The Aesthetic of the Cheap. New York is the capitol of capital. For a city that has been the home of the likes of Duke Ellington, Jackson Pollack, Elia Kazan, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Laurie Anderson and countless others, the New York of today is a nearly impossible place for artists to both survive and create. The galleries are filled with artists from Pittsburgh, Providence, Berlin and beyond. The theatres, when not playing revivals, mount productions of regionally developed works as a sort of Gotham canonization ritual that eludes me. Musicians seem to have it easy, or at least the sort of musicians that only require a guitar and a trucker hat as an investment. I mention all this, simply to set the landscape. Finishing strokes might include acknowledging that the biggest art show of the decade was Matthew Barney’s multi-million dollar Cremaster Cycle and a brief glance at the American Airlines Theater on Forty-Second Street. This is the town in which I work, and serves as the practical impetus for what follows. As a young artist living in New York, I find myself trapped in the same dangerous cycle that so many of my friends have found themselves in: To create art, you need money- to get money you must work- to work in New York means to work in a cubicle- to work in a cubicle is to kill the impulse to create. I know writers who are dying as editorial assistants, I know painters who design GAP ads. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. If your goal is to make a lot of money, this is a good way to do it, however, if your goal is to create art, it’s a fairly counterintuitive way to go about doing it. Talent is not a rock, it is a sensitive and precisely tuned Stradivarius that must be bowed and plucked by the most sympathetic of hands. If I were to spend the next five years in a cubicle, I would, best case scenario, lose my mind. The dilemma: Short of a trust fund, how does the artist create? I’ve told you all this to establish that there is a practical reason for the theoretical aesthetic that follows. This in itself is completely fitting within the concept of “cheap”; as you will see. Most art today is inherently capitalistic. In theatre especially, the specter of commercial viability looms over every aspect of production- from choice of material, to casting to marketing. This does not hold true simply on Broadway, where over staged musicals (42nd Street, anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber) and upper-class liberal hand-wringing straight plays (The Goat, Take Me Out, Proof) are the norm. The supposed tautology between high quality and high budget also informs downtown theatres, who show their rejection of this ideal through bare stages and self-consciously avant-garde staging. This is a mirror of the audience that theatre caters to, one which in youth rejects the very bourgeois attitudes it will embrace in maturity. The hippie who grows into a middle-management bureaucrat is no longer simply a cliché, but a modern day rendition of Joseph Campbell’s hero myth; that is, we are expected to lose our ideals and so we chose ideals from the outset that we are comfortable with surrendering later. That our nation’s youth are savvy to this carefully constructed series of morphing poses has left them dispirited, ironic and nihilistic. To them and logically so, the act of having ideals, being political and attempting to enact change is not just futile, but folly. They know, if not always consciously, that in the totalizing system of capitalism, even the act of rebellion exists only to be commodified and marketed. It is not my goal to find a remedy to this totalizing force, but to offer an aesthetic response to the total milieu of late stage capitalism. That response is “Cheap”. Cheap is political. Cheap is the enemy of capitalism. Cheap is already a force embraced by youth. Drinking Pabst beer is Cheap. The ‘irony’ of our generation is not ‘irony’ at all, but rebellion. Wearing a trucker hat, while not terribly original, is a political act that rejects capitalism by deliberately seeking out and embracing what capitalism fears most: the tacky, the functional, but above all, the unmarketable. While retailers have quickly started selling designer trucker hats, the ultimate trucker hat is one that can be bought for seven dollars in Missouri. Cheap has nothing to do with things. Cheap acknowledges that capitalism will upscale any object deemed to be ‘popular’, but Cheap will have rejected the object by that time, for Cheap is the material expression of anti-materialism. It sets capitalism on a hamster wheel, vainly chasing after increasingly unsalable things. For an artist, Cheap represents a way to escape the poverty of the capitalism’s gauntlet of success. Cheap allows the artist to arbitrarily commodify and sanctify whatever is at hand. It invites excess as both parody and earnest undertaking. Like all movements, Cheap is not an unexplored country. John Waters has used Cheap not just to shock (Cheap is always shocking to a capitalist) but to politicize. Waters’ films are profane because they are made Cheap and advocate Cheap, not because they include pubic hair and teabagging. That the recent Broadway version of Hairspray totalizes Waters’ cheapness into the rubric of later day capitalism only highlights theatre’s role in America as the ultimate bourgeois institution. It this role that the theatre plays in America that makes it the perfect forum for advocacy of the cheap. Cheap can be found in other places. In performance, there is The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players, who create songs and narratives for disused and forgotten memories. Cheap can be found in the impromptu memorial to September 11th near Saint Vincent’s Hospital that was created from individually marked glazed tiles. Its eloquence lies in its cheapness; the memorial is unabashedly sentimental, genuinely heartfelt and simply rendered by individuals who respond with immediacy instead of tortured test-ballooned deliberation. It is virtually indestructible, for even if it is dismantled, it will continue to exist as individual tiles or even individual fragments. Its cheapness allows it to be fractured by design; an assemblage of disjointed parts that becomes an inversion of the tragedy it memorializes. Cheap can be a tin-pot opera, a racecar action adventure told through soapbox derby cars, a king in polyester, the exultation of toilet bowl cleaner as divine and MUCH MUCH MORE!. Cheap reduces complexity into the symbolic. ACT NOW! The semiosis of the generic can be reworked into opulence. TIME IS RUNNING OUT! If we want to insult a woman, we call her cheap. A cheap suit is emasculating at best and oftentimes fatal. When the artist embraces the cheap, she manifests the nightmare visions of the CEO, but reworks them into the sublime fantasia of truth and hope that is the cubicle dweller’s daydream.

posted by Japhy at 11/05/2003 12:13:00 PM || #