who knows which one it will be this week). Maybe it'll be in one of those xeroxed 'zines that come out whenever someone has money. This is a condition which is happening nearly everywhere, but it is epidemic in Seattle, and consequently there is not centralization to critical discourse. As a result any hierarchy of cultural production falls apart in loose and sloppy ways. You can't really know what is broadly 'important' because there's no consensus or authority to make anything 'broadly important'. There is no venue to sanctify it, and no critic to anoint it. The kind of hierarchy that still thrives in New York, for example (where there are still regular sightings of 'the next big thing') has entirely collapsed where I live. Consequently, for any cultural production form in Seattle to gain importance, it must be 'discovered' somewhere else (Gary Hill in Europe and Japan, 'grunge' music by English journalists, Raymond Carver by New York publishers and critics). THIS FRUSTED ME WHEN I first moved back from New York after ten years away. Nobody cares at all about quality in Seattle, I thought, there is no rigor or discernment. It was upsetting to be removed from the talk and critical dialogue which made events in New York always seem so momentous. But after three years back in Seattle, it became clear there was a lot going on which I didn't notice at first because I was only attuned to the noise and hype of New York's loud, constantly amplified cultural discourse. Which reminds me of another West Coast artist, John Cage (who began his collaborations with Merce Cunningham and his work with prepared piano when he was a teacher at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and then continued that work with Lou Harrison in Oakland before moving East). Cage was speaking in a sizable auditorium without a microphone, much to the dismay of some people in the back, and one man yelled, 'Use the microphone, I can't hear you.' And Cage said, 'If you listen, you will hear me'. The multivalence I mentioned happens in part because the locations of work are multivalent. Beyond the laundromats, I want to plug a series of readings I help organize in Seattle, the Rendezvous Readings, which are these, well, parties really, where we invite writers we totally admire to come to Seattle and read at this party or whatever it is. It takes place in an ex-mausoleum that a theater director named John Kazanjin turned into a theater-bar-gallery-cabaret (the cabaret is where we have the readings) and this sort of arrangement is fairly usual, an organizational corollary to the hodgepodge of 'zines and other cheap xeroxed publications which circulate within a city (though usually you can get, say, LA or Groningen 'zines in Seattle or in New York - there's always a number of places to get 'zines, and usually they have a bundle of from elsewhere). These two facts - the dispersal places where work appears and the dispersal of commentary and dialogue about work - I think are the most powerful manifestations of the shift that interests me. And last, critical discourse is getting plainer and dumber. I went to see Gary Hill talk about his work. He grew up in California and was a surfer. A lot of his new work has to do with surfing. He was being interviewed by a poet named Robert Mittenthal who wanted to talk about some of the ways Gary Hill investigates language, the way language falls apart into gestures and sound, in a number of his videos, and after a long elaborate theory-laden question, Gary Hill answered with a slack-jawed, soundless empty mouth of air. He just stared at Mittenthal with his mouth open. Now that's truly dumb! A lot of art catalogues and curatorial essays are getting purposefully plainer and dumber. This kind of duh-brainy, anti-jargon can sound really brilliant (like it does in the book and art criticism of Dennis Cooper and in Dave Hickey's luminous essays, he lives in Los Vegas), but it also effectively refuses to engage with the hostile questions that a more elevated discourse dwells in. So, for instance, Hickey can go on and on about the great orange glow of the Sunset Strip (when discussing Barnett Newman), rather than having to dick around with color theory. (My talk today is another example). More importantly, this is reflected in the spaced-out style of discussion that surrounds new work. To describe these off-hand habits as a 'style' does some violence to them, but typically one (maybe the only) question is: 'What's happening?' And this is an important and incisive question, as incisive as the more impressive ones (like Robert Mittenthal's) that may be couched in an elevated vocabulary. 'What's happening?' is a sufficiently dumb question to allow many kinds of responses and it focuses, tellingly I think, on action, on doing - the cultural dialogue and the manifestations of work are not articulated in critical language or in commentary so much as they just happen: they're done; they are what's happening. Amidst bigness, there is a return to anonymity, too, people not signing work, or using proliferations of false identities, as well as a flourishing off-the-cuff, completely unprogrammatic collaborative spirit. Most 'zines and performance-spaces are little more than the loosely organized 'collaboration' of a shifting group of writers and artists. Or as another example: Dodie Bellamy's accumulations called 'The Letters of Mina Haker' - sort of a collaboration with her own demons - which make up her early fiction, and also her exchanges with Sam D'Allesandro (published under the title 'Real'), or Kevin Killian's occasional plays, drawingroom operas really, starring whichever writers/artists are hankering for a turn in the spotlight (or the bathroom light, as these evanescent dramas play as often in the same peculiar spaces I described earlier, as in 'real' theaters and museums). The plays mix Killian's art/writing world with the high melodramas of Hollywood and US tabloids, plus a variety of academic theory-wars. The confounding multivalence I spoke of before isn't, in these cases, just a feature of venues and critical organs, but of 'artists' and of the works of art themselves. To connect this to some of the language used elsewhere in this conference (Jeffey Kipnis') perhaps the situation I describe - wherein work is independent of any 'authoritative' critical dialogue, work is sufficient merely as activity - is an example of intensive coherence. The proximity of different properties does not answer to an extensive coherence (of any kind that might be brought to bear by critical dialogue or any set of delimiting or determining programs). This work, rather, emerges out of an almost organic proximity. Which reminds me that such an intensive coherence is in danger of being crushed, or just not seen, because so many of our programs for inquiry here and now are critical programs, ones which move forward by building a grand and commanding distance which will then allow the imposition of an extensive coherence, of a scheme or system. We will seem to be reaching for exactly that - as if the only question worth asking is how to encompass this all? How can we connect the particular inflection of Bernard's vector to the exquisite surface that we've seen in Jan van de Pavert's video - where is the larger, more abstract extensive coherence? The spaced-out culture that I value is shy and dumb about theory. It establishes connections simply through proximity, and proximity has already happened here today. The editors were wise to refrain from directing the participants toward a programmatic coherence. They simply gave us a word and a room (now a magazine). They asked us only to come and be in the same place. This leaves all of us with a much more confused residue, but a residue that is perhaps richer and more subtle in its material. Maybe it can help each of us move forward in whatever perverse direction we're drifting toward, and there are a lot of them. My experience, amidst the big, suggests that if we focus on proximity and situations in which work is simply allowed to exist in juxtaposition - arrangements made with some kind of tenderness - we can support the productivity and the robustness of this community, by which I mean anyone we happen to be with. I think in the midst of this march towards 'Bigness' with all of its talk of regimes and programs and teams that we should stay dumb, we should preserve the evasiveness which helps protect that which is shy and quiet, that which will not defend itself, that which will not bother to engage with the questions asked by a hostile paradigm. This delicate sub-fauna is native to the grave of giants outlined in Rem K. [Koolhaas], but too many gardeners could be a problem. This talk originally appeared in Wiederhall (Dutch architecture mag), Fall 1994.
			© The Raven Chronicles 1998