Art About Nothing (or An Ode to Small Things)
I suffer from a narcissistic obsession with the minutiae of my own life. One of my favorite hobbies, is the amassing of various pieces of paper detritus, card board coasters, tickets from museums and concerts, magazine clippings etc., and arranging them in an aesthetically pleasing way. I’m not the only person I know who does this, although I do think I tend to go a little bit overboard with it.
Manic pixie teen queen of the moment, Tavi Gevinson, does a great job articulating the feeling I get when I lay in my bed in the shadow of this shrine to my own life in a video tour of her New York apartment. On the topic of her own artful clutter she muses: “I find that I need to surround myself with these objects that represent something important to me, something that represents a time in my life, or something I did that I’m proud of, or someone who means a lot to me…just living in the orbit of all those things is the feeling of home”
My objects aren’t as cool as book of Sulamith Wülfing illustrations with a personal inscription from Stevie Nicks, or a T-shirt of a Jenny-Holzer-style Inflammatory Essay reimagined as Drake lyrics, but they certainly cultivate my feeling of home. To exist in the orbit of these tactile memories, the paper ones and the various tchotchkes stuffed in stockings or meager crevices of suitcases over the years makes home feel like home, and makes me feel like me.
I remember a car ride, my friends and I indulging in that dorm room-type deep talk for which college kids are constantly ridiculed. We came up with this metaphor; that every person you meet is holding inside them an impossibly intricate tangle of associations, of varying weights and levels of irreversibility, so dense and devoid of light that much of it might be a mystery to even themselves. Some are clear and often shared (I get why I’ve always confused Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg — their blue collar northeastern-ness transcends the disparate caliber of their work). While others require a bit more personally specific digging (why can’t I hear Things Fall Apart without thinking of The Things They Carried — school assigned reading for the same summer, and they are both about Things!). They are our quirks, our idiosyncrasies, and our emotional baggage. All coming together below the visible surface to form hulking trails of garbage that make us, “us.”
These accumulations of memory and connections are also the subject of what I like to call “small art.” Stories that never try to be anything bigger than what they are initially. Larger motifs, messages, and themes may be assigned to them externally and after the fact, but at their core they are exercises in empathy.
Richard Linklater is a hero and a champion of this form. A 2014 New Yorker profile describes his work as “against the fashions of contemporary filmmaking” in that his “notion of cinematic refinement has less to do with virtuosic camerawork than with creating a moment that’s worth capturing.” Two of his films, Dazed and Confused and its spiritual sequel Everybody Wants Some!!!, are confined to the scope of a day or two. The events they conjure, high school graduation and the inaugural weekend of freshman year, are archetypal “big” events, but they often don’t feel that way in the moment. When I think about my own high school graduation, I’m not transported to a grand image of my stride across the podium with Pomp and Circumstance swelling in the background. Instead I usually think of my best friend sitting in my upstairs bathtub, pants-less and tear stained, both of us eating cold pizza while we hide from the 90-degree heat and our fleeting youth.
Even Boyhood, Linklater’s bulging 12-year opus depicting the life of one Texas boy in startling detail, is in some ways small. The scope of the project is enormous, but the subject matter is quotidian. Seeing your first pictures of boobs on the internet, getting drunk, parents fighting, none of these events are necessarily grand or significant, but they are human.
Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld were and are notoriously obsessed with the creation of “a show about nothing.” The project began with Seinfeld and grew with Curb Your Enthusiasm. Both shows might be deep into syndicated reruns, but their mission remains as relevant as ever.
My favorite iteration of this genre in 2016 would be the HBO-acquired web series “High Maintenance.” It’s since been reconfigured into the more traditional 30-minute comedy format, but in its original incarnation, High Maintenance was a series of roughly 10-minute-long character sketches loosely linked by the often brief appearance of “Guy,” a benevolent and bearded drug dealing Brooklynite, and the closest thing the show has to central character.
The episodes range from dark and surreal, the caricature of two coke addled monster millennials in “Olivia” and a gothic portrayal of the unrequited love felt by a man who lives in isolation with his comatose grandmother in “Helen,” to warmly domestic and borderline Rose-y, a vignette of a lesbian couple too pacifist to kill the mouse in their kitchen in “Jamie,” to the straight up absurd, like “Ruth,” in which middle aged first date ends with one person dunking the other person’s genitalia in a bowl of 2%.
High Maintenance is nowhere near as shticky or slapstick as Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, nor will it bring you the almost painful level of suffocating laughter Larry and co can when they really turn the heat up. But, for me, the shows seem to convey the same basic message, which may in fact not be a message at all, but rather the intentional absence of one. It’s this giggly brand of nihilism that seems to say: this is who we are and this is what we have lived, you can describe it anyway you want, but isn’t it a little bit fun to look at?
The last piece of small art I want to touch on, arguably the nearest and dearest to my heart, is Judith Guest’s 1970's novel Ordinary People, and the film adaptation starring Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland, and Mary Tyler Moore (may she RIP). It’s short and sparse novel that shows the struggle of an upper-middle class family attempting to put their lives back together in the wake of immense tragedy. Not a new or shocking story by any means, but the searing images of sensitive Conrad bearing the brunt of his mother’s grief as she grinds up the remainder of the French toast breakfast he was too depressed to eat hasn’t left my mind since I first read it in tenth grade. Nor has the suburban yet strangely touching opening scene from the movie featuring a high school choir rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon.
Recently I saw Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By The Sea in theaters. It’s a small quiet movie, but already receiving many “best of the year accolades.” Like Ordinary People, the tragedy and plight experienced by Manchester’s characters dwarfs any superficial “problems” I’ve experienced in my own short life, but the way Lonergan chooses to depict these moments, and their inescapable banality will ring true to anyone. Patrick’s phone rings during his father’s funeral service. My own extended family was an hour late to my bat mitzvah because they were walking my aunt’s dog. The bullsh*t doesn’t stop during the big stuff, but the dissonance and friction between the two is the texture of our lives. My big stuff isn’t as big as Patrick’s, but the recognition of the feeling remains all the same.
The way we experience life is anecdotal. We might choose to revisit old events and arbitrarily organize them into some sort of coherent narrative to subdue our own fears of directionless-ness, but that always involves a good deal of artistic license. Therefore, the truest art must be anecdotal as well.
Is this the foundational conceit of empathy? To truly accept that we are all simply products of our experiences, accumulations of actions done unto us by others and unto others by us? By choosing to be about “nothing” these pieces of art are really about “everything.” As hackneyed and cliché as that may sound, their humble specificity is the key to their universality.
Linklater chooses to end both Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!! at the break of dawn, after long drawn out nights during which you know you are about to go back to sleep away the day.
Both scenes are dripping with the sepia-toned sweetness of nostalgia. They emit this body warming contentment that, at least for me, always makes me glad to have spent the last two hours with his characters, and ensures the everlasting fondness in my heart for all of his movies. Self indulgent? yes. Do I care? no.
Nostalgia always seems to get a bad rap. It marks you as weak or deluded, or serves as some admission that your life now is not as good as it once was or could be. I think there is another way we can chose to look at nostalgia, not as a longing but as an appreciation. A gratitude for the impossible tangle of people, places, things, feelings, and just general sh*t that bounced, tumbled, and rolled around together on planet earth in the specific way such that you can exist in your present form today.
There is a David Foster Wallace quote from the famous “This Is Water” address at Kenyon’s 2005 commencement that I’ve had on a laptop Stickie note on for a few years now: “In the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.”
I’m still not entirely sure of what I think it means. But I like the sound of it. Living is hard. But occasionally it’s not. Every now and again we are struck by these moments that remind us again what a shining brilliant privilege it is to be alive at all, to be conscious, to have feelings, to be able to communicate these feelings to others and maybe even have them be understood. DFW’s speech advocates an awakeness to these moments and a vigilant commitment to radical empathy. This sight, this existential awareness, is vastly improved through the creation, consumption, and sharing of small art. If life is trench warfare, these “banal platitudes” are the MRE’s on which we sustain ourselves.
Diane Nguyen of the fictional world of BoJack Horseman says it another way, when she breaks it to the namesake character, after he asks if she thinks that “deep down” he’s a good person: “I don’t know if I believe in deep down. I kinda think all you are is just the things that you do.”
BoJack thinks this is depressing. I don’t. Our identities are layered amalgamations of the past. The clippings and the tchotchkes are the physical relics of these experiences. Looking at them reminds me of what I’ve done and who I’ve done it with, a reminder who I’ve been. If I can be proud of what they represent isn’t that the best any of us can hope for?
