In mourning and defense of cynical art
Last year, I lost Milan Kundera, this year I lost Richard Serra. With their deaths, my world shrank a little. Their work is rarely described as beautiful. No one reads a Kundera novel, and says “I believe in love!”. Similarly, Serra’s iconic sculpture installations of looming walls of steel produce sensations of vertigo, smallness, constriction, and disorientation. Kundera’s and Serra’s work is rooted in a fervent opposition to:
“kitsch [is] the absolute denial of shit”
-a quote by Kundera that I proudly, in my academic manic-pixie-dream-girl snobbery, wrote on the whiteboard that hung on the door of my freshman dorm room.
Serra came from a generation of sculptors that got rid of the pedestal. But before becoming a sculptor, he threw his painting supplies down a river, the Arno, after seeing “The Meninas” by Diego Velazquez and deciding he was never gonna be able to paint something better. Later on he also got rid of the idea of the “studio”, and traded it for steel mills.
Kundera, a crusher of happy endings, writes flawed characters that are often selfish and/or lacking self-awareness, sometimes borderline pathetic. But as unlikeable as they might be, their qualities and poor-decision making is what makes them ridiculously human.
Similarly, Serra centers the audience’s experience of the space in his sculpture by barring them from ornamentation. His sculptures shape the space around the viewer at his will. I once stood inside one of his sculptures in Fort Worth, Texas, and felt I was being swallowed by an industrial Behemoth.
Upon his death, my mind, exhausted from the ennui of my day job at an advertising firm, kept replaying Serra’s lesser known video-art work collaboration with Carlota Fay Schoolman: “Television Delivers People”. The video depicts a monologue about mass media in white text on a blue screen. As the monologue goes on, it prays a litany:
It is the consumer who is consumed.
You are the product of t.v.
You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer.
He consumes you.
I began cringing at the meaninglessness of my 9 to 5 and Serra’s statement about class came to mind:
“if you’re making art, you don’t know what class you’re in, but if you work in a steel mill you’re part of the working class,” this might sound ironic coming from an artist who gets multi-million-dollar commissions, but it is true.
Historically, artists, especially the ones from working-class backgrounds, exist in limbo. The elite employs artists, but unlike the service, they are allowed to mingle upstairs: a class chimera.
I hate the art scene probably as much as making spreadsheets for a barely livable wage. After art school, I became increasingly intolerant to working with art institutions, the red tape, the nepotism, the impossible hustling of trying to make a living from art. I could no longer stand the narratives of art with social activism pretensions while their creators also stayed loyal to not making their patrons uncomfortable.
After losing jobs, even getting blocked on social media by one museum and one gallery, for speaking my mind demanding labor rights and speaking against institutional elitism, I decided it was not worth it.
This is something I especially admire the most from both Kundera and Serra: their willingness to burn bridges.
Serra, dramatically, once said, “To remove the work is to destroy the work.”
This conceptual conviction fueled his $30 million lawsuit against General Administration Services after the removal of his infamous “Tilted Arc” from the Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. I remember dearly this freedom of expression case from my Media Law & Ethics class, yet it cost Serra securing commissions in his own home country for a long while.
Serra wasn’t the only one burning bridges at home. After exile, Kundera only wrote in French and vehemently refused the translation of his books to Czech. He rarely returned to his home country even after being granted his citizenship 40 years into his exile.
However, time and time again, Kundera takes the reader to the shores of the Vltava in Prague and small villages in the Czech countryside. But it should be noted that the sentiment is always far from patriotic. Sometimes, he even punishes his characters for returning.
In “Ignorance” my favorite novel by Kundera, two Czech lovers, who once shared a one-night-stand, reunite by chance as they return to their home country after living abroad, where one of them ultimately realizes that the other does not remember their first encounter in the same way as they did. Similarly in his most well-known work, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” the protagonists leave the country but after a series of unfortunate melodramatic events, return, and die.
So what is there to enjoy about the rusting patina of big walls of steel or cynical magic realism? To me, in a world oversaturated with toxic positivity and the empty promises of late-stage capitalism, there is comfort in the work of other people that acknowledge that a lot of life is just bullshit.
