Statements from Which Man Would Trust? (McKinley Shooting Gallery)
by Betsy Frazer and Craig Reynolds, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Spring 2001
In Buffalo, we are greeted with a Grecian challenge, a mammoth promise founded on distinct principles of emptiness. We are left with no hope, no future, and yet––because we exist (which is the only thing that really matters)––we must place our faith in human energy alone and forge a future for ourselves in the spaces rent open through collapse. | Buffalo provides a challenge, not a legacy; it taunts the uninspired until they flee to a city where legacy’s flow will carry them along. Buffalo requires a substantial commitment, like that of a drowning man to his condition. In Buffalo, we wrestle with God, Job’s God, and the fact of being is enough. | Like Odysseus, we must push forward, even if the promise of a Helen on which to set our gaze eludes us––perhaps even because it eludes us. We must do it anyway and that fact ennobles us. Our challenge is not to rebuild but to start again, to erect the future on a bedrock of absence––despite oblivion, despite absence, because of absence, because of oblivion. | Unlike in other cities, where it’s easy to sink into the flow of everything’s fine, in Buffalo, you must be a prophet or drown in utter mediocrity. Buffalo demands existential authenticity, and the rock we push up the hill (only to have it roll back down over us time and time again) is our only salvation. | Like those born the day after the end of the world, in Buffalo, we must confront silence or die. Those who refuse doom themselves to the obscurity that inevitably engulfs them or flee to less difficult cities where silence at least means something. | Living outside the new American power centers we are like trees falling in a person-less forest, condemned to make of our condition its own meaning. Many who recognize this predicament champion the blue-collar work ethic that the city exhibits so effortlessly; but the fact of existing without the reassurance that doing so matters is in and of itself significant--possibly even revolutionary. | In Buffalo, where silence reigns even at the apex of the downtown workday, we are ennobled by the awareness that no matter what we do, silence remains (even when burying one's head in the loudest of corporate symphonies) and shouting into the void is the best we can hope for . . . | Buffalo is a word that means nothing, expresses nothing, communicates nothing, demands nothing. Its ephemerality is its essence. Its unwillingness to cling to any one meaning serves as testament to its democracy. Its inability to represent anything at all is its crowing glory–– | In Buffalo, there’s nothing to distract you from the fact that there’s nothing to do . . . | Buffalo is the most advanced city in America; we progressed beyond progress. Our truth is grounded on an intense understanding of everything that is false (or an intense understanding that everything is false). | Like Rimbaud in the gutters and back–alleys of Paris, in Buffalo, you have no choice but to remake life; there are no material illusions left to buy, no palace gates to hide behind (I endure Siddhartha Gautama’s 4 passing sights whenever I walk out my front door). | We don’t need to realize the ultimate insignificance of the world; our world realizes it for us. Not only does Buffalo’s faded, tattered industrial landscape prefigure a dawning, postmodern art and architecture, it augers a new way of being. I mark in every face I pass marks of weakness, marks of woe––the sane, saintly sufferings of Christ. | The evaporation of meaning experienced daily on Buffalo’s streets proffers an intense understanding of the true materials of reality, and today, as the project of cultural deconstruction initiated in 1901 nears completion, we must accept loss forever and progress into the new millennium unencumbered by nostalgia for the structures that our forefathers––true visionary buffoons––spent the 20th century dismantling. | Our concern is not so much with loss (and therefore, recovery), as per our parents' generation, but with absence, with oblivion, with an utter lack of clear guiding principles by which to orient our lives, with the existential indeterminacy that this situation engenders––that is, the silence that succeeds last season's crash. | In Buffalo, we have exhausted all the tired cliches of American culture, but who needs them anyway? I’d rather run with wild dogs through silent streets than jump from old mall to new mall hopelessly fleeing my own inevitable collapse. | OBJECTIVE: to rewrite history by reclaiming the terminology that enslaves it, as well as the mythology of failure that results from that terminology. Buffalo can’t win because it defines itself by an outdated mode of appraisal that clutters the closet like a dress several seasons too small. There’s no need to cling to a failed terminology, and there’s certainly no reason to judge oneself by it, especially when the adjustments that produced devaluation loosed a revolution of avant-garde cultural activity based on an inversion of its primary tenets. | The impermanence, emptiness, hopelessness we experience daily demands a reevaluation of the our central metaphysical assumptions, a revaluation orchestrated to accommodate a more open–ended, infinite vision of reality, one that accommodates the forces of opposition, disruption and decay in equal measure to those of construction, order and life. | Buffalo nurtures the verbal spirit because Buffalo itself is a word. Elsewhere, you find yourself slammed (to dance) by the thunderous rumble of syncopated street life, but in Western New York, you are crippled always by the idea of Buffalo, a central reality as pithy and omnipresent as Mardi Gras beads in New Orleans, cooked shrimp on the bayou, morning mist across the Rockies or dirt–lined fingernails in New York City. What chariots your stay in Western New York is the myth of Buffalo––the grandiose legend of absolute absence that consumes us. | Buffalo exists only in theory––as an abstract possibility (like infinitude, or absolute zero), a concrete manifestation of an unspeakable reality (we live this reality, in mind and body). Nobody actually visits Buffalo; you're there before you arrive, gone before you came––I'm not convinced Buffalo even exists . . . except as hearsay, legend, memory . . . perhaps as literature. But as Proust demonstrated, transcendence is only a memory away, and dreams don't exist but in the words we use to describe them afterward. | Buffalo unfolds like poetic verses, each street another line, each house another word. Buffalo accumulates words and lines and stanzas like an abandoned lot hoards garbage and dogshit. Buffalo unfolds like a grand novel the last 30 or 40 pages of which have been torn out (I’m sure you can guess what happens in the end). | In Buffalo, relegated as we are to the plane of fiction, of myth, of theory (by America's unwavering willingness to facilitate our descent into memory), the words in which we exist provide a loophole for transcendence. To deny our essence now––sentences constructed from memory and imagination (in the service of a supposedly distinct reality every decaying thing about Buffalo conspires to prove does not actually exist)––would be to forfeit our lives to the cliches that enslave us. This remains a horrible possibility whose slippery likelihood demands a renaissance of the fractured word––if not merely a healthy airing of pure and total nonsense, the meaningless verbal cacophony that is Buffalo's most endearing contribution to the American diction. | Walking the streets of Buffalo, our minds have no choice but to fill the spaces our bodies no longer occupy; we experience dream and reality simultaneously. We stretch backwards and forward through time, experiencing the vast imaginative landscape of the unfettered frontier, the logical buildings of the city on the rise, the decay and disruption of that particular enterprise, and the unfolding contours of the new era, which inverts the troubled industrial apparatus. | History––the concerted narrative applied to moments released onto the surface of memory––is an entirely ex post facto conceit constructed from shards of experiences. In Buffalo, we are left with a choice: try to resurrect the past that eludes us or accept the fact that we are left with nothing and build from fragments of the present––and of the future. | The silenced bricks discarded in scattered piles where once stood irrepressibly vocal monuments to history's progress invite a re–dressing of history according to the realization that the edifice of time is only as stable as the wrecking ball is slow to swing in its direction, and that the mortared brick–lace once thought to protect and preserve the meaning we were quick to defend was itself the focus around which we felt confident orienting our focus-less lives. | The city of Buffalo is the ultimate capitalist gesture. It came and went like a heart attack, rendering its innumerable accomplishments as obsolete as overpriced Cabbage Patch Dolls. In Buffalo, we already know what younger cities will learn when their 100 years are up––the absolute oblivion of the American dollar. | Buffalo is a giant void that sucks itself gradually inward, deconstructing its own glorious history even as it continues to unfold. | The central condition defining Buffalo's history, like all histories, is absence, which means we should concern ourselves with generating an appropriate response to this dilemma. | As the last factories stumble to a halt, the railroads sink into memory and the Erie Canal lies in rot, Buffalo set its sights on the seeds of rational thought, one of which is linear writing, the warped off–spring of standardized printed type. The collected works of Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Michael Basinski, Ray Federman and other individuals living and working in Buffalo represent the future of the futureless present. They evince an approach to living devoid of any formal clinging to prescribed order, language, systematology or design. | Buffalo has busied itself creating a vocabulary of absence and decay that articulates the American––perhaps, Western––dilemma at the end of the old world, which Leon Czolgosz signaled when 2 shots rang out on a Pan–American afternoon and Trico, Bethlehem Steel and other bastions of American enterprise echoed in the grinding silence of factories left to die on the edge of the industrio-rational century. | That the world has come to an end around me, evidently not as permanent as Buffalo’s legislators of the "real"––and America’s architects of the absolute before them––led us to believe, is not my concern; but as a result, I hesitate to designate the inherently temporary world we inhabit "reality." | We have inherited the empty shell of a city, of a history, of a life pursuit that once had meaning inherently but does not do so any longer. That this history, this city, our lives, once exemplified an experience that has come to define the country's, and by extension, the Western World's, central principles only makes our dilemma that much more pregnant, relevant and absurd. | Walking the streets of downtown, with its splayed buildings strewn across the fragmented landscape, one has no choice but to linger between dream and reality perpetually, to occupy that space where fact and fiction intermingle and bleed together. That is not to turn our backs on the past but to refrain from turning our backs to the present, as the present at least gives us hope. Our outrage, the first shocked gasp, is followed by a burst of pure elation, in which we realize how lucky we are to have eluded the trap that the rest of America is destined to stumble into. | Today, with the city’s buildings––and by extension, the edifice of history––left in ruins (that the edifice of time is hollow inside is central to an understanding of the true nature of American reality), it is imperative that we appropriate the fractured materials positively, in the service of a progressive agenda free from nostalgia for a former, more comfortable reality splayed indifferently across empty lots in a ravaged downtown. | A surrealist suicide in protest against God and Time, our history miraculously vacated itself, orphaning its own to the wind. Now, we are free to re–invent the world at the nexus of memory & imagination (a privilege we would not enjoy had we lived in a city where the apparatus of American distraction remains firmly in check). | As Buffalo crumbles further, revealing itself to be artifice, and, in memory, fiction, we are forced to accept the burden of genius. No longer able to distinguish between what’s there, what was there and what could be there, Buffalonians have no choice but to experience the city on all 3 levels at once. Fragmentation, disruption and decay initiate a stretching of the soul, a spiritual implosion incurred to accommodate this wider, more complex experience of human reality. |