Life in Art
There’s a crisis I have when I meet someone new sometimes, laying in bed and close together. I see my life slipping away, thinking that I could be making something instead, or reading and writing and critiquing, or working on a project, or anything else: let’s go outside and make something real. My heart rate speeds up, and I start to squirm, not with an anxiety but with a dissatisfaction, a desire for a bigger world than one falling asleep to trash television. If I am going to be with someone, let us build a world bigger than ourselves…
In her article “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture,” written in the 90s, Rosemary Hennessy takes issue with the commodification of LGBTQ identities. Somehow, for her, the commodification of the subject corresponds with the stylization of a life, which, ultimately, becomes a stylization taking place in consumer choices. (“Buy more and better clothes! Become a stylish gay!” epitomizes this issue). And yet this stylization has an intellectual lineage (according to Hennessy): Foucault tells us “we have to create ourselves as a work of art,” and Nietzche tells us to “give style to one’s character—a great and rare art.” I’m not sure two people is enough to establish a lineage, but nonetheless, for Hennessy, this attitude is similar to queer theory’s “notion of identity as self-fashioning.” Queer theory is her territory, so she takes up critique. An attitude of stylizing one’s character is an attitude that formed from the Baudrillardian “regime of the simulation;” an aestheticization that conceals social relations, allowing us to only see life that is also “artful or stylish.” Consumer choices, rather than moral codes or rules (which is, in my mind, a naïve way for her to put it) dictate an individual’s subjectivity. A postmodern self emerges in, for Hennessy, the conflation of art and life. And the conflation of art and life, again, for Hennessy, leads to a subjectivity determined by consumer choices.
Well I do not think Hennessy knows much about the stylization of a life. Hennessy’s stylization is one of mere consumption (has she ever produced style?).
The other day, I walked around with someone I had known, and we flirted with the idea of building something consistent, and I walked along, thinking. Staying up late laying in bed doing nothing but watching music videos is not a sort of life I enjoy, and I do not think my brain is broken for stating this. It’s a consumption of media that creates the postmodern consumer of the screen (think of you: reading this on the screen!). I continued to think, walking. And I thought of my camera in the car, and the world began to align and make some sense: if anything, I could make this sort of life with another person into a bit of an art, and then it would be worth it in any sort of scheme of things.
It's an art practice that might almost be religious: totalizing, consuming, demanding as a god, but it is also, unlike commodification or consumer choices, what makes me me. Maybe I am a too postmodern of a subject: art instead of religion. But I believe that to make something of a life in front of me is not totally to commodify it with style, but instead to primarily give life a sort of coherence and articulation. This is where my sense of agency lies. Maybe life risks becoming part of the “regime of simulation,” but this is the problem (or a feature) of all mediums with any sort of figuration.
Anyways, to end: Mojave 3’s “My Life in Art” is on the playlist today.