a statement

When Brewster from Brewster’s Millions was finally able to reveal that he had spent the $30 million in order to get the $300 million, I thought about art. Art is like that, you know—like spending $30 million to get $300 million. But did you ever wonder what Brewster did with the $300 million after he got it? And did the conspirators who tried to obstruct Brewster’s attempts to gain his full inheritance really go to jail? Or did they just have attorneys who got them off the hook? Seriously, maybe Brewster forgave them because he was a nice guy. He seemed like a nice guy, when he and John Candy weren’t out philandering. It doesn’t seem, however, like Brewster was ever going to get to play for the Yankees. But, just because the sun comes up today, doesn’t mean it will come up tomorrow, so perhaps he did play for the Yankees eventually. He could get anybody out for three innings. But that’s the thing that escapes us, I guess, is we just don’t know what Brewster did after the movie. Hell, we don’t even know what he was up to for much of the period in which the movie was set. It would be impossible to document every minute of Brewster’s life for a month. I mean, I’m talking about something a bunch of people made: they spliced it together from take after take, probably out of sequence, into what should seem like a random series of scenes, but it somehow adheres into a linear narrative. It’s nearly magic, and I’m still not satisfied. And I keep mixing in that scene from the first—or maybe the second—episode of Quantum Leap when Sam was a ball player, and he talks to his dad who, in Sam’s day, or in the linearality of his own life—I mean, it’s time travel, so it gets confusing—is dead. His dad is dead, you see, but Sam has gone back in time, so he gets his dad on the phone. It’s pretty neat. So when I fill the lacunae—the anti-narrative space—left after Brewster’s big game—following his team’s humiliating defeat and his big speech to the assembled crowd—I insert that scene from Quantum Leap. It’s poignant. Anyway, I draw from another piece of work altogether to craft my own story, and I somehow associate those scenes with my own feelings of loss, reminiscences about time with my folks, imaginings of how it will feel when they die, sympathy for all those people who have lost parents—in short, the experience of the scenes becomes interwoven with everything that has contributed to the constitution of the feelings that are mine, that feel so personal and spontaneous, even though they are an inheritance, simulacra of authenticity. It all gets mixed in together with a presentation that I make for myself from an amalgam of Quantum Leap and Brewster’s Millions—two programs to which I had access originally only because of a confluence of resources and materials available to the artists (if you’ll grant the makers of Brewster’s Millions and the Leap—my pet name for Quantum Leap—that status), the color TV I had in my own home growing up, and myriad other conditions within and beyond my control. But when I make art, when I’m called to make something that may or may not be constituted as art, or when I’m called by art to make it, or when I am called an artist (which has never happened), I can’t help but wonder what Brewster did with that $300 million and how he lived his life after he was awarded it. I don’t think it was the intention of the people who made that film to inspire speculations regarding Brewster’s dying words or to establish any desire within viewers to splice scenes from Quantum Leap into the narrative of the movie. So, in a way, it doesn’t matter what I intend with or for my "art." Furthermore, it doesn’t matter whether I think my stuff is art or artsy or artistic; attributions are, ultimately, beyond my control. Personally, I am not trying to participate in some field of power in which my specific investment in the term “art” has a bearing on the symbolic, social, and material resources that are available for the production, distribution, and interpretation of…whatever. I don’t have positive material or symbolic investments in the term “art”--I don't ascribe the label to my work. Doing so would be to appropriate a term with which I would prefer to have a minimal association. But, again, ultimately, I have little control over such attributions. Honestly, I just want to know what Brewster did with that $300 million.