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.”