To be colonized is to become a stranger in your own land

Walking home from the coffee shop balancing my old roommate's handmade dishware in my arms, I tried to channel what I imagined being a waiter would feel like to balance opening doors and holding my coffee while also making it up two flights of stairs with out dropping these precious gifts she left behind for me on her way out to LA to start a new life. A memory bubbled up, as memories often do, and I struggled with my conflicting emotions as I navigated doors and years of doing hard labor and ironwork along my path.

My freshman year of college, I was moving back to Sarasota. I had been born there, and some part of me knew I would be going back. One of the top art schools in the U.S. sprawled along the beaches there, and I had been accepted - it was the only school I had bothered to apply to. I have vague pictures of a house with a window between my older brother's room and mine, where we would signal to each other after everyone went to sleep. My mother took me to dinner at The Columbia in St Armand's Circle, where she had been a waiter during my infancy, and eventually met and fell in love with the father of my younger siblings. She had worn a bow tie and slacks like the men and refused to be called a waitress, and told me later that they had to leave in part because they couldn't avoid run ins with the Cuban Mafia for much longer, possibly because of my step father's drug trafficking and addiction.

My mother recognized some of the waitstaff during this precollege visit, exclaimed excitedly the name of the latino woman who brought us water. As my mom described who she was, I saw a pained recognition crystalize across the other woman's face, and my mother gestured to me, bragging about bringing her daughter here for college, asking about the other woman's daughter. She barely glanced at me, with my blond hair and blue eyes and fair skin, choked out a few words in broken English and walked off as soon as her task was completed. As my mother giggled and crooned about how they used to do coke together when I was a baby, I watched that woman signal a different waiter to attend to our table, and I sat in contemplative horror at the strange innocence that so defines my mother. How was it not obvious that this other woman was embarrassed, possibly for still being in the same work environment, or her own relationship with her children and college, or maybe her memories of that time are darker than my mother's, who was able to walk away and not have to face starkly different fears about surviving, how could none of that flit through her mind, somewhere behind her somewhat vacant eyes?

On the way out my mother had an extended conversation with the Maitre D', while I stood on the sidewalk and watched from a distance, trying to figure out what felt familiar and what was fabricated in my sense memories of this place. As she collected me and we left she told me he had offered me a job if I ever needed one, and she threw her head back and laughed good and hard at the thought of me being a waitress, like I was too soft to be able to handle something like that.

I have thought about that moment a lot over the years of being on and eventually running construction crews, almost every time I get on a forklift, so many strange moments where I have exceeded the limitations in my mother's view of what I could be capable of.

She obsessively hoards all of the awful student work I tried to throw away, bad ideas or overworked and with tiny arms and such, the beginnings of all artists. My siblings tell me about the paintings lining the walls of my childhood home that I hope to never step into again. My little brother even stole one of those paintings once, to my glee - and he received the strangest, quietest phone call from my mother who claimed it was worth some obscene amount of money ($15,000 I think?). I don't know what picture of who or what I am lives its rich life in my mother's eyes, all I know is that anything that undermines it is a threat to whatever narrative she has crafted, and it amazes me that someone could move through their lives or look at their children with such an overwhelming blindness.

I think it makes some parts of my natural expression harder to lean into, picking up a pencil to draw carries with it the weight of potentially fulfilling my mother's blind desire for me, like it is not truly mine somehow. And I fight to be noticed for other kinds of physical prowess with a ferocity that is somehow related to needing her ideas of me to change, to recalibrate around something real - battles I bring in every day to work but are being fought for a ghost, an idea of what a Mother should be, for a child I buried in my body a long time ago.

I can't even do simple tasks without thinking about the box she thinks I live in.

Set from MFA Film Thesis I did Production Design for.

you’re not asking about a property of space, but rather a property of yourself

VII.
Ideas as Artifacts
Motion and Gesture
a part of our language
Narrative
an embodied form
of discourse


VIII.
Immune System
as an act
rather than
an organ


IX.
creative drive
sex drive
death drive
thumb drive
disc drive


X.
interface
what is our human boundary
when we modify ourselves (as a human race)?
race against what?
techno hack vs body hack
genetic modification vs microbiome
integrity of the body (modesty)
replacement organs
anxiety as an artifact


XI.
How do you heal the landscape
without erasing its history?


XII.
The difference between Sacred and Rigid:
Holding Space vs Space being Held

Community holding something is different
Than a Structure holding something

Am I the Container
or am I contained?


XIII.
Memory
is a person a thing a process?

identity/structure

is the meaning in the words
or the person who hears them?


XIV.
a transition that feels
like there was no
transition

Your horse teaches you to drink the ghost of its water

From the booth I sat in at the Columbus Circle Holiday Market, I watched the eddies and flows of the bodies moving past. Eyes flicked and scanned, individuals glossed over the variety of potential gifts with something or someone in mind. Often the gaze stopped on the wares displayed in my particular booth, a weird double vision, where it was clear that they were looking at objects for sale, but saw someone very specific while taking that object in. This time I was selling someone else's handcrafted items, instead of my own, and in the lack of fear about my own value as an artist, I was able to participate in the gift buying business in a completely different way. All of the emotional space I might have held for things I gave birth to was instead available to hold the customers needs and desire as they considered their loved one's needs and desires. It was no less intimate than having my own things handled, but I was invited into their sense of love or care for an individual, I was a way to express that in the future ritual of gift giving. I felt like a Sphinx, like my job was to ask the kinds of questions that gave me clues to this invisible person, to guide me as I offered different items to my audience. Oracular in my booth, the days I worked ended up being big money days for my friend who had hired me, as I took in mirrored gestures and matching laugh lines suggesting the similarity of structure gifted genetically, as I witnessed mothers and daughters confer, the unsure and the confident gift givers, as I silently showed children the inner structures of the hand built Book Clocks, while their parents perused the selection surrounding me.

In the booths around me were mostly mass produced home goods and jewelry, much farther along in their transition from handmade art-thing to full fledged capitalist venture. My friend's process by necessity gets more streamlined, when faced with the kind of volume that the market's proximity to Times Square had to offer, but his particular product still lived in the space of being novel and somehow familiar, being crafted from books that so many grandmas paused to consider because they recognized titles from their youth. I've come across Craigslist ads during slow season that are explicitly asking for skilled fabricators to work in shops that create the things that famous artists are known for. People like Jeff Koons send their specs in and teams of highly skilled, underpaid craftsmen build the things that sell for so much money, with that man's name on it, that 'artist'. There are entire towns in Italy filled with mold makers and bronze masters that spend their whole lives reproducing other people's work, but it is Rodin's name that is spoken in hushed tones in the antique show booth I just finished constructing, for a tiny copy of a copy of a copy that will sell for $45,000.

What is the difference between being an artist and a slave? Between being a Subject and an Object? What does Ownership really mean? When you buy a reproduction, or something fabricated by individuals being paid to produce someone else's ideas, what now belongs to you? The sweat and sensitivities of those unknown hands? The shape of an experience born out of a context of which you may know nothing? A feeling you had when you first looked at that thing? Part of me wonders if antique shows aren't a product of age trying to prove it still has value.

I watched an ancient man spew unkind words and an attitude of such superiority towards me as I sat in a scissor lift waiting for my crew to get back from their union specified break. 'You are going to move this 'contraption'.' he informed me. I explained that we needed to finish building the wall it was parked under, to which he replied 'Not right now, you are not.' He was an appraiser of antiques, there were about 50 of them let in before the build was complete. I finally stopped working for Fashion Week events, the divide between 'worker' and the Production team is so clearly delineated by those who touch things and those who don't, and Designers won't even respond to you if they have seen you lay hands on something. The last Alexander Wang gig that I worked I received excited comments from someone I went to grade school with, who still lives in my home town. I didn't mean to dump my darkness on her romantic associations of the fashion world, but this divide between people with ideas and money, and those who actually have the skills to craft it but are paid to make someone else's art are held in the kind of regard we might associate servants and slaves with. I have found this attitude to be pervasive. And no one seems to know that we treat the builders of our physical and cultural reality this way. There is only so much of ourselves that we can give away in obscurity before we are merely selling the effort of our bodies for money, and they too become simply objects to be filled with other people's desires, and we in turn become numb to our own cravings and creative impulses.

When I had the pleasure of working on a massive project with Marina Abramovich, we all were participants in the creation of what was essentially a piece of art. When I asked her how she felt about the way the director had translated her life, she responded with 'I don't know, I give him my story and he make slapstick.' Its impossible to describe the herculean effort of constructing the space for this performance, and I worked on almost every crew that installed and then ran the show, I was backstage surrounded by performance artists from all over the world who have devoted their lives and physical bodies to becoming an object of expression to be consumed by an audience. And when I rode the train home every night, I was surrounded by that audience, most of them the older wealthy patrons of the Armory. All I heard was one vicious dismissal after another. They didn't care how hard any of us worked to give that experience to them.

In a circle of conversation the other day, there arose a distinction between heart and intellect that someone was seeing as important, but something about it really rubbed me wrong. I tried to explain how my crews and I communicate in and around a spatial plane that involves a bodily understanding that supersedes that distinction, and she quickly blew me off  'that's an object. I'm talking about an idea.' she said, flipping her hand vaguely in my direction without making eye contact. I thought about one of my best friends, from the first shop I worked in. He had almost a superstitious reaction to drawings, and had really intense fears of feeling stupid, something that was beat into him in the public education system. He wouldn't even come near the drawings at first, it took me months to make him feel comfortable enough to be confused or unsure in my presence to finally talk him through the symbols we use to indicate shapes in space and relate that to the time of building a thing and the organization of what comes first and how abstract numbers relate to physical markings in the room. And in the midst of this conversation with these educated women, I suddenly felt, for the first time like I shouldn't be there. There was no space for my reality in her dismissive gesture, in the words she was trying to find to describe some specific internal feeling about having an Idea. Like objects aren't inherently a manifestation of ideas, like material and immaterial aren't deeply intertwined expressions of each other. Like these men aren't having ideas while they discuss how to build something.

Objects are often things that we fill, with memories, with symbolic weight, with fear or desire, but not as much with their own sense of history, of being born, of being filled with something before or outside of our interactions with it. I wonder how a baby experiences an object, as they grapple with organizing and coordinating their own seemingly disparate parts. Do they feel that object possessing its own selfness the way they themselves do? Is having that little bit of dominion in an alien landscape that they are initially helpless in an important piece in distinguishing themselves from other things? Is it something to wrap the sense of experiencing around, a container of sorts for their growing awareness? How does the way we handle objects when engaging with a baby help define the way in which they will handle objects or other people later?

I wonder if I lost my mother in a sense, when she met my stepfather. I was 3 and suddenly she was pregnant and in love, when they eventually married she asked him to dress in the same white tux with a red rose in the pocket, like her favorite potential option from the board game Mystery Date. I'm sure in some fractured vacuum in myself, there was a desire for some animal affection that I saw in the face and the soft triangular body of a stuffed bear I found at a garage sale with my Grandmother. Digging through other people's things was a regular weekend event, whether it was driving around looking for handwritten poster board signs with arrows, or riding from one thrift store to another to another. My Grandmother was born in the middle of the great depression, and grew up during a war time era, a rationed society, so store bought gifts and school clothes were a once or twice a year kind of event for us when I was growing up. I don't know anything about that bear's previous name or life, but I cried so many tears into Brownie's fake fur over the years. When I was 11, I knew it was time, that I was too old for stuffed animals and tucked him away in a box in my closet. In the 7th grade our Labrador puppy dug him out and chewed off his nose, so I moved him to a high shelf in the closet. When I came home from college every once in awhile, I would apologize, not with words, but the feelings in my body when I saw his dark eyes up there in a forgotten cardboard box.

Once when I was a tarot reader for an event, I asked that payment be some form of exchange, whatever the receiver of the reading chose to give in return for my energetic focus on their question. People laughed and cried, there were intense pauses, and furtive glances towards partners who were out of earshot, and I was an anonymous vessel, to be filled with their burning questions about a looming decision, about something they were second guessing, things they didn't even want to admit they hoped for, things they admitted to me but wouldn't even admit to their spouse. I took it all, wrapping them in my steady presence, listening without judgement, paying attention to what rose to the surface in them during our session. Things that went into my cup included a lock of hair, a poem written in lipstick on a piece of trash, two small silver rings that the girl told me later had been made with someone who had died, the person who ended up being a major part of her reading.

Out of respect, I wore those rings on my pinky finger, every day for an entire year. I still have them. It seems strange to me now, that I would treat someone else's memory filled objects with such reverence, when I have vehemently refused to keep pieces of my own history.




"Movements are born in the moments when abstract principles become concrete concerns."

Part 1. Kinship

  

 

Post class reflection on Deconstruction themes in Literature, Art, Philosophy, Mythology, Pop culture etc:

 

When providing us with a lens through which to view something, whether you define what that is or not, there is an agenda - because there is something made uniquely available in the process of looking with specificity. A vantage point that makes clear in the contrasts what binds the things being looked at together, what kinship exists between subjects and their objects, and the threads that hold it all together: ideas. Ideas and how they are transubstantiated into matter and become the cultural fabric we build the structures of self with. Ideas, sturdy as institutions. Mythological characters that only lived on the lips of a blind man in ancient Greece became some of the core structures of Freudian analysis. This particularly human trait of finding narrative threads to lead us and to inspire us creates so much the contexts we live inside of, but it is hard to feel and listen for the insubstantial when faced with the substantial - how much easier it is to feel something under our fingertips than it is to feel the edge of a new way of seeing the world.

Which came first - the Wall as metaphor, or the Wall as physical? Is a boundary a thing or an idea? Is there even value in drawing distinctions between the two, if it becomes a vessel for cultural expression, potentially a vehicle for communicating shifting ideas of Self and Other in concretely physical ways?

Institutions are susceptible to ossification when resistant to the changing tides of human need and curiosity, and it is the connective tissue in our body that shows us what we do over and over again, as it molds itself around our habitual movement patterns. At some point the walls we build around our ideas of Self will hinder our ability to respond to new things, and massive upheavals, like devastating weather patterns and falling in/out of love may shake that sense of Self so deeply it feels like we no longer have a sense of who we are.

This is maybe the greatest gift Art, Literature, Philosophy, Mythology and Pop Culture have to offer us - ways to process our past, to define and redefine our narrative according human needs inside of their context. To fully embody our multiple facets and know ourselves inside of them still - like our current myth/theory of the wave particle duality, we exist materially here, in this moment, but what do we orient ourselves around as we are constantly pulled forward by the Current into a place we have never been ourselves before, the Now. Does it help us to bother distinguishing between current/Current and now/Now? How do you know yourself betwixt the two?

What is the difference between Sacred and Rigid? Between Artifact and Idea? Self and Other? Creation and Destruction? Whomever's responsibility it is to draw the boundaries, define the maps, to build the semiotic/literal walls around the stories we tell  - requires a reflection in the mirror, a shadow self that exists in the in-betweens and constantly asks us to reassess who we truly are.

Perhaps this is the role of Artist, Philosopher, Architect, Writer, Priest, Performer - to embody the questions that can be so scary to ask, to craft with language things impossible to name, to live in the world of ideas and to transform word into deed, idea into matter, knowledge into power, communion into flesh.