Straight on target

Determined action but also long, drawn-out, wearisome even, negotiations. In any case, all committed efforts aimed at reaching an objective, at achieving a goal. But what if purpose is blurred? Let us then come to terms with the essential meaning of artistic endeavour and the artist’s strivings and struggle.

Straight on target. Like Lucio Fontana cutting his canvases, absorbed and determined in his task, his sharp blade pointing at the canvas like an essential weapon, a solitary practitioner of his art. Each essential incision had to be accomplished in perfect isolation.
Indeed, as the photographer Ugo Mulas was subsequently to acknowledge, Lucio Fontana agreed to pose for the famous picture in which the master is portrayed in the act of performing his artistic gesture.

And yet aim as one may, hitting the bulls-eye is not always so easy.
Shooting straight is not good enough. The line of fire can be very intricate and tangled. Unravelling it requires negotiation. It is a key concept for understanding a diverse range of things, from the art of Rirkrit Tiravanija to the economics of Amartya Sen. To negotiate is an alchemic art entailing general appeasement. It’s knowing how to bring off a deal by being elastic enough in the process and obtaining results where no one stands to lose. Christo’s Running Fence graphically illustrates this concept. The artist’s idea was to lay down a line of canvas stretching overland from the Pacific Coast to the middle of the United States.
The result was a wiggly, wavy line, twisted and thwarted by countless contortions and detours. These convolutions were the result of the artist’s negotiations with wary landowners who proved far from keen on the idea of their fields being put in the shade or alternatively in the glow of the mediatic limelight, even if only for a few days.

And what if there is no target to aim for, no touch-down line to get to, no goal to score? What if the problem is not so much reaching an objective but finding it? Orientation or the lack of it, the perennial dilemma of youth, can lead to selfrecrimination, depression and despair if carried through unresolved into adulthood. Without a strong spirit of self-determination or capacity for choice, reaching middle-age can bring with it a terrible realisation, that of having gone through life thus far simply accepting what came along as it came along – a husband or wife, a job, a house with mortgage –, with the only option being the freedom to grumble about it. Or perhaps of being satisfied even, for there’s always some soul with the capacity for self-contentment.

That’s definitely not the case for Jackson Pollock. We can gain a deeper insight into his personality by observing his paint drippings rather than by reading his biography. They tell us far more about the years he spent undergoing psychoanalytic treatment, about his addiction to drink, his chronic destitution, his turbulent relationship with Lee Krasner. Not surprisingly the members of his group chose to call themselves the “Irascible”. Of course choosing to be hottempered is already in a way choosing an approach to life, a course of action. But it means focusing more on what one is against rather than on what one aspires to. What the majority of the group’s members wanted most of all was simply to drop out from life itself, nothing more.

Vociferous they were, and always on the move, but where to, one wonders? Admittedly, it’s not everyone’s lot to have aspirations and to be strong willed enough to pursue them. That’s not to say having goals and self-determination is always a good thing. Oscar Wilde is worth recalling on this subject.
“Unfortunately”, he wrote, “dreams sometimes come true”. That “unfortunately” is laden with the pained sense of all the hardships, suffered and inflicted, and at times maladies even, that are the reward of accomplished desires.

Having self-determination for anyone knowing where they’re heading can be useful for moving forward. Ultimately, though, striving after something has in itself an essentially impelling, non-rational aspect. Christo may not be among the trendier artists nowadays but he still has a lot to teach us on this matter. As he has shown, for life to be truly lived impossible hopes need to be nurtured and steadfast patience maintained for years, decades even, until the law-givers of a new Germany or the officials of the traumatised city of New York decide the time has come to turn dreams into reality.

The road to any destination may be full of bends and detours, it may require backtracking and moving in circles, it may have a spiralling movement, like a table designed by Mario Merz or like a galaxy. Whatever the route ultimately followed, it is the vectorial outcome of many and uncontrolled variables. The same sort of circumstances are at work in determining both artistic and cosmic events. The initial impetus is immediately confronted with magnetic forces pushing and pulling it in opposite directions and gets quickly caught up by centripetal and centrifugal movements.

Is it then so surprising to discover at times that when one pursues a goal with unflinching tenacity and stubbornness, when one introspectively over-focuses on self-motivations, the goal appears to have shifted or become blurred? Motives are indeed frail creatures.
So much so that it seems safe to assume that in the long run any wilful action is the outcome more out of faith than of reason.

When Allan Kaprow started practising his art he began to think around the concept of “temporary happenings”. His reflections have lead to memorable essays on the subject of transitional events, at the expense, though, of the events themselves, of his art in action.
Initially, he’d get his public involved by requesting onlookers to do things like arrange heaps of tyres, eat, sit and walk around. It’s years now that he’s limited himself to trying to gather up his shadow from the ground, an objective onto itself that fully satisfies his desire for self-accomplishment.
Taking one’s bearings and choosing a direction can even mean this, that is running the risk of being so lucidly aware as to what is quintessential that any wilful action is made to precipitate as in a solution, fine-tuned down, for instance, to an incision on a piece of canvas. It’s the sort of thing a Tibetan monk would approve of.

But the Western Self refuses to even entertain such an idea, to move, that is, through life without a decent road-map. The winds that drove Ulysses off course, the Labyrinth of Krossos, or the darkness installed by Maria Nordman and that visitors to Villa Panza at Buino experience when they enter the darkened room and anxiously await for it to be flooded by light at the excruciatingly slow pace at which the human pupil allows the eye to become receptive to its surroundings are all so many chapters of our ancestral nightmares. Works such as these reveal the reason for our refusal to travel without the aid of a compass or nowadays without some other high-tech path-finder.

More often than not such pointers are not so absolutely indispensable as we deem them to be. And yet just as for a wilful mother who cannot even remotely brook the idea that her wise counsels go unheeded by her children but whose presence is nevertheless reassuring to them, we prefer security to freedom.