The coronavirus diary Part 3 (Pay attention)

Bruce Nauman, Pay attention Motherfuckers, 1973 Lithograph

Pay attention Motherfuckers

I don’t remember what I was looking for online when I came across this work by Bruce Nauman. It struck me with its emergency and its relevance to what I see happening in the world around me lately. I immediately felt my voice shouting it out in my head. And that was not to remind people to wash their hands.

Because, it is not just the virus. It’s what happened in America, what’s happening everyday, all over the world. It is how I see (some) people treating one another. And I consider this to be a result of our lack of attention towards our environment, humanity and the concept of being human. But more of that later.

I want to investigate the power the work exerts over me. I start by looking at it closer. It is a black and white lithograph, one of the many works of Nauman that has to do with language.  From what I see by looking at the google results, the work is very famous and other artists have appropriated the sentence or other aspects of the work for their own purposes.

It is of course an insult. An angry statement. As such, it is powerful. Why then do we bypass the insult and engage with it as a work of art? Is it because of our guilt syndrome?

Perhaps also to an extent, but the work functions in wittier ways. First, the text is in reverse. (although I did see somebody that put it on pinterest reversed once more lol). So we have to become especially attentive in order to read the sentence in the first place. While reading the sentence we become conscious of ourselves paying attention to the reading process. That is we, the motherfuckers.

It seems at first that Bruce Nauman, as the artist, is telling us what to do standing opposite to us, on the side of the artwork on the wall. While reading, we also become attentive to conceding to being called a motherfucker. We are in a closed circuit, we and the artwork, telling us what to do. It is not a liberal artwork. But being liberal is perhaps not what this artwork is about.

The letters are stacked close together and placed on thick straight lines as if they were products on market shelves.  Especially the three letters on the top, PAY, have a cast shadow that makes a three dimensional effect, although inconsistent in terms of a definable light source. The word attention is rather hard to read so perhaps an initial rapid reading of the text could be PAY MOTHERFUCKERS which brings to mind capitalism and its demands from us. As I said, the shading is inconsistent, and I start to think that Nauman himself is not paying enough attention while writing the sentence but gets distracted on the way.

 It does seem as if he is actually pressing himself into paying attention.  He seems to be pressing the crayon on the stone, writing this word over and over, nearly concealing it as a result. Like the little child that is punished by being made to write repeatedly ‘I will pay attention in class’, his self-induced ‘punishment’ is to repeatedly attend to the (word) attention.

The work is in reverse, so subconsciously we feel as if we are looking at a mirror. This assumption also seems to make up for the inconsistency of the cast shadows. From this place we would perhaps also be seeing ourselves in front of the text, which is now perceived as being situated in the same space as we. And here comes the revelation!  The artist is sharing the same place with ourselves, that is the other side of the mirror. Instead of being indicative of the artist’s separation from the audience the ‘s’ in motherfuckers is actually indicative of the artist merging with the audience. We are in this together.

 The work strikes me because it flashes a light to something that seems very important at the moment. Being conscious. This is a work about mindfulness before mindfulness became hip. It reminds us that we have to pay attention, although frequently what we are asked to do is to pay, fullstop.

Are we really paying attention?

It seems that more and more we are conditioned to being distracted, overwhelmed by the incessant flow of information and connection, always checking our phones and social media, always being somewhere else than our bodies are at the moment. Sometimes I am struck by how people can have a ‘gone’ look in their eyes, how they seem to be talking to you but not really being there.

The man who murdered George Floyd, was he paying attention? Floyd was saying he can’t breathe still the officer was looking the other way, almost laughing. Isn’t this a complete lack of attention, a lack of attention to human life, to what being human actually is? Isn’t this complete inattention not only to the other man, but also to one’s own sensations and feelings? And isn’t this exactly the opposite to what he was supposedly there to do, as a policeman? Unfortunately, this lack of attention was shared by his colleagues on that day. Today I saw another video, one policeman pushed an elderly man to the ground. His gesture was so dismissive and, again, inattentive. I see this more and more everyday now, everywhere I look, in big issues and small details.

I say to myself: Practice paying attention. Without criticizing or attempting to correct. To what arises. To your first reactions to something. And your second. Pay attention to the people you come across everyday. To your loved ones but also to the ones you don’t know. Reveal deep rooted unconscious thoughts that seem to go beyond simple conditioning. Pay attention to your mind, when it sends an alert every time a somewhat ‘different’ person comes your way, your DNA is tainted with racism.

 The last words I saw written in this file where I keep my notes for the blog when I opened it to write this post were these:

 ‘Is there a need for the art object?

With all these discussions about art during the current crisis, I am wondering if there is a need for the art object. Do people need art? And if they do, in what way? Are they satisfied in looking at a work of art on the internet, do they want to see it live, do they need to live with art? Why? Is art just a decorative object on the wall?’

It seems that the answer, at least to some parts of this question came, for me, with this work. Art is a way to make us pay attention, motherfuckers.

The coronavirus diary part 1.

Hallo everybody

I hope you are all well, stay at home and keep your spirits reasonably high, in these strange days..

Here in Athens things are getting harder.  Today a total curfew was announced.  People will be prevented from moving, apart from going to the super market pharmacy or doctor, exercising outside alone and commuting to and from work . For these you will need to issue special permits. It seems that I will not be able to move freely between home and studio for some time. Not that I can’t but it seems rather complicated. . It’s ok since I have already moved some of my stuff at home and I work from here.

TRYING TO FIT IT ALL IN THIS TABLE

I am not freaking out. On the contrary, I think I am getting a lot from this lockdown. Here I share some of the things and thoughts that make up my everyday reality these days.

I started meditating. Everyday, for 15 minutes. This is the first time I actually commit to doing this and it is thanks to Justin Michael Williams and his audible book ‘Stay Woke’. I actually started with this book two weeks before the coronavirus incident, but it came at the right moment.

I do my yoga practice everyday. Again, after 5 years of practicing, it is the first time I do it everyday. I try to keep my practice as soft as possible. I don’t want to push myself to reach any standard, just to quiet my mind and intention and start recognizing patterns and sensations in my body and way of moving and being

MY YOGA MAT

What has happened lately is that little by little I am starting to recognize an underlying pattern of  believing or feeling something is not right,  something is not good enough. This is the reason I often feel agitated, not satisfied with what lies before me, thinking I have to change something, correct something, be otherwise. It is the reason I sometimes get tense and do things in a hurry, the reason I sometimes destroy wonderful paintings by overworking them.

LIKE THIS ONE HERE

I have decided to attempt to focus on not pushing myself to attain the unattainable, a standard of perfection, if I may call it this, unattainable because not even existent - it does not have a specific form. It is just Other than what Is.

Even though I chose my path in order to be free, in order to be able to explore and express my deepest desires, in order to escape the feeling of not being where I want to be, I have not escaped the trap of needing an approval, an outside confirmation of what is considered good, or right for that matter. Of course we have all heard that ‘right’ does not exist in art. But my experience tells me otherwise.

I remember I started painting as an antidote to theory. Having studied Social Psychology and then doing my master’s in Media and Communications, I wanted to do something closer to my being. The keyword here is do. I wanted to do things, not think about them, theorize about them or apply other people’s theories about them.

I started painting. And even though my passion was dance, there was something in the act of painting, that drew me more and more to it. Surely this was in part due to its solitary nature. Solitary means being left on one’s own devices, having to decide for oneself how to do things.

Not adhering to standards…

I also saw it as better suited to what I was looking for. My authentic expression, beyond boundaries and limitations. There were no standards, or the standards were so many and variable that practically did not exist.  Or so I saw it in the beginning, and this is how I practiced it, with enthusiasm and passion.

Still, after the second year in art school I found myself questioning the practice, myself, the meaning of it all… Teachers in art school are eager to make you get down to the important stuff – why you do what you do- so you will not spend your time painting, not knowing why, like a child…(actual words of teacher)

Or prevent you from taking the wrong path –‘you have things inside that cannot be expressed through painting’- (again, actual words) or, -‘you like this painter”? he is so passé, forget about that direction’…

Or even worse ‘STOP PAINTING”

 What happened is, I stopped. For some years at least, until I was done with my studies in art school.

I started painting again right after I finished. And it has been a long way of trying to get back to how I was painting when I first started. With no preconceptions on how it had to look like. Just painting, just acting.

Of course this is something that takes a lot of practice. What I find interesting is how thinking about setting one’s own standards has connected to my thinking about painting as an action and my ongoing project on art as a process . I stop for now and will take it from here soon.

However, I want to share some last thoughts with you,

-       Is it perhaps now a time to consider what we truly and authentically love about what we do, about our lives, about our relationships, and concentrate on making these particular aspects flourish, instead of trying to correct something in order to fit in a preconception of how things should be,  a time of tackling the issue of believing we are not good enough, and therefore not trusting ourselves and what comes naturally?

-       Is it a time now, in relative seclusion and isolation, to get more quiet and start to recognize our voice and distinguish it from the outside critic, mentor, guru, idol whatever?

-       This can happen because we are getting more quiet. Perhaps this can be a way of navigating through this hard time and gaining something from it. Something invaluable for the life we are called at the moment to protect by staying quiet.

Take care and stay safe.

AND DANCE, AT HOME