THE FLOATING BEAR no. 1
Prospectus Affordable Space A PROJECT BY BRIAN PRUGH
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printed
THE FLOATING BEAR no. 1
(I) | Looking for | Prospectus (II) in Miami, Florida
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JUNE 20, 2014
Prospectus (I)
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THE FLOATING BEAR
The Floating Bear is a kind of experiment in living. My family and I will be moving onto a boat which is currently parked in the Biscayne Bay, just outside of Miami. I took this picture on the day we bought the boat. I was intoxicated by the air, and the water, and the wind, and the city. My family includes my wife and two young sons (five and two). The boys are very excited to be moving onto a boat. Living on a boat makes for a hard life (hauling water, careful power use, and a dingy ride to land), but it requires a more simplified existence that we have been after for a long time. Buying an antique 30’ sailboat off of Craigslist made this financially viable. I am an artist and a critic. I intend to set up a studio here and to write about art using Miami as a home base. I’ll make art here and I’ll write about the things that I see here. But I also wanted to reserve a space to work out some of the ways that this life is shaping and changing me, and for this reason I am starting The Floating Bear Blog and this series of booklets. They will take as their subjects things I am learning. This is the first booklet, so I wanted to provide some background. no. 1
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Looking for Affordable Space places we have lived for a month or more since getting married in 2005
When we moved out of our last apartment, my son drew this picture on the sidewalk in front of the door. He said it was a picture of a person in a boat. He said that he drew it so that anyone who walked by would know that the people who used to live here moved onto a boat.
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PROSPECTUS (II)
There are the places that we have lived and there is the thing we are trying to do; it is the latter that has prompted this project—not because we have some understanding of what we are doing, but precisely because we don’t. This project is not unrelated to another project that I documented in an artist’s book two years ago called Housing Project. That project involved a political action surrounding affordable housing, and trying to imagine a way to think differently about housing. I suppose that this is a different way of thinking about housing, but it is not radically new by any means. We are trying to live within our means and accomplish our professional goals like everyone else. It is not unrelated to my painting, either. Several years ago we were driving to visit my in-laws on their boat and the fact of the drive, with the possibility of arriving at an expanse of water gave me the idea for a series of paintings with two parts: The Asphalt Road and The Sea and Sky. It was a series of small gouaches. The Asphalt Road paintings were square and The Sea and Sky paintings were vertical rectangles. It is still one of my favorite bodies of work. The title of my MFA show was The Ocean Is What I Meant By, the final line in a poem from Ben Lerner’s 32
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Mean Free Path. I took the line out of context, and I became fascinated with the idea of the ocean as a place by which the activity of meaning takes place.There is something of that in this project, too. There is a strain of art-making today that takes a greater interest in the acts of the artist than in the material works of art. It has been theorized in different ways and has taken widely different forms, but central to all of the work is a suspicion that making an art object, at least as it has been traditionally understood, is not the most important thing an artist can do. There are performances (Chris Burden shoots himself in the arm, Ana Mendieta buries herself in a landscape) in which the most significant part of the work is that the artist did the thing, not that he or she photographed it. The photograph or video documents the (artistically) primary act. There are social interventions (Santiago Serra tatoos day laborers, the Center for Land Use Interpretation photographs overlooked (and often politically charged) uses of land), where the artist (or collective) make work that is important because of the way that it makes visible social or political structures—a strategy not unrelated to Marcel Duchamp’s interventions in the art world. no. 1
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Some artists and collectives engage directly in social or political work (WochenKlauser’s manifesto demands concrete social intervention with measurable results; Laurie Jo Reynolds lobbies the legislature to attain specific political results); in these cases the political act is seen as more important and interesting than any potential material object. A fourth strain is a kind of experimental living (Andrea Zittel’s clothing and functional objects or Fritz Haeg’s landscape designs) in which the artist’s creative muscle is put to use solving practical life problems in an imaginative way. Taken together, and considered within the Western tradition, these life-works (instead of artworks) seem a significant departure from the typical stuff of art historical study—but they also sound remarkably like a different kind of thing: episodes from the lives of the saints. One of my favorite stories told by Thomas of Celano in his Life of St. Francis is about a time when Francis was sick, and was coerced by his brothers to break his ordinary austerity and drink some chicken broth to recover. When he recovered, he felt so bad about eating such rich food that he ordered one of his brothers to tie a rope around his neck and drag him through the town 34
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crying, “Behold the glutton, who has grown fat on the meat of chicken!” It’s a great story, but one of the things that makes it great is that Francis did not tell it himself. It would be easy enough to cull from St. Francis’ life a series of performances, social interventions, political actions and experiments in living that are in keeping with many works of art being made today—many stories about him have much the same admixture of theatricality and sincerity as the kinds of life-works I have been talking about. But the stories belong to hagiography, not art, and I think this is the source of my abivalence toward much of this work. On the one hand, I respect the tendency because it places the work of art within the context of a life, and this is much more interesting to me than, say, placing it in the context of a museum. I am suspicious of the tendency because it too often appears that artists are attempting to write their own hagiography. The idea of an experiment in living is something of a contradiction in terms. An experiment, considered as part of the scientific method, must isolate a particular phenomenon to study—a phenomenon that, when generalized, will suggest a scientific fact. Further, it must be repeatable: someone else wishing to perform the no. 1
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experiment must be able to reproduce the same results within the same set of conditions. To suppose that anything I might do out here on The Floating Bear would submit to those requirements is presumptuous at best. The things that made this adventure possible for my family (a healthy tax return, the one boat for sale in the place we needed it for the price we could afford, in-laws who had enough experience doing this to help us get on our feet, not to mention the impressive collections of ideosyncrasies in the lives of the members of my family that made this sound like a good idea) are, importantly, unique. To what degree the conditions of this experiment could be transferred to another life is anyone’s guess, and the extent to which I can make use of anyone else’s life experiments is similarly dubious. When making a life you are always contending with the history of everyone around you, and no two personal histories are the same. You must also accomodate the hopes and dreams of everyone you live with—and my dream of uninterrupted worktime will sound like the seventh circle of homework hell to others. It must be true that there are things we all share, but the shapes of our bodies (someone four inches taller than I am would really struggle on this boat) and the shapes of our souls 36
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make the way those things that we share manifest themselves in our lives look quite different, especially on a surface level. Perhaps this is just to say that living resists scientific treatment, and that whatever it is that I am going to learn out here, it will not take the form of scientific fact. But that of course does not mean that there will be nothing to say, or that I will not have learned anything. It is only to suggest that whatever it is that I can really learn, and whatever it is I can possibly share, lies in a category outside the reach of science. I wonder sometimes whether we have forgotten that this is even possible.
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brianprugh.com/the-floating-bear
No. 1 Prospectus (I) Looking for Affordable Space Prospectus (II)
A PROJECT BY BRIAN PRUGH
June 20, 2014