I am not going to have time to tell you everything I think about how great the Lynda Benglis retrospective at the New Museum is--not for awhile. But I can tell you this. I enjoyed the Lynda Benglis retrospective so much that, for the first time in my career of going to the New Museum, I didn't even care that the museum itself is an architectural failure.
It's brilliant. She's brilliant, and the more you step back and see what all the other sculptors were doing, the more brilliant it gets.
And it's serious fun. It affirms your body in space, and the fact that you're an oozing organism. That likes glitter. And weight. And defying gravity.
Finally got to the MoMA yesterday. The contemporary show they have up is a club-footed art historical case for collecting detritus from Paul Chan's Waiting For Godot*, and On Line was predictable. But I loved the photography and performance show and loved the Rock, Paper, Scissors part of the Ab Ex show, even though the title of that show sticks in my head as Scattered, Smothered, Chunked and Topped.
It had good Louise Nevelsons. And it was good at talking about the fifties and sixties and that kind of modernism as a coherent aesthetic. And I've finally discovered Mad Men, and have been mainlining episodes, often ignoring more virtuous entertainment to do so.
I like that Mad Men is (apart from smoking and drinking) about the fact that what's on your inside will always be different than what's on your outside--that inner and outer life are different dimensions. Nevelson does this too, all the paint. All the hiding of the scraps of wood becomes a gesture that points more and more aggressively to the fact that this is chunks of 2x4.
I'm an honest person, myself. But I like dishonesty. It's not just more interesting. It's more true.
I've been reading about Henry Darger, and getting over the holiday.
Henry Darger is what he is from, and this is a beautiful and painful project. I'm glad it's not my project.
When I was a child, one of my parents was kind of cold and empty, and lived to hurt and ruin the other. The other parent was terminally angry and addicted to martyrdom. Even after a brutal divorce and a decades-long "cooling off" period in which horrors surfaced that are too nasty to discuss in this relatively polite company we keep, these people are still going at it. My brother and I were sometimes busy parenting the parents, but were more often used as weapons. When we were not of utilitarian value, we were largely ignored. I was a semi-feral child, highly attuned to the adult action and constantly seeking fixes and approval, but from a fairly distant orbit that my parents kept, roaming pretty much independently. I am still trying to truly understand that just because these people used me, that doesn't mean they needed me, or that I should seek a closer orbit to either of them. I don't pretend to know what that means in terms of basic expectations of parent-child love, except that I am careful.
I started making art for Darger-esque reasons--to describe and make sense of this world that I endured. But I quickly developed biases against the forms that would help me do that project, and became attracted to all the forms that would push me away from it. I developed an irrational hatred of narrative in art, and despised art that was about psychology or getting to know the artist as a person. Kiki Smith, Darger and Louise Bourgeois were the enemy, and I tried in vain to say that Matthew Barney's narratives are irrelevant! I fell headlong into worshipping Richard Serra, Rachel Whiteread, Charles Ray, Chris Burden. I wanted art to extract me from this painful cesspool-of-mind I grew up in and tell me what was real on a phenomenological level that, if not objective, at least clearly lived outside my head.
I am grateful for these strong biases, even though they hobbled my ability to appreciate art for a period of time. These are the biases that delivered me from having to make art at all, you know. And now that they have run their course,
(and with the exception of Kiki Smith)
I am finding that I am relieved of them. My project is to see clearly, and to do that, I need to see more.
I can clearly see that my parents still have the energy to do that voodoo that they do so well, and that in some very small ways I am still the cleanup crew. I can sit here with a Darger monograph on my lap and accept this, and use this circumstance to help me sink into this Glandolinian Child Slave Rebellion, and let it soothe instead of panic me.
A Paul Thek installation detail that is so not currently on view at the Whitney
I have this new role as Art Ambassador. Yesterday wandered Paul Thek: Diver at the Whitney defending the museum-ey elevation of quick sketches on sheets of newspaper and sketchbooks and garbagey pink and blue paintings that don't move me either.
I don't disagree with my guests' point of view, which was basically that the show was inscrutable and looked like shit. Thek was an early hit and has one profound innovation under his belt
(the meat sculptures still amaze and installation art is all Thek's fault)
but he left very little behind and so became a set of ideas: his love affair with Peter Hujar; how he acted as connective tissue between distinct contemporary art narratives and the particularly pathetic quality of his career's death as well as his own propelled others to do creative work using him as material--the best example of this that I can think of is Chris Kraus' Aliens and Anorexia. The only other artist I can think of who more neatly fits this You Mean More To Us Dead Than Alive profile is Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared at sea while committing an act of performance art in 1975.
It's a lot of wearing another person's pain like a suit of clothes, but there is something legitimately interesting and beautiful about what Thek became--a kind of ghost who infected multiple consciousnesses by so nastily and slavishly representing his own. His installations were material manifestations of consciousness at its finest and most effusive--baroque Jungian feasts that explored and shared what it felt like to be Paul Thek so intensely that they are both a literal and figurative invitation to climb inside the artist's skin.
The conceit of the Whitney show is that those installations were as ephemeral as the consciousness they represented. There is poetry to this point, and to make it, they wound up with a show of physical artifacts. The early meat sculptures hold up, but the rest of Thek's career is reduced to dilapidated latex bodycasts and other skeletal remains of installations, and a lot of sketches and fast paintings that stuck around because they aren't very interesting.
It is as poignant as it is lame that most of the show is uninteresting because it has nothing to do with that intensely visceral, archetypal experience of self that Thek gave us. What physically survived is reams of representations of all the boring internal dialogue that fills most of our consciousness on most days:
Fragment of a sinking ship, fragment of a banner, fragment of a moon
pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink
this still sucks, it needs something, put dots on it!!!!
A number of pithy phrases that all basically say that life is unfair
Get Over Yourself! Get Over Yourself! Get Over Yourself!
It's as if the point of Diver is the fact that we have martyred this person who is just like us. Thek momentarily overcame his consciousness from time to time, but he didn't master it. When left to his own devices he mostly filled the page with anxiety about what other people think and atavistic repetition of the stupidest formal cues. He was casting about. Most of the fragments don't gel into anything.
I love this point. I think it's a brilliant show. But I was with someone who wants art to elevate, to transcend. To be viscerally interesting. And the funny thing is that I brought her to see Paul Thek because he does that. But he doesn't do it here. If I had understood the show the first time I went through, I would have chosen something else. But when I walked through Diver the first time, my eyes were so full of what I wanted to see that I didn't even see how shitty and dead it all was. Or how lame seventy five percent of the subject matter was. I don't know how to make this show anything but an insider-only affair. I can't straightforwardly explain that the show actually did made sense without telling hours and hours of stories.
My job is evolving into something that more resembles a career. I am grateful for this, and I've been explaining my background to other people lately, distilling the two years of blind fumbling this blog represents into a comfortable elevator pitch about why I am not an artist anymore. And you know, the more I reduce the more I see that the fundamental answer to this question is irreducible.
I stopped making art because the freedom to do whatever I want makes me less creative, not more. I need to submit to something larger than myself. I chose to make sculpture because it was the kind of art that had all these external rules in the form of Newtonian physics that I simply could not ignore. The sculpture I made was organized around losing control over form and content--I was working as an artist to give the art back to the materials and process themselves. I wanted to stay out of it and watch. I wanted to enable the possibility that something creative would happen in front of me, but that was not of me. Screwing tires together just wound up being the hardest possible way to get what I am actually after.
This is going to sound like I am changing the subject, but I'm not, I swear. Yesterday I went to take Hal Lehrman Sensei's class, which I try to do every Friday at lunch because he's teaching emptiness. As a relative beginner, I positioned myself to train with a very senior student. This is critical when it comes to Hal's classes because, well, because Hal's teaching emptiness. But you know, aikido is a social experiment as much as it is anything else, and I wound up getting paired with someone who had been training less than a month.
This meant that I was in charge, and the subject of the lesson for that hour was emptiness. I was so screwed!
There were a lot of things going on in that hour that are only interesting if you do aikido. Hal is so good at what he's doing that it often looks like he's doing it wrong, and I am definitely not an expert, and the cool thing about Hal's classes is the way senior students flock to it because he's such a poet. Trying to bridge that gap as a novice was, on a strict Martial Arts Nerd level, exhausting. But you don't want to hear about it.
Two things happened in that hour though that I think translate outside the dojo. First, it became immediately clear the minute I stood with this beginner and had to explain why what he was doing wasn't working that I know much less about aikido than I thought I did. I've been training a lot, and thinking about aikido outside of class, and feeling like a bit of a hotshot. But all this knowledge I thought I possessed clearly lives in other people's bodies. They loan it to me on the mat so that I can generate just a little bit of my own to keep. I can't think of any time when it's not helpful to assume that this is the case.
The second lesson is weirder. See, it is not necessarily clear to a beginner that a dojo is a collaborative environment, and my partner was, I think, full of doubt about the way this all works, and might have also been coming in with a specific idea of what it's like to be martial. So he was rigid and testy, and didn't understand that I was trying really hard to work at his level, and that I had to do this because I didn't want to hurt him. He was refusing to get thrown.
You can't learn aikido without giving it the benefit of the doubt. One mentor who watched some of this hour and soothed me afterward put it this way:
You have to give your balance in order to learn how to take balance.
And I have never heard the word trust defined so usefully, or experienced a trust relationship unfolding in such a hamfistedly literal way. My partner didn't trust me, I am not sure he trusted Hal because a lot of what Hal does looks like magic, and for that matter I didn't exactly trust me either because I was wrapped up in lesson number one and trying to interpret Hal. This trustlessness proliferated, built on itself. At one point we were doing a technique that calls for taking someone's balance by, basically, striking their face. I'm not going to do that to a beginner. So I put my hand near his face.
On his face.
And then said, "Listen, ideally you don't want me to touch your face. Pretend I am hitting you right now and move your head back, OK?"
And he said in an agitated voice, "But you are not hitting me!"
And I thought about my options, and we went again, and I hit him in the face. His balance was taken and he narrowly avoided the smack, and he fell hard. The technique worked. But this did not increase his confidence or trust in me as much as it increased his fear. He doubled down on his initial strategy of martial-feeling rigidity, the hour slogged on, and the only tool I really had was explaining over and over again that he was putting himself into a bad position:
"It's true that you don't have to go onto the floor right now. But I have your arm and could break it if I wanted to. Getting on the floor signals to me that you don't want me to break your arm. "
There's got to be a more elegant way to say that. Don't you think?
Emptiness was nowhere to be found. By the end of class Hal was speaking the typical magic about not fighting, and were were focusing on basic interpretations of techniques instead, and we were fighting our way through them in this very basic and literal way that I cannot summarize, and need to hold onto and learn from.
I like looking at art as a consumer instead of as a maker. As a maker, I looked at more art faster, sorting rapidly into Useful and Not Useful at twenty paces. Yesterday Joel and I did the Whitney, the two of us looking at art together for the first time since we both decided to do other things than art, and the experience took hours because the question surrounding each object had nothing to do with us. Instead of cruising the galleries as if we had a stopwatch running, making snap judgements about that handful of things we could do something with, we actually parked in front of each object and wondered why it existed at all. Why we should be looking at it. What it's here for. What this experience even is.
Turns out the experience of looking in this way is deliciously open, almost gravity free. Time really does go away when you're not approaching art expediently. You really do feel stuff. Make discoveries. I had always relegated Hopper to Interesting, But Of Limited Use bin, and so each Hopper experience I had under my belt before yesterday was cursory. I like the inside-outside peeping tom thing he does, and have always included an image or two of his work when lecturing about space. He's a good gateway to Barbara Hepworth in a beginning sculpture class, because everyone gets Hopper and because oddly enough we live in a world so full of imagery that it's easier for a lot of students to see what you mean by the word "space" in an image than it is in a thing that takes up literal space. These formal ideas about Hopper have pleased me. But I did not understand, because he had always been Of Limited Use, how awesome it feels to stand in front of these works and feel your body create the sensation of the outside of the building, and the view in, and delight in the stolen reveal of naked flesh, or upturned ass, or pensive thought, in this way that really does simulate or represent Hopper sharing his private moment with you and you alone. I can't get over the fact that this representation of intimacy works in a crowded museum. And I don't even know what to say about the Paul Thek exhibit, because I have always found him Useful and so knew how great this work makes me feel. The difference between just enjoying Thek and using him is impossible for me to put words on just yet. Maybe there's no need.
I don't quite have a language for this shift in my own perception, which I may or may not want to keep documenting. And I don't quite have a way to talk about what looking at art is for or like now. Looking has become luscious and shloopy and open ended, and I think of writing as a way to focus, and I don't know what to focus here yet. What I do know right now is that I apologize for teaching art appreciation classes before this experience. It's as if I decided I was qualified to teach a sex appreciation class because I go out and have sex constantly and therefore obviously know everything about it. But I didn't even see that my practice is limited to quickies in bathrooms and the back seats of cars.
So, in aikido I've been focusing a lot of energy on being thrown well. I've been trying hard to listen to what is actually happening and respond to that instead of checking out and either throwing myself or leaving myself behind. Particularly because I am newish, working from this point of view involves investing attention in the person I am working with and forgetting myself a bit.
The instant benefits I get from this focus are going to sound repetitive to the dedicated reader. In the process of getting a BFA and MFA and building an art career, you are expected to focus relentlessly on yourself and your vision, with no simultaneous humility-building activity like submitting to the rigors of a craft or technique. As a result, your ego can at first become swollen and distended, and eventually grow into a malignancy that blocks your sphere of action, and even your field of vision. Anyone, talented or mediocre, who leaves this system winds up having to either excise or embrace this massive ego-fortress that the MFA Industrial Complex has helped them build. Even though shrinking one's own ego feels nothing less than absolutely fucking impossible, I do honestly believe that most people* are going to find it easier to get over themselves than they are likely to find anything truly interesting for other people from within that deep space inside themselves.
I train because I really need to submit to a humility-building activity. I need to be wrong a lot, I need to be in an environment where rank is much more important than ideas. I need to be where you are a beginning student for many years. And in that environment, I need to organize myself around listening. That's my homework. It's good homework for me. I really do feel happier and more creative. I've stopped hating art because my ego can handle looking at it now. Who knows what lies on the horizon? Life is great!
So here's a new wrinkle. It turns out that the next thing to work on is this clear and understandable bias I have against me--what I am doing and what I need. Because of my homework, I tend to focus too much on accepting what is happening externally and working with that, even when it means that I am sacrificing my own learning and power. A couple of weeks ago I was training with someone who's all about generating power. And I like power and have this listening homework and it's really hard not to get all whooped up when I am training with someone who wants to go fast and hard. So I was getting super sloppy when it was my turn to do the throwing. I was a huge chemical reaction to the stimulation of being thrown hard. I kind of forgot that fifty percent of the time I'm supposed to be focusing on doing the best technique I can to him.
Ruth, a teacher that I slightly idolize who is in the video above, stopped me and said that if I need to slow down and understand the technique, he will adjust. And it was true, and it seems like such an easy thing, but it's a really difficult switch to flick! I listened for four turns, and reacted as cleanly and openly as possible to what he was doing, thinking about myself in terms of safely accepting it. In these four turns I got thrown so hard that all I wanted to do is throw him hard back. And then I stopped, took a breath, absorbed his first attack, which was intense and fast, and instead of reacting to that, tried as hard as I could to move slowly, put my mind on where my body should be
(in this case, sliding behind him so that I can see his shoulder blades)
and keeping my hands, which have his neck and his elbow, in front of me. And not thinking about him at all beyond that. Thinking about me. Where are my hips? Are my hands connected to them? Do my feet have a strong connection to the mat? Are my shoulders relaxed? Am I standing up straight?
Now, let me be clear that this is very easy to write and next to impossible to consistently do. I don't want to leave you thinking that I can enter some zen state when someone tries to punch me in which I calmly turn my focus to my own actions and allow the attacker to disappear. The founder of aikido said "not to look at the attacker, not to look at the weapon. You should be looking like you are looking at a faraway mountain." But there is video of one of my teachers who trained with O Sensei kind of snorting as he quotes this and saying that this is an attitude that develops over many years, that it's an attitude you develop manually.
This resonates with me because everything true I've ever learned I've learned with my hands and body. And while I emphatically did not manage to slow down this powerhouse partner, I did get this amazing glimpse into what I was doing. And I saw the fork in the road, and saw what I should be trying to do to move on to the next part of this journey or whatever. I didn't realize before this that I was entering practice on the attacker's terms. I was thinking about how fast he was coming at me, how hard he would be to throw, how hard I wanted to throw him because I desperately wanted to "listen," and v. 1.0 of "listening" meant "keeping up."
*Not all people! I've been looking a lot at Brody Condon's performance work lately. He operates like none other from the inside of this ego-fortress, and should keep doing the fucked up shit he's doing, even though it's sometimes kind of wrong.
I think that the first sign of real success as a blogger is having to deal, in the real world, with people that you really don't want reading your blog coming to you and saying that they have read your blog. This has been happening to me more and more lately, in part because I am just doing more things that make people want to google me before I show up and in part because I am moving around a lot laterally and making new friends. For many years, this blog has been by an artist and as near as I can tell, for about 100 other artists. Now it's kind of all over the place, as am I. And so it sits here on the internet, a record of new ground covered haphazardly. A long-ass digital skidmark that stretches from here all the way back to 2006.
There are lots of reasons to be cool with this. I think the posts I've done about moving away from art have helped some people feel less guilt or anxiety. And the posts that I've done about aikido are probably boring as hell to non-MA geeks, but have helped out my daily life as I figure out how to live a little differently. This is what a blog is for: it's a platform for peer-to-peer generosity, and for putting who you want to be outside yourself, so that you have no excuses. But as both the writing and the audience broaden and I move away from the court-jestery role of artist, in which I am fundamentally powerless and the only authority I have is to say whatever the fuck I want, the Grand Theory of Blogging stops being theoretical.
The Grand Theory of Blogging states that there is nothing to hide, that all the fun stuff--opportunity, interest, connection, cool projects--grow out of the generous sharing of oneself, and that it is fundamentally diminishing to attempt to protect your privacy in a world where everyone has access to everything anyway. In other words, I am already googleable. Since that's true, the most powerful thing I can do is ensure that the first thing you find when you google my name is me. If I am putting my real me out there, then I am narrowing the gap so that I can be helpful to you and connect. While I am at it, I can also set some expectations--for example, don't expect me not to swear and don't expect me not to tell you the truth, even if the truth is a difficult one. I leave you with a clear sense of who I am that is more than a resume--that is more about what drives me than what I have done.
The only person I don't want reading my blog is the person who reads it and tells me that they "found" it like it's a dirty secret. This person is concerned that it is overly tender, and worries to me about how much I am putting out there. When I am in that conversation, the Grand Theory stops being something that I believe or say, and has to become something that I actually enact or apply. My first stabs at application have focused too much on how this person is missing the point. I've been explaining that this accusation of tenderness is absurd, that the content of this blog is actually considered, that there are a lot of things I only write about privately, that I am a huge fan of boundaries, that I'm not Jennifer Ringley. That's just arguing. It turns all that presence I've been working to build into distance.
The cool thing about the Grand Theory is that it is the device that makes this kind of arguing unnecessary. In this conversation in which I am being accused of tenderness, I am standing fully before a person who, because they have read my blog, knows how I can and cannot help, who I think my best self is, how I struggle as we all do and how I specifically aspire to overcome those struggles. The conversation started because that best foot is forward: I am a truth teller. I admit my mistakes. I have a specific trajectory and a way of organizing my world and making it meaningful. I have limiting habits of mind that I work to catapult over. Because I am a known quantity, I actually have the luxury of shutting my mouth in that moment and listening to what that person is telling me about who they are and, in this specific instance, what they fear.
In aikido, there's the person who throws and the person who is thrown. I've been working on being thrown better. It's called ukemi . It's mostly about listening to what the person who is throwing you is actually doing, and responding to that in a way that keeps you safe. You don't want to bail or throw yourself or anticipate--you want to just let the throw happen to you. You want to face your partner and look at them the whole time. You even want to look at them instead of looking at the mat, which is where you are going, and this is really hard to do. You want to keep being present and connected without resisting. You want to relax. A lot. But not so much that you lose your core strength or integrity. And you want to balance all this giving and allowing stuff with a lot of boundary and protection stuff. Definitely keep your mouth shut. Stay upright--don't lead with your face! Make your partner take your balance instead of just giving it to them. Don't leave any room between your face and something your partner can hit you with, like their arm or shoulder. Turn your head to protect your adam's apple. Look for openings. When it's time to go, get yourself low to the ground first. Keep your head off the mat. Once you are hitting the mat, the goal is to do it quietly, without slapping your feet or your legs (or kidneys) unnecessarily on the mat. There are people I train with who slide out of a throw like a snake sliding out of a tree. I am definitely not yet one of those people.
There are practical benefits to this focus. Fifty percent of each class is falling down, and the tiny injuries have been piling up. I've got sore knees, cricky-cracky elbows, pulled muscles in my ribs (ouch!) and legs, and the more conscious I am of how I am falling, the less old I feel later. But there's more to it than that. Being thrown well is a function of listening to what's actually happening, so that you can avoid throwing yourself harder than your partner intended, or worse, underestimate the force and leave part of your flesh behind.
There's a depth to that listening part, to understanding that there is a gap between what is actually happening and what I think is happening. And this depth is soothing because I am such a beginner and spazz, and am still often flummoxed. I feel like I am never going to stop being told that I am moving from my shoulders instead of from my center. I don't know when I will stop moving backwards on accident during this one technique that depends on moving consistently forward. I am getting really used to being told that I am sticking my butt out, and it's getting easier to laugh at the fact that the one technique I can't stick my butt out for is the one technique that requires it.
Training your body to do what your mind wants is a sometimes humiliating process in which what's most interesting are these disconnects--these gaps between what you know and what you do. I began making sculpture because I found so much comfort in the way the world outside your mind is unarguably what it is. The wall is bearing a load or it is not. The weld holds when you beat it with a hammer or it doesn't, and nothing you can say makes it otherwise. You can have an idea in your head, but you will make the sculpture that reality will allow you to create.
The limitations of thinking sculpturally have on this blog become a litany. Depending on the physical making of the physical world to tell you what's real creates artistic needs that nobody can sustain forever. Looking exclusively at the relationship between human and built object avoids all this meaty territory in which we really do make reality with words and ideas and interactions. The macho persona a sculptor (well… this sculptor anyway) creates is more about hiding and fear than it is about exploring. Strength is always a limited resource. Blah, blah blah.
But there is a doorway here. It's entirely possible that I am a better artist than I think, and that the kind of art I should be making hasn't happened to me yet. Not in a way that I've been able to listen to.
I saw Jackass 3D last night and laughed so hard that my stomach muscles hurt this morning!
Jackass has been art appreciation curriculum for me for a long time. When attempting to explain contemporary art to non-artists, I usually start with (a better version of) this clip of Dave England shitting in a display toilet in a hardware store. I do this because it grounds us in the abject, crappy world of contemporary art, and because Dave England shitting in public is really easy to have an opinion about. The biggest hurdle non-artists face when looking at art is the culture of head-nodding that pervades art and blocks intelligent discussion. Non-artists see more clearly than artists that there's something scammy about galleries. You can put just about anything in a cavernous, empty white room and guard it with a cadre of serious-looking white girls in pointy shoes who look right through you, and when you do that you make that thing into something that everyone has to find very important, even if it's actually stupider than Dave England shitting in a display toilet in a hardware store. The fact that Jackass is an MTV product and not a Gagosian product has, if you'll permit the pun, a laxative effect on discussion. Students are compelled by the act itself to ask why? The second question is usually how, and whether or not they personally could usually follows that, and imagining what it must have been like to be the store owner or a patron follows and suddenly all the defensive "I could do that" walls that kids in a mandatory art appreciation class throw up are tumbling down and everyone in the room is experiencing something intense. It's either revulsion or admiration, but it springs out of empathy for the artiste and is at the same time relentlessly focused on whether or not the gesture works.
Once that orientation of empathy has been dialed in, all these other performance art videos become relevant, and they become a foundation upon which it is possible to head out into the galleries and actually talk about a lot of different kinds of art, from the perspective of empathizing with the individual artist and his or her quest, and whether or not that quest works for the students:
But it's interesting that if you try to show Shoot first, or Vito Acconci spitting into his hands, or even Bill Wegman's early work, you'll get blank stares. It's a function of context, but I don't think that this is simply about Jackass being a known quantity. Johnny Knoxville begs for empathy in a way that Abramovic, Burden or Acconci simply assume, and that a contemporary example like Ryan Trecartin simply demands.
I don't know whether begging for empathy is about MTV needing a different product than Mary Boone because it serves a different market or if it's about a humility that is inherent to the Jackass crew. I'm assuming that the pressures of one context are simply different than the pressures of another, and that this difference demands different mindsets. And I have no idea whether this makes Jackass better or worse as art. But it's a consistently useful lever.
