Midnight Meandering: I Need to Talk About Art
Cleaning out my brain of all the artistic thoughts, impulses, and influences that have been rolling around everywhere
A Word from Rod Serling
They say a dream takes only a second or so, and yet in that second a man can live a lifetime. He can suffer and die, and who's to say which is the greater reality: the one we know or the one in the dreams, between heaven, the sky, the earth…
On tonights episode of Midnight Meandering, I’ll be working to untangle and lay to rest all the art movements that have been rattling around in my mind the past twenty-three years. Coming up next:
A Brief Journey Through My Childhood
French Class and a Tryst with the Surreal
Fluxus for the Rest of Us!
Aesthetic Girlhood Clutter as Modern Fluxus
A Brief Journey Through My Childhood
For about a decade, I was raised as an only child, mainly left to my own devices. I had a pretty admirable collection of toys: a handful of Black Barbie dolls, Littlest Pet Shop figurines, miscellaneous McDonald’s kids' meal prizes, and one of those drawing reference figures that I used as a makeshift Ken for my Barbies. Not all of my toys were necessarily meant to be toys. I made whole towns out of whatever I could find in my real house, brought to life with my overactive imagination.
I recall one day when I wanted to make a Lego tower but didn’t have any Legos. So, I used buttons and toothpicks instead. I would stick a toothpick into one of the button holes, sometimes two to reinforce the bond, and then connect the other end to another button. This went on, branching up and out into an interesting sculpture made all the more intriguing by the limitations of my medium.
This little anecdote is a thinly veiled literary device to say that I have always been a very crafty kid. I mean, I used to rewatch the same MacGyver DVDs back to back every day. Being something of a creative at heart, and often without the resources I wanted, I had to make do with what I had.
Influences At The Time
One of the few games I would play with my cousins and uncles growing up that I actually enjoyed was Little Big Planet. I didn’t have to be good at fighting or driving, just collecting stickers and following a lovely little story.
Fraggle Rock, the Doozers specifically, really speaks to my inner tinkerer. I think it’s lovely that they spend their lives building these beautiful crystalline towers, only for Fraggles to come along and consume them hungrily and with great haste.
French Class and a Tryst with the Surreal
I took French as a language prerequisite for four years of high school and another three quarters in college. Naturally, I hate the language. But the one thing I did take away, besides forging some really great trauma bonds with a lot of lovely people and meeting a lot of sweet French women, was exposure to surrealist art.
Picture the following: It’s 1:30 Friday, it’s 95 degrees. The second lunch period has just ended, and I am lethargic from sitting in the sun and eating fruit snacks and beef jerky. Despite only needing two years of a foreign language to graduate, I sat in fourth period surrounded by fourteen other students who were cajoled into taking a third year.
Mme. V, a very sweet woman and the driving force behind our collective decision to suffer through another year, was working her way through a presentation on French art movements. As she clicked through each slide, works by Degas, Renoir, and Gaugin flashed across the screen. Our assignment was to select one of the artist and complete a brief research paper on their works and impact.
Out of a quite, placid, but frankly boring assortment of petite women and flower gardens emerged René Magritte, my beloved. His work spoke to me the same way Slaughterhouse-Five and Douglas Adams did. It was offbeat, strange, and enticing. This assignment unlocked a whole new life philosophy that made dealing with the weird and wonderful world a little more bearable. We all have that creeping sensation that something going on is terribly wrong, almost comically so, and the absurdist simply says, "Yes, that is probably so...oh well…what can one do?"
Fluxus for the Rest of Us!
I was perusing Pinterest, ogling pictures of Chloë Sevigny, when I came a picture entitled, "Your Name Spelled with Objects: Dick Higgins" It’s part of a series by artist George Maciunas, where he selects random objects representing the letter in someone’s name and places them little vessels.
At first glance, it looks like someone emptied the contents of a child’s pockets into a container. Something about the image caused my attention to linger. I have a thing about flat lays and rituals. Clearly there is a deeper context here. Come to find out, I wasn’t being a pretentious asshole, this IS art….Fluxus to be exact.
Fluxus is an avant-garde art movement that emerged in the 1960s, perfectly encompassing the countercultural energy of the era. It attempted to blur the boundaries between art and everyday life. It centered around the use of everyday materials and the rejection of elitism.
I tend to favor the sculptural works over the interactive and performance pieces. The performance art aspect splintered off into what is known as Happening, a separate art style I can’t get into right now as this post is already too long. Essentially, it can be summed up as rich people feigning intellectual and cultural awareness, yelling and acting insane in public for art's sake [which sadly is also very quintessential to the sixties]. Suffice it to say, Fluxus is one part really cool conceptual art, one part loud pretentious assholes. Then again, isn’t that always the way?
Aesthetic Girlhood Clutter as Modern Fluxus
If the Fluxus Movement is about rejecting hierarchies and embracing the flow and art of benign daily happenings, then there is nothing more Fluxus than a 20-something recording short clips of her life.
A snippet of her bedside table, the contents of her purse aesthetically splayed out for viewers to pick over, an artfully stacked set of objects that seek to capture the essence of the sculptor. These videos reflect some of the core tenets of Fluxus: little moments of life elevated to the status of ritual and art.
I think the main thing that made me look at this and go Fluxus is that it’s taking back power from influencers—the link-in-bio-run-don’t-walk overconsumption types. Contemporary Fluxus Girlies are not trying to sell you anything. Yes, these videos are materialistic in that they are centered around object fetishization, but the purpose of the objects are twofold: to promote individuality and to help create community. These Contemporary Fluxus Girlies [everyday I can just say words and no one can do anything about it] are trying to connect with kindred spirits who share the same affinity for vintage leather pouches and Burt’s Bees Lip Balm.
This harkens back to the rejection of the petit bourgeoisie from the Fluxus movement of the sixties, where the emphasis was on democratizing art and breaking away from commercial and elitist constraints. The items that make up the day-to-day lives of these young women, when assembled together in this format, surpass their corporeal form and take on a new metaphysical meaning*.
*Author's Aside: Sometimes I write just to allow myself to be as unhinged as possible to see if anyone will stop me.
Recommended Readings
Once again, I find myself falling down rabbit holes in the void I was already parsing my way through. Here are some additional artists to look into. A few bread crumbs that I have left along the deep and winding path, abandoned morsels but interesting and delicious nonetheless!
Closing Remarks
To the wishes that come true, to the strange, mystic strength of the human animal, who can take a wishful dream and give it a dimension of its own…"
Thank you all for joining me on this episode of midnight meandering. No matter how you wandering in, I’m glad you came…I’ll see you next time!