And then, late on a Saturday I ask a couple from Brooklyn if they have ever been to Ocean Grove, New Jersey, the Methodist town where leisure was meant to be holy, even godly: no alcohol, just church and waves. I ask them, have you ever thought about how in our society leisure is supposed to be uplifting in some way? We’re to derive some edification from it? They look at me curiously, and with some pity. What I have said seems like a joke to them. The man offers, no, it has never occurred to him. That’s not anything they’ve ever encountered, she adds. I say to the woman, well I think about it; my children’s school says they are not supposed to watch more than an hour of television or videogames a day, that there are other things to do. The man laughs. Really? They say that? The mother has a daughter, and she says to him that she has, indeed, heard the teachers say that. “They say no more than two hours a day.” She then turns to me, “But she does play more hours a day than that, especially in the winter. It’s cold and dark—and I don’t want her to go out and play when it is just boys in the streets. In Brooklyn, the boys play outside, the girls stay in.” Her husband is still shaking his head, thinking about this school rule. He is Dominican, he offers. “I didn’t grow up with these things, where I grew up, we didn’t have TV. So I just let her do what she wants—I don’t know the rules.” I offer that I grew up in the countryside, and we just ran around and did whatever we wanted all the time. Out and running around, no adult supervision. The husband is suddenly interested again. “Ah, that’s how I grew up. No one telling me what to do all the time, pestering. I think about my daughter, she’s always inside, always her mother and me and her brothers around.” I ask, “Do you think a lot about the differences in your growing up?” We are coming near the pass through. As I slip away I hear him answering with a note of worry, “I think how different she is growing up, from me. I think about it all the time.”
The video on YouTube is looping again. Now, I’m a bit teary, wishing I could go back to see the empty rotunda with the open glass ceiling one more time, or maybe find that Dominican couple. On the video, the layered voices of organ and soprano have kept me from reading the credits, but now I do—the video is by Lars Vilks. The name is familiar, but I can’t place it. I Google. Vilks, Swedish, is an artist who drew cartoons representing the Prophet Muhammad as a dog. These cartoons had led to a murderous plot against Vilks by a group that included a suburban Philadelphian woman nicknamed Jihad Jane, who was indicted in federal court on 9 March 2010. Jihad Jane’s brother, interviewed in the newspapers, said that he was as surprised as anybody that she was wrapped up in such business. For all he knew, she was “just like anyone else.” As probably was Vilks at the Guggenheim: just one more tall, gray artist/Swede/European, talking about this or that.
It was a strange feeling, looking at the video a last time, finding my pleasure tied up now with the disgust I felt toward Vilks. He had a thing for giving images to things that insisted on no images. Why? What was the irritant about the lack of image—secular or religious—that made him pursue it madly, destructively? If I had met Vilks on the ramps I could not have asked him that question directly. That was one of the rules. Instead, I was to ask a sideways question, like one of these: Do you know that the Amish think that a photograph takes a part of your soul? Do you think conversations have images? How do we remember things that we don’t have images for? Why does English have so few words to describe the way things taste? Does viewing a movie of your trip to Disneyland change the trip itself, or only the memory of it?
After hundreds of meaningless conversations prompted by questions like these, the desire for a question that gets closer to the bone—that does not operate on the level of our politeness, which runs so deep that we can consider every option, that displays our knowledge, that provides positions that we can inhabit–only intensifies. Maybe one of those sideways questions could hit the mark. But how would we know if it had, with so much else unresolved? The secular temple will not offer up its mysteries so readily, the skylight is closed. The procedures of “This Progress” create the sense of this desire but they cannot slake it. There must be more than this. There should be more options than these. But before we can ask the question we are on our way to another conversation. We are so contemporary.
Tino Sehgal says:
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