Positively camp - the Hirsch Farm Project

ArtForum, Oct, 1994 by Rhonda Lieberman

MONTAIGNE OBSERVED that you can never win when you talk about yourself. If you say good things, people hate you, and if you say bad they believe you. This didn't stop him, though, from using himself as a guinea pig in all of his essays. So the first half of my summer, darlings, was clouded, anticipating a week I was to spend in Hillsboro, Wisconsin, at the Hirsch Farm Project, "a ten-year experimental forum for the discussion of public art, the environment, and community," to share and care about this year's topic--"Optimism." I had been invited along with seven emerging creative types (all of them sensitive about representing themselves with "labels") by curator Mitchell Kane, who considers the week of "brainstorming" and the resultant catalogue to be his art.

Kane was initially surprised when others received his topic as a joke waiting for its punch line. In the same way that Walter Benjamin invented the concept of the aura at the moment of its eclipse, it made perfect (if perverse) sense for people to fasten on optimism now that a huge self-help industry of books, tapes, seminars, and other therapeutic services is booming, a sure indication that there's both a big demand for optimism and a dearth of it. As precious libido (i.e., money) appears to be draining out of the art context, I thought, a look at the cultural forces that are guzzling it couldn't hurt. Feeling soiled by my noningenuousness, I suspected I would stand out as the farm's contrarian party-pooper: my chief perspectives on optimism were: 1) daily horoscopes and tarot readings; 2) Friedrich Nietzsche; 3) listening to (others on) Prozac; and 4), and perhaps most spiritually challenging to be seen with, Freedom from a Life of Hell, by Vernon Howard, "a unique teacher who has broken through to another world. He sees through the illusion of suffering and fear and loneliness," and is based in Boulder City, Nevada.

Not considering myself especially fit to address the topic, I asked assorted smart people what they would do about optimism. D. commented, "This is worthy of one of those '60s art gestures--don't show up and send a telegram that says 'Things are looking up.'" C. reminded me I've been very optimistic lately about shopping, as I've recently overcome a major hurdle of squeamishness and can now wear anything used, even shoes, without grossing out. And I'm very optimistic about the fall fashion for a change, "distressed glamour"; I'm finally in synch. My friend P. wisely remarked, "The only thing more stupid than optimism is pessimism." He is a professor of comparative literature. T., a student of Jean-Francois Lyotard's who begins her dissertation next week in Paris, was more affirmative: "I lost about two years of my life to depression. I think that's good. I think there's value to that!" This contradicts Spinoza, who thought that sad affect indicates a stupid or wrong idea, a muddiness of perception. The sense that clarity of vision or of thought will necessarily result in happiness is very different from a moral universe that implies that if you are sad then you are bad. Rather, the good news according to Spinoza is: if you are sad, you are simply wrong, that is, you are not seeing clearly enough; adequate ideas affect happy moods, which affect general well-being.

It's funny how cultural artifacts sneak into your nervous system and affect your behavior in real life--so watch out! My invitation to Wisconsin aggravated a deeply embedded Eva Gabor fantasy, precariously dormant since I set foot in the Midwest, now festering and about to pop, having been squeezed by an imp who declared, "You're going to be the star of that whole farm!" My fabulous farm future imminent, I packed in a swirl of competing bucolic fashion-statements. Yet I felt the undertow of a psychic trauma witnessed as a reader of Still Talking, the deeply moving Joan Rivers autobiography (with Richard Meryman). Profoundly mortified by the anecdote when the young Joan (before she became Joan Rivers) gravely overpacks for a Jamaica holiday and outs herself as unclassy, with city dresses and pumps rather than more unstructured cruisewear, I was determined never to fall into that trap. Glamour-imago dissonance split my brain: Eva . . . Joan? Green Acres . . . Can We Shop? Marabou . . . Jew? While the early Joan got shamed by the reality principle, the TV Eva exulted in the bliss of what others must struggle for through many office-hours of Lacanian therapy: never ceding her desire to be fabulous, no matter what the environmental factors, the heroine of Green Acres remains resolutely high maintenance with a good conscience. Foolishly chucking this analytic insight, I may have been short on optimism. But I knew I had the right "I'm Proud to be a Farmer!" T-shirt. I could go to that camp with casual confidence.

Nestling in a remote area of Wisconsin, the optimism farm could have been in Switzerland, but without big mountains in the background and Amish people running around. I greeted the director, Laurie Winters, with the resigned cheer of anyone about to be trapped for eight days in the boonies with ten art-achievers. A haimisheh Jewess with girlishly long curly hair, a degree in social work, and an MBA, she remarked, "I didn't think you'd be the way you are from your writing. . . ." Masochistically, I couldn't resist pressing her for some precision of expression here. "You know," she beamed at me warmly, "I thought you'd be sophisticated!" She was attired in pieces from the Gap; I withstood the comment with the genial sangfroid of Jackie O. at a Hadassah picnic.