After Secrecy

by Peter Eleey, Walker Art Center Curator

 

We live in an age marked by both a lack of secrecy and a sense that secrets abound. Whether the result of an overabundance of personal information volunteered into the digital realm, or unfettered governmental surveillance, privacy and confidence seem ever less important and harder to protect. In this climate, secrecy has had to find new places to hide, and perhaps counterintuitively, it has made its way into the most ordinary and obvious. In the election-frenzied intimations of anti-American tendencies concealed within the ranks of Congress, or in those unattended bags that could be bombs, conspiracy surrounds us, and even the most well-lit places can harbor shadows.

 

A similar paranoia suffused the heyday of Cold War America, and perhaps it is no surprise that a material interest in secrecy and hiding was common to American art of the late 1960s and early ’70s. In 1969, for example, Douglas Huebler wrote to his students at Bradford Junior College in Massachusetts, asking them to join him in a special project. “I need to use an important secret of yours in order to complete a project on which I am working,” he implored. “Simply write it down and then burn the paper on which it is written in an ashtray, seal the ashes in an envelope addressed to me and have it put into my faculty mail box. I will complete the project by combining all ashes so returned into one mixture and then scattering it randomly around campus.”¹ Secrecy assumed physical form in a number of Bruce Nauman’s works made during the late ’60s, notably his John Coltrane Piece (1968), which conceals a mirror on the bottom of a steel plate, blindly reflecting only the floor upon which it sits. Nauman’s title suggests the performative element of his attraction to the clandestine, and he was interested in Coltrane because the saxophonist periodically turned his back on the audience—rehearsing, on the stage of a jazz club, the essential dialectic of aesthetic philosophy, between inside and outside, between the visible and the hidden, and the desire we have for that which appears to be withheld from us.

 

Although secrecy was most evident in the work of artists who, like Huebler and Nauman, we associate with the development of Conceptual Art, concealment featured in one of the main critiques levied against Minimalism. The critic and art historian Michael Fried charged that the boxes of Donald Judd and Robert Morris are “hollow,” protesting the way in which they draw our minds to their “having an inside.”² A work of art is, in Fried’s assessment, meant to exist completely on the level of the visible; the suggested interiority of Judd’s and Morris’s sculptures was criminal, like a concealed weapon, because we couldn’t see it. He bemoaned the “hidden naturalism” of their work, evoking an epistemological battle between surface and depth (along with its contingent questions of subjective truth) that long predated both Coltrane and Minimalism.³

 

In the previous century, for example, naturalist fiction writers pursued the world at face value, while their realist counterparts sought to expose its underlying structures. The differences between the Impressionist painters and the Cubists and Constructivists who followed them can be arrayed along similar lines, and indeed, the early modernist manifestos often speak in the terms of veracity and authenticity. Kasimir Malevich described “a need for truth, not sincerity,” and Georges Braque said that the purpose of painting is “not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact but to constitute a pictorial fact.”⁴ Malevich and Braque, like their realist forebears in literature, sought a penetrating kind of vision that displayed the bones of things, exposing their concealed essentiality. “The Realistic Manifesto” (1920) of Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner emphatically connected interior structure with truth, describing the artist working as “the engineer constructs his bridges,” in search of “the innermost essence of a thing.”⁵ For them, realism erased the aesthetic distinction between façades and what lies beneath them, simply divulging the world in full. “One cannot measure space in volumes as one cannot measure liquid in yards,” they wrote. “Look at our space . . . what is it if not one continuous depth?”⁶

 

Morris insisted that he was continuing the formal indivisibility celebrated by Gabo, Pevsner, and their Constructivist peers, but Fried’s assertion of the hidden interior of Minimalist sculpture conflicted with this notion of a “continuous depth.”⁷ In other words, you couldn’t be hiding something and claim complete transparency. For Fried, however, the greater sin of the “literalist sensibility” was less about what it might be hiding than what he considered to be its “theatricality.” Theater, of course, includes an assumption of artifice, and thereby disguise—a stage actor may be said to be hiding behind the character, and conversely, an object that is hiding something is, in some way, acting. But Fried’s critique had as much to do with theater’s presumption of audience as with its artifice. He believed that art should exist timelessly on its own terms, without depending upon being seen, and he accused its practitioners of making objects that lie in wait for the viewer, like a kind of trap.

 

Clement Greenberg, interestingly, saw something similarly startling in the “desperation” of Conceptual Art, arising from a kind of deep boredom that he considered to be practically indifferent to its audience. “It’s as though Conceptual Art says, all right, we are going to turn around on you, we are not going to give you any surprises at all, and there won’t be an expectation involved either.” In Greenberg’s formulation, Conceptual Art, like Coltrane, turns its back on us, and in this rejection of audience the critic somewhat paradoxically found that the ensuing boredom can assume its own kind of theatricality. Still speaking in the voice of the conceptualist, he continued that “you are going to get boredom so undifferentiated as to constitute a surprise all in itself. This solid, monolithic, unadulterated, undifferentiated boredom will really stand you off and be our memorial.”⁸ Minimal and Conceptual strategies seem to be continually reasserting themselves in recent art, but Fried and Greenberg, taken together, suggest that these two strands running out of the 1960s might be best considered on a kind of performative continuum that is rooted, on some level, in a shallow game of secrecy and revelation. Somewhere between the dumb theatricality of Minimalism and the theatrical dumbness of Conceptual Art lays an entire swath of contemporary art, if not the sensibility of a generation.

 

The notion of a dumb kind of theatricality and its connection to hidden truth is most easily traced not to art criticism but to theater itself, where the Polish director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski had coined the term “poor theater” two years prior to Fried’s seminal 1967 article. In contrast to nineteenth-century conceptions of naturalist acting, in which the actor disappeared behind the character, Grotowski described a stripped-down approach to performance that emphasized a kind of purity, what he termed “the discarding of masks, the revealing of the real substance.”⁹ Far from putting on airs, his theater was one of disclosure, of confession, in which the primary transformation occurring during a performance was one that exposed the actor most essentially.

A similarly demonstrative poverty is abundant in current art, and Gedi Sibony is one of its preeminent masters, arriving from Minimalism’s literalist sensibility but subtly altering its melodrama. Sibony appears to celebrate what Greenberg called “the look of non-art,” except that the artist’s arrangements of cardboard, industrial carpet, tree branches, and other such prosaic materials lack any sense of high-minded rebellion or debasement [page #29]. At its best, Sibony’s theatricality almost lacks risk, seeming too honest to fail, and yet perhaps not sincere enough to succeed. The Fluxus artist and publisher Dick Higgins saw the flirtation with failure as an essential ingredient in good art, noting that “in order to build intellectual excitement into work there must always be the sense that it was a near miss—a near failure.”¹⁰ This is what he termed the requisite “danger” of art, and it is something Nauman internalized when he made his multiple-exposure photograph Failing to Levitate in the Studio (1966), in which we see the artist lying pathetically between two chairs in his studio, his theatrical levitation superimposed upon its inevitable failure. Sibony’s power, notably, derives similarly from disappointment, but with a different sequence of effort. The levitation in his work comes at the end, instead of first; the general state of his work begins in failure and abandonment rather than arriving there after much effort. Utterly lacking in danger, Sibony’s slapstick shamanism elevates his materials practically by luck rather than will, rescuing them only briefly before returning them to their enduring condition of simple trash. His literalism is a kind of double negative, miming the feel of art borrowing the look of nonart, but ending up almost entirely recouped by its secular tedium once and for all. Rather than dress up, his art strips down, staying on the stage but donning only a ghostly costume. This should not be mistaken for laziness—if there is radicality in his art, it derives from his suggestion that the high drama of realism’s revelation is rather lacking in drama after all. Now you see it, but it was here all along.

 

The mundane is valorized differently in the work of Ceal Floyer, who often uses unremarkable phenomena as material. As such, she is concerned less with what something is than how it behaves, which is one of the marks of the theatrical dumbness of the conceptual legacy that distinguishes it from simply poor theater. While Sibony begins and ends with the blandness of his vernacular supplies, the stuff of Floyer’s art lies in the performance of that ordinariness, not in the materials themselves. She works with what we know and when we know it, and in this sense her art may be less about how the banal behaves than how we behave in the face of its factual stoicism. Rather than unveiling an effect, she belabors how it exists in the first place, and her epistemology, pointedly, is rooted in the time it takes to see these things for what they are, more than their actuality. Now you see it, sure, but how long has it been here?

Like a bad magician, Floyer often uses absurdly inefficient kinds of formal trickery to flesh out this temporality. A lightbulb turns out to be illuminated from without, brightened by four spotlights in the corners of the room that are trained upon it. The sound of water dripping into a bucket is just that—a sound, emanating from a speaker sitting rather obviously in the bucket, its audio cable in plain view. The sliver of light under the bottom of a door, suggesting a lit room beyond the gallery, is a simple illusion, made by nothing more than a masked slide in a projector on the floor next to us [page 39]. In all of these cases, the brain trips over itself, kicking us because there is no sleight of hand, no real trick, and yet the setups are just too dumb for us to have paid them any notice initially. The burdensome physicality of her constructions conflicts with the quick elegance of their effect, and this makes for a frustrating kind of déjà vu, in which we feel as if we knew what is going on before we came to know it. With an embarrassing overliterality, Floyer creates little traps that give rise to the indifferent surprise Greenberg found in Conceptual Art, though we begrudge them that power. If Sibony’s work displays “continuous depth,” Floyer can be said to move in the other direction, adding a transparent extra layer onto the surface of the world. This layer magnifies its mundane substrate, creating an excess of knowledge, a kind of super-natural realism.

 

That excess of knowledge has its own limits, however, and we find it in Tom Friedman’s 1,000 Hours of Staring (1992–97) [page 43], which seems both excessive and miserly in equal parts. Friedman’s bare sheet of paper doesn’t even flirt with the nihilist air of nonart, as Robert Rauschenberg did when he famously erased Willem de Kooning’s drawing in 1953. And though totally blank, 1,000 Hours is not at all about what is missing, erased, or denied, but rather oddly about what we can see. Radically without depth and yet completely continuous, the blinding light of its self-evidence would seem to deter a deeper looking, presenting itself as a final resolution of formal aesthetic empiricism.

 

Friedman, though, has gone it one better. There is no material theater in this work: the paper is just what it is. And there is no temporal performance, either, because there is nothing for us to discover. Time is monolithically part of Friedman’s material, but without a way to measure it, we wonder if he is lying about how long he stared at this thing. In this sense, Friedman has made what Kirk Varnedoe might have considered the most complete “picture of nothing,” what he described as “vessels of intelligence that appear utterly dumb,” but with a new twist—call it the “suspiciously dumb,” which, unlike the invisibility of some classic conceptualism, plays out entirely on the level of the visible.¹¹ His triumph, then, is to inject doubt into the obvious, and with it, judgment and thereby ethics—a politics of vision, in short.

 

And so what do we think we see? 1,000 Hours simply refers, of course, to that duration of the artist’s gaze, recorded immutably on the page, and the date of the work tells us the five years during which the staring was done. But what of the hours of everyone else since then who has seen it and tried to discern something, anything, in its blankness, including those of us now standing before it? Do these supplemental minutes of attention alter the work? Once aware of this problem, we find that we are looking at looking in the dumbest way possible without a mirror—a deep twist on Heisenberg’s now-outdated principle of uncertainty, in which the location of subatomic particles are assumed to be influenced by our efforts to see them. Only in this case, the paradox is more basic, and more vertiginous: that which oscillates, like a hallucination, between the visible and invisible is nothing short of vision itself, and its ability to affect things in the world.

 

John Cage, in his legendary lecture on nothing of 1950, said, “I am here, and there is nothing to say. . . . What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.”¹² When Cage finally gave us silence, two years later, composing a work for piano in which the performer sits tacitly before the instrument for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, he asked that we listen harder. Yet in drawing our attention to the ambient sounds around us—people coughing, shifting in their seats; a bird outside—he suggested that silence cannot be achieved, that even if he stopped talking, noise is still there. Expecting to find silence in the soundproof environment of an anechoic chamber, he was surprised to discover that even there, he heard the low sound of his blood pumping and the high tone of his nervous system humming. Varnedoe believed that our culture demands pictures of nothing in part because their blankness gives form to the sense of loss that has accompanied the progress of modernity. But what nothing demands, of course, is that we keep on looking, and pictures of nothing, then, can’t really exist—if only because in looking, something is always seen.

 

Our response to terminal blandness reveals the impossibility of nothingness. Higgins, who was a student of Cage, believed that “boredom played a comparable role, in relation to intensity, that silence plays with sound, where each one heightens the other and frames it.”¹³ In other words, nothingness (the lack) and ennui (how we feel about it) became tools to be used against each other, enacting a kind of self-inoculation. What at first blush may seem to be the disappointment we experience in boredom turns out, as least initially, to be restorative. In the self-reflexive loop of 1,000 Hours’ content and form, no longer distinguishable from each other, something nevertheless accumulates, and Friedman’s point is that the very act of looking—even at nothing—eventually leaves its own trace, like an invisible version of the burnish that graces the bronze toes of public statues. The spectral residue of vision is this work’s true material, both obvious and secret, protected by the impossibility of being observed. To find proof of its existence, we need look no further than modern advertising, an economy of attention denoted by “impressions” that estimate the number of times something may be viewed.

 

But lost in all of this is the attention we give to that which cannot be seen, and the desire we have for the unknown and inaccessible, which never goes away. What, after all, could be more boring than a world without secrets? Nauman’s face-down mirror and Huebler’s burned confessions arose from an awareness of this platitude. As such, they are not about seeing at all, but rather about envisioning—about imagination, and the seductive fogginess of those places we cannot reach, the things we cannot know. They hew to the classical realist notion of truth, and they bolster its power and allure by keeping it hidden. You never see it, and that is precisely what ensures that it stays true.

 

The suspiciously dumb rejects the very existence of deeper truth in favor of some sincere faith, but it pointedly still embraces some notion of secrecy. The secret of 1,000 Hours is contained in its title, and this suggestion of a covert history invites us to confuse an imaginary otherness into the plain banality of its blankness. What may be most remarkable about Friedman’s sheet of paper, perhaps, is that it performs this politic so efficiently, marrying the reductive clarity of seeing with the untethered vagaries of imagination in almost perfect coincidence, to a degree possible otherwise only in complete darkness. This perverse equanimity—in which light is dark, dark is light; in which reality must be taken on faith, and the imaginary so easily assumes the habit of truth—may stand as a modest monument to our time.

 

But looking back from here, we can also see that 1,000 Hours prophesied a new aesthetic of paranoia, one born of a lack of secrecy and yet molded under its threat. Cage outlined a particularly reductive theatricality, removing the subject from the stage in the hope that nothing, completely unveiled, would perform itself. Its legacy, however, exposes more about its audience, and what, in a kind of delusional auto-performance, we insinuate into its void. When all is revealed, we will still hide things, albeit in plain sight, becausewe need to. For some time now, it has no longer been a question of whether you may see something tinged with secrecy, but when and where, and then whether or not to say something.

 

NOTES

1 This text is part of Huebler’s resulting work Location Piece #8, Bradford, Massachusetts (1969).
2 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 (Summer 1967): 19.
3 Ibid.
4 Kasimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting,” in Art in Theory
1900–2000, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 174; George Braque, “Thoughts on Painting,” in ibid., 214.
5 Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner, “The Realistic Manifesto,” in ibid., 299–300.
6 Gabo and Pevsner, “Realistic Manifesto,” 300.
7 Furthermore, Fried noted that despite Morris’s interest in the Constructivists, he and Judd opposed sculpture constructed “part by part,” like that of David Smith or Anthony Caro. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 12.
8 Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 175–76.
9 Jerzy Grotowski, “Statement of Principles,” in The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, ed. Michael Huxley and
Noel Witts (London: Routledge, 2002), 217. On realism and naturalism in nineteenth-century acting, see, for example, Robert Gordon, The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2006), 8–12.
10 Dick Higgins, “Boredom and Danger” (1966) in Ina Blom, Dick Higgins, exh. cat. (Høvikodden, Norway: Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, 1995), 112.
11 Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 271.
12 John Cage, “Lecture on Silence,” in Silence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), 109.
13 Higgins, “Boredom and Danger,” 107.