[UNTITLED] Water, Perspex, Soil, etc. : Imagined Theatres

Form	Themes	Histories	Politics	Philosophies	Experiments
image spectacle objects artist statement humor autobiography diary experiment	time humanity catastrophe landscape documentation politics everyday public children collectivity poetry installation labor water art climate change economy vulnerability	event environmental antropocene	ecology capitalism activism aesthetics	institutional critique eco-criticism

This is the height of my “career”. I have received a multi-million-dollar commission to make a piece of public performance: I am delighted. I am so fucking delighted. I’m not even going to lie about it. You’d be delighted too.

The piece that I’m going to work on is something I’ve been gestating for many years, since I was born, really. Since my whole life if I’m being honest. It’s going to be titled The Children vs The US Government. And here is what I’m going to create.

The sun is baking down, a cliché. The sweat is rolling down my arms from my pits, a state. The sky is a marshmallow, a metaphor. Meaning: the sky is thick with smog and the air is hot. Sweet, there’s a sweetness – yes. The smog has been here for years now. For the first half of my life we didn’t notice it so much. Now it’s highly present, a constant debate. I’m laboring, I have decided to perform a labor. An act of labor. I want to birth the work of art with my sweat, to make it real: the bodily co-presence of anyone with me and my sweat will heighten the sense of ‘the real’ to the point where it is, in fact, real.

Here’s what I pitched in my grant application, which was approved to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars. Oh wait, I said this was a commission didn’t I. Multimillion, commission. Right. I had to write a kind of pitch for the commission. Let’s say. Grants are dead, the NEA is dead, the Arts Council is dead. The piece will revolve around a vast Olympic-sized swimming pool (the Olympics are dead).

I have been digging this hole for the past seven years now. I have to admit, when I began this project I did not think it would take this long. This is why I have decided to add the idea of ‘labor’ into my work itself, and of course ‘the real.’ The hole I’m digging stretches 50m long and 25m wide. I have soil underneath my fingernails that is from a different geological epoch. They changed the geological epoch while I was digging. My mother died while I was digging. I imagined digging her grave too but honestly I couldn’t face it. I already have the feeling I might be digging a grave, a mass grave. No, no — it’s a swimming pool. I have to remind myself.

The basic premise is that the swimming pool will reach 5m into the ground, and then a Perspex wall will also stand 1.5m above the ground level: so when the pool is filled the water will be visible above ground level. Does this make sense? It’s important. So the sides of the pool are visible, a bit like an aquarium. You know, fish. The pool will be finished in concrete once the hole is done, that will then be finished in fiberglass. There is a mold for the Perspex, which will be inserted last. Perspex is cheaper than glass. The Perspex will be secured with grit and that gummy stuff that lines the bathtub.

Now at year seven I have realized there is no need for the 5m underground, what was I thinking. 2m will be plenty. Also why waste that much water, considering the content of the piece.

One hundred children will float, suspended by inflatable rings that sit around their necks, in the water. Does that make sense: so the children are floating in the water, with just their heads above the surface. Their bodies are submerged. I have partnered with 30 local schools for participants. Children will spend three hours at a time floating, then they will be rotated out. This is due to attention spans. The children cannot play and frolic in the water. It is a somber piece.

I’m not sure about the title.

Can you see it? A huge expanse of water, crystal clear, a cliché. Dotted with little floating heads. What a better way to encounter the notions of vulnerability, fragility, instability, accountability, renewability, and reality. The reality of science, the scientific reality of it all.

I wake up one morning and get dressed to go to the site. My laptop is open on my bed where I fell asleep to Excel – working on the budget. At this point we’ve (I’ve) finished the digging and the concrete has (finally) been set, the fiberglass is in place. We’re going to put the Perspex in today and then we will finally be close to filling it. My project manager, Jeremy, is doing an amazing job working with the schools. The teachers are all pretty excited and the parents are on board. Anyway, I wake and get dressed to get to the site. I turn on the news.

You will be able to see the bodies and legs of the children through the Perspex, floating in the water. I haven’t decided about whether or not they will wear swimsuits or underpants or what. I haven’t decided what will be a better representation of vulnerability. I actually think there’s a power to ‘the nude’ that is undeniable and inherently at one with nature, the natural. I.e. climate. So underpants may or may not heighten ‘the vulnerable’. We may or may not feel accountable in relation to the nude. It’s a difficult choice.

I can’t sleep. On the news is another giant wave, another tsunami, another storm, another suicide, another and another. I watch the shaky, blurred camera footage and the rain hits the lens and the palm falls over, is pushed flat.

Children drown on the news, for days. I am alarmed by the reality of the work. It feels unethical. I think: have I caused this? That feels narcissistic. Which is worse. That’s a real, not a rhetorical, question.

I reread ‘Revolutionary Letters’, by Diane di Prima, a collection of poems from the 1970s. It’s one of my favorite books. It’s a collection of poems that are letters, poems written as letters, about a real revolution in the 70s. The author lived underground, was forced to live underground as a political radical, a free radical, a chemical, for her political actions. ‘I realize that all I have to offer is my body, no more, no less.’ That’s one of my favorites.

I can’t sleep, I read again.

I turn over. Perhaps I fall asleep.

We fill the pool.

I reread ‘Revolutionary Letters’ again.

I sleep with a little help from my friends.

I wonder whether I have ‘submitted’ to a ‘system based on linear time, on causality.’

The children are dead the children are all dead.

I wake up.

It’s a very real proposition.

Unethical I decide.

The pool sparkles in the light, the light dances on the surface of the water, a cliché. My nephew and two of his friends are here to do some test runs, I get them pizza for their time. The pizza comes in a cardboard box, three cardboard boxes.

I reread ‘Revolutionary Letters.’

The opening of the work is a huge success. I’m not just saying that. The reviews are great, other rich people come, they might commission something else. The kids look great in the water. It’s such a simple and clear articulation of what I mean. The kids, suspended in the water and just their mouths above the surface, nearly drowning.

In [UNTITLED]Water, Perspex, Soil, etc., Kate Attwell imagines a theatre that is past irony. The auteur at the heart of her text yearns to close the gap between the art object and herself, the art star. At least, she wants the appearance of having forsaken aesthetic detachment. And we’re with her. (I am with her.) After all, there is no room for deadpanning when it concerns million dollar art “commissions.” Not that it was ever easy to be ironic about producing massively-scaled performances before—we get a sense that there was indeed a time before since so much has been declared “dead” by the art star. But even in the halcyon before, the time of the living, large crowds generally preferred unruly expenditures of euphoria or anger to that of pure disinterestedness. In the present time of [UNTITLED], acts of gathering cannot be fathomed. (Like the climate crisis suburban constituents were once unable to imagine—too busy taking selfies and buying comestibles in bulk—no one knows how to collectively gather, even though images of crowds remain as readily available as pornography.) No one gathers en masse in the new now; like a theatre past irony, it can no longer be performed in real time.

The art star in The Pool works backwards. She searches for the crowd as if it were a fossil from a previous era for which there is no longer an equivalent. This is not interpretation so much as it is sacrifice, bodily sacrifice with each inhalation of smoggy air, each hand dug extraction of earth. (She is assumedly digging for our benefit not to motor her international career. Yes, irony and clean air got stamped out, but art world ego survived the crossing from the time before.) And yet, even she cannot reconstruct public assembly, but digs her way by hand to the present, the new now, and the infantile age of the dead crowd. In searching for the agora, the closest the art star can come to conjuring a crowd is a viewing tank in which motionless children are durationally suspended in the water from the neck down. In another context, living time, this would have been a parodic gesture of a too, too precious artist with money to burn and kids to exploit. In the new now, it is the closest thing to collective embodiment.

In truth, the art star is in thrall to her own bloated masterpiece, even if she did cut the project a few meters short. Anyone who digs for that long has bypassed a restrained, “cool” evaluation of the situation—the situation being our planet, which tipped, long ago, past crisis and into its manufactured death throes. The only work left is to build the graves and bury the dead. This is a different kind of art labor than the conceptual virtuosity demonstrated in Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). The shark is dead; the school children are drowning but alive. This is “nonlife” pace Elizabeth Povinelli, a living death in which the four chambers of the heart continue to pump in the presence of planetary extinction. In the new now, the sky has fallen on our heads. We need not contemplate death as a high gloss referent, since life itself barely persists in Perspex.

While it goes unmentioned, the art star has always harbored a distaste for Hirst and his removal from his own material processes. Not that she could have gone it alone. She is grateful to her energetic project manager, competent nephew, the helpful parents, excited teachers, docile children… (The point is Hirst never got his hands dirty in the time before.) And yet, a nagging question remains for the art star: why assemble to witness “nearly drowning” children in the floating performance installation when everywhere we witness children actually drowning? Clearly, there’s a confusion of priorities, but no one can doubt her respect for materials, her physical commitment to the work, the “big build.”

[UNTITLED] Water, Perspex, Soil, etc.

[UNTITLED] Water, Perspex, Soil, etc. : Gloss

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[UNTITLED] Water, Perspex, Soil, etc.

[UNTITLED] Water, Perspex, Soil, etc. : Gloss

About the Author

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