The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Art Does (Not!) Exist by Rosalyn Drexler
Michelle Latiolais

Rosalyn Drexler. Art Does (Not!) Exist. FC2, 1996. 187 pp. $19.95.

Julia Maraini, the first-person narrator of Rosalyn Drexler’s latest novel, Art Does (Not!) Exist, begins her story with these words: “This book will help me decide which project to present for an NEA Fellowship in Visual Arts-Based Performance, Video, and new genres.” We understand very quickly that Julia Maraini is a video artist, or less exaltedly, we understand that Julia Maraini’s response to anything in her life, urine streaming down her basement apartment windows, an acquaintance confessing to sodomizing cows, human skeletons between her refrigerator and stove, is to film it, to record it on video tape. Not much enters Maraini’s life that doesn’t find its way onto tape or into images. Even Julia Maraini’s husband, the genetic scientist Josef Konrad, from whom she is recently separated, finds himself on the “Geraldo Show” exposing his step-father’s cruelty to him as a child and ultimately—as the live audience watches passively transfixed—stabbing him to death.

What is at work in a novel whose primary project is the literary depiction (ekphrasis) of lives and deaths placed on video? Certainly one task we assume as readers is to help curate Julia Maraini’s oeuvre ourselves: Which video project should she send to the NEA in application for a fellowship? Another task we meet as readers, not extricable perhaps from the first, is to think about the possibility that none of this is art, not even the book we’re reading; that all of it is art; that we no longer have a clue about what art is; or more profoundly what its office (interest?) is within our irretrievably contemporary lives.

An arena of insights within the novel centers around the idea of revision or corrections, errata, if you will. We are not unaware as we read the text of Art Does (Not!) Exist that it is riddled with errors. A character’s name fluctuates between Ann and Jane, and words are misspelled or variously spelled. Certainly as I read I wondered if FC2 was bereft of copy editors, and then it dawned on me that perhaps the fact that I was “catching” these errors, that I was annoyed and reacting and wondering What the hell! was a point the novel was happy to make. That when I exclaimed across the bed to my husband, “You’d think they could at least get Jayne Anne Phillips’s name spelled correctly,” I was still in the land of the perceiving, the reacting, though within that land just barely, and as copy editor. There are marked contrasts in the novel between the all-accepting reactions of people viewing videotapes or television and the reaction we have as we read the imperfect—intentionally imperfect, I hope—text of this novel. I suppose that we—on some level—remain critical, active, energized, bemused.

The novel ends wonderfully, satirically with a list of editing mistakes, “Corrections,” made in an absurdly gushing article from the New York Times “Arts & Leisure” section on the now famous Julia Maraini, “the preeminent artist of her time: 1994 to 1995 and one-half.” When the article claims that Maraini’s work “appropriates without apogee, the entire history of art,” it is a beautiful example—error or no error—of an entirely substanceless response to art, Maraini’s or anyone’s. I wonder if part of Drexler’s meditation doesn’t finally suggest an America without self-reflexive abilities, without much of a capacity for acute perception. Even reader as copy editor is better than the complete and utter lack of critical response artists receive today in the United States. I suppose Drexler is suggesting that in order for art to exist there must also be a context in which it is actively examined, even if just typographically?

On my darkest days I’m not sure I really believe the above, but I certainly appreciate from where the sentiment is coming, and though I’ve probably been lugubrious in my reception of this novel thus far, I must quickly say that there is great smart fun here, and much of it eddies around the literary representations of Julia Maraini’s various videos. Both in and outside these videos there is an entertaining and motley crew of characters, and the remove we enjoy by reading about these videos and their subjects instead of viewing them the way the medium intends they be viewed is hysterically amusing, enlightening, even sobering. But this is not a sober book and when I had to put it down, I was anxious to return, to take up the very funny—read satirical—story of Julia Maraini’s apotheosis as an artist in today’s America. As a scholar said to me in complete wonder a few years ago, “I didn’t know anyone wrote a novel of ideas anymore.” Here ya go, darlin’ and it’s a dandy. [Michelle Latiolais]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction Art Does (Not!) Exist by Rosalyn Drexler Michelle Latiolais Rosalyn Drexler. Art Does (Not!) Exist. FC2, 1996. 187 pp. $19.95. Julia Maraini, the first-person narrator of Rosalyn Drexler’s latest novel, Art Does (Not!) Exist, begins her story with these words: “This book will help me decide which project to present for an NEA Fellowship in Visual Arts-Based Performance, Video, and new genres.” We understand very quickly that Julia Maraini is a video artist, or less exaltedly, we understand that Julia Maraini’s response to anything in her life, urine streaming down her basement apartment windows, an acquaintance confessing to sodomizing cows, human skeletons between her refrigerator and stove, is to film it, to record it on video tape. Not much enters Maraini’s life that doesn’t find its way onto tape or into images. Even Julia Maraini’s husband, the genetic scientist Josef Konrad, from whom she is recently separated, finds himself on the “Geraldo Show” exposing his step-father’s cruelty to him as a child and ultimately—as the live audience watches passively transfixed—stabbing him to death. What is at work in a novel whose primary project is the literary depiction (ekphrasis) of lives and deaths placed on video? Certainly one task we assume as readers is to help curate Julia Maraini’s oeuvre ourselves: Which video project should she send to the NEA in application for a fellowship? Another task we meet as readers, not extricable perhaps from the first, is to think about the possibility that none of this is art, not even the book we’re reading; that all of it is art; that we no longer have a clue about what art is; or more profoundly what its office (interest?) is within our irretrievably contemporary lives. An arena of insights within the novel centers around the idea of revision or corrections, errata, if you will. We are not unaware as we read the text of Art Does (Not!) Exist that it is riddled with errors. A character’s name fluctuates between Ann and Jane, and words are misspelled or variously spelled. Certainly as I read I wondered if FC2 was bereft of copy editors, and then it dawned on me that perhaps the fact that I was “catching” these errors, that I was annoyed and reacting and wondering What the hell! was a point the novel was happy to make. That when I exclaimed across the bed to my husband, “You’d think they could at least get Jayne Anne Phillips’s name spelled correctly,” I was still in the land of the perceiving, the reacting, though within that land just barely, and as copy editor. There are marked contrasts in the novel between the all-accepting reactions of people viewing videotapes or television and the reaction we have as we read the imperfect—intentionally imperfect, I hope—text of this novel. I suppose that we—on some level—remain critical, active, energized, bemused. The novel ends wonderfully, satirically with a list of editing mistakes, “Corrections,” made in an absurdly gushing article from the New York Times “Arts & Leisure” section on the now famous Julia Maraini, “the preeminent artist of her time: 1994 to 1995 and one-half.” When the article claims that Maraini’s work “appropriates without apogee, the entire history of art,” it is a beautiful example—error or no error—of an entirely substanceless response to art, Maraini’s or anyone’s. I wonder if part of Drexler’s meditation doesn’t finally suggest an America without self-reflexive abilities, without much of a capacity for acute perception. Even reader as copy editor is better than the complete and utter lack of critical response artists receive today in the United States. I suppose Drexler is suggesting that in order for art to exist there must also be a context in which it is actively examined, even if just typographically? On my darkest days I’m not sure I really believe the above, but I certainly appreciate from where the sentiment is coming, and though I’ve probably been lugubrious in my reception of this novel thus far, I must quickly say that there is great smart fun here, and much of it eddies around the literary representations of Julia Maraini’s various videos. Both in and outside these videos there is an entertaining and motley crew of characters, and the remove we enjoy by reading about these videos and their subjects instead of viewing them the way the medium intends they be viewed is hysterically amusing, enlightening, even sobering. But this is not a sober book and when I had to put it down, I was anxious to return, to take up the very funny—read satirical—story of Julia Maraini’s apotheosis as an artist in today’s America. As a scholar said to me in complete wonder a few years ago, “I didn’t know anyone wrote a novel of ideas anymore.” Here ya go, darlin’ and it’s a dandy. [Michelle Latiolais]

Search the full text of our books: