[-empyre-] Bare Life Is Not About Art

["G.H. Hovagimyan" <ghh@thing.net>]

I don’t believe that bare life has anything to do with art.  We are  
all on the edge of a potential tragedy.  Since I am of a certain age  
people around me are succumbing to various diseases. My brother-in- 
law is lying in a hospital bed in a stupor from a brain aneurism.  My  
poor sister is suffering terribly. One day everything is fine, the  
next you are confronted with your fragile world as it collapses.

 I live eight blocks north of the world trade center. My windows  
face the buildings. I saw the planes crash into the buildings as I  
was doing my morning exercises. I saw the people jumping from the  
burning buildings. No it was not on videotape for me it was “bare life.”

I have a second home in northeastern Pennsylvania.  Huge rainstorms  
and snowmelts have flooded the Delaware River as well as many creeks  
and streams in the area.  People lose their homes. One teenage girl  
in Livingston Manor became paralyzed with fear and could not jump to  
safety as her home was swept away by the floodwater.  The floods are  
classified as one hundred year floods but they have occurred three  
times in the last three years.

I consider myself lucky.  The World Trade Center didn’t collapse on  
me, I am not yet in a hospital dying and I still have a home.

It is almost impossible to make art about the WTC attack.  It is an  
enormous physical disaster as well as an information event. The same  
may be said of the New Orleans disaster that is still unfolding. The  
psyche of America is disturbed. It is now operating on a believe  
system that has no basis in reality. This narrative and its larger  
reality make a fitting subject for art.  The reduction to bare  
essentials, to mere survival, does not create the conditions for  
art.  If anything the art makes a counter proposition. For example,  
concentration camps are mentioned in the original Bare Life,  
question.  How does one make art about concentration camps?  I can  
think of several examples, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus or Mel  
Brooks comedy film and Broadway play The Producers or Liliana  
Canvani’s 1974 film The Night Porter or the 1960’s TV sitcom Hogan’s  
Heroes. I’m sure there are many more but these are the ones that come  
to mind.  They are not documentaries. They do not bear witness to the  
events. What they do is process a collective trauma and re-balance  
the human psyche.   This then is the true nature and value of art and  
the artist. The artist makes it possible to continue living in spite  
of a shattering event.  Make no mistake; art is not social work or  
psychoanalysis. Most of all it is not a diversion (divertissement) or  
entertainment. It is not about teaching (didacticism) or the  
marketing of high priced objects for the idle rich.  True art does  
not make one comfortable. What it does is reorder our sense of the  
world and our internal narrative.