Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)
"I think we're always responsible for our actions. We're free. If I raise my hand, I'm responsible. If I turn my head to the right, I'm responsible. If I'm unhappy, I'm responsible. If I smoke a cigarette, I'm responsible. If I close my eyes, I'm responsible. I forget that I'm responsible, but I am. So, like I said, there's no escape. When all's said and done, everything is good. You just have to take an interest in things and find the beauty in them."
Here's fun for you: have you ever been out and about, in a public place, sitting, chatting, drinking coffee, and you could just tell that someone was looking at you? Maybe you weren't even paying attention, when suddenly you felt the cold blue steel of those eyes boring into you, straight into your soul? If so, don't panic: you don't have super powers, and you're not psychic. It's something we all have and it's called a 'gaze detection system'. Put simply, it's your brain analysing the positions of the people around you and sending you a signal as quickly as it can if it believes you might be being watched.
But why?
A man puts his hand up at the back of the room, I nod, letting him know that he's free to talk: "A survival instinct? Something to let us know that there's a predator watching us?" He puts his hand back down, feeling pretty good, suppressing a smirk of satisfaction. The rest of the room is quiet, and you just know that some of them are wishing they'd said this. If only they hadn't been so worried about what other people might think.
So yes, survival instincts. That could well be a part of it. When going down this route you can also start talking about sclera, that's the white part of the eye to you and me. In humans it's super white, but in other predatory animals it's often much darker, and hence harder to clearly distinguish where an animal's eyes are looking. Another possible explanation might be… I look around the room to see if any other hands are going to go up. The man at the back of the room meets my gaze as I glance over at him, but his eyes quickly fall to look at something else. I keep staring at him, and when he tentatively looks back up his eyes quickly fall again, and he nonchalantly brushes at something that isn't on his face. No one? Okay, well it may have something to do with people as social animals, as forming a community or society, and a subconscious form of categorising how we all fit into this large public group.
Andrew Calder and Colin Clifford did a study of people looking at other people that included sunglasses, the ultimate impediment to the gaze detection system. It seemed that if a person is faced with a room full of people wearing sunglasses they'll just assume that everyone is looking at them, even though they don't know whether this is actually the case. So what's that? Does that say something about our egos? Ben gives a little shrug here, as if to suggest 'well, who really knows?'
It's 1972 now, and you're in the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. It's cold out, and your shoulders are covered with a fine dusting of snow. You take your gloves off, and step inside. You're here to see a piece you heard about from a friend of yours. You're not crazy about art, but the person you're with today is, and you want them to like you. You want them to think that you care about this kind of thing. The room you're in is completely empty, and you're waiting for this person to come out of the bathroom. You think you're alone (but you're not) so you walk around the room, dropping that mask that you wear for social occasions. The floor at the far end of the room slopes up, as though it were a ramp that leads into… the wall? Intrigued, you walk over to it, presuming that this is the art. But once you get there it's a different story. There's a voice. At first you can't tell where it's coming from: A hidden speaker? A window somewhere? A hole in the ceiling? And eventually you realise that the voice is coming from under the floor. This ramp at the end of the room isn't a ramp: it's a false floor, concealing a person. The voice is whispering. You can't hear what it's saying clearly because it's so low, so quiet. You lean down close to the floor and listen carefully, head mere inches above the wooden ramp. You can make it out now: a torrent of abuse!
Now it's 2005, and we're at The Guggenheim, New York again. Marina Abramović is here performing Seven Easy Pieces, a variety of art performances from other artists, which includes the above: Vito Acconci's Seedbed, an interesting piece on being both public and hidden at the same time. A lot of people here are disputing the importance of an artist recreating the work of other artists. Surely originality is the point, n'est pas? But then no one's had the idea to do this before, so maybe that's what it's all about. Another of the pieces she's recreating is Joseph Beuys' How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). Beuys locked the onlookers out, leaving them only able to view through the windows, then spent 3 hours slowly walking from painting to painting, his head dripping with honey, gold leaf applied in patches. Beuys held the dead hare almost like a child, and whispered to it as he passed each picture. Eventually he unlocked the doors, and faced the wall, not interacting with the public. Beuys was fascinating. Much more interesting than a lot of people: very big on shamanism, and myth making, and healing. His death at the age of 65 seems like too much of a sudden ending for me.
You know all of this stuff already though. And none of it takes away from the nagging feeling that everything should be better. Sometimes you find yourself talking to others about nothing in particular, and then for no reason at all the tears are there, right behind your eyes, and it's everything you can do to stop them streaming down your face as you're mid-sentence, or while you're doing your best to show the person opposite you that you're listening, interested, caring about what it is they have to say, and not asking yourself over and over again "is this all there is, is there nothing more to it all, why does everything hurt so God damn much?"