8 years later: On revisiting old work, finding joy through grief, and growing out of dormancy

[Obama's election] marks the end of such a long period of pain, of indignity and injustice for African-Americans. And for so many others of us, of the trampling and debasing of our most basic ideals, beliefs that we cherished every bit as deeply and passionately as those of the "values voters" around whose sensibilities we've had to tiptoe...

[This marks the end of] an era of unbridled deregulation, wealth-enhancing perks for the already well-off, and miserly indifference to the poor and middle class; of the recasting of greed as goodness, the equation of bellicose provincialism with patriotism, the reframing of bigotry as small-town decency.

...these years shut down, for some of us, the ability to fully imagine another way. The election brought the return of a country we'd lost for so long that it was almost forgotten under the accumulated scar tissue of accommodation and acceptance.

For me, this will be the enduring memory of election night 2008: One generation released its grief.

Judith Warner, Tears to Remember
The New York Times, November 6, 2008

Judith Warner articulates so much of what I've been feeling these last few days since Obama's election. I've been trying to write about it, but just haven't found the words. So thank you, Judith, for giving me opportunity to quote yours.

Culturally and historically, this election is meaningful in ways we don't yet have the hindsight to comprehend fully. As Warner says, this triumph ushers in a new era of the same magnitude that Reagan's election in 1980 ushered in with the previous. I believe that Tuesday's win goes beyond the person of Barack Obama just as Reagan's campaign tapped into the zeitgeist of the previous generation. With a positive message and rationally-based campaign (not to mention the use of technology in information exchange and grass-roots organization), Obama was able to motivate a critical mass toward progressive change and begin the healing of a racial divide. This is no small thing. That there was a critical mass to be motivated in the first place speaks to the changing of the guard of ideas and values rather than change in leadership alone.

Personally, I feel as though I'm beginning anew... as if I picked up where I left off in the year 2000. And somewhere in the muddy middle is this depressive and hopeless blur of the past 8 years of dubious elections, corruption, lies, an ill-founded war, social inequalities, economic disparities and (eventually) financial collapse.

In the weeks leading up to the election, I'd become increasingly anxious about what the outcome might be. Like so many others, I'd begun to expect failure and had lost much hope in the corrupted political and financial institutions and processes. It wasn't easy for me "to risk heartbreak on the chance," to quote Warner again, that anything in this country had or could be changed for the better. But I did risk (even so far as to become a volunteer for the Obama campaign) and things did change.

It's within this context of post-election exhilaration and pre-election hopeful anxiety that I chose to finish archiving my thesis, Fallow, online. The images below are excerpts.

we planted a tree

the first tree died and we planted another one
we're planting a whole forest of trees

For the most part, archiving an artist's book into a blog format is a slow and monotonous process of cutting and pasting text, layering and transferring images, matching images to text, etc. The upside to the drudgery is that it has been affording me plenty of opportunity to sit with the material, to ponder and to take a broad view of the work over time.

So for the last few weeks, I've been archiving, which means I've been pondering Fallow, fretting over the potential outcome of the election and wondering about the dialectic between those two activities. Specifically, I've been wondering: Why now? Why did I choose the weeks preceding and directly after the U.S. presidential election to archive (and essentially "show" in another venue) a piece I wrote and videotaped 8 years ago?

Only through the work of archiving – telling and re-telling, the act of reiteration – have I been able to better understand the motivations and answer those questions for myself. And with that, I should probably offer another re-telling – a concise summary of Fallow – so connections between the emotional charge of the work and my feelings about the political horror that has been these past 8 years and the promise of a more fruitful future might make more sense.

Fallow narrates a series of shared losses that I and my marriage partner, Frank, shared in the Summer of 2000 and about how the nature of human loss is to compound one loss upon another and another... loss of a parent, a pregnancy, a beloved pet. As the text unfolds this personal narrative of repetition, still video images complicate the narrative with both disruptive and sympathetic resonances. The video images walk the viewer step-by-step along a staircased circular path leading through a fallow plot of land in the Franklin Hills of L.A. The views reveal an otherwise overlooked and forgotten location where the lack of cultivation (either in planting or pruning) has spawned an abundance of plant and animal life. The story circles between those spaces of hope and grief where the play of image and text repeat cycles of attachment, suffering, joy, and even outright delight in the wildness of the landscape.

For me, Fallow is a pretty grim (though still surprisingly playful) piece of work that ushered forth from a depressed mind. That being acknowledged, it is not an easy piece for me to revisit let alone read daily or sit with and ponder for weeks on end. It nearly always brings me to tears. So with that level of grief embedded in the work, I wondered (as I was cutting and pasting and layering and reading words like "one loss leads to another") if I would not in the days and weeks following the election be writing a blog post that would cast this work as yet another song of grief.

'sokay we say
'sokay we said

we push the furniture to the middle of the room
and paint the walls red
we mop the floor on our hands and knees
we wash our hands
we clean our noses of the smell
we clear our heads of the idea

we're spending this year talking ourselves out of
what we spent last year talking ourselves into

'sokay we say
we're convincing ourselves
we've convinced ourselves

This repetition (and expectation that begins to form with repetition) is built into the content of the piece as well as its structure – how bodies and minds interact with the piece during installation / presentation. Online, the reader can pick up the narrative of Fallow at any point or read in sequence as it appears on the blog (from top to bottom, contrary to the way blogs are usually read). Similarly, with gallery installation, the viewers create the repetition of the narrative by their movement through the space – movement which is led by individual interest or curiosity.

With the gallery installation, I marveled at the consistency with which the visitors viewed the material's content. Despite being fairly diverse (in age, sex, race, status, occupation), each individual walked a slow pace through the gallery and read every single page (all 210) in sequence. I had not expected this at all. And further, that many of them would be moved to tears... though I myself had been, though Frank had been, though friends had been, though colleagues had been... I had not expected this from strangers.

That others might share in the circumambulation of the space as Frank and I had wound full circle again and again in the Franklin Hills – that we might share some common emotion despite individual differences of experience – was surprising to someone as myself so overcome with sadness and so accustomed to disappointment. On election night, the feeling was one of déjà-vu as our house cried tears of joy with friends on the telephone, with email chats and with images of strangers on television during the election speech.

fallow means something else now

Frank recently reminded me, "Fallow does not mean dead, only dormant."

I think I had forgotten this.

Frank and I and so many like us have been dormant for too long in a country where fear and greed have won out over reason and justice. My hope is that this little archive of Fallow becomes a personal marker for the end to hopelessness and the beginning of something better. The people have shown with their vote to a whole world watching that "We are better than these last 8 years."

Lest we forget the reasons we left Los Angeles…

…David Maisel will show us our immersion, remind us of our experiences and invoke our readings, i.e. Mike Davis.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got on the internet and began searching for more aerials of Los Angeles and happened upon the work of David Maisel – specifically the Oblivion series (Los Angeles) and Terminal Mirage series (Great Salt Lake in Utah).

I feel terribly ignorant not knowing this work, but glad I found it at this time when it's so relevant to my own work. I must have come across it before now… and even have vague memories of reading something in Art in America (5 or 6 years ago?) about someone’s exquisite aerial photography of toxic sites. Something must have lodged in my subconscious… though I can recall no names or specific details about the work.

Maisel’s photos of Los Angeles are haunting. When I look at them I’m both mesmerized and simultaneously sinking inside. I loved so many things about living in L.A. (the diversity, the people, the food), but there were other things that deeply disturbed me and contributed to my misery.

I don’t remember a day of living in L.A. when I didn’t feel trapped and implicated, when I wasn’t engulfed in noise, pollution and over-consumption. I was weighted with an enormous guilt for the near decade I was there – always thinking of the environmental destruction: the driving, the water consumption where there is none, the city sucking the life and resources from elsewhere to support its overgrowth.

This is why Frank and I were so eager to leave. So whenever we begin to feel nostalgic for L.A., we have these images to remind us of why we left… which makes me think that, as cultural and historical documents, they’re already embedded with a future potentiality for viewers to feel both loss for the great project, regret for even pursuing it and resignation that it could have been no other way.

But of course, the consumption and environmental destruction are not limited to L.A., and a lot of what I associate with L.A., SUVs in particular, were less to do with place than time. What was happening on a grand scale in L.A. was happening in sprawling suburbs across the country. There seems to have been a consumption explosion that just happened to coincide with our years in L.A. It’s not just L.A. – the entire U.S. is caught up in the all-consuming destruction. We are all implicated.

I wonder about those North Americans who haven’t had their consciousness raised through lived experience in a place like L.A. where the reality is visible and undeniable – will they continue to ignore the seriousness of the problems because it’s not in their face every day? Does the whole landscape and climate have to transform into versions of Los Angeles before we stop and take notice? And if we can’t even take notice, what has to happen before we take action? I say this because at least in a place like L.A., there is a discourse about the problems (because they are so obvious and difficult to ignore) and activism on a grand scale to meet the grand scale of the destruction. At the same time, many Angelenos adopt a complicit resignation because of the enormity of the situation and recognize their individual powerlessness to effect change on the scale necessary. The problems are deep and structural and bigger than any one of us.

Below are some quotes from David Maisel that I pulled from this interview where he discusses the Salt Lake images and sublime beauty:

…I think there’s also a twinned process of seduction and betrayal involved- a viewer might be seduced by the colors and forms of these images, and then, in a sense, betrayed once knowledge of the subject becomes clear. It parallels the way we are seduced, and ultimately betrayed, by a certain level of consumerism that exacts such tolls on the environment. Yes, I want my SUV and my wide-screen TV and… oops! There goes the ozone layer! Imagine that!

…I’m motivated by the notion of discovering and revealing sites that might otherwise remain unknown or unseen- be they clear-cut logging sites, strip mines, cyanide leaching fields, etc. My photographs of these sites are intended to be reflective of some sort of internal, psychological state as much as they are documents of a particular site. And, I consider myself a visual artist first and foremost- as opposed, perhaps, to a photojournalist or a documentarian. I'm most interested in making images that have a kind of depth-charge, that have a certain poetic or metaphoric impact visually.

…Beauty has been seen as problematic for the visual arts in general because we no longer trust beauty as a serious means of investigation. But it can be. Beauty wedges into artistic space a structure for continuously imagining what we do not yet know or understand. For an object or an image to possess beauty does not mean that it is empty of meaning or shallow. In fact, beauty can be incendiary. It can be subversive. It can make us cringe.