There is something wrong with contemporary art. People have gotten killed for saying less, but I’m saying it anyway. And I have been thinking this way for ages too; in endless wanders around Biennials, taking in video loops imprisoned in an endless “now”, grainy documentational photographs, badly cobbled together installations, accompanied by reams upon reams of text  - all about what exactly? And also of course, my job as an instructor. How difficult it seems to be to get my students to invent stories. At conferences, with colleagues from all over the globe, there tend to be these endless moan sessions: Our students seem to find it very difficult to become involved, indeed to even muster any kind of enthusiasm for the creative process itself. A lack of imagination. A big howling empty space where you would normally have expected to find a bubbling up of wild ideas from a 20 year old. What you get instead is agonized constipation, a writhing around socially anxious truisms and politically correct platitudes.

My father was great. We used to play a game where I would be a lost rabbit and he would be a good hearted bear helping me to get home. All kinds of magical adventures we had. And here I am again, this time with Roy, who got his students to invent stories: “Imagine you wake up one morning to find that you are a sponge. Describe visually your adventures during the day…. Invent a typewriter bird and show the kind of tree within which it could most successfully hide… Create a world on paper with major and minor structural systems. Show a fault occurring in the minor one; design a repair centre to put it right…” (from “A Groundcourse for Art”, Telematic Embrace).

Karnak

The narrative space of Karnak. It reminded me of Second Life. Or rather of a structure that I am very familiar with in Second Life: The Whitenoise Church, by MosMax Hax. I am not sure what the pantheon that generated this circular cathedral is all about. A church for avatars. Is there a myth of creation already in place for Second Life? If so, is Ruth the mother goddess? Like Karnak, the church tells a story with its bottomless rowing boats, its chained in place cars, its columns constructed out of trucks and its teddy bear steeple. These are not about Ruth, or any kind of  Second Life pantheon for that matter. Instead they are the projections of the psyche of a man who used to be a boy who played with trucks and cars and teddy bears and who has now managed to find his way back to that boyhood – and who has the guts to express it. And somehow, through an almost magical act of transformation, this conglomeration of boyhood objects winds up becoming more than the sum total of its parts, in fact winds up becoming the manifestation of a myth of creation for a yet to be named deity, for a yet to be defined ritual. The deity of Second Life would have to be childhood, and the ritual would have to be play. And its book of prayers would then be endowed with narrative. 

The steeple of the Whitenoise Church by MosMax Hax

The Garden has shown me today that gutsy forgers of narrative are to be found elsewhere too. Admittedly, not too many of them it seems, but they are out there alright: Nonnatus Korhonen and the “Little creatures that tend to follow you around with strawberries”, Madcow Cosmos and “Hetorotroph”, Truthseeker Young and “The Singularapture is Near” and Bryn Oh and the “Steam Bath”.

Truthseeker Young “The Singularapture is Near”

This is not really about form. If I had been in search of aesthetic formalism I would maybe have picked out other examples as well, maybe not even picked these at all. What I am looking for is a “story”. Not a “concept”, mind you! Please, I am really getting very tired of “concepts”. It is the sacredness of the “concept” that has brought us into this constipated mess in the first place. What I want is unselfconscious narrative, someone getting totally carried away with the story that is inside of them and spilling it all out as visual form. Something that is not just of the “now” but carries embedded in its being a “past”. A personal mythology. Stop hitting me with ideas for God’s sakes, tell me something instead. Anything, something – make it up!

Nonnatus Korhonen “Little creatures that tend to follow you around with strawberries”

Nonnatus Korhonen tells a very quiet whisper of a story. The heroes are shy white creatures of a hard to describe soft reticence. Looking at the white flecked landscape I get a sense of the child that brought these creatures into this habitat. One quite different from Madcow Cosmos that’s for sure (hh). The way those dragons spew out into the sky. There is a cruel, humorous story there – I make it up as I go along. After all, the artist is not the only raconteur in the game.

Madcow Cosmos “Heterotroph”

Truthseeker Young does sneak in the teeniest bit of conceptualization into his story of the decapitated head by telling me how the process is painful but necessary. But this is a concept that I go along with anyway and it is so subtly phrased that it ends up becoming something more along the lines of “and the moral of the tale is…”, which again, makes the whole thing a very funny story indeed. And Bryn Oh’s steam bath, with its peeper at the door and the beetle bathing inside is so endowed with ominous narrative that I stand in front of it completely spellbound. 

Bryn Oh “Steam Bath”

These are master story tellers and all is safe in their hands. But unfortunately stories do have a way of turning maudlin, of becoming cute, if not downright banal. So the trick would be to tell your story, plaster all of your teddy bears onto your steeple so to speak – and then work the magic whereby they transcend their teddybearness and become part of something that will be quite hard to describe and almost impossible to dissect. Art, one would call that, I guess. Definitely not a game for those faint of heart… And these artists whose work I saw in the Garden today are so not faint of heart. 

Are they part of the “serious” art enclave in Real Life? I tend to doubt it. A lifetime habit of self important conceptualization does not get shed overnight, or if it does it is usually only through a very painful process of moulting. But then again, who knows? They very well might be… The creator of the church has certainly had his share of “serious” acclaim in past years. (Which makes the whole teddy bear syndrome even more remarkable in its gutsiness). So, more power to anyone like that who landed themselves here in Second Life to play. The roots of narrative reside in childhood. But children are not yet completely separated from the larger whole, the archetypes snatch at their little heels. Joseph Campbell tells us that in all the world, no matter where you go there are very few basic children’s game matrices and they are always the same ones. We must be bringing this knowledge with us from somewhere then. Therein resides the “Abyss” and its ruler, the “Shadow” guides the child. Play is cruel. 

The Garden is remarkable. The work mentioned here is remarkable for my purposes in that it relates to narrative. But almost all of the garden is remarkable in its spontaneity. And yet, I fear that soon it may all be over. The “serious” brigade is already making its way in. And then there will be art exhibitions that look quite different from the NPIRL Garden of Delights; ones where the likes of Madcow Cosmos and Nonnatus Korhonen and myself (of course!) will be laughed straight out of the door. Cold, sterile shrines dedicated to intellect. No imagination, no unselfconsciousness, no color, no bizarre associations. No Gestalt even. No narrative, no play. Certainly no teddy bears. Everything brittle on shiny floors. Surgical. Or on concrete floors, virtual spaces made to look like factories. The artist as proletariat. All verrrry verrrry politically correct. Very humorless. Certainly not under a benevolent virtual sun. Certainly not sprouting forth from a rich, humus ridden virtual soil. 

Ouch! I hope I am wrong. Of course, I am wrong! The law of attraction tells us that this type of pessimism can lead only to perdition. So, yes: “Play” lies at the heart of the matter of the metaverse. Which means that in the metaverse “play” and the “story” will always always always win – hands down.

So, what happened to the story? The fairy tale, the “maerchen”? When did narrative become so “un-cool” then?

I think it happened in the aftermath of the second world war, after humanity came too close to the edge of the abyss and saw the “Shadow”. The Dadaists still had it, the narrative, as did the early Surrealists. A narrative that originated from the subconscious mind, that sprang into being in the collages of Max Ernst and the poetry of Paul Eluard. But there inside the subconscious, right next to the fairy tale and the beautiful poetry and the mesmerizing collages also resides the “Shadow”, present in each and everyone of us. No one is exempt. And, when humanity faced its own “Shadow” at the end of the war it turned away in a schock of recognition. It was simply too hard to acknowledge, too unspeakably cruel to deal with – so we hid behind the impersonal, the non-narrative. Art became non-narrative. It was easier that way. Space became impersonal, a shrine to minimalism. Beautiful in its generic nudity, functional – and resolutely silent, non-narrative. The cold cold climate of political correctness, the safe boundaries with which we try so hard and so desperately (and with such futility) to circumscribe the abyss and the “Shadow” – there inside all of us. The death of humor. The endless loops of flickering video art of the “now”, stubbornly refusing to tell stories. Because the “story”, the “maerchen” comes from a place that is just too close to home, too close to the abyss and to the “Shadow” waiting therein. Stories lead to imagination and imagination leads to the abyss.

No coincidence then, that it became unpopular to tell Grimm’s fairy tales to your child. A bookshelf full of literature in a friends house on the correct way to raise children – grounded in educational toys and realizm. No violent toys, no guns… Little picture books where little rabbit goes out and sees a little butterfly and then… Nothing… “Hello Butterfly!”… “B is for Butterfly”… And then it gets to be night and little rabbit goes home to sleep. No stories… please no stories… Much too dangerous. The roots of narrative reside in the abyss.

Second Life has given me back my childhood. But children are cruel. They stand too close to the abyss with their imaginative little minds turning broom handles into magic swords to… kill! And yet here we are, a horde of children, testing out the waters of narrative, once again. And cruelty is already here, already implied, in the neko merchandise. In the blood soaked wings. The neko crime scene kit. The bloody bandage outfits. The countless spike collars and braces and leg wraps. The troublemaker belt with its paw handcuff. I buy them. I look at them. The fish grate necklace – obviously I must have eaten the fish at some point and now its remnants hang from my neck like the scalp of an amazon warrior. The teddybear hat. Except that the bear is holding two sticks of dynamite in its round little paw. Narrative is cruel. It resides in the land of the “Shadow”. And the “Shadow” is the price paid for imagination. I embrace the teddybear – dynamite and all.