My friend Mo, who makes art out of smashed glass and discarded objects (urinals, ice boxes, diner stools etc.), sent me and several hundred other people an email the other day. The email referred to an essay "Art is the Excrement of Action," by Jeannette Winterson, a writer I had loved in college. The essay was co-opted by anonymous street art vandals to explain their actions. Reading about it reminded me of a quote from one of her novels that has stayed somewhere in my head. The quote reminded me of the novel it's from, which I had signed by the author some years ago. In looking for the book I realized I had lost this treasure, and that I was no longer that attached to it.
I felt strangely compelled to respond to Mo's mass email newsletter. To tell her about this author and her effect on my silly tender heart. I guess I needed to explain, to defend something I had loved in the past. I did, and then of course that fool woman wanted more, so here it is:
"What you risk reveals what you value."
When I Googled that, in an attempt to make sure I had the right book, Google completed my sentence. That's significant because Google only completes phrases that are ubiquitous on the web. My heart sank, both because it is ubiquitous and because the places that cited this quotation the most were sites purporting to index "quotations about risk." None of the places I looked could confirm for me that this was from The Passion, which is an early novel of Winterson's about gamblers and soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars and all kinds of other things. It's also about love and sacrifice, because that's the only subject Winterson writes novels about.
Since she doesn't worry much about the genders of the lovers or even the kind of love they express in her work, you can imagine why they attract the attention of the young and the sapphic. There are tons of places where you can find out what this quote means; I won't write an essay about that here. The Passion is a tremendously popular and well-studied book. This is the heart of its philosophical assertion: that love of any kind is a gamble, but it is worth dying (or going through a passion) for. Out of context, it's strange that this quotation is seen as being about risk, because I have always loved it more for its being about values. I think of values as the product of our process of living. I remember this quotation from Winterson's novel because this novel and meeting its author taught me the difference between the process and the product.
When I was younger, and I suppose more sapphic, I was also unsure what I valued. Looking at it now, it is apparent that I really valued being witty and getting laid. Almost everything I was doing in college could be described as a process for producing witty writing and getting somewhere with young women and men. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that the first time I read about Winterson's risk and values proposition, I was reading it in an attempt to get a particularly beautiful young woman to sleep with me. Or, failing that, to think I was clever. Either one would have satisfied my narcissism at the time. It also should surprise no one that The Passion became an ideal of good writing and even good living for me.
It shouldn't surprise anyone because it's true for thousands of others. That it's a high concept romance novel is exactly why this book is popular with certain young people, and why I think Winterson has been running from it for the entirety of her career. She created in that book a beautiful art object, and froze herself in 1987. Based on what she's written since, it seems she might wish she had released her third novel in a time when Women's Studies and Gender Studies were not looking so hard for someone to canonize.
What I can admit now is that whatever my motivations for picking it up, after I read that novel it was no longer about me and the hot young woman. It was about me and Ms. Winterson. Never before and certainly not since have I ever been infatuated with a writer or any other kind of celebrity. I don't have the same love for The Passion that I had when I was twenty. While I'm nostalgically upset that I lost my signed copy, I'm not as upset as I would have been to have lost the book before I got it signed. The reason for that is that the spark went out as soon as I met the author. I'm certain she meant for it to.
When I met Winterson, and by met I mean that I shook her hand and mumbled something at a sparsely attended reading in a Dublin bookshop, I was more disappointed than I should have been. On an intellectual level I knew she was not the same as her writing voice. I knew that she and the product of her creativity were not the same thing. I was sophisticated in the ways of postmodern criticism.
I was also, though I would not admit it then, a breathless hero-worshipping romantic. Winterson's book tapped into that. She did nothing more than write the perfect contemporary version of a Romance, and I did nothing more than read it. Her book worked on me because it was an exploration of hero-worship and I needed a hero but was too old for comic books. Twenty years after it ceased to be important to her, it was important to me. The problem was, I confused the product with the process. I let myself get caught up in something that was no longer a living part of its creator. I let myself feel like I was there when she wrote it.
But every romance leads to disillusionment. When I met her I was disappointed, as so many who meet their idols are, but I also respected her way of intentionally smashing up my expectations. She read her work and signed my book, looked at me coolly and said "that's interesting" about whatever I had mumbled. I can't imagine she even heard what I mumbled. She threw me an encouragement that had no real meaning or emotion behind it. She dismissed me. Beyond that she was short and middle-aged. Not an all powerful hero at all. That finding out your Prince or Princess Charming is a toad is a common fairy-tale theme did not occur to me in the moment.
Yes, Winterson still writes about love, but she doesn't write about the risk so much anymore. Now she writes about art and technology and living and dying. In some ways she is still risky and sexy, but not like she was when it was all about hero worship. I would not want her to be. That would make her a dirty old woman. I still read her books because she still writes beautifully, but I'm not in thrall any more. Perhaps that's because I am no longer trying to get smart college girls to sleep with me. Which is all to the good because while I'm not middle-aged, I think they could do a lot better with other smart college girls and boys.
So, about my friend Mo's email. How does it have anything to do with Jeanette Winterson, my schoolgirl crush, or making art? Well, it was about art and destroying public works of art. Apparently someone's been running around New York City splashing paint on public art and leaving a manifesto thought to come from an essay Winterson wrote, called "Product is the Excrement of Action." Winterson's thesis is that we Westerners fetishize products over experiences and that artists who obsess about the product are betraying the process by not living in the present. Well, I guess that explains why she didn't ask me out all those years ago when I showed up asking her to sign my fetish object. My little relic of her to take home with my other souvenirs of "study abroad."
What I don't get about the "Splasher" (the Village Voice points out that it's a comic book name) is how he/she or they justifies caring enough to destroy these "fixed, deathless images," (in Winterson's terms). If he or she devotes time to destroying them and leaving manifestos about it, haven't they gotten in on this little fetish on a level beyond that of the casual art appreciator? I mean, isn't writing crazed screeds (based on an established artist's work), publishing them on homemade wheatpaper and pasting them to public art you've just splattered paint all over evidence of being a little too involved with art objects? Further, if your screed also threatens harm to those who might remove it (via bits of smashed glass), isn't it more about the future than the present?
The best part of the email is where my friend (she who makes the old new again) takes the manifesto of the paint splasher and does this with it:
I, forgetting that this was not Winterson's idea even though it referred to her essay, asked my friend if she thought Jeannette was Anna Nicole Smith's baby-daddy. I felt a pang of envy for Anna, and then I laughed. I laughed at the impossibility of being human without creating monuments, myths and heroes to worship. I laughed at the impossibility of avoiding romanticizing our past.
So I am posting the manifesto in its entirety here with my expert analysis from my secret spy decoder ring, font size randomizing decryptologizer software, and I while I have uncovered the true message of the manifesto, I will leave it to you to decide just who seems the most likely Raskolnikov here:
~"ART: THE EXCREMENT OF ACTION
A Dadaist once smashed a clock, dipped the pieces in ink, pressed the ink-soaked pieces against a sheet of paper and had it framed. His purpose was to criticize the modernist idealization of efficiency. Rather than inspiring the widespread smashing of clocks and the reevaluation of time in society, the piece of paper has become a sought-after commodity. The production of a representative organ(the ink-imprinted paper) for theaction (the smashing of the clock) guaranteed this outcome. Likean idealistic politician, the piece of paper, despite its creator's intent, can only represent, and it is for this reason that it instantly became a fetishized object segregated from the action. Only in a culture obsessed with its own excrement are the by-products of action elevated above action itself.
Representation is the most elemental form of alienation. Art as representation is no exception. It is just another means by which our perceptions and desires are mediated. Art is the politician of our senses: it creates actors and an audience, agents and a mass. True creativityis the joyful destruction of this hierarchy; it is the unmediated actualization of desires. The passion for destruction is a creative passion. We are all capable of manifesting our desires directly, free of representation and commodification. We will continue manifesting ours by euthanizing your bourgeois fad."~
Mystery revealed.
