In Defense of Toiling in Obscurity for No Tangible Result.
or, Art matters as it happens.
Published in MuseeMagazine
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? If an artist stages a performance event and does not photograph it, does it matter? If a photograph captures part of the event, is that photograph a documentary work or an original work? What is more important; that the event happened or that it was photographed?
Clearly the nebulous world of elaborate performance art / public art / public spectacle is a difficult one to navigate; there are only questions.
Only the performance, the happening, the event matters. Everything before the event is foreplay, and everything after it is the cigarette.
The band “Hanatarashi” played a show once. On stage the band members tuned their instruments and did a full sound check where they made minute adjustments to the monitors and volume control. They then left the stage and drove a bulldozer through the wall of the club.
No one documented this. What is important is that it happened. The photographs of the aftermath exist, but the event was not a set up to be photographed. Creating events simply for the purpose of taking one or two pictures is photography. But when there is a constructed lead up, public interaction or a backstory, then the photograph fails to capture the essential spirit of the moment and is ultimately disposable, simply a keepsake.
Spanish photographer Andrea Galvani spent years developing a flashlight that could penetrate the earth’s atmosphere and shoot into space without being dispersed. He became an expert in the effects of every layer of the atmosphere, and by the end of it he could have written a paper on the development of high energy flashlights. Of course this had already been done with the advent of laser technology, but Galvini started from scratch. Not content with simply building his light and turning it on, he went to the North Pole and shot the burst, which only lasted a few minutes, from a dingy surrounded by ice, where the Earth’s magnetic field and therefore the Aurora Borealis is at its strongest. Physics attempts to explain the universe through equations, proofs and experiments of which the laser is a tangible result. Art has the same brief, simply approaching the questions from different angles. It’s the journey, not the destination.
John Hutt 