Mine and my wife’s bed: 8:18am. Monday, 21st January 2008. Photograph by Phil Day.

Hospital Corners

My mother was a nurse for more than thirty years (for more than half of them she was referred to as a ‘sister’). After she retired she had to have an operation on her wrist. Years of lifting patients had taken its toll. She said there were many rules that have disappeared in that time. Like standing to a sort-of attention with your hands behind your back when a doctor entered the room. But hospital corners, when making a bed, stayed. Maybe only for neatness, maybe due to habit – I don’t know. Either way there was (and apparently still is) no cause for re-inventing how to make a bed.

Hypothetical

Hypothetical:  While watching TV my wife enters the room, smiling with some excitement, and says: “You’ve got to see this. Come look.” So I do. I follow her to our bedroom and she says, “Look!” pointing at our unmade bed. I narrow my eyes assuming one of our cats has hidden among the tangled blanket looking sweet, but I can’t see one. “What am I supposed to be looking at?” “The bed” she replies. “What about it?” I ask. An inventory of the bed ensues: “Look at the crumpled pillows, the blue doona cover, look, look at the cordless telephone resting on the mattress, and here, where you left them, your striped pyjama bottoms.” (Wow).

Emin’s Bed

I am aware that this is another stab at Emin’s bed, but if it ever had any real interest surely that interest shouldn’t disappear with this new version, unless of course it was only of interest because of the unexpected surprise of it being in a gallery. But it’s hard to ‘BOO!’ someone twice. Emin’s unmade bed is an easy target – let’s be truthful, it’s an unmade bed (with some used condoms and blood stained underwear). And an unmade bed doesn’t seem to offer new ways for people (artists) to communicate what it might mean to ‘be’.  The ontological position doesn’t seem more enlightened by the bed as a vehicle for expression, unless it is being used for fucking, fatigue, or jumping for joy, but people have done these things before the bed. What are we supposed to make of an unmade bed as art?

Transformation

One of Pythagoras’ rules for the Pythagorean order was:

When you rise from the bedclothes, roll them together and smooth out the impress of the body.

Not really a philosophy you can live your life by. It is a mystical position and not very helpful. You could argue that it was useful for the ancients to make sure they made their beds preventing spiders and other nasties that might lodge in the blankets and bite them when they returned to it. But that doesn’t explain the ‘smooth out the impress of the body.’ This seems to be more the behaviour of a compulsive obsessive, not a brilliant mathematician. But there is no confusion. We don’t retain Pythagoras for his ideas on what to do with an unmade bed. We simply don’t believe them. So why do we believe (or entertain) that an unmade bed is art? I am not suggesting (at least I don’t mean to) that an unmade bed is an unsuitable subject for art. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who awakes, as a hideous bug (most likely a cockroach), on a bed certainly deals with the concerns of existence and how we struggle to deal with it. Samsa struggles for in first half of the book to get out of bed. Kafka’s Metamorphosis deals with transformation head on. While Emin’s bed asks us to imagine what? Respond how? Given the choice we might like to excuse ourselves from the boredom preferring instead to simply crawl into the bed and fall asleep. There is no encouragement to exercise any imagination, although there might be if I fall asleep. Picasso turned a bicycle-seat and handle-bars into a bull’s head, a cane basket into a goat, a child’s toy car into the face of a baboon; Cornell took the rubbish of others and built little universes contained in a vacuum; Koons made a giant puppy out of flowers, but where is all the other topiary? What is new to the limited imaginations of contemporary artists and its public is not necessarily new at all. The brilliant Peter Cook joked:

I’d like to come back as a light-switch, in an all female household. Get women feeling you the whole time … that’d be great that.

Cook’s ability to empathise with such simple props as an ordinary house fitting and communicate humour by slight of hand and with words is to take us somewhere else: transformation occurs. A light fitting in the hands of Cook becomes a man’s (more specifically, a heterosexual man’s) paradise, while displaying how single-minded men can be (for the boring literary theorists there is probably a lot of Freudian analysis in there as well – but that would kill the fun). However, a light switch in the hands of a contemporary English artist, Martin Creed, gives us: Work No. 227 Lights Going On and Off. I have never witnessed this work first hand, but with my limited imagination, I believe I can imagine it well enough. I have been in a room where a light has gone on or off. It has even happened to me without my choosing, such as a blackout. The events surrounding the light switches, lights, and power are of concern, but I would have to say their emotive influence on me, as a being, is banal. They are like the bookmark to my Hamlet, or the fridge magnet to a photo of my cat. Why we might consider a light going on and off in a room as anything more than a light going on and off in a room is confusing. Then again, if the society we live in is infatuated with the cellulite on celebrities thighs, the death of Princess Di, and a children’s book about a child wizard (and if popularity and sales are anything to go by, the Harry Potter series could well be the greatest contribution to English literature) then maybe there is scope for a light going on and off in a room. You can say I’m being cynical, but can I ignore it? What does it mean when the most sought after tickets for the Olympic Games are the opening and closing ceremonies where no sport is played? Recently the Guardian Weekly reported that there are 500 million people in the world who are dying of starvation, and that there are an almost equal number of people with morbid obesity. If this is true (and looking around town I am able to believe the latter) both are a natural reaction to the diet on offer. The Visual Arts (I would argue all the arts) are suffering from the same circumstance: the menu.

Reading what’s on offer

A musician friend (lets call her M) said that when she reads music she can hear the music in her head. I didn’t believe her entirely. I agree that she could imagine the sound in her head, but she can’t actually hear it, there are no disturbances in the air to shake her ear-drums. Of course I can imagine what the colour red looks like, but there are no light particles or waves impacting on my retina. Therefore my ‘seeing’ red in my head is not the same as my seeing red with my eye (Newton and Goethe have a lot to say about this). M may even prefer reading music to listening to it, I don’t know. I know I prefer to read Hamlet than watch it, but I don’t think that they are the same, nor should M think that her reading music is the same as her listening to music. One is a much more sensual experience, without a doubt; while the other is arguably a more cerebral exercise. If we muddy them up we may lose contact with what each have to offer and the words ‘hear’ and ‘listen’ will begin to mean something else. We should avoid such confusion if we wish to try and understand art’s unique communication.

Art and everything else

To conceive something is not the same as to react to something. So when we say ‘art’ we have a conception of what art may be, potentially it could be anything, it could be an unmade bed, but we won’t know until we are offered the opportunity to react to it. When the conception of an unmade bed is brought to fruition we are then able to react to it. Of course our senses will react to the unmade bed, they have to, it is largely involuntary. However the reaction must be something other, something else, something less ordinary, otherwise how is art any different to non-art? A smart-arse would argue it is more ordinary to see what most would consider art in an art gallery; therefore we are reacting differently, but only differently to the environment, not differently to what is normally on offer outside of a gallery.

Words, words, words

This summer we saw an incident in cricket that was more about semantics than cricket; “big monkey” is it a racist term?; “bastard” is it culturally more offensive in India than Australia? What do either of these words have to do with scoring runs? Emin’s bed (and much of contemporary art) is much the same. It is more about semantics. The Unmade Bed (as she calls it and what it is) withholds its meaning. It is non-discursive, refusing to speak directly to our senses. In itself it represents one thing – an unmade bed. And without the help of collectors, curators, galleries, critics, and words (lots and lots of words) Emin’s bed would be incapable of its ‘intrinsic’ sensual and cerebral interest.

When 1 + 1 = whatever you like

So what sensual or cerebral experience does Emin want to share with me? I really have no idea. Just as if my wife asked me to look at our own unmade bed, I would wonder why? (unless of course she wanted me to make it). This complexity, how art communicates and what it communicates, has led to a confusion so great that it seems as though the art going public will settle for anything that will calm their anxiety, and so they have settled for:

            It’s art because an artist made it.

The idea that artists are capable of individual expression that others can empathise with has become interchangeable with individual indulgence. The artist’s calming words are:

            It’s art because I say it’s art.

We wouldn’t accept this from a religious fundamentalist:

            It’s true because I say it’s true.

It seems that it is difficult to write something intelligent about art, but it seems to be even more difficult not to write something stupid, I apologise for the next sentence in advance.
Emin, as an artist, has expressed so little with her Unmade Bed that it is recognisable as zero, but her score for indulgence is ten out of ten.

… skin deep, but ugly goes down to the bone
It also seems to me that it is clever to lie rather than tell the truth. Many contemporary artist’s attempts to communicate what they feel, as an emotion – a subjective truth that is beyond our understanding – has become a bit sentimental, a bit folksy, a bit dependent on common-sense. Supposed ‘intellectual rigour’ has overridden the ‘primitive’ feelings that we used to call, for the want of a better word, our ‘soul’ and one should not be mislead by such trickery. For me it is a great loss (and I mean great in the true sense of the word), a great loss for all of us. We have limited ourselves to a diet that is less than nutritional for human feeling. Having said that you may think I am suggesting we repel new and different ideas. This is not true. We should embrace them when they offer something that actually is new and different. When this occurs it is usually so self-evident that it requires little discussion.

Nevermind

Wang Wei (A.D. 699 – 761) a Chinese poet and painter. Today celebrated as a poet. Only one of his paintings has survived along with hundreds of his poems. The surviving painting is a portrait, but it is believed his influence on landscape painting was genuinely original – it is thought that he may have invented the horizontal landscape on a scroll. Prior to him they were all vertical.

 

PHIL DAY

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