February 2010

More concerned with social services and the integration of “artists into a participatory role in business matters and decisions making,” the APG committed “to the making of no product, work or idea.” Indeed, this broader movement away from the art object was, at the time, in keeping with Conceptualism’s interest in dematerialization. Latham’s emphatic refusal to give either form or definition to the placement of art appeared as a direct confrontation and critique of a society obsessed with objects and products.

It is this aporia between the falseness of representation and the truth it communicates that Fast mines so successfully. Reality has no place in his work. It becomes impossibility. Recognizing that fidelity to the event, through the lens of representation, is absurd, Fast fully embraces that absurdity. We see the actor climbing out of the apparatus that hides his intact body, leaving gory stubs of the victim’s limbs lying abandoned on the set, and leaving us, in turn, with a perfect portrait of the mechanics of storytelling.

Two further artists investigate the combination of the mundane and the communal during a time of war. In Lamia Joreige’s piece Objects of War from 2006, interviewees discuss an object which represented their personal experience of the Lebanese War, in many cases something as simple as a radio or a key. Brought together, these items detail the shared experiences of many through the everyday. Daily life is also the focal point of Steve Mumford’s twelve watercolor sketches; in one, Mumford captures “Iraqi contractors waiting to be paid on a Friday morning FOB Thunder, March 2004″ while another depicts street trading as usual.

And yet, once the book was published there were these gems related to its distribution that I had to give voice to, such as when I was outed on a chicklit book forum pretending to be a fan of the book and concealing my role as author. The forum administrator who suspended me was named FunkyTown, and the exchange became one of the vignettes performed in relation to the work. Another centered around an Amazon user named “soulnourisher” who identified Sexy Librarian as number 3 on his list “Ultimate Guide to Literary Soul Nourishment for Librarians” (other compendiums included “Ultimate Guide to New Modern Day Female Clerical Sleuths,” and “Ultimate Guide to Faith Based Scrapbooking”).

I read Catcher In the Rye around the time when postwar coming-of-age novels were required elementary school reading (possibly 6th grade?) and I remember being struck by Caulfield’s off-kilter slang and vaguely psychopathic tendencies—as well as being shocked by the fact he could simply run away without fear of parental reproach. But even as I admired the novel, it never really resonated, and until college I dismissed many of its advocates as teenage fanboys happy to find a justification for hating their daddies in one of literature’s most overexposed rebels.