Elusive Quality
Essay

Fail Better
Lauren Cornell, August 2004
Originally printed in Black Diamond Magazine

In its Report, the 9/11 Commission points to four kinds of failure - “imagination, policy, capabilities and management” - as causes for the government’s inept handling of terrorist threats to the U.S. and the drastic oversights that lead to the events of September 11, 2001.[1] This, coming from a nation so excessively confident of its socio-economic edge and sovereign destiny, marks a moment in which American myths are being forcibly dispelled, not just for those on the Left (who knew it all along, right) but across the political spectrum in the U.S.

At the same time, American pop culture persists in its optimism and its upward and outward (global) mobility. The media landscape assumes a pretense of responsibility and inclusion. However, this pose of post-liberated glory is just a fresh set of injustices coated with spin. Programs such as Reality TV and Fox News present illusions of difference, information and participation while, in actuality, these democratic principles are increasingly threatened. If one wonders why the cultural and political happenings of the ‘60s so haunt the present, it could be because this was an earlier moment of widespread dissent and questioning in the U.S., whose goals and legacies have yet to be fulfilled. In response to this contradictory state of progress, some artists have taken to visualizing what is so aggressively covered up, namely acute realities of economic, cultural and everyday failure.

Elusive Quality

“Elusive Quality,” the video program curated by Astria Suparak and myself, affirms the position of failure in relation to American-bred fantasies of athletic, sexual and political mastery. The works included, a few of which are discussed below, are formally and conceptually diverse. Some originated as site-specific performances not necessarily meant for single screen exhibition. In the program however, they are all linked temporarily through their shared consideration of how an embrace of failure can re-imagine the terms for success.

In “Mud Wrestle in The Earth Room” (2004) the toyshop collective drop a boombox and their scantily clad bodies onto the famous mud floor of Walter De Maria’s “New York Earth Room” (1977) to indulge in a brief orgy of wrestling until they are halted by a security guard. Originally meant as a good time, their action comes to express an irreverent and engaged reckoning with institutional art history by a younger generation of New York artists.

Emerging Canadian art outfit Virginia Puff Paint, composed of Jeremy Laing and Will Munro, revel in homo-erotic desire and perversion. Their lush performances offer a counterpoint to the hetero-normative issues (i.e. marriage) that have focused mainstream gay discourse of late. In “Inside the Pavilion of Virginia Puff-Paint” (2004), both artists don costumes covered with ornate orifices and removable, conical protrusions. Assuming different positions in their sumptuous tent, the two enact seemingly endless possibilities for penetration, until they collapse in an intimate tangle on the pillowed floor.

Political filibuster is taken on in Rohesia Metcalfe Hamilton’s “Everyone Must Tighten Their Belts” (1997). The short piece features a late night talk show host, interviewing an alleged expert on labor relations. Prompted to explain the relationship between inflation and unemployment, the expert evades the question by re-iterating it, until her speech becomes a rhythmic pattern of hollow repetition.

“The Claw” (2003) by Chadwick Rantanen satiates the desire of any current or former adolescent who has plugged a coin-operated game in the hopes of scoring a prize, and lost (again and again). Rantanen installed a crane machine in a dark, vacant room. Inside its large glass box, illuminated by a ring of small light bulbs, a lone claw dips repeatedly into a mound of colorful stuffed creatures, each time tenuously clasping one and sending it down a chute. Where one could only ever hope of attaining one of the furry, oddly shaped prizes, here the claw methodically empties out the entire space. By isolating the game outside of the context of say Coney Island, the lust for the strange prizes – ranging from animals, insects, fruit to cowboy hats – indicate a culture so obsessed with amassing things, it matters little what they are. In this way, the content of the game is displaced and the sheer act of winning is laced with a palpable, scintillating tension. The claw’s unwavering victory puts an end to the cycle of rising aspirations and deferred satisfaction that keeps our capitalist economies churning.

“Rejected or Unused Clips arranged in order of importance” (2003) by Seth Price is a compilation of forgotten or trashed video clips from the artist’s studio. The random array includes low-res internet videos of boys fighting, pseudo-scientific diagrams of emotional well-being and psychedelic visions of utopia. When tightly edited together, the clips merge into a work that distills the artist’s continuing fascination with the ways violence, authority and control are insinuated into spiritual and material realms. Price’s investigation reveals how systems of power are played out and sustained by people in all sorts of mundane and/or extreme ways.

In a political climate where the buck is consistently passed, these works, and all those included in "Elusive Quality", demonstrate how failure can be an engine for creative thought and a catalyst for personal reflection and social action. Each work is imbued with a sense of hope and urgency that accompanies such processes of realization and reclamation.




+CREDITS

Elusive Quality first screened at Participant, Inc in New York, in conjunction with the release of “Practice More Failure,” the third edition of feminist journal LTTR. http://www.lttr.org

Thanks to Astria Suparak for her collaboration, and support of this essay, and to Michael Connor.

+ FOOTNOTES

[1] 9/11 Commission, 9/11 Commission Report (W.W. Norton & Company: 2004), 356.

+LIST OF ACCOMPANYING STILLS

-“Inside the Pavilion of Virginia Puff-Paint”, Jeremy Laing and Will Munro, 2004. Courtesy of the artists.

-“Everyone Must Tighten Their Belts”, Rohesia Metcalfe Hamilton, 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

-“The Claw”, Chadwick Rantanen, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

-“Rejected or Unused Clips arranged in order of importance”, Seth Price, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

All of these can be downloaded from http://www.astriasuparak.com/elusivequality.htm

All of the works in “Elusive Quality” tease wider social criticism from more immediate, microcosmic situations. As does one of the curators: When she tours, Astria Suparak conducts impromptu surveys with her inter-generational audiences on questions like “What is Sex?” and “What Age Does Old Start?” which riff the format of quizzes in teen magazines that ask “What is Your Style?” and “Does He Like You?”, etc. By asking open-ended questions on such fundamental issues, she invites the participants to consider whether the language they use successfully describe their experience, or fall short of it. At the same time, the surveys encourage them to re-define terms like “sex” and “aging” for themselves.