nile harris's strategic consultant show got me out of writer's block
My new friend and cohort member Gee invited me to a Nile Harris performance at Performance Space New York and frankly, it was kind of a hoot. Nile; funny as always, crafted this open ended, hyper-citational piece about the institutional legacy and character of the space. "Space and place", he trolled. A joke that would've been completely at home at the 4columns art criticism event a couple weeks ago where panelists and audience alike nay-ed and yay-ed various terms used in contemporary criticism. How would his signature trolling be received by Performance Space NY, the arts non-profit and as would come up several times during community input, former nyc public school? Well, Harris may have said it best himself when two thirds through the performance, embedded in the crown, he would look around and remark, “I’m fucked aren't I ?” lol I thought- aren't we all!
Anyways, my first thought after the performance, which moved through a myriad of reflections on the political and social limitations of a non-profit art organization, was that at the end of the day there are people who really “care about art”and there are people who just don't. I snickered to Gee afterwards that this was the difference between writers and the art world; writers would happily throw their craft down the toilet in service of an idea, while artists much more tethered to the utopian prospect of the transformative capacity of their craft, continually look towards the non-representational and representational for a sense of nothing or something or something to do. As a writer, it is in that difference where I found Harris's performance to be quite joyful.
In casting aside the disciplinarity of a term like “improvisational", I find it interesting to think of this performance in relation to a notion of ambivalence. Ambivalence, insofar as it exhibits a refusal to perform and thus an assertion of opacity.
“in my community we call this two face”
LOL
Shamelessly uninterested in delivering deliverables, despite his title as"Strategic Consultant", Nile Harris performs no such role.
In a bout of sincerity that was both wise and topical, he closes the show by satirically smudging the image of a heart drawn in chalk on the wall only to then turn around and tell us that we should be weary of deriving ethical jouissance from non-profit art organizations, if not he warned, we will be obviously disappointed.
And of course I agree with this. I would even extend this rule to almost anything that ins't torturing someone who truly deserves it or burning down a building that truly deserves to fall (for which I obviously do not advocate for : ) ( for legal and non-legal purposes! :)
The reality is that in a world where human life and ecological life are certainly not deemed sacred nor certainly not protected, what does it mean to emphatically suggest that art should be, that performance should be? And in fact, wouldn't it be just as, if not more nihilistic to do so, a kind of enacting of a cruel optimism as Berlant would say?
And thus to flounder in the simplicity of cruelty, the awkwardness of ambivalence, the spectacle of one's own ambivalence, and the capacity to performatively "fuck ourselves" out of/through the only thing we really have left, our craft, perhaps we are laying bear an affective mode of living or better yet, bearing life.
The proposition for the emerging artist on the other hand, is much more critical. Not only is it a provocation towards the institutions that are trying to accumulate them (even the good ones), but a provocation vis a vis the negotiability of provocation itself.
“ YES TO ______________________________________________________________”.
i should've taken pictures !