Sisyphus Shrugged?

“Witness,” on leave from a project with Helen and Newton Harrison, is visiting us for a while.  As per usual, Witness is asking questions [in the tradition of Socrates] that help us focus in our search for understanding…..

Witness:  So what exactly is the difference between “ceaseless” and “useless,” or are they the same thing?

Jean:  Well, I think Sisyphus’ labors may be ceaseless, and they may be useless in terms of energy output being turned into something concrete – his labors cannot be called “work,” I suppose.    But his energy expenditure is also useful as the signifier of a general human condition.  And that is beneficial.

Witness:  So does that mean that Sisyphus would not be expected to shrug?  That is, Sisyphus will actually continue to labor into eternity?

Jean:  Yes.  His tedium is a form of prayer.  It is repetitious and focused – I’m sure he experiences that sense of “stopped time” – what Eliade would call the “Eternal Moment.”  And so his labors transmit to us the possibility of stopped time as well. 

You know, I’ve been thinking about this whole issue for quite a while, and for a time even thought that “tedium” had something to do with God – “Te Deum.”  Make sense?

W:  But – what will we DO with that information?  Surely it is of no benefit to us unless we have a means to achieve the same state of grace?

J:  I think you must be asking me that question as a fellow artist – am I right?  Aren’t you wondering how an artist might tap into the ethos of ceaseless labor, thus achieving the epiphany of stop-time?

I suppose each of us has to find our own personal means to that end.  But if we assume there is a “benefit,” don’t we also assume a moment of completion?  I think what we really seek is fulfillment, not closure.  I guess fulfillment is beneficial……..

W:  I may have been thinking about Jay DeFeo – that congealed mass of paint that she worked on for so many years, and which may never have been finished.  Didn’t she die without declaring it finished?

J:  I’m not sure about that last part, but I do know she worked on it for years – endlessly or ceaselessly!

W:  So what would be your own particular version of what DeFeo was doing?

J:  I’m not at all certain that DeFeo had voiced any kind of conceptual agenda – that she had any particular vision for the process.  I’d need to go further into that. 

Oddly, Peter Scheldahl recently suggested that there is a trend toward working in small scale and in tedious increments – I think he refers to those artists as “Termites”!  DeFeo’s canvas may have been monumental, but the engagement was the same – termite work…..  And this all fits with how I envision a game for myself.

W:  What do you mean by “game”?

J:  As an alternative to a finished product.  More as a kind of state of eternal playing and imagining.  I think about Borges a lot – his fantastic imaginary libraries that stretch on into infinity and eternity – and I try to live in my own ongoing Borgesian fantasy.  In fact, that’s why I hate that whole current art crit riff about end games……

Here are two examples.

I construct collages from hundreds of tiny, ½ inch squares, which are cut out of very old textbooks.  In these textbooks, which I have collected for years, I started to notice that the children who had used them made marks – what you might call “doodles” or “graffiti.”  Funny little figures, strange scrawls and hackneyed pronouncements [“Roses are red”] are found throughout these books.  One boy even did graphite rubbings from coins in his pocket – he must really have been bored!  So I imagine that these marks were made out of a sense of – oh – eternal tedium as only children experience it.  Stuck in a classroom while birds are singing outside!  And the books are also stained – fingerprints, grease stains, little bits of food, ink blots – even pressed flowers and the stains they leave.  The books have been touched.

When I cut out a square, I only do so from those parts of a book that have been marked or stained.  The collages I make with them, then, are reconstructed records of thousands of children and thousands of hours they spent in a kind of suspension state.  I, in turn, share in that through my process of snipping and re-arranging the squares.  Too, I feel very close those distant children – so time is compressed and halted.

So far I’m only making fairly small grid pieces of these materials – ranging from 8x8” to 24x24” mostly.  But I imagine much, much larger works – panel after panel, say 40x40”-- that stretch on into infinity, each one consisting of thousands of these tiny squares – each 40 x 40 panel would contain 6400 separate squares.  So that, eventually, all of the graffiti and stains in the world for all time are preserved.

W:  That does indeed sound like a good example of useless, or at least ceaseless, tedium.

J:  That is the whole idea, of course.  I like the thought that I could have a project that never ended – that would carry me forward into the unknown future.

W:  So how can you show me what you mean?

J:  Only in fragments.  Here is one small piece with a lot of wonderful doodles and stains.  I think of it as being evidence – a small specimen – of what I can only imagine.