Often, between 1 to 3 AM, I find the bed sheet tangling and untangling me. If the drunken first-year UQ students don’t wake me with their percussion performance of shopping trolley rides, then I construct my own insomnia; it takes form as something between a Socratic dialogue and Jens Lekman’s “An Argument with Myself”. Unfortunately, grand, noble problems—of science, economics, and politics—do not keep me awake past the witching hour.
No. Art keeps me awake at night. Questions and problems surrounding art, its history, its theories, its criticism, and its philosophies bully me into insomnia. Perceived as privileged and frivolous (evidenced by most budget cuts), art and how it has become despairingly pretentious and unconvincing keeps me awake. Similarly, I am kept awake by how art can be nuanced, majestic and intimate, profound and humorous, and heart shattering and life affirming. But why do only some artworks achieve this? Here, anxiety shimmies in and I question my degree in art history:
Is there something wrong with me, if I cannot appreciate the current ‘big’ artists?
Why am I not convinced by the art of these ‘big’ artists? (Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst, Kara Walker, and Takashi Murakami top a long list. Micahel Zavros, Ben Quilty, and even Sidney Nolan (to an extent) top my list of Australian names.)
Am I exhibiting the same ignorance and prejudice as the Parisian Academic Salons of the 19th century?
Do I lack the same creativity and insight that led the Salon to dismiss artists such as Manet, Monet, and Pissarro?
“Women Artists”—this term … this category? Why do I find it problematic? Am I betraying my gender and feminism if I find it unconvincing?
Does grouping ‘women artists’ empower women in art? Can art just be about its depth of visual, intellectual, and social concepts? Why do I find Tracey Emin’s oeuvre insufferable, Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono over marketed, and Marina Abramović worrying?
Isn’t it better that I think of great art first, and gender as a biographic fact, when it concerns artists such as Eva Hesse, Isa Genzken, and Camille Henrot?
What does it mean to be convinced by an artwork? Is it sufficient if I say, to be convinced about an artwork is to intuit any sense of “not being convinced”? Or, is conviction the subtle difference between an artwork able to suggest ambiguity, as opposed to being utter incoherence?
What makes an artwork intelligent, but not esoteric?
Why does some art warrant my returning attention and time? Why do these artworks affect me the most? Is this the definition of art standing the cliché ‘test of time’?
How do I want to think, look, and write about art?
What qualifies art as good?
Why do I find relativism and subjectivism inadequate to judge and think about art?
By now, existential panic sets in and I ask: What gets me out of the immense despair—exasperated despair in how art has been popularly written about and marketed? Poussin and Chardin jump to the rescue … followed by everyone from Naum Gabo to Rodin to Carmen Herrera and Jan Dibbets. Faith and confidence slowly restored, I start thinking about great writings on art. These writers, their names—Baxandall, Krauss, Fried, T.J. Clark, Svetlana Alpers, Yve Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Leo Steinberg, Adorno, Foucault, John Berger, and even the often irksome Vasari—calm and restore me better than any sleeping pill.
Finally, before I can snooze and convalesce, 0.38 enters the final step of my (perhaps self-inflicted) self-medicating. 0.38 is a start, for me, because nothing motivates me or comforts me with the anticipation of writing (be it notes, research, or essay plans) like the buttery, almost creamy, 0.38-nibbed black ink pen from MUJI. Therein lies the intention of this website; it is an attempt at attempting to consider those sleep depriving questions. Attempts. Beginning with reviews—books, exhibitions, and journal articles—these attempts will be guided by the intellectual creativity and academic integrity of the great artists and writers who always make looking, reading, thinking, and experiencing art worth our time. To bed … to bed I go … Zzzz.
0.38 