When I was at art school, a guy called Mike coined the phrase 'one-liner'. It describes those works of art that you look at and 'get', those works that don't have very much to command your attention after the punchline. Being young upstarts, we we simultaneously trying to make one-liners and hating them with a passion.

In the many years since then, I've been accompanied to galleries and museums and am almost always turned to by the person who 'doesn't get it' and I tell them that getting is overrated - that what matters is what happens between the person and the work, and if nothing happens, that is not a fault in the person.

On Sunday, I was that person, turning to my lovely friend Nicole, saying 'I don't get it'.


We were at the New Museum, experiencing an installation by Anri Sala. The first room we encountered had a piece called 'Answer Me' and featured three looped large scale video projections. I don't know how much time passed in that room, only that the videos - two featuring musicians (drummer, saxophonist) very tightly framed so the instruments are mainly discerned through sound - lopped twice before we could bring ourselves to move on, and reluctantly at that. 
I thought I had a handle on the third video: inhabitants of a town, all 'card-carrying' (the cards were manilla, with punched holes of varying lengths), separately visited a music box to sample their card. I knew, when strung together, the cards would create a song, and that's what happens. But it only became apparent on the second time through that another set of scenes was being projected on the reverse of the screen that divided the room. So far, so rug-from-under-the-feet.
Then my synapses, in their futile attempt to make connections - to 'read' the work - were truly fried: the saxophonist appeared again - or rather, the close up of his dreadlocked hair with its crown of rhododendron. And an actual flesh-and-blood saxophonist appeared. Or didn't appear. Instead he played an answering sax (or perhaps a calling sax) to the back of the screen, which was flickering almost in sync with the volume of the music. Toward the end of the piece, the saxophonist walked around the screen.

What was it? Performance? Dialogue between instruments, between musicians, between the live and the recorded? Story? Sensation? I didn't know. It was, undoubtedly, of and about many things. But I stopped thinking it was important to know.

I wanted to kiss whoever had put that show on. I wanted to own the videos - of disembodied hands performing miracles on ivories; of a woman 'playing' ravel on a twin deck turntable; of colourful balconies and the political dimension of personal space - and I wanted to feel it all, and not know a thing. No sobre. Not about anything.