FIVE STAGES OF CONFERENCE GRIEF (WITH APOLOGIES TO ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS)
Anticipation
With only a few writing deadlines wandering lonely as clouds in the warm blue sky above me, I’m loathe to interrupt a more or less unstructured summer in my studio. But, man, I really ought to accept this invitation to attend a Philadelphia conference for Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital grantees. We’re going to listen to lectures, gather in “breakout” sessions, and schmooze over meals for three days. Most of the attendees on the list are either esoteric academics or cutting-edgers who write pieces in magazines with titles that sound like East Village boutiques. I’m 70 now (yikes!), and need to find out what the youngsters in artcrit are up to. But I’ve got these cool new shoes -- Camper brand basket-weaves, bought in a San Francisco thrift store -- so I won’t look totally like a sinecure copy editor at The New Criterion. And the get-together is a freebie; there’s nothing I like more than dialing up Morimur on my iPod and settling into a mystery novel on a public conveyance that cleaves reliably to the Earth.
Intimidation
The venue is the University of Pennsylvania. We all stay in a desultory concrete dorm tower which has as yet to enjoy that final spray of Lysol and fastening down of closet dowels preceding the arrival of the fall semester. My bed, four feet off the ground, is as narrow as a gurney, with a mattress like a single sheet of bubble-wrap. The entire suite (I’m in a triple) contains not a single water glass. I say to myself that if the guard towers are still unmanned after dark, I’m going to escape over the wall to the British Zone in West Philadelphia. (Later, I make the joke aloud to a few people. Nobody laughs.)
We first gather in capacious, darkly collegiate Houston Hall prior to boarding buses for an outing to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When I arrive, everybody is already seated in little clots of intense chatter. I’m a wallflower. One of my roomies waves to me, so I walk over and squat down beside his chair. When I ask what he does, he answers that he teaches cultural studies at a liberal arts college in New England and -- an African-American who studied at the Sorbonne -- he’s at work on a book about the ritualization of death in the work of African Diaspora artists in the Caribbean. Oh. The conference poop sheet tells me other participants are writing books about art under South African apartheid, the famous topless cellist Charlotte Moorman, and the Brazilian installation artist Hélio Oiticica. In addition to such tomers, conferencees include a large cadre of digital-heads with Internet projects, who make me feel like Ol’ Farmer Pete, plodding slowly along behind a horse-drawn populist plow of print.
Our exercise at the museum bids us split into small groups and follow a leader (ours is a professor of Renaissance literature at Princeton, no less) to a work of art, which we observe in four seven-minute segments -- Encounter, Attending, Negating, Realizing -- and then discuss. I’m a two-minute guy, myself (although I do loop back). At bedtime in the dorm, two Excedrin PM bring sleep but not self-confidence. I think I’m in over my head.
Acceptance
A while back, my wife and I took a few yoga classes. Typically, I’ve perverted its meditative regimen into 50 sweaty sun salutations while I watch “Pardon the Interruption” on ESPN. One yogic posture, though, did stick with me: sitting up straight, shoulders lowered, hands on lap, gaze fixed ahead. Thusly positioned, I find that I can not only stay awake, but actually pay attention to 7¼ total hours of lectures. They include getting ideas for writing (which is called “Conceptualizing”), typing the words (“Crafting,” as in small-batch beer), finding out what au courant artists think about all this (“Artists as Readers”); and finally, getting published (“Worlding” -- a term that needs to be killed in its crib, with a stake through its heart).
As usual, however, I start to argue in my head with everything I hear while I’m hearing it. Such art-world buzzwords as “texts” (always with intimations of “sacred”) and “practice” (dermatologists and lawyers have “practices,” goddamnit, not artists) make my fillings hurt. But with my ears floating effortlessly above my yoga’d spine, the speakers’ theses soon begin to wash over me like a lukewarm shower. Acceptance is not capitulation, I say inwardly, and some of this stuff has something to teach me. Take it all in now, filter it later. Peace. Love.
Criticism
Everybody at this shindig is to some degree politically left. Everybody here wants art to do some sort of social good; everybody believes the more narratives in play from more different kinds of people, the better. Nobody wants to be Horatio at the bridge in favor of Dead White Europeans. Nobody’s favorite art writer is Hilton Kramer. Eventually, alas, testiness bubbles to the surface, in both the small breakout sessions following the lectures, and in hallway conversations around the coffee-and-pastry table. Even well-meaning people, it seems, get tired of trying to morph themselves into total benevolence, of trying to stay open to threatening viewpoints, of trying politely to nod yes.
A “relational esthetics” artist talked about it being necessary in her museum installation piece to jerk the chains of the museum crew assigned to assist her, in order to arrive at an unexpectedly but deliberately “unfinished” show in the alleged service of “institutional critique,” a.k.a. biting the hand. People in my breakout session think she’s just cruel. An afternoon “Crafting” lecture was delivered from a podium, by a speaker dressed in all-black, with a water bottle in his hand. He showed a video clip of himself at a podium, dressed in all-black with a water bottle in hand, interviewing a writer who, just that morning, had talked to us in the flesh. My other roomie called the presentation “high comedy.” The social-activist art foundation director who spoke during “Worlding” seemed in favor of every feel-good approach to everything under the sun. (And boy, did he like the word “perhaps”!) I say in breakout that I haven’t heard language that vague since listening to Department of Defense flacks explain how we were actually winning the Vietnam war. An African-American art historian sitting next to me says that he was “insulted” that the presentation essentially scolded him about not being a good cultural citizen.
Our getting rankled is as much a function of endurance -- or the lack of it -- as what the lecturers said. Criticism is an inevitable state of conference grief, and would probably kick in just about now even if the talent behind the mikes were Socrates, Oscar Wilde and Gloria Steinem at the absolute tops of their games.
Camaraderie
Negativity gradually subsides. Nobody here wants to stay a fortified obscuritanist, or cranky turf-defender all the way up to Sunday morning’s departure. We’re all conference-going sisters and brothers under the skin, thankful upon reflection for the chance to be briefly among our own. After all, we all put on our pants one deconstructionist leg at a time; we all have problems finding somebody who’ll publish our words and help us -- however meagerly -- make a living. And back home, we all have difficulties of varying degrees of intimacy. Over the course of three days and nights in close quarters, some of these problems leak from our mouths to the ears of other conferencees. In spite of my usual “George Smiley vow” that I’ll behave at these gabfests like a John Le Carré spy in Cold War Moscow, I’m a major offender. But I manage to keep it mostly to shoptalk peppered with references to old movies and sports sayings. A Polish-born art professor who earned her stripes in the lead-up to the fall of the Iron Curtain, tells me I have a colloquial saying to quote for every issue that comes up. She smiles. I hope it’s a compliment.
In the afterglow of 60-plus hours of sharing stories and kvetches about magazines, deans, colleges, art schools, day jobs, editors, readers and landlords, leave-takings are larded with sentimentality. “Hey, I’ll see you in Chicago.” “Sure, look me up -- you have my card.” If not in Chicago or Boston or Houston, at least at the next conference down the line, where these five stages of grief -- breakout sessions of the soul -- will kick in again. Especially if “Worlding” hasn’t been laid to rest.
PETER PLAGENS is a painter and art critic.
