Archive for January 5th, 2010
And on to David Antin and The Prisoner
A glimpse of my stroll west last night.
It was way way cold, and when I returned home I didn’t want to do anything but finish up my viewing of the Prisoner and my reading of A Book of One’s Own. I’m toying with the idea of trying to read at least a book a week this year. But no resolutions, especially with so many things in flux. I’m just happy that I can get pictures taken and a bit of writing.
Home wifi is still no-go, which is a bit of a blessing in that I have fallen into a bad habit of continual image skimming in recent months. With only my iPhone to rely upon this morning, I did a bit of Tumblr posting and then quickly got my nose back in a book. The current one is i never knew what time it was by david antin. (If you noticed, the link is to St. Marks Bookstore, where I bought my copy, since I’m going to try to link to independent media sellers these days, as much as I use Amazon).
Antin is someone worth looking into, if you’ve never encountered him before: a verbal essayist/performance artist/teacher/thinker, who does something not quite like any one else. I’ve seen his work in person a few times and each time it taught me volumes about ways of making art. Watching him deliver one of his talks one can never be sure how much is premeditated and how much is occurring to him on the wing. He takes apart the notion of the artist making something art simply by paying attention to it by making you ask what exactly is paying attention.
Mallon’s book proved to be inspiring as well – pointing me to dozens of diaries I’d love to read. My favorite books are those that expose my own blindspots, and few diaries that I have been able to make it all the way through.
As for The Prisoner, this was my first truly end to end viewing of it. Previously I’ve caught episodes in various PBS marathons, and while familiar with most of it, I’d never seen the full arc before. Its subsequent influence is so great that I have to keep reminding myself of how different is was in its time. Taken piece by piece you’d have to say that there was not much special about it, but taken all together it constitutes an almost perfect cult object: detailed enough to suggest the possibility if completeness, but fragmentary enough to provide space for the fan’s interpolations. The supposed rule for show biz success is to “leave ‘em wanting more”, but the cult success relies on leaving them wanting a specific kind of more: the tantalizing missing bits that fans can exercise their imaginations in fleshing out. It’s doubtful that one can really go about doing this deliberately, although the current generation of artists seems hell bent on trying over and over again. But people love OZ in the way they do in spite of what Baum was trying to do in his books and not because of it. Any number of tv shows have suffered the wrath of fans at the moment of conlclusion or payoff. That is because most complete works of art give us what the creator decided was ultimately the point of their invention, and in doing so shoulder aside our ideas about what it would be neat to see happen. Cult works need to be both episodic to give us a wealth of moments and yet ultimately shapeless so as not to preclude our sense of how they should go.
In other works of art, what we as viewers do with the complete or incomplete is very different. I don’t expect A Dostoevsky novel to be fully resolved, but neither do I desire to “spend more time in its universe”. I look to the kinds of experiences it generates and the way it’s made as being sufficient unto itself without embellishments from me.
Tags: daily photo, David Antin, making art, night, reading, The Prisoner, tv