The Spooky Art

by Norman Mailer

  What step is left to take? Only one. A show that offers no object at all. The last reference to painting or sculpture is the wall on which something can be hung, or the floor on which a piece can sit. That must now disappear. The art-piece enters the artist: The work can only be experienced within his psyche.

  From The New York Times, September 2, 1973, by Peter Plagens:

  a marksman-friend shot Chris Burden in the upper left arm with a. 22 long-jacket before an audience of 12 intimates. He [Burden] figured on a graze wound with a Band-Aid slapped on afterward, but it “felt like a truck hit my arm at 80 miles per hour”; he went to the hospital, nauseous, and filed the requisite police report (“accident”).

  Plagens goes on to describe other “pieces.” Burden chooses situations for their possibility of danger, pain, humiliation, or boredom. There is:

  “Movie on the Way Down,” in which Burden, hanging by his heels, nude, six feet off a gym floor with a movie camera in his hands, is summarily chopped loose.

  The movie is presumably taken on the way down (is it filmed in slow motion?) and he ends with a cut lip. There are other pieces where he rockets flaming matches “at his nude supine wife” or sets ablaze two 16-foot wooden crosses on Laguna Canyon Road at 2 A.M.—“the intended audience for that piece,” says Burden, “was the one guy driving down the road who saw it first.” Ah, Los Angeles! For “Endurance/real time,” he 1) stays in a locker for five days, 2) does 1,600 tours of a gallery on his bicycle, and 3) remains in bed for three weeks and a day. He also pretends to be a dead man lying under a tarpaulin on the street and is arrested by the police for creating a traffic hazard. He gets a hung jury at his trial and the case is dismissed but “one of the nine votes for conviction, a stewardess, told Burden if she ever saw him under a tarp again, she’d run over him herself.” He even does a study in the shift of identity. For “I Became a Secret Hippie,” Burden cuts his hair short and dresses in FBI clothes. “If you want to be a heavy artist nowadays,” Plagens, reporting on Burden, concludes, “you have to do something unpleasant to your body, because everything else has been done. [Burden] may be a product of art-world art history—backed into some untenable masochistic corner because all the other novelty territory has been claimed.”

  At the least, Burden is fulfilling the dictum of Jean Malaquais that once there are enough artists in the world, the work of art will become the artist himself. Burden is refining his personality. Through existential tests. Burden is exploring not his technique but his vibrations. The situations he chooses are, as Plagens describes, “edgy.” They have nothing remotely resembling a boundary until they are done. In “Movie on the Way Down,” Burden can hardly know if he will cut his lip or break his neck, feel a live instant on the descent or some dull anxiety. When he shoots lighted matches at his nude wife the areas defined are empty before the action begins. Given every variable from Women’s Liberation to the sadomasochistic tales of Wilhelm Stekel, Burden can know in advance only that a psycho-dramatic enterprise will be commenced. But where it may end, and what everybody might feel—will the matches burn her skin?—will the marriage be fortified or scorched?—no, there is no confidence which question is going to offer an answer. Perhaps he is not refining his personality so much as attempting to clear a space in his psyche free of dread. But isn’t that the fundamental operation of the primitive at the dawn of civilization, the establishment of the ego? For what is the human ego but a clearing in the forest of the psyche free of dread? Money, held in one’s hand, is free of time. Cash has no past; its future is assignable. It is powerful and empty. So, too, is the ego. It bears the same relation to the psyche as cash bears to the security or comfort of the body. The ego is virtually separate from the psyche even as money is still separate from every organic communicating logic of nature.

  We are back to the cave man and his cave painting. His hand draws the outline of the animal in defiance of those gods who watch him. Burden is smashing his nose on the floor or displaying his wife in defiance of the last gods of conventional art. They are that audience remnant of a once-leviathan bourgeois culture. They still trickle out to see Happenings, the desire of the middle class to preserve its last religion: the world of the artist, palette, museum and gallery wall. Middle-class passion is to appreciate the work of art.

  But art may be the little ball rolling off the table. Perhaps art now signifies some unheard reverberation from the subterranean obsession of us all: Is civilization coming to an end? Is society burning? Is the day of the cave man returning? Has our search for ego which was once so routine—a useful (somewhat heartless) ego to be fashioned for a useful (if heartless) society—now gone past the measure of our experience so that we no longer try to construct a control center at the core of the mind, but plunge instead into absurdities which offer us that curious calm we find in the art of the absurd, even as the cave man, defying his gods, discovered he was not always dead on the next day?

  But we are at the possible end of civilization, and tribal impulses start up across the world. The descending line of the isolated artist goes down from Michelangelo all the way to Chris Burden, who is finally more comfortable to us than the writers of graffiti. For Burden is the last insult from the hippie children of the middle class to the bourgeois art-patron who is their spiritual parent, but graffiti speaks of a new civilization where barbarism is stirring at the roots.

  If at the beginning of Western painting, man was small and God was large; if, in the Renaissance, man was mysteriously large in his relation to God, now, in our times man has disappeared into God. He is mass-man without identity, and he is God. He is all the schizophrenia of the powerless and all-powerful in one psyche.

  As we lose our senses in the static of the oncoming universal machine, so does our need to exercise the ego take on elephantiasistical proportions. Graffiti is the expression of a ghetto that is near to the plague, for civilization is now closed off from the ghetto. Too huge are the obstacles to any natural development of a civilized man. In the ghetto it is almost impossible to find some quiet identity. No, in the environment of the slum, the courage to display yourself is your only capital, and in the streets, crime is the only productive process that converts such capital to the modern powers of the world, ego and money. Art is not peace but war, and form is the record of that war.

  Yet there is a mystery still. From which combat came these curious letters of graffiti, with their Chinese and Arabic calligraphies? Out of what connection to the past did these lights and touches of flame become so much like the Hebrew alphabet, where the form of the letter itself was worshipped as a manifest of the Lord? No, it is not enough to think of the childlike desire to see one’s name ride by in letters large enough to scream your ego across the city, no, it is almost as if we must go back into some more primeval sense of existence. If our name is enormous to us, it is also not real—as if we have come from other places than the name, and lived in other lives.

  Perhaps this is the unheard echo of graffiti, the vibration of that profound discomfort it arouses. Can the unheard music of its proclamation and/or its mess, the rapt intent seething of its foliage, be the herald of some oncoming apocalypse less and less far away, and so graffiti lingers on our subway door as a memento of all the lives ever lived, sounding now like the bugles of gathering armies across the unseen ridge. That sound will be muted and heard again and muted and heard and muted into all the decades of the century to come.

  * John Simon, as predictable in his critical reactions as a headwaiter, naturally thought Last Tango was part of the riff-raff. Since it is Simon’s temper to ignore details, he not only does not hear the panties tearing (some ears reside in the music of the spheres) but announces that Schneider, beasty abomination, is wearing none.

  * Dialogue from Last Tango in Paris was not entirely written in advance but was in part an improvisation. In other words, a small but important part of the screenplay has in effect been written by Brando.

  GIANTS

  TOLSTOY*


  Somewhere around the turn of the century, we have Chekhov visiting Tolstoy. He takes the train to the nearest station. Let’s say it’s wintertime. He rents two horses and a sled, and drives out through the snow to Yasnya Polyana. Tolstoy’s pretty old by now, big, strong, severe, of course, and sits him right down and they talk. They drink tea and they talk. Tolstoy says: “Chekhov, you are a very good writer. You are excellent. Some of your short stories are so good I would have been pleased to have written them myself. But, Chekhov, I must tell you: You are a terrible playwright! You are awful! You are even worse than Shakespeare!”

  Afterward, Chekhov drives back to the railroad station through the snow. In his journal he will write: “I whipped the horses. To the moon I shouted, ‘I am even worse than Shakespeare!’ ”

  It’s a fine story, but if it’s true, why did Tolstoy dislike Shakespeare so? I expect the answer is that Tolstoy was always searching for subtle but precise moral judgment. That required a detailed sense of any sequence of events which had produced a dramatic or tragic event. You had to know how to assess the blame. For that, you needed to know exactly when and why things happened.

  But there, very much in the way, was Shakespeare, the greatest movie writer who ever existed—centuries before cinema had a silver screen. For Shakespeare was not interested in making careful connections with his characters. Shakespeare was looking to get the most dynamic actors together under any circumstance available, no matter how contrived (King Lear can be the first example). He was looking for superb exchanges of dialogue and fantastic moments, vertiginous possibilities for the English language, whereas Tolstoy looked for sobriety of moral judgment. So he considered Shakespeare a monster who paid no attention to causality except when it was useful to him. Will’s people did incredible things, fell in love or murdered, the latter with a minimum of preparation—Macbeth—and then had exceptional speeches that seared an audience’s consciousness. To Tolstoy, this was monstrous, and must have been equal to the way some of us look these days upon advertising campaigns that are stuffed with manipulation and little else.

  But why Tolstoy would compare Chekhov to Shakespeare is another question. I don’t know that anyone is prepared to answer.

  If there is a reason, I suspect it was for a different set of faults. Tolstoy may have felt that Chekhov was a prelude to someone yet to arrive, someone like Beckett. In his plays, Chekhov’s people were simply not doing what they ought to be doing. What had to irritate Tolstoy immensely was that Anton’s play-actors sat in their own spiritual excrement and made sweet speeches and moaned a little and sighed and groaned and never got out of their situation. To Tolstoy, this was a cardinal sin. One should not live with the given when it is vapid and vaguely immoral. That was one of Tolstoy’s most basic notions. You may have to endure a dreary given as a discipline, but you do not accept your condition as eternal, as the meaning of life. He could not permit that. Could not accept how Chekhov made so much of the essential inanition of the Russian middle class.

  HUCKLEBERRY FINN—

  ALIVE AT 100

  Is there a sweeter tonic for the doldrums than old reviews of great novels? In nineteenth-century Russia, Anna Karenina was received with the following: “Vronsky’s passion for his horse runs parallel to his passion for Anna” … “Sentimental rubbish” … “Show me one page,” says The Odessa Courier, “that contains an idea.” Moby-Dick was incinerated: “Graphic descriptions of a dreariness such as we do not remember to have met before in marine literature” … “Sheer moonstruck lunacy” … “Sad stuff. Mr. Melville’s Quakers are wretched dolts and scrivellers and his mad captain is a monstrous bore.”

  By this measure, Huckleberry Finn gets off lightly. The Springfield Republican judged it to be no worse than “a gross trifling with every fine feeling.… Mr. Clemens has no reliable sense of propriety,” and the public library in Concord, Massachusetts, was confident enough to ban it: “the veriest trash.” The Boston Transcript reported that “other members of the Library Committee characterize the work as rough, coarse, and inelegant, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”

  All the same, the novel was not too unpleasantly regarded. There were no large critical hurrahs, but the reviews were, on the whole, friendly. A good tale, went the consensus. There was no sense that a great novel had landed on the literary world of 1885. The critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway’s encomiums fifty years later. In the preface to the English edition, Eliot would speak of “a masterpiece … Twain’s genius is completely realized,” and Ernest went further. In Green Hills of Africa, after disposing of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, and paying off Henry James and Stephen Crane with a friendly nod, he proceeded to declare, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. … It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

  Hemingway, with his nonpareil gift for nosing out the perfect vin de pays for an ineluctable afternoon, was more like other novelists in one dire respect: He was never at a loss to advance himself with his literary judgments. Assessing the writing of others, he used the working author’s rule of thumb: If I give this book a good mark, does it help appreciation of my work? Obviously, Huckleberry Finn has passed the test.

  A suspicion immediately arises. Mark Twain is doing the kind of writing only Hemingway can do better. Evidently, we must take a look. May I say it helps to have read Huckleberry Finn so long ago that it feels brand-new on picking it up again. Perhaps I was eleven when I saw it last, maybe thirteen, but now I only remember that I came to it after Tom Sawyer and was disappointed. I couldn’t really follow The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The character of Tom Sawyer, whom I had liked so much in the first book, was altered, and did not seem nice anymore. Huckleberry Finn was altogether beyond me. Later, I recollect being surprised by the high regard nearly everyone who taught American Lit lavished upon the text, but that didn’t bring me back to it. Obviously, I was waiting for an assignment from The New York Times.

  Let me offer assurances. It may have been worth the wait. I suppose I am the ten millionth reader to say that Huckleberry Finn is an extraordinary work. Indeed, for all I know, it is a great novel. Flawed, quirky, uneven, not above taking cheap shots and cashing far too many checks (it is rarely above milking its humor)—all the same, what a book we have here! I had the most curious sense of excitement. After a while, I understood my peculiar frame of attention. The book was so up-to-date! I was not reading a classic author so much as looking at a new work sent to me in galleys by a publisher. It was as if it had arrived with one of those rare letters that say, “We won’t make this claim often, but do think we have an extraordinary first novel to send out.” So it was like reading From Here to Eternity in galleys, back in 1950, or Lie Down in Darkness, Catch-22, or The World According to Garp (which reads like a fabulous first novel). You kept being alternately delighted, surprised, annoyed, competitive, critical, and, finally, excited. A new writer had moved onto the block. He could be a potential friend or enemy, but he most certainly was talented.

  That was how it felt to read Huckleberry Finn a second time. I kept resisting the context until I finally surrendered. One always does surrender sooner or later to a book with a strong magnetic field. I felt as if I held the work of a young writer about thirty or thirty-five, a prodigiously talented fellow from the Midwest, from Missouri probably, who had had the audacity to write a historical novel about the Mississippi as it might have been a century and a half ago, and this young writer had managed to give us a circus of fictional virtuosities. In nearly every chapter new and remarkable characters bounded out from the printed page as if it were a tarmac on which they could perform their leaps. The author’s confidence seemed so complete that he could deal with every kind of man or woman God ever gave to the middle of America. Jail-house drunks like Huck Finn’s father
take their bow, full of the raunchy violence that even gets into the smell of clothing. Gentlemen and river rats, young, attractive girls full of grit and “sand,” and strong old ladies with aphorisms clicking like knitting needles, fools and confidence men—what a cornucopia of rabble and gentry inhabit the author’s river banks.

  It would be superb stuff if only the writer did not keep giving away the fact that he was a modern young American working in 1984. His anachronisms were not so much in the historical facts—those seemed accurate enough—but the point of view was too contemporary. The scenes might succeed—say it again, this young writer was talented!—but he kept betraying his literary influences. The author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had obviously been taught a lot by such major writers as Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck; he had certainly lifted from Faulkner and the mad tone Faulkner could achieve when writing about maniacal men feuding in deep swamps; he had also absorbed much of what Vonnegut and Heller could teach about the resilience of irony. If he had a surer feel for the picaresque than Saul Bellow in Augie March, still he felt derivative of that work. In places one could swear he had memorized The Catcher in the Rye, and he probably dipped into Deliverance and Why Are We in Vietnam? He might even have studied the mannerisms of movie stars. You could feel traces of John Wayne, Victor McLaglen, and Burt Reynolds in his pages. The author had doubtless digested many a Hollywood comedy on smalltown life. His instinct for life in hamlets on the Mississippi before the Civil War was as sharp as it was farcical, and couldn’t be more commercial.