Not Another Art History Paper: Part II
Faye Gleisser & Ding Ren Conversation Piece
2008

For a conceptual artist, the art studio is makeshift and movable. It is wherever and whenever ideas and conversations unfurl. If tonight it is the room behind the photography lab from precisely 5:30pm to 7:00pm, last week it was New Hampshire Avenue in the exact spot where Ding and I stood for three minutes to discuss the demise of art history and art. Art has little use today. We mull this over. Three cars drive by and become part of the dialogue. How to make art useful? How to be an artist today?

Ding says I like to think of things scientifically and straightforwardly. So we make a checklist. There are two columns: ‘useful’ and ‘just stuff.’ Is writing an essay useful or just making stuff? Is painting? Listening to the end of a song? We proceed carefully with our words, lining them up in our mouths so that we can check each one off later.

Ironically, Ding is researching lines. One day, if she is lucky, she will be a line expert. Lines symbolize what is problematic in art for Ding: It has been done before it even happens. A line is still a line if you break it in half. If you boil it in water, paint it red, or scream it out. Even the line you are not imagining right now exists as a line. Lines are always lines. This is the very genesis of Ding’s disenchantment with objects. For her, art making died when Robert Barry exhibited a card with the words: “All of the things I know but am not right now thinking.” Signed and dated. Art stopped there. Because what else can be done? On the street corner under lamplight, we consider whether or not the interpretation of objects in an art context can ever just be. Ding says:

I can’t stand metaphors.
It is what it is. The End. Take it.

Can we get rid of a metaphor? Ding wants to put the word NO on the wall, but I tell her it is too cliché. It will defeat the purpose. We are haunted by syllogisms. We run through a thousand in the room behind the photography lab. How to get rid of a metaphor? If we do A that means B but C is still the same as Chris Burden falling off of a chair, Lee Lozano giving up pot for a month (and failing), Yves Klein’s exhibition of an empty room, On Kawara mailing postcards, Dan Flavin’s lights turned on, not off. Upon entering the world as art, these acts and objects and spaces carry the weight of our art historical discourse. We drink them in and swallow them as cultural aperitifs.

The formidability of the metaphor in art remains an obstacle for Ding. Perhaps it is art history’s dependency on symbols that perpetuates this condition. Metaphors, as Arthur Danto says,  “go dead in a way that sometimes requires scholarly resurrection…it is the great value of such disciplines as the history of art and of literature to make works approachable again.” In spite of this virtue, we must consider the larger implications of art making and interpretation when ‘no’ suddenly means ‘yes’ upon the gallery wall.