Reality Hunger (26 page)

The contemporary vogue of not tucking in your shirttail (which I dutifully follow): a purposeful confusion of the realms.

Living as we perforce do in a manufactured and artificial world, we yearn for the “real,” semblances of the real. We want to pose something nonfictional against all the fabrication—autobiographical frissons or framed or filmed or caught moments that, in their seeming unrehearsedness, possess at least the possibility of breaking through the clutter. More invention, more fabrication aren’t going to do this. I doubt very much that I’m the only person who’s finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels.

The mimetic function in art hasn’t so much declined as mutated. The tools of metaphor have expanded. As the culture
becomes more saturated by different media, artists can use larger and larger chunks of the culture to communicate. Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silk screens and his
Double Elvis
work as metaphors because their images are so common in the culture that they can be used as shorthand, as other generations would have used, say, the sea. Marilyn and Elvis are just as much a part of the natural world as the ocean and a Greek god are. Anything that exists in the culture is fair game to assimilate into a new work, and having preexisting media of some kind in the new piece is thrilling in a way that “fiction” can’t be.

The body gets used to a drug and needs a stronger dose in order to experience the thrill. An illusion of reality—the idea that something really happened—is providing us with that thrill right now. We’re riveted by the (seeming) rawness of something that appears to be direct from the source, or at least less worked over than a polished mass-media production.

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.

We’re overwhelmed right now by calamitous information. The real overwhelms the fictional, is incomparably more compelling than an invented drama.

I’m finding it harder to just “write.” The seeking and sculpting of found text or sound have become my primary “artistic”
function. Actually generating that text or music seems increasingly difficult. Lately I’ll sit down with a blank pad and feel like I really have to dig down deep to get my own voice to come out over the “sample choir.” It’s a very strange feeling, like a conductor trying to sing over the orchestra, and is, I believe, a fairly new one for artists.

The culture disseminates greater and greater access to the technology that creates various forms of media. The “ordinary” person’s cult of personal celebrity is nurtured by these new modes of communication and presentation and representation. We’re all secretly practicing for when we, too, will join the ranks of the celebrated. There used to be a monopoly on the resources of exposure. The rising sophistication of the nonexpert in combination with the sensory overload of the culture makes reality-based and self-reflexive art appealing now. There are little cracks in the wall, and all of us “ordinary” people are pushing through like water or, perhaps, weeds.

Kathy Griffin, for example, now acts out her own reality show,
My Life on the D-List
, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting like a boardroom or desert island.

We are now, officially, lost.

the reality-based community