I can’t bear to listen to the sound of my own voice, so I won’t be listening to the playback of our podcast anytime soon. However, I’m pretty sure that I said some less-than-completely-enthusiastic things to say about Marlene Collas’ tiny orb sculpture. I’m writing this because that piece has stuck with me over the last few days and I now really want to amend my previous comments on it.

First off, before I even really get there, I just want to say that looking at work in any environment and being told, “GO!” as in, “CRITIQUE THIS WORK… NOW!” is really hard. Art isn’t created impulsively like that, at least most of the time, and it shouldn’t really be interpreted like that. In addition, it’s hard enough to get your bearings in a place like SL without having to contextualize alien objects and know what to say about them. This is an inherent flaw in the project, but the alternative would be to have us all spend a lot of time thinking about each artwork left on the sim, and I can tell you that all the contributors would start bitching about the amount of time that was taking and eating up our lives. It’s just not practical to have us do it that way, so this “hurry up” method is probably the only one that would actually work at least in some fashion.

Having said all of that, I do think that critiques that work on the level of “I like this” or “I don’t like this” and then spiral off into their own conversation are, in fact, helpful to both the artist and the public that is viewing the work. It’s not the deepest way of thinking about work, but it’s an attempt – and no one is suggesting that what gets said on our podcast immediately gets added to Janson’s.

So, ok. Back to the orb:

This is a tiny, tiny orb with even more tiny pictures on it.

The main argument against such a piece is pretty straightforward and plays into the kind of ideas that plague artists that are even the tiniest bit self-aware. I’m speaking mostly of that gnawing feeling that your parents and your postman and the people down the hall have no idea what it is that you do for a living and that in a society so obsessed with jobs and working, that’s kind of a problem. Or to specifically apply that thinking to this specific piece: It’s so small that you don’t know it’s there unless you’re already tipped off to its existence, ie if you have some sort of insider status. This makes the piece exclude such a large percentage of the population as an audience that really, what’s the point?

I get that. But I think I want to see it in a different way. Instead of thinking of this piece as being exclusionary, why not think of it being inclusionary? Meaning, instead of your heart immediately going out to all the folks who will walk right past it and not even know it’s there, what about the small community that is built among the various strangers who do, in fact, notice it or are tipped off? Suddenly, there are these people who probably don’t have much else in common except that they are in on the secret… but at least now they have that.

To me (at this moment), the ability of art to create communities out of its audience is the single most interesting thing there is. Maybe it’s Rirkrit Tiravanija serving pad thai in art galleries, or the experience I had of riding in a taxi and talking about The Gates to the cabby – whatever. I’m really fascinated by this idea of the viewing of art being something more than just an idle passtime, but rather a way to connect to random strangers who have had the same experience.

There is nothing to say that only art can do this; in fact, lots of things can. But for most of those things (shopping at a grocery store with your neighbors, mowing your lawn), the creation of a community is simply an unintended side-effect. But with art, it can be part of the reason why the object was actually created.

Anyway. It’s for all these reasons that I felt that the orb deserved to be revisited. So there.

Posted by Amy Freelunch on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 5:05 pm.