There’s something strange going on in Hannah’s early career.
There’s a hundred pat things to say about it, but only one is right.
If I could transcribe here what we just talked for the last couple hours, maybe it would get close, but probably not.
Art on art, is what she called criticism, and I’m enthused by the touch of a woman / she’s a masseuse. —Kendrick
Elsewhere I’ve been writing about Rodin for similar reasons. Saint John the Baptist on the front lawn of the Norton Simon. I wasn’t the first one to use the word wilderness—that was Hannah, halfway through the morning at the first location.1 For some reason Rodin decided to pose him naked—I suppose clothing him in a camel hair smock would have defeated the purpose, not to mention the technical difficulty. “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord!’”
‘Fanaticism’ is just a more biased term that spectators use for what is rightly called ‘secessionism’ taken up by people who have lost interest in keeping their feet on the ground, who are willing to go to any length in the pursuit of spiritual perfection. Cf. Hannah’s dedication to the mastery of the koan-esq ethical statement she makes at the core of her practice: “Making art is bad.”
The details though: Hannah is setting up a table, not unlike the ubiquitous taco stands around the city, and cooking omelets on propane camping gear. She’s got the chef fit, quality ingredients, a couple of chairs, and the soft skills to talk with whoever walks by. The morning of the first location in East Hollywood at Sunset and Gramercy she served thirteen patrons. One woman was pretty much the bottom of the barrel unhoused. I think she enjoyed the free hot food. Another rolled up in a vintage Porsche (though actually I don’t think that guy ate an omelet). And several others at various points between these two poles.
At the second or third location Hannah told me that someone gave her $100 at which point she wanted to make it about earning money. The ‘about’ question still being an open one.
It gets either deathly dark, or blindingly light real quick:
Thomas Mann, incidentally, in the chapter on the Parisian circus in his Confessions of Felix Krull, had already put a vehement denial of the artiste’s membership of the ordinary human race in the mouth of his protagonist. One reads that the trapeze artist Andromache, ‘daughter of the air’, is neither a woman in the conventional sense of the word nor even a human being at all. Her true nature is that of a ‘solemn angel of daring’. Jean Genet voices similar sentiments: ‘Does anyone in his right mind walk on a wire or express himself in verse? It’s sheer madness. Man or woman? Unquestionably a monster.’
I haven’t read Mann or Genet, but I have read enough Sloterdijk to know that when he says something like this, with characteristically unrestrained pathos, he means it in the most earnest way possible.2
I’m quite sure that to be ironically sincere is not an oxymoron—wait, I got that wrong.
Hannah’s graduate thesis on the anti-art hero, Broodthaers—though I haven’t read that either—has put on the miles. Less than six months out from graduation she is in the process of adding a significant mark to the moment in which we find ourselves floundering in post-Marxian, or, depending on how smart you want to sound, even post-postmarxian critical incapacity. Who cares anymore about discourse on the base and superstructure? I don’t even know what those terms together mean, and I have a feeling that my younger colleagues are far more invested in contemporary genderism than the socio-economic schemes of the nineteenth century.
Though I’m overstating here. I know that we construe:
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of old ones.
to mean something important about genitals. And really I’m just resentful about my White Pill-ish involuntary celibacy.
Point being the ‘art-ness’ of Hannah’s art is shimmering like a mirrorball, unstable, in the center of the room where we’ve all piled in to dance to an old Britney album. Opaque by its resistance to current curatorial taxonomies from the one side, and transparent by its openness to contingency from another. Certainly though, it’s spherical, as is anything that approaches holistic or totalist forms.
A friend (and word count) tempts one to go further:
Hannah and I discuss Maggie Nelson and The Argonauts, which I mention only to promote the work because it is one of those recent books that rounds the eyeballs of the reader in the best way. I’m shivering at Hannah’s hot take about the author’s method of self-disclosure, I squinch my eyelids is how I react when I’m overwhelmed. She asks if I have a headache.
The Maggie Nelson blurbing on Eileen Myles: “Myles’s poetry is kinetic, ecstatic, muscular, hilarious, sorrowful, valiant, original, necessary, and timeless.” [Emphasis added.] ‘Necessity’ is the most useful term to reign in the facts of “Sliding Scale Omelet Buffet”, though when one attempts to cross over from fact to value that same necessity becomes quite undesirable. How is it that we live in a society that necessitates something as desperate as what Hannah is up to? Not that she is desperate. Desperate as in the multi-layered disparities made explicit by the work, however subtle.
In the words of Myles:
I am starving & the traffic is slow. I’ve missed the whole brouhaha about concept ualism because I am sleepless & corny isn’t that enough
Because Hannah actually could have said ‘the whole brouhaha about conceptualism’ at some point since I met her, and I am sleepless tonight.
A few blurbs later in the front matter of Evolution, another darling I’m trying to get Hannah to read: “The art: I mean it’s pretty but it ain’t pretty and all of that is in there, in the way you move and walk around.” —Fred Moten
Cut-ups go only so far, but it’s in such a mode that I get most hot and heavy. Tumescence is or is not at all related.
All of which—I mean everything above—is about the job. The one fucking job. What is the job? Where does one do the job? How much time does the job take? When do I show up? Though not ‘why’. ‘Why’ is that scuzzy cousin you haven’t needed or wanted to see in decades.
Hannah gives herself something tangential to a legal ten minute break during her public cooking shifts. If there’s a complaint, feel free to file it with the manager. But it won’t be me.
Note that the work is designated by “locations”, not something that sounds more artsy like “iterations” or even worse, “manifestations”.
Even if it was his research assistants who did the reading. There is absolutely no way he has personally read all the thousands of sources he cites throughout his oeuvre.