Embedded

 I bought an unusually homely painting, even for me, at the Alemany Flea Market recently. It’s a drab WWII scene of amphibias transports, ferrying troops to the beach on D-Day, as artillery shells explode around them.

The men’s magazine genre is generally not my thing unless it features Nazi midgets and bare-breasted amazons. But I got sold on the possibility that, given the age of the board and the artist’s point of view—which we would now describe as embedded—the picture could have been done by someone who was actually there.

Even so it was half way to the graveyard, which my wife still charmingly calls the garage, when junior got curious. He’s seven and heavily into machines that kill so he began asking questions. I started to tell him the story. Now I’m pretty cynical abut America, and might describe our world war II adventure as an excuse to spread the new testament of consumerism to the old world, but I soon found myself choking up over phrases like, most of these men were about to die, and they were fighting a war against people who were murdering innocent people, and they gave their lives so that we could ….

I stopped. Were I alone I would have said, “shop at Wal-Mart.” Around a boy for whom guys in green suits and muddy boots can still be heroes, a pathway to some closed off pool of emotion was cleared and I could only gulp. This was the clearest, most physical demonstration I’d ever had of how the significance of an image can fluctuate based on context. For me the picture’s subject became its porousness, its instability, and finally mine as well.

It has only been a few decades since art theory has accepted the tilt in power from object to context, but dealers have always known this and relied on it to make their living. What is a press release if not an attempt to cloud the viewer’s sight of the object with a plume of hyperbole. The white cube, the tabletop monographs with essays by celebrated writers, the auction records, these are all things that disperse the object’s significance across a field of marketing and situations. When you add to this the art fair dynamic of tribal get-togethers in which collecting functions as a pretext for social exchange among economic elites, it looks like the infrastructure no longer exists to support the object—if it ever did—but quite the reverse.

Should we worry that the marketing, the tourism, the architecture, the socializing is enshrouding the object, the so-called raison d’etre for all these things? Or should we just give in to the truth of our age, that context and interpretation are as valuable as creation?

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