Is 10:04 Art Writing? What is Art Writing?

10:04 begins with moneytalk. Ben Lerner – the autofictional Ben Lerner – discusses with his agent the “six figure deal” she has negotiated for him on the strength of his debut novel and a story he’s had published in The New Yorker. She asks him what he’ll write, and he tells her he’ll write the book you’re now reading. 10:04 is full of metatexts and puzzles; the second chapter is, reprinted in full, the story that helped secure financing for the book. Here though, I’d like to look at the ways in which Lerner harnesses metatextuality to explore contemporary art.

The narrative of Lerner’s debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, is interspersed with explorations of writing and art practice that interrupt and recontextualise the story. While, in 10:04, Lerner certainly dives into esoteric questions of reality-building, he retains a focus on the concrete means by which his writing, like any artform, is facilitated.

Where the story of Atocha was punctuated by discussions of poetry and classical art, 10:04 circles back to various contemporary artworks Lerner encounters in New York and Texas. He watches Christian Marclay’s The Clock at a local cinema, attends the “Institute of Totalled Art”, modelled off Elka Krajewska’s Salvage Art Institute, and visits the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Lerner was in Marfa on a Lannan Foundation residency, and this was one of several means by which he managed to afford to write the book you’re reading about him writing; those other “means” include a teaching job and the six-figure advance. The “Institute of Totalled Art” is a particular exercise in art-financing-as-art, as it consists of damaged artworks that have been removed, by insurance companies, from the art market, but are being redisplayed in gallery format by Lerner’s (fictional?) girlfriend.

In the acknowledgements section, Lerner credits Krajewska, and even Daniel Zalewski’s essay on The Clock, from which Lerner borrowed details of things he didn’t get the chance to see; he notes that he’s taken his epigraph from a book by Giorgio Agamben, and that the self-published pamphlet he cowrote with “Roberto” and reprinted in 10:04 is based on a book he wrote with Elias Garcia; he tells us that, as well as The New Yorker story being a reprint, two other sections of the book had previously appeared in The Paris Review; the poem he wrote in Marfa, and which he includes and discusses in the novel, was published in a poetry journal. With so much of the book being something other than “original” content, we start to wonder what our expectations for a book are. Is it okay if everything in this novel is available elsewhere? And if not, how much “new” material is necessary? And given that pre-releasing sections of the book was the means by which Lerner funded writing it, do our expectations for originality exclude from the publishing market authors who are not reliant on their writing for an income?

If you’ll allow me to speak generally about a topic I don’t know very well, I’d like to make this observation: one of the dominant preoccupations of contemporary art is with interrogating the means by which art is made and monetised; this focus seems to have started with the process-oriented conceptual artists of the twentieth century’s latter half. A renewed focus on the means of production has led to some very self-reflexive art that foregrounds the (im)materiality of artworks, and reconsiders the means by which art and literature is disseminated, commodified, and consumed. Called into question, too, is the notion of the “sole author” (to whom copyright reverts), which is an inheritance from Victorian London’s publishing and legal practices. While Lerner’s name is the one on the cover, therefore, and while he is paid the book’s royalties, his far-reaching acknowledgements section calls into question the extent to which the book is “his”.

Image Credit: MusikAnimal

One of the frustrating things about contemporary art – aside from the fact that contemporary artists are often so cool you can’t look directly at them* – is that it’s very often extremely difficult to access. Many artists’ magazines that challenge dominant modes of dissemination do so by limiting the size of their editions or circumnavigating the usual means by which we all get our stuff; performance art usually takes place in galleries in the major cities of the world, and is staged for a tiny (and select) group of people. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does mean that Cork/Dublin-based neophytes such as myself must rely, if we’re lucky, on PDF scans of physical magazines, grainy photographs of 1970s art performances, and testimonials from the few people who happened to see an artwork in person. This article is predicated on the notion that, no matter how faithfully art is described or documented, a direct encounter with an artwork is always different to a second-hand one.

I did some research recently on Tellus Magazine, a New York magazine published in audio cassette form and distributed by mail between 1983 and 1993. Almost every track on each Tellus cassette is unavailable anywhere else: Tellus #1 has an otherwise unhearable track by Sonic Youth, and Tellus #21 has recordings of a performance by George Brecht and extracts from “A l’infinitif” by Marcel Duchamp. Given that these tracks exist only in cassette form (and would therefore be difficult for me to listen to even if I had one of the extremely rare copies), I was very lucky to find them all on UbuWeb, which describes itself as “a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts”. The site operates in what it calls a legal grey area, in that it “openly violates copyright norms”; it refuses to incorporate money into its practice, neither paying it nor being paid. As such, UbuWeb might get shut down at any moment, and the archives it hosts disappear from circulation.

What does 10:04 have to do with any of this? Since we’re talking in general terms, I can assert that, like the contemporary art world, 10:04 is concerned with the transience of human experience, and the ephemerality of the world. Lerner tells and retells a fictionalised account of his having written the book you are reading, and swaps various details around on each retelling, interrogating the processes by which we narrativize our experience of the world and attach stable meanings to collections of random events. He documents his writing of this book, a book that is a documentation of his documentation of his life, a life that involves, among other things, finding new ways of documenting human experience, and which frequently finds Lerner documenting pieces of art that interrogate the ways in which we document experience. You see what I mean, about all this.

Excuse me while I try to define a genre that actively resists definition, and which I, again, don’t know that much about: “art writing” is writing about and of art, which finds its exemplars in publications like Critical Bastards and The Happy Hypocrite; art writing is art in form and content. If, as I hope I’ve been able to get across to you, 10:04 is about contemporary art and is also a piece of art, then it can be considered art writing. Yet, where most contemporary art writing finds its home in magazines that tend to be written and read exclusively by denizens of the art world, Lerner’s novel is significant because it’s one of the very few pieces of art writing I know of that has been distributed in mainstream literary fiction circles. If you, as I do, think that the more people who read and learn about contemporary art the better, then this is very good news indeed.

There is no substitute for seeing art first-hand, and hearing a description of a piece of art will always colour our perception of it; the same is (assumedly) true of The Clock, the Salvage Art Institute and the Judd sculptures described in 10:04. For now, however, given that much of the art produced today was inaccessible to (or just unaccessed by) the masses even before Covid happened, 10:04 might be instructive. It is at least entertaining.

*And by this I mean somewhat more seriously that because an artist’s name is fundamental to their ability to make money (thereby facilitating their making more art), success in the art world can become synonymous with one’s ability to create a personal brand. Would artists have the cool hairstyles and clothes and apartments they have now if their livelihood didn’t depend on convincing fans that they are through-and-through, imitable artist-types? Would they have social media accounts?

Photo Credit: Nan Palmero

WORDS BY FIACHRA KELLEHER