Dear Tao Lin, here is my “essay”, which I wrote quickly and did not edit (much) for typos and grammatical mistakes:
Tao Lin wrote a “humorous piece” about Marina Abramovic’s art piece at the MoMA, “The Artist is Present”. “The Artist is Present” is a performance art piece in which Abramovic sat in a room at the MoMA everyday from March 14 to March 31 and stared at museum guests. Guests to the museum would sit across from Abramovic for a duration of their choosing, and stare at Abramovic, who would stare back. (“The Artist is Present” isn’t really a staring contest, though if you were at the MoMA during the exhibition you could treat it that way. You could sit across from the present artist and stare with all your might. You could fight the blinks. She would blink first or you would. Depending on the outcome you could scream “YOU LOSE!” or “I LOSE!” Then you could walk away.) Lots of people showed up to this thing to stare at this woman. There was a live internet video feed of all the starers, many of whom cried (as in “boo-hoo” not “AAAAHH!”). (Honestly, after I read about the art piece, I thought I’d just recreate the art piece throughout the rest of my day, by looking at people. Whenever I looked at somebody and they happened to look back, BAM, impromptu and unannounced art. Little bits of art everywhere, masquerading as little bits of social awkwardness.)
Tao Lin’s “humorous piece” isn’t really about “The Artist is Present” as much as it is about his and his friend’s considering to go to the art show, attempting to go a couple times, but ultimately not going. In the “humorous piece”, most of Tao Lin’s saga of trying to go the art show is related to the reader via Google chat transcripts. Really, the “humorous piece” reads just like an entertaining blog post: the main thing that seems to set it apart from a blog post is its not appearing on a blog. This is OK. I unabashedly like that contemporary fiction of the sort created and published by Tao Lin is blending form with available story-telling media, like blogs and Gchat. (All my quoting the words “humorous” and “piece” so far, incidentally, has been non-ironic; I only quote the words because they are what Tao Lin refers to the piece as within the piece itself.)
The situation gets better though. The reason I am writing this “essay” about Tao Lin’s “humorous piece” is because he posted on his blog a solicitation of readers to write and “essay” about his “humorous piece”. If you write such an “essay”, say Tao Lin, he’ll send you a copy of one of his books. I really want one of those books and so I’m writing this. I unabashedly like that Tao Lin is inviting critical/non-critical/creative/non-creative/scholarly/non-scholarly responses to his “humorous piece” in this way, with a straight-up book bribe.
I like the form that Tao Lin adopts in his writing and I like his straightforward self-promoting for pretty similar reasons. Maybe for the same reason. I like them because, by being straightforward and intuitive, they appear to flout some kinds of arbitrary and unfounded social norms about the nature of creative literary production. There is a cultural expectation that literary creation stick to some guidelines governing form and content, and that literary production stick to some established conduits for delivering writing from writers to readers. But there is no reason that “literature” needs to have plot, themes, morals, or even clearly stated projects. It can have these things, and it might benefit from any or all of the above, but it’s not a rule. And there is no reason that “literature” needs to be accessed by “readers” via things like Barnes & Noble. The facts are that we’re just a bunch of people writing and reading stuff for a multitude of reasons; we write and read for information, for kicks, for emotional enrichment, for understanding of the world, for the sound of it, for the look of it, for no clearly stated reasons at all; but whatever we decide to write “counts”--we can argue over whether our reasons for reading or writing are the best or are worthwhile, but I don’t understand calling one thing literature and another not based on its sticking to some arbitrary, inherited set of reasons for reading and writing stuff. So there.
It’s funny, though. Given my kinda-sorta-more-or-less pluralist position on literature, as just stated, you’d think I’d be all for “The Artist is Present”. It flouts some apparently established rules about artistic practice and accomplishes something kinda novel in the process, and has gained some cultural currency in doing so. But something about “The Artist is Present” rubs me the wrong way. It’s fishy to me. I think what I mean by “fishy” is something like “seems posturing and disingenuously trying to be thought as profound when really it’s just a gimmick”. I can’t help but even feel this fishy feeling about the guests who sat across from Abramovic: how many of them cried just because they want to appear to be emotionally involved in something intense? So go my suspicions. But do I have any ground, given my almost total toleration of Tao Lin’s unorthodox style and means of self-promotion?
Here’s one way I could defend myself in this position. Yes, I can like that Tao Lin’s stuff, and stuff like it, exists, and, simultaneously, consistently, feel fishy about the success of “The Artist is Present” (how do you like all the commas in that sentence!?). The nature of my evaluation of each is a little different, in a few different ways. First, my position towards Tao Lin is a (kinda sorta more-or-less) thought-out position, whereas my hunch about Abromovic is a hunch, a feeling, a suspicion, to which I do not necessary commit myself but nevertheless admit to having. (I actually have just now spent like an hour watching stuff about her art project(s) and now feel a little less of that suspicion, but I’m going to keep writing as if I didn’t just do research and still had my unformed suspicion about her work). But lets assume I did just say “Tao Lin’s work and behavior regarding it is a-okay; Abramovic’s is no-way-jose”; I still think I could do this. There are a few things to evaluate with each artist and their work: the thing they did, why they did it, whether they succeed in doing the thing they meant to do, how they deal with the thing they did as an object in the world and why they deal with it that way; how people respond to the thing they did.
Tao Lin wrote a “humorous piece” that blends a couple unorthodox means of literary expression (Gchat, e-mail, first-person creative non-fictiony sprawl, etc.); he intended it to be funny, and probably a little interesting in it’s own right, but probably not really deep or meaningful or earth-shattering (I am guessing a bit here); he succeeds in being funny and interesting (I laughed at a couple points during his gchatting; I laughed when he said he thought Abramovic looked like she should exist as a NPC in “Diablo II”; I laughed when he kept “bleeping out” the [subplot] in the story, AND I found it interesting too because now I want to know what the [subplot] was (I think Tao Lin should write a very short “humorous piece” as a supplement to the one he just wrote, where the [main plot] of it is the [subplot] from this one--like behind-the-scenes features on a DVD: THINK ABOUT IT TAO LIN (Or, he should just e-mail me what the subplot was about to satisfy my curiosity)); other things struck me as funny in a way that didn’t make me laugh but nevertheless should count as funny because lets be honest lots of things are funny but don’t make people laugh, including just the very notion of Tao Lin’s project (short “humorous piece” about thinking about but not going to an art exhibition), its self-referential moments; other stuff); he bribes the internet at large with his books if they will comment on the thing he did--this must be done knowingly, both with an honest desire to self-promote, sure, (which is funny) and a straight-up understanding that it’s just fun/funny to go about it that way (I like this bit particularly for the reasons I cite way up above: Tao Lin isn’t sticking to some cookie-cutter way of creating his art or in treating his art as a product; he’s just doing his thing, man); people probably are responding to Tao Lin’s “humorous piece” as a mildly enjoyable “humorous piece”, but not going gaga about it. When all is said and done, Tao Lin’s thing is a clever little thing that has every right to exist in the world and which I think is kind of fun and I’m happy I spent the time to read.
Abramovic put on a piece of “performance art” where she stares at people who stare back; she probably meant it to be pretty meaningful/deep/passionate/vulnerable/thought-provoking/communicative or something else pretty heavy/intense; I don’t think she succeeds at that: I think it’s a clever gag, staring at people in the MoMA, but I can’t see too much past the gimmick of it--don’t get me wrong, I love gimmicks, but I love them when they are executed as gimmicks and understood as gimmicks--the thing that really bugs me is when people employ gimmicks as something deep/profound/emotional/whatevs: (incidentally, have you noticed how out of control my punctuation has become? I think it’s because i’m listing these long things with semi-colons, but then don’t know exactly how best to indicate with my punctuation all the side-comments/subordinate clauses/extra info/etc that I want to express in the process of doing that without breaking up the list; however, now I’m just enjoying going crazy with my punctuation and will probably start deliberately misusing it) what she does appear to succeed at is executing a clever little gag on a large MoMa-RAMA-sized scale, and snowing a lot of people into thinking it’s way more than it’s cracked up to be in the process; blah blah; most people who respond to her work appear to be impressed by it’s depth and meaning and etc--lots of people--for instance--cried while staring at this--woman----this bugs me too, because I think they are reifying some worth/meaning in the art piece and end up being a little--silly--in the process--I wish that everybody just thought it was a fun way to pass the time, thinking about the boundaries of art, thinking about people, thinking about what it is to be stared at, just enjoying the physical act of staring into somebody’s eyes, etc., instead of getting all weak-in-the-knees about a woman staring at people. So, I don’t mind the art project as an object or experience or performance, but I do mind its particular instantiation in this world and the way everybody appears to be treating it (THAT SAID, remember that I recently went and researched the project a bit and now feel, a little, like it isn’t as much of a failure--though, honestly, the fishy feeling abides).
So there it is. Evaluating the two things at length shows how they’re really different in nature and also that I’m taotally entitled to like Tao Lin’s stuff and behavior but be suspicious of Abramovic’s stuff and behavior. I admit that both are kinds of art, but when it comes to the latter I think it fails in what it tries to do and I am suspicious whether what it’s trying to do is worthwhile in the first place, whereas with Tao Lin’s stuff I kinda-sorta get the idea, I think, of why it’s fun/worthwhile, and I think he succeeds in what he tries to do, and so I’m all for it.
P.S. For anybody reading this who doesn’t like the F-Word and is thinking of reading Tao Lin’s thing, WATCH OUT.


