Oddly Satisfying Art

These naïve videos and their mood-enhancing music resemble, more than a little, some of the first video artworks from the ’70s and ’80s: artists filming themselves exercising their fingers, bouncing rubber balls, doing tabletop tricks with spoons and eggs and matchsticks. I’m thinking here of Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, William Wegman, Fischli and Weiss, but especially Terry Fox and his Children’s Tapes (1974). My favorite of this subgenre isn’t actually a video, but a short 16mm film by Richard Serra called Hand Catching Lead (1968). It is just that: a white, grimy, work-worn, open hand is all you see—that and the rough lead billets that fall, every couple of seconds, from the top of the frame to the bottom. The hand clenches as the lead passes, trying to catch it, squeeze it, crush it. Sometimes the metal hits the hand but keeps falling. Catching lead for art must be a tough, dirty job (your hands get sore, your arm tired, your blood poisoned). Part of that film’s poetry is its tedious senselessness, a routine striving with an indifferent outcome, where neither catching nor not-catching seems like a gain. Serra’s piece represents industrial labor and its psychedelic drudgery but does not illustrate it. Today an artist making a film this entrancing would likely feel the need to cite current or historical events—yet Serra does not drop and catch the lead to call attention to the brutal repression of a 19th century lead miners’ strike or the atmospheric evils of leaded gasoline. Or, if he does, I don’t want to know. Like Gaillard’s video, Hand Catching Lead is better received, not unraveled; interpolated, not interpreted.

Against interpretation! Interpreters use the back door! But isn’t it a moral bind when, retrospectively, the imagery in question is entwined with some catastrophe, an epochal injustice or a genocide? The total alternative to didacticism, indeed—the imaginary version of Gaillard’s beautiful, frivolous film where nothing on screen is ever specified, or justified, by real events— is a re-mystification of the blooming world, and therefore its denial. Gaillard’s lm is both a break and a burden—an art “work” after all. It offers relief from the very task it presents, that of interpretation.

Describing what art means (not, again, what it does) is like taking a monocular photo of a stereographic film.

The world goes at. I dare you not to get satis ed. The gallery closes at six.

I had to leave that satisfying video behind for a gray street in Chelsea. The roadbed had been scraped into little furrows but not yet repaved. The air was clear like a lens. It started to rain out of a monochrome sky so pale and uniform that I couldn’t make out the drops until they struck. I want art to be like this: an interface that might change the way you see, but that does so flexibly, without being fixed, and without fixing.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 13. 

Cyprien Gaillard, Where Nature Runs Riot (2018) (installation view). 3D motion picture, DCI DCP. 14:56 min. Image courtesy the artist, Sprüth Magers and Gladstone Gallery, NY. Photo: Timo Ohler.

Cyprien Gaillard, Nightlife (2015). 3D motion picture, DCI DCP. 14:56 min. Image courtesy the artist, Sprüth Magers and Gladstone Gallery, NY. Photo: Timo Ohler.

Cyprien Gaillard, Nightlife (2015). 3D motion picture, DCI DCP. 14:56 min. Image courtesy the artist, Sprüth Magers and Gladstone Gallery, NY. Photo: Timo Ohler.