Lately, people keep referring to Baca Street as the "SoHo" of Santa Fe, which makes me feel all pissy inside, like an urban underpass early on a Sunday morning. Yes, there was once a renaissance of some kind, benefiting some artists and some galleries in New York in an area
of that city that's now primarily useful for high-end retail shopping, but the sad fact that all neighborhoods with the potential to host blossoming art
scenes must forever be cursed with comparison to SoHo, just as all political scandals are tagged "gates," is annoying and, more vexing, just plain lacking creativity. Plus, you've got to figure that anyone comparing SoHo and Baca has never been to both places.
True, just this last weekend, I was in a house on Baca Street, the table in front of me littered with the remnants of a lovingly home-cooked meal, several Tofutti Cutie ice cream bar wrappers and a shockingly lovely bottle of Tobalá mezcal (its existence in the US made possible by Taos artist Ron Cooper's amazing Del Maguey company, reachable at
); the wall beyond the table was chock full of paintings and photographs and, sitting around the table was a visual artist/educator, a writer/visual artist, a composer/sound installation artist, a blacksmith, a visual artist, a poet/college professor and me-so it was, in all honesty, at least a little Boho, but quite a ways from SoHo. Just as I was fuming internally about why a nice little neighborhood like Baca Street would be burdened by a burly moniker from New York's fame, one person said "naked," and another said "performance." I think they were separate conversations, but all of a sudden the subject turned, quick, ugly and curiously titillating, to performance art. Now, understand that I was floating on a fuzzy and blissful mezcal cloud when I tell you the conversation went something like this:
Sound Artist:
Damn that infernal Marina Abramovic for reproducing, and therefore cheapening, seminal performance art pieces last year at the Guggenheim.
Poet:
Really? I normally hear the words "performance art" and run the other direction, but when I read about the Abramovic thing I was intrigued-isn't more exposure for performance better?
Pause in conversation while everyone considers whether or not to say what they do when they hear the words "poetry reading."
SA:
I'm all in favor of the idea of performances basically being scripts that can be performed again, but I think it should be done as a personal, meaningful experience by an individual rather than done by a celebrity artist for her own glory.
Poet
(muttering): Performance artists can qualify as celebrities?
Me:
Isn't it a bit like the Indigo Girls covering
All Along the Watchtower
? It's bad and wrong on every level, but you wouldn't want to make it illegal or anything.
SA:
But what about the people who start to believe that it's an Indigo Girls song to begin with?
Artist/Educator:
Isn't the crux of it that the idea of the original pieces can be brought into prominence again only because of Abramovic's fame? The Guggenheim isn't going to let unknown individuals do these performances.
Poet
(still mumbling): Why do performance artists get to be famous?
Me:
But isn't a certain amount of celebrity beneficial in order to attract funding toward large scale art projects?
SA:
You don't need money to make good art. Well-funded art projects have no edge.
From there the idea was also tossed onto the table that artists, you know-pure artists, real artists-ought to do something else for a living. I guess so their work isn't tainted-but there was also general agreement around the table that the romanticized, if painful, myth of the suffering artist was bunk, an unnecessary contrivance. But I know plenty of folks who'd rather pull duty as the proverbial starving bum artist than, say, work retail, wait tables, swing hammers or balance books all day long-talk about suffering. I personally think artists (and even poets) ought to be able to make a living by doing the art that's meaningful to them. I love that it's possible for grand projects like Christo's wraps or Cai Guo Qiang's fireworks to make or find the funds needed in order to be realized. There would be a hole in the world if the Dia Foundation didn't take a loss to maintain expensive and impractical things like Walter De Maria's
Lightning Field
and dozens of other maintenance-intensive installations. But I do hate the fact that a few artists make a big living and enact grand projects while the rest toil without acclaim.
The sound artist at dinner that night was right that limitations often breed creativity and that money can be constricting and compromising. What exactly "edge" might be is fairly subjective, but I would propose that artists who feel success and the attendant celebrity and funding is largely negative are feeding a systemic problem more than they are fighting it. It's a self-defeating hubris, a fear of money encouraged by those who control the world with money and certainly wouldn't want the trouble brought by artists feeling comfortable and fluid working with lots of it.
The bottom line is that artists should always be manipulating the material and conceptual worlds. Money and fame are mediums to be used like paint or steel or ideas. And an artist's insistence than any particular tool has a corruptive influence is an admission they don't know how to use that tool. An artist that can't make art out of money and celebrity is no different than an artist who owns a lathe or a kiln or a hammer but has never learned to use it.
I guess when Baca Street has a MOMA Design Store, I'll have to admit I'm wrong.
