Bit Part: On Art & Kids
“The concept of family is almost too much of a convention for the art world. ”
“[Jane] Gallop’s maternity had rotted her [Rosalind Krauss’] mind—besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.”
“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions.”
“Ree Morton’s iconography was composed of the very clichés—bright, almost childlike colors; the presence of playground objects like seesaws—that critics might have used to condemn her, as they were those associated with a wife and mother, already into her 30s, who had domestic duties and a
parochial life.”
“The point of art is to unsettle, to question, to disturb what is comfortable and safe. And that shouldn’t be anyone’s goal as a parent.”
HONEYMOON PERIODS destroy every other relationship, so much so that if honeymoons lasted forever the world would not last. Evan Dando’s plea to Juliana Hatfield in The Lemonheads’ Bit part is reasonable for the needs and wants of two realists, two musicians, two artists. Anything more than a “bit part” will need “reprimanding” as the last lyric promises. See, a “bit part” is all we are willing or can afford to give to the Other as artists. Anything more than less is too much. Indeed the percentages are a little bleak when it comes to self-obsessives. Obsession is good for the artist, necessary even. Obsession is something “you cannot will” according to artist John Baldessari, the same way free association in psychoanalytic practice cannot be willed. In other words, if you are not afflicted by obsession, by the ‘big part’, then you might as well give up on being an artist. Without obsession art is a hobby, a break from the day job, the kids, a marriage. It is not a commitment. Being an artist is about keeping the honeymoon period going and the marriage (and children) at bay, even though the sun has gone down, the croissants are hard, the coffee cold and the shower too hot. (We all end up being married in the end, to ourselves if not someone else.) If you cannot “will” obsession then it’s something you were born with or something you are running from. Either way obsession separates those that do and those that don’t do. Perennial honeymooners (real artists) don’t ‘think’ about doing like Eva Hesse is accused of by her close friend Sol Lewitt, honeymooners “DO!” as a recourse to thinking too much and not doing enough. The difference between honeymooners and hanger-ons is the former keeps turning the soil of their art while the latter hopes the one crop of work will never need harvesting. Evan Dando’s lyrics are realistic enough to proffer nothing more than a “bit part”—to save himself from himself and a “walk-on would be fine”. There’s something desperate and selfish about his plea, whether as bait to achieve a bigger part later, or the limits of his devotion. Our devotion to ourselves through our art as artists makes us casually devoted to everything outside ourselves and our art. But what happens when devotion for something outside ourselves and our art becomes the ‘big part’?
Psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips wrote in the Penguin Freud Reader that his relationship to psychoanalysis is one of “casual devotion”, and that anything more would mean being part of the “cult”, adding that psychoanalysis, and by implication, any relationship, is best when it conspires with something else, in his and psychoanalysis’ case, with literature. Art critic Melanie Gilligan said something similar in relation to a split in devotion at a conference on art criticism, where she advised or advocated having one foot out of the artworld is a necessity, one of critical fortitude and survival—Gilligan’s other foot is planted firmly in finance theory, which makes perfect sense when you think of what a powerful hold the art market has on the hydraulics and mentality of the artworld. Texte Zur Kunst founder Isabelle Graw in an interview for Spike Magazine devoted to the secret subject of “Kids in the Art World”—the said title intimating the artworld and lifeworld are separate—shared her personal split in devotion to art after becoming a “so-called older mother” in 2006, “I had, after all, devoted myself passionately to writing or, more precisely, to theorising about artistic practices and I subordinated everything to this primacy. One consequence of this focus on work was that my social relationships were largely instrumental: I would scarcely have concerned myself with anyone who didn’t interest me in relation to my work.” Graw’s example interests me most here as a fellow parent and art critic who found my full devotion to art split in 2012 when my wife and I decided to have children, and I decided that my art practice would not survive the financial or emotional demands of being a new parent, but somehow writing on art would be more mobile and conspiratorial with parenthood. Looking back it seems like a cynical, almost nihilistic move on the part of an artist who achieved high visibility and worked hard and unapologetically towards that end for five years rolling, following an MFA in the midst of the financial crash. Strangely, it was a move and decision made with optimism and retrospectively, no regrets. I knew the artworld that I had come to know intimately would not accommodate parenthood. Donald Winnicott and his ‘good enough mother’ comes to mind when I think of how, not just the mother, but also the father adapts to parenthood, especially the first five years, when the parents’ relationship with the world as they once knew it and existed in, free and wheeling, becomes “good enough”, becomes a “bit part” relative to the “big part” of parenthood. The paradox of choosing to have children is you don’t know what it is like to have children until you have children. And being a parent or not is not a case of being selfish or selfless; parents and non-parents are greedy in their own ways. Christopher Hitchens in a late interview at the time he knew he was dying from oesophageal cancer said his life and writing would be quite arbitrary if it wasn’t marked by having children, even though in the next breath he admitted that his children were only a bit part of his life, especially in the infant years when he stood back and marvelled at the natural capacities of their mother to “know what to do”.
Being a parent is essentially a breakup with the world. The Lemonheads’ songs always feel like breakup songs. Like: “I still care about you,” s/he said, before the break up in a universal heartbreaking moment when love is demoted to “care”. To “care for” someone in other moments of life, life being momentous not monstrous, such as to care for someone who’s ill, or dying, means giving yourself over, offering yourself to someone who is in need, for a moment in time at least. And yet moments can become monstrous, changing us on a molecular level, forevermore. Thing is, breaking up with someone is a case of inflicting injury upon them, inflicting trauma even, so “care” is the appropriate word after wounding them in the most cruel of ways by revoking your once-upon-a-time love: the end of the fairytale as it were. I broke up with art some eight years ago. Not art per se, which I still love and also ‘care for’ through writing; I broke up with my artist-identity which I loved and cared for since the age of ten when my 4th class teacher said there was an artist in me after I painted some landscape one early afternoon amidst freewheeling childhood and Autumn chestnut fights and noticed love and regret in his eyes. Twenty years later I became an artist with two feet in the game attaining visibility and agency. I attended everything and anything of relevance to art. My appetite for art was always satisfied. I was never hungry for more, maybe less, much less. My appetite for production was informed by the privilege of procrastination and boredom. I was always at a loose end. We decide to have kids. I tentatively shared the news with close artist-friends knowing what the response would be, from concerned “What about your art?” to cynical “See you in twenty years?—maybe not!” Neither response bothered me. My bags were already packed. I knew that being the artist I once was needed my full commitment and attention; anything less was less. I was a parachuted dreamer leaping into a new life for everyone involved. Eight years on from the birth of my son and daughter I raise my head above the trench of parenthood to see the field is furrowed all the way to the horizon, although the trench is not as deep. This is parenthood: it’s phasic, it’s chronic, both wonderful and worrying. Since their birth I have been greatly affected by moments in film and literature that portray the so-called successful visual artist or writer as detached parent, especially the mother. For example, you have the young Susan Sontag leaving her seven-year-old son to head to Oxford for a residency after a period of “domestic imprisonment” and “intellectual stultification”, and then to Paris to write, to love and appear in a French New Wave film, detached, smiling and self-conscious. Parent to parent, it’s the “self” in “self-conscious” that jumps off the screen when I look at Sontag. The self is something pissed and soiled upon when you become a parent: “an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject” (Julia Kristeva). Early parenthood is a stew of emotions where language is heated in a slow cooker so the stink mists you day and night, bathroom to bedroom, memory to dream, in abject wet and want, in a home turned womb, hot with anxiety and love where windows are blinded day and night and day. There is no time or energy for the self as you once knew it so intimately, so all-consuming. You and not you, the infant self is so big and narcissistic and compelling and monstrous that it strangles the Other. In one sense it is you, or the memory of you and the environments and contexts that swallowed you and embraced you as a child, as an adult, as a dream; in another sense, it is pure, unadulterated self, id., turning inward, overlapping itself, folding, inging, a baroque incestuasness that finds warmth in its own florid embrace and fold. This what confronts you as a parent, a self more committed to itself than you were to you. And this is just a father talking from the outside of the maternal embrace. Fathers are mere voyeurs of pregnancy behind an ajar door that partly obscures the abject embrace of mother and child. A father’s view is a warped iPhone view, a scrunched parallelogram of blind spots and black spots, granting the emotional and perceptual objectivity to describe it in language that still manages to fail at every milky fold of its realness. Language is never so-called real here; it’s colourless and flat and late to the real that it decides to decode and attend to, grafting itself on to the real like a slippery Band-Aid hiding and mending the wounds that squirt and ooze stuff that words cannot stick to. Language is shit here, this “thoroughfare where ‘nature’ confronts ‘culture’” (Giovanni Bellini). As a stay-at-home father my language changed in this environment where relationships swim together in air that breathes and touches and cries and weeps and ejects. How could an artist survive in this abject sweat, man or woman? You have heard parents talk about tiredness, victims of this unhappy animal that weeps and screams from every orifice, day and night, without respite. But proclamations of tiredness is just language failing again. It’s not tiredness; it’s how day and night, dream and reality, past and present, time and space and memory become the same. The child’s abject gravity face plants you in this environment, bruised cheek to slobbering jowl, where the walls of privacy dissolve and skin grafts to skin, forgotten memories forming new memories and vice versa. The world becomes fragmented and you start to notice sinewy tendons holding the everyday together. The round world becomes flat again, made primal and mythological by a prelinguistic child that shifts the perspective from distance to detail. The infant forces this new way of seeing, feeling, that is both horrifying and pleasurable, maybe close to what Lacan described as “jouissance”. It’s the turning inward, due to an inflated need for privacy because you and it are vulnerable, at your most vulnerable, ever—‘vulnerability’ was just a theory, a word before, before you entered this lair. You are not the same, you are not doing the choosing, this wordless animal the navigator. This is an environment where words are not enough, where words fail dramatically, as we try to inflict words, graft words, onto this animal that twists and turns on its own volition and violence. We never bond with the things and institutions of self in the world but, if lucky, we bond with ourselves and those we make abject contact with in the world. The bond is terrifying, however, because when the bond is forming the sutures hurt and when the bond loosens it hurts even more. The push and pull, closeness and distance of familial life and relationships perennially flirt with pain and pleasure at the threshold of being. You give yourself to your child. Skin to skin is the first procedure; it physically wrenches you out of a world where bonds are not biological but instrumental, their strength constructed in memory and routine, self-preservation of mind and matter being the motivation. Being at a loose end is not freedom to do anything; it’s the unravelling of a system that you have constructed over time to stave off nature. Nature is chaos; the artworld is the nursery.
Spike Magazine’s artworld parent interviewees for their “Kids in the Art World” feature were, unsurprisingly, already high profile artists when they fell pregnant, so reflections on a loss of productivity and social mobility—as a productive and creative means to work and success—are the main neoliberal grievances. Art and life (without kids) according to their rare experiences and privileged positions, are interlinked socially and professionally, so that a real fear of disappearing and losing agency is felt by artists who fell pregnant. Isabelle Graw is the most articulate and at her most open, sharing “That this sort of life dedicated to the requirements of work came at the cost of other needs, such as emotional attention or human sympathy. Initially, the idea of becoming a mother, and consequently no longer being able to operate in the very front ranks, was certainly frightening. When you have a child, you can no longer participate in all the events, which reduces your presence and visibility.” Graw’s gain in “emotional attention and human sympathy” is singed by the loss of instrumental sociability, that place where care and truth is replaced by agendas towards greater agency and fluidity within the extremely conservative and formal parameters of the artworld. Sometimes I think the artworld that we are breeding is not the right world; that the artworld, a world that we didn’t name ‘artworld’ when we first tripped on the dream of becoming artists, is so distant a memory as artists become more entrenched in the way things are that we have forgot the dream; the dream being, art and life—not art and professionalism—actually need each other; that oxymoronic terms like ‘social practice’ did not have to exist out of a polluted outlook to re-territorize art away from the big bad artworld, but in doing so making art and life separate; that art and life was one big part not compromised bit parts. But here we stand, divided,
rehearsing all the time. .......