I recently finished Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother, which was not nearly as impactful as Night Sky with Exit Wounds—in his defense, he set an impossibly high bar for himself, that book is fucking beautiful. I underlined so much of it, it looks vandalized.
We want our interactions with art to change us, to transcend our meager lives, and when that doesn’t happen, it’s such a let down. I think maybe this is why we write scathing reviews. We had such hope! And in the void of it, anger rushes in. Disappointment.
I was so bummed I didn’t like Time Is a Mother, and then I looked at the Amazon page for Love Where You Work and saw that my rating went down and thought, Oh. Well, clearly I disappointed someone, too.
Such is art. Such is love.
We set out to move the needle of the world, we give it our everything, and we inevitably fall short because making good art is hard—and making transcendent art is damn near impossible.
I remember seeing this installation once, years ago—at the Art Institute of Chicago maybe or the Tate Modern—called Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Félix González-Torres.
It’s a giant pile of candy heaped on the floor, pyramid-style. The candy is wrapped in multi-colored cellophane, but is otherwise unassuming. If you’re not paying attention, you might trip over it. Or miss it entirely.
A sign encourages you to take a piece of candy, so you do, unthinking, unwrapping a piece and popping it in your mouth. Then you read the placard, which tells you that the pile of candy is the ideal weight of González-Torres’ lover, who died of AIDS-related complications.
In taking the candy, you’ve taken a piece of Ross himself—you’ve become, in a sense, complicit in his death. In all the AIDS-related deaths that were willfully ignored, dismissed, forgotten, and buried by the Reagan administration and countless others in power.
And you think, in your grief and astonishment, the sweet coating your tongue, turning it bright red, marking you, that you will never make something so beautiful, so touching, as this, and you sit down on the floor of the museum, next to Ross’s symbolic body, and you weep.
Eventually, who knows how much time has passed, you get up, pick up a pen, and try again. Because what other choice is there?