Certain Porous Boundaries

One of the themes of this blog has been the interaction between fiction and life – what I have from time to time referred to as the dotted line between fiction and non-fiction. 

Rather than attempt to address this issue in an essay, I’ve been posting some hopefully interesting and illuminating examples. Readers can make of them what they wish. 

In that vein, here are a couple of stories from the July 14, 2015, “New York Times” that attracted my attention. These artistic endeavors don’t involve writing, but the principle is arguably the same. 

The first story reported that Tania Bruguera, a New York-based Cuban artist, had been chosen to be the first artist-in-residence for Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Office of Immigrant Affairs – a year-long appointment. At the same time, the NYT said, the Museum of Modern Art announced that it had acquired a “politically charged” video Ms Bruguera had created called “Untitled (Havana 2000).” 

What interested me about these developments was that Ms Bruguera was described as an artist “whose work blurs and sometimes obliterates the line between socially conscious performance art and straight-ahead social work.”  

When the NYT story was published, Ms Brugura was in Cuba and uncertain when she might leave due to a dispute with the Cuban government over whether she will be free to return to that country if she departs with a passport that was recently returned to her. But she is hoping that the recent improvement in U.S.-Cuban relations will allow her to take up the NYC residency where she believes a melding of the artistic and the civic is “rife with possibility.” 

Art, which is arguably akin to fiction, can interact with real life is by showing people how to imagine their identity in creative ways, the artist believes, arguing that this is particularly important for immigrants who, as a result of their dislocation, may have lost their ability to dream. 

Artist residencies can bring new kinds of thinking to city programs, NYC cultural affairs commissioner Tom Finkelpearl told the NYT, adding “Tania is obviously at the forefront of this kind of art.” 

The other NYT story reported that Joe Gibbons, a filmmaker and performance artist who once taught art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), had been sentenced to a year in prison for robbing a bank – an event he filmed with a pocket-sized pink and silver video camera. It was also apparently captured by bank video cameras. 

Mr. Gibbons “claimed it was an act of performance art coupled with dire financial straits,” the NYT said. The paper also noted that Gibbons’ MIT   profile “cites his predilection for exploring the boundaries between fact and fiction.” 

Gibbons is not a marginal figure. “His work, mainly film installations, has appeared four times in the Whitney Biennial and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris,” the newspaper said. 

“While acknowledging that Mr. Gibbons had dubious legal standing, Ann Pellegrini, a professor of performance at New York University, called the case a classic example of ‘performance becoming performative,’ an act that questions ‘the relationship between actor, audience, and enactment,” the NYT article said. “In the robbery, the bank teller and the police unwittingly played their roles ‘without knowing that they were at the same time performing in Gibbon’s art performance of a bank robbery,’”  Pellegrini explained to The Times.

The newspaper article went on to quote art critic Ed Halter as saying that the robbery might only be part of a larger, future work.  “His [Gibbons’] work has always incorporated diary elements, and very often in a way that the viewer can’t quite be certain about what’s true and what’s not.” 

Perhaps the bank surveillance video of the Gibbons robbery will also eventually make it onto the art market, or be acquired by a major museum.