Black Bucket Essays
Volume 2, Issue 1
“The value of art is in the observer."
- Agnes Martin
Phil Hessler
I'm looking at a list that I wrote about two years ago. There are art projects on this thing drawn up as
possibilities for an exhibition. On it: ten unorthodox projects that would cost untold physical and mental
and material exertion. This little index remains a neat dead-end.
Two sorts of places to which I’ve been drawn my whole life are dead-ends and abandoned buildings
because they are snares that catch up outré roamers and unsavory characters in equal measure.
Outsiders can go there looking for contemplative aesthetic abandon beyond the confines of advanced
capitalism, walking the former belly of the bull to feel the dread and to revel in the shell of what once was
its intestine. Many more probably go there for a place to urinate (why not?), to write graffiti or to have a
smoke. But these places are also useful as sites to get away from, well, in Agnes Martin’s term,
“observers.”
I decided against making that art on the list, and then went on to forget them altogether. It hits me that I
am stopped by these now because they read like a description of some really interesting work –
conceived by an artist other than me. I wish I’d thought of them, and then in a perverse moment
remember that I did.
None of these can be observed, none can be said to exist as art, but I would call these ideas ‘art’ as they
are now, in a way that probably exceeds any observable future iteration in value.
Those who know me would probably expect me to counter Agnes Martin’s quote by examining the de jure
implications of ‘value,’ since this brings forward important Marxist distinctions about commodity fetishism,
contemporary art market rubbish etc. They may even expect me to rail against a recent ArtNews
publication that has the hypocrisy to contend that - in one single magazine - all of the important artists
and critics and dealers who matter can simply opine their way out of this sticky wicket while drinking from
it.
But I have written these invectives before. There’s something else to address with the quote - Martin’s
idea that art is in the observer resets the focus to reception. I think my filiation with Brecht’s theater puts
me closer to Agnes when it comes to this, to an extent – though Brecht does reset the observer as actor
(i.e. artist), which highlights how the Agnes argument curls up when you hold a match to it. On the issue
of observer (reader) as creator, I also side more with Michel Foucault’s signal use of retroactively
assigning authorship as yet another way to look at how the author’s name and legacy detach from work in
a disruptive and interesting way. *
But I will counter Agnes with a rider to her quote. The value of art is in the observer, and for the artist
there is value in initially discerning something unobserved, unperformed, blank.
* Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-memory, Practice. New York: Cornell University Press, 1996. (pp. 113-138)
Volume 2, Issue 1
“The value of art is in the observer."
- Agnes Martin
Phil Hessler
I'm looking at a list that I wrote about two years ago. There are art projects on this thing drawn up as
possibilities for an exhibition. On it: ten unorthodox projects that would cost untold physical and mental
and material exertion. This little index remains a neat dead-end.
Two sorts of places to which I’ve been drawn my whole life are dead-ends and abandoned buildings
because they are snares that catch up outré roamers and unsavory characters in equal measure.
Outsiders can go there looking for contemplative aesthetic abandon beyond the confines of advanced
capitalism, walking the former belly of the bull to feel the dread and to revel in the shell of what once was
its intestine. Many more probably go there for a place to urinate (why not?), to write graffiti or to have a
smoke. But these places are also useful as sites to get away from, well, in Agnes Martin’s term,
“observers.”
I decided against making that art on the list, and then went on to forget them altogether. It hits me that I
am stopped by these now because they read like a description of some really interesting work –
conceived by an artist other than me. I wish I’d thought of them, and then in a perverse moment
remember that I did.
None of these can be observed, none can be said to exist as art, but I would call these ideas ‘art’ as they
are now, in a way that probably exceeds any observable future iteration in value.
Those who know me would probably expect me to counter Agnes Martin’s quote by examining the de jure
implications of ‘value,’ since this brings forward important Marxist distinctions about commodity fetishism,
contemporary art market rubbish etc. They may even expect me to rail against a recent ArtNews
publication that has the hypocrisy to contend that - in one single magazine - all of the important artists
and critics and dealers who matter can simply opine their way out of this sticky wicket while drinking from
it.
But I have written these invectives before. There’s something else to address with the quote - Martin’s
idea that art is in the observer resets the focus to reception. I think my filiation with Brecht’s theater puts
me closer to Agnes when it comes to this, to an extent – though Brecht does reset the observer as actor
(i.e. artist), which highlights how the Agnes argument curls up when you hold a match to it. On the issue
of observer (reader) as creator, I also side more with Michel Foucault’s signal use of retroactively
assigning authorship as yet another way to look at how the author’s name and legacy detach from work in
a disruptive and interesting way. *
But I will counter Agnes with a rider to her quote. The value of art is in the observer, and for the artist
there is value in initially discerning something unobserved, unperformed, blank.
* Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-memory, Practice. New York: Cornell University Press, 1996. (pp. 113-138)
