At the LBC blog

I saw the artist Chris Burden speak at SCIArc last night. I know of his work from the art history classes I took in college. He is most well known for conceptual/performance pieces that even in our more jaded times are pretty shocking: He locked himself in a 2ft X 2ft X 3ft locker for five days; he sequestered himself for 22 days on a ledge built close to the ceiling in a New York gallery. Though the audience was told he was there, they were not able to see him from their vantage points. At his gallery in Venice Beach he pressed live electrical wires against his chest. He had hiself briefly crucified atop a Volkswagon Beetle. And, in a piece that has proved to be his most notorious, he had a friend shoot him, agressively confronting the artist/audience relationship.

At some point, however, he switched to architectural work, both on the scale of buildings and scale models. During his lecture he didn’t not explain this transformation. I suppose he wasn’t obligated to, but it would have been interesting. His later work is very introverted, and seems very weak compared to the early part of his career.

He did have a few things of interest to say though. most notably that “sculpture is different from two-dimensional work in that it forces the viewer to move,” and the revelation early in his career that if he brought a prexisting object into the gallery and acted upon it during the course of the piece, the audience would see his actions as the art and not the objects. This was his transition from sculpture to performance. L. and I discussed at length whether we should be disappointed in an artist who has turned away from his early, daring work, and who seems unable to talk about why. Though in the end it is hard to make such a judgement based upon a single lecture. Today, my coworker said that the wilder the public persona, the milder the private citizen, and surely there is an element of that at play here. Still, I cannot reconcile the idea that a man who once had himself shot before an audience (1.) can find little compelling to say about it and (2.) now creates work which is as bland as his early mastery was vital.

Here is a link to his interviews as well as some of his work.

A while back, we diagnosed David Brooks‘ Bobo Shuffle; now it’s time to call The New York Times’ most pugnacious and prolific book reviewer on her patented move: The Kakutani Two-Step. It works roughly like this: belittle a novelist’s finest work to date – preferably by tossing around unsupported adjectives…say, “arbitrary,” “flimsy,” and “unfinished.” Then, five or six years later, when the novelist in question brings forth his next book, or the one after that, complain loudly about how lame it is compared to his previous masterwork, which, it is to be inferred, you adored. (Bonus points if you actually now call the previous book a “masterwork.” Double bonus points if you also work in the word “limn.”)

The Kakutani Two-Step depends on readers having short memories (or perhaps sagely avoiding Kakutani’s “Books of the Times” columns altogether) and so not noticing the cognitive dissonance. Only fans of the writers she caricatures (and, one imagines, the writers themselves) are likely to detect the sinister signature of the KTS. The latest victim is Jonathan Lethem, whose new Chronic City Kakutani calls “tedious [and] overstuffed”…and that’s just the first sentence of the review! “This fictional Manhattan,” she continues,
has none of the energy or keenly observed grittiness of the real-life Brooklyn that Mr. Lethem captured with such verve in his 2003 novel, The Fortress of Solitude.
But wait, wasn’t that “dazzling” novel “fundamentally flawed,” with
a series of unconvincing and weirdly forced passages that break the spell that Mr. Lethem has so assiduously created?
Not to mention a “contrived” and “melodramatic” ending?” And “many defects” in between? According to Kakutani, circa 2003, it was. Your takeaway from the Fortress of Solitude review: flawed, uneven, defective. Your takeaway from the Chronic City review: Michiko misses the “vividly . . . movingly” dazzling Fortress of Solitude.

To be sure, it’s possible to square the two Lethem reviews, if you’re enough of a Kakutani exegete to infer that her kneejerk distaste, in each case, is for Lethem’s forays into genre-bending. But all the casual reader will notice is the invidious comparison between the two books, the sudden vanishing of any her earlier reservations, like a magician’s cloth being whisked away to reveal a tiny, perfect turd.

I’m too tired right now to track down other instances of the KTS, but you don’t have to look hard to find them; you might start by Googling David Foster Wallace (and if you think of more, why not leave them in the comment thread?) To be sure, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. It may also be true that Michiko’s judgment works on the time-release principle of certain antacids…that hindsight makes the heart grow fonder. But, even in these lean days for newspapers, the Times presumably employs fact-checkers who could easily catch La Kakutani’s self-misrepresentation. One thing is clear: she can’t be bothered to check herself.