And Then There's This by Bill Wasik

Author:Bill Wasik
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101057704
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2012-02-19T03:02:52+00:00

FIG. 3-4—KURT STRAHM’S IDEA TREE

“I tried to break down what I was interested in,” Strahm said as he scrolled through. “It’s silly, but that’s the kind of person I am.” Many of these ideas described art projects that Strahm felt were too grandiose for him ever to implement. For example, he pointed out one called “Car Alarm Coffin.” He explained: “I hate fucking car alarms. You know this guy Issa, Darrell Issa? He’s a right-wing congressman from California; he claims to have invented the car alarm. So I was going to, you know, bury him”—a rendering of Issa, that is—“in this coffin surrounded by, like, sixty car alarms, and let him have it for eternity.”

Another idea was called “Accidental Street Sculpture”—he had it filed under HUMAN - CONSTRUCTIONS - TECHNOLOGY - JUNK—and had a single picture to go along with it. The idea ran as follows: “A series of snapshots of twisted street sign poles, accidental sculpture.” He had taken the single picture so that, through his blog, he might explain the concept to others. I pointed out that unlike, perhaps, Car Alarm Coffin, Accidental Street Sculpture seemed eminently doable for an artist of his skill level.

“Given the time, I could,” he replied wearily. “You know, walk every street in Manhattan. What a clichéd idea—every edition of the New York Times, every street in Manhattan. I thought of taking a picture of every long garbage pile in Manhattan, at the right time of day. . . . The trouble is, I’ve been trying to quit just enjoying having ideas, and communicate a little like you’re supposed to when you do art or write, and explain in an interesting way why I found these ideas so pleasurable myself.”

In his telling, no single one of Strahm’s ideas ever merited much of his own respect. It was only when he laid out the meta-idea—how he was disseminating the ideas through his blog—that a softening, almost a sentimentality, crept into his voice. “I never had kids, I never wanted kids,” he said. “So the question is, what do you pass along, when you, you know—what do you pass along? And what I want to pass along is—there’s so much fucking ugliness—I would like to pass along what affected me about life, what I find deep, and, you know, meaningful, and interesting, and funny.”

Looking at the painstakingly realized artwork on the walls—the cultural production of an earlier self—I realized that Strahm now saw the world with clear eyes; he had figured it out before the rest of us. It was a mug’s game, these days, to spend months laboring over an art project, only to have it exhibited briefly in a gallery, perhaps purchased, but almost certainly soon forgotten. By contrast, a stripped-down, imperfectly realized project, or even just an idea for the project, can be disseminated, spread, appreciated in an instant; one can watch it spread online from mind to mind, see plaudits and criticisms spin out in real time; one can watch, indeed, its very abandonment, even as another idea has taken its place.

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