On loop

Every morning, on waking into the same November day in which she is trapped, the narrator of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume checks to see which of her possessions has survived the night. A Roman coin she had intended to gift to her husband is always there beside her, even if she has attempted to rid herself of it. A notebook that she believed she needed, disappears; an orphaned sock, persists.1

At the turn of the year, we might also reflect on what we are carrying forward into the new cycle, and what we should let go. If, unlike Balle's lead character, we have some choice in these decisions, we might still derive a simple rule from the looping world that she inhabits: only what has meaning to us will endure. This literary construct illuminates the pattern of our own days and years, individuated and made meaningful by the objects and experiences that accompany each of us through them.

Among these companions in time are works of art. We do not need physically to carry a collection of masterpieces around with us—though I do have a selection of postcards that travel with me and a moldering stack of paperback novels that, inexplicably, I cannot bear to throw away—to understand that works of art function in the imagination much like the objects that Balle’s narrator cannot shake. They stimulate ideas and feelings to which they become attached in the memory, thereby establishing part of the mental furniture by which we identify ourselves. These are the fragments we shore against our ruin. 

But perhaps the key lesson of Balle’s novel—and one that critics are advised to keep in mind—is that the subject is integral to the production of that meaning. To put it another way: a thousand cinephiles can tell you that Jeanne Dielman (1975) is the most important film ever made, but if you haven’t seen it, if you haven't formulated your own emotional and intellectual responses to it, then it will mean less in your world than the old sock that continues inexplicably to reappear in your underwear drawer.

All of which is to say that art is made enduring not by its transcendence of mundane experience but by its complex entanglement in it. As we move apprehensively into a year already marked by violence, greed, and lawlessness, this month’s program reflects upon the way that works of art are mixed up in—and might thereby give definition to—the mutable worlds that produce them. From paintings ambiguously branded with the marks of protest and domination, to an exhibition directly addressing the baleful impacts of the oil industry on our future, and another that asks us to consider whether the remarkable influence of European thought on high American culture has now come to an end, our reviews this month evidence a shared preoccupation with the issue of what of our recent past will cross the threshold into an unstable new era.

This quality of “stickiness” is not easy to identify in a work of art. The works a critic hopes will be perennial—because they meet her own political or aesthetic values, perhaps—can prove to be mere flashes in the pan. Equally, a work that she initially hated might nag away at her for a decade, two decades, a lifetime, because she could not easily resolve or dismiss it. As in life, some people and things that we want to keep will leave us; others will remain with us however much we would prefer to leave them behind. It is, perhaps, less important when looking at works of art to guess what will survive into the future—to pick the winners—than attempt to work out why.