Detroit Research Volume 1

127
Paul Chan's Waiting for Godot in New
Orleans: A Field Guide 1 arrives on my doorstep
two months late, but any complaints over the
byzantine process of online ordering fall to the
wayside as I tear off the wrapping. The binding
is beautiful and intimidating in its simplicity. I
feel its weight in my hands like a stone dropping
into my stomach. It is a confirmation of my expectations:
the simpler a beauty is, the more formidable
it becomes. The lack of ornamentation
sets me off balance for another reason, however
– one that deals primarily with my understanding
of the nature of art. Looking at the stark blue
covers, I can hear the challenge that would trouble
me for weeks to come in a seminar on social
practice: art isn't at all what you think it is.
My view of art is a common one that has
gone relatively unchallenged during my time as
a student at the College for Creative Studies in
Detroit. When I hear the word "art," I think of museums
and galleries. I think of installations and
performances. I think of very wealthy people
spending millions at auctions. I think of an exclusive
world with its own language and customs
that I neither speak nor understand. When I hear
the word "art," I also think of animation, of advertising,
of comic books, of visual effects. I think of
Hollywood, and I think of people hunched over
computers kerning lines of text. But all of this can
be boiled down to an additive process based on
skills and tradition: drawing well, making a nice
sculpture, creating something that is beautiful
and permanent.
I open the book, and my fingers notice
the cut running down the spine, sharp and clean.
The incision cracks and widens every time I turn
the pages, and I find myself burdened with destructive
power. By reading, by bearing witness
to the documentation of the staging of this performance,
I hasten the inexorable collapse of the
book's structural integrity. I alter the very thing I
am trying to observe.
The difficulties inherent to observation
are sources of conflict throughout the staging
of Waiting for Godot. The book wastes no time in
addressing this struggle, quoting Susan Sontag's
On Photography:
Although the camera is an observation
station, the act of photographing is more than
passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is
a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly,
encouraging whatever is going on to keep
on happening. To take a picture is to have an
interest in things as they are, in the status quo
remaining unchanged (at least for however
long it takes to get a "good" picture), to be in
complicity with whatever makes a subject
interesting, worth photographing – including,
when that is the interest, another person's
pain or misfortune. 2
This phenomenon is not limited to photography,
or even to art. The observer effect, the idea that
observation changes the very thing being observed,
is an integral obstacle in physics, and in
partiuclar quantum mechanics. I am fascinated
by the parallels between the artistic observation
of individuals and the scientific measurement of
fundamental, subatomic particles. Measurement
simply cannot be unaffected by observation –
there is inevitably an impact, one that must be
taken into account in order to understand that
which one is observing and to inform the process
of observation itself. There must be interaction to
have any understanding, even if that understanding
must necessarily be incomplete.
I confess that this was a point of concern
in reading this book. I have seen and heard
countless stories of artists who made no effort
to connect with the places and people
with which their work dealt, who could not see
that the absence of care can have as great an
impact as care itself. The consumers of art are
complicit in this deception. "When the viewer
views The Documentary," says Cauleen Smith,
who filmed the documentary of the making of
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, "she mistakes
the experience of watching wretchedness for the
experience of having done something to correct
wretchedness." 3 Smith explains that through the