WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART AT BARD?

“So Many Important Things” - a psychogeographic travelogue

Sunday, 27 September 2009

The artists Jason Grote and Karinne Keithley told me “Walk to a place you have never been, but have always been curious about.  Once there, follow the instructions on the audio.”  It’s been raining steadily since ten this morning, which, according to Debord, is a significant factor and influence on one’s dérive, making them virtually impossible.  I do it anyway.

I plant myself onto the center of the circular island in Olafur Eliasson’s Parliament of Reality and switch on my iPod.  The voice tells me that the bottoms of my feet have sensitive ears, listening to the sounds of the ground.  What do you hear?  Nothing.  It’s silent.

As she instructs me, I look ahead, to my right, and to my left.  On both sides, low-lying flat-faced boulders sit atop the smooth cement pIatform.  The water extends out about twenty feet to round, pebble edged shores. I smell the air. Everything is wet.

She tells me to walk forward and that there are no relevant traffic laws to obey.  I knew there would be some obstacles in doing a psychogeography project, which typically focuses on cities, on a college campus, much less rural Dutchess County.

You’ve entered this space amid a slow implosion of things, text, words, elbows, faces, videos.  Where is the exit?  There’s an enclosure, that a wide open space contains including rooms and traps and internalized mechanisms of control and limitation.

Each of us is a nexus of competing areas of memories and desires, imagination and will, and as we walk around and down the streets, we are really almost anything but free.

My eyes scan the lattice of silver oval shape rings that make up the bridge connecting the island to the “shore”.

We think we’re on our own free thoughts.

We think we’re thinking our own free thoughts, but how much of that is conditioned?

Worries bout the rent. Hopes for tomorrow…

This upcoming paper.

Can I pull off this project?

How’s he doing now that his parents have separated?

Am I going to have enough warm clothes to wear this winter?

I really need to redo my budget for this semester.

I must look like a crazy person, out here, no umbrella, standing in the center of the Parliament of Reality, photographing my feet, the sky, white cords plugged into my ears.  Can anyone see me?

At the next intersection, cross the street and walk to your left. More wet rocks amid wet cement. Closing my eyes, I went to see the terracotta warriors, they stood guard, a scouting party of a few hundred, accompanied by tarps and folding chairs, and some sand was brought inside for them.  Outside looking cold, the warriors stood there silent, as they had been for centuries. Wait, what am I doing here? What is this place and via what convoluted route have I ended up here? How can I justify it? I had answers to these questions.  I felt the very familiar beginnings of an existential panic.  Suddenly, I was in a bleak, windswept plaza, with incongruous pastel banners flapping in the wind, which you would think would be even more existential, and it was.

Continue to walk forward.  But then, I realized that the panic was unacceptable.  Life is arbitrary.  It is something we make up with others in the world.  There is no teleology.  There is no fate.  There is no intrinsic meaning.  Only extrinsic and temporary accommodation of things.  That feeling of free fall of existential nausea is an accurate response to this desire for some kind of solidity, for a script.  And maybe it is those places where we do not feel this kind of panic that are the most dangerous.  Because in those places we get too comfortable.  Too easily convinced that we are meant to be here, in the Parliament of Reality, at Bard College, in the countryside, studying, working towards a profession itself in the midst of an “identity crisis.”

In a moment, pause, turn the sound off but leave your earphones in.  Then, after another moment, turn the sound back on.  I’ll still be here.  Nothing.  One car races down Annandale Road, making that wet, slishing sound that automobile tires make on the road when it’s been raining.  The screeching beep of the nearby fire drill continues in quick successions of 1 – 2 – 3,3,3.  I can’t hear the rain though.  Silent rain is a little creepy.

Resume moving forward.  Stop in front of the first convenience store you see.  If you are hungry or thirsty, you may get something to eat or drink.  Despite all the gaps and boundaries, things still get through.  Asymptotes and other metaphors are limited to the extent that they are comprehensible.  Art cannot only frame how we see reality, but in some cases, can be the experience.

Are you at the convenience store?  There are all these guys in there just hanging around.   It can’t be for the ambience or the décor.  They can’t be watching the overwrought foreign language soap operas with the clerk. They’re not actually shopping.  What they’re doing in there is scratching.  It’s the lottery.   The dream of striking it rich obscures everything about the convenience store.  How it’s grim.   How it’s a dead end.  How no one is getting rich in there, or is rich.  If you’re still in the convenience store, leave.  Walk in the opposite direction from which you came.

At the next intersection, cross the street, walk five paces from the corner and stop. I think about Pittsburg, Washington, and Seattle as the blocks of cream-colored dorm buildings come into view.

Over two hundred and thirty years ago, a number of people painted their faces, dressed in wild primitive costumes and ventured out at night in a pack.  They planned a theft and destruction, unlawful assembly and a very specific mayhem.  As a protest against excessive rules and regulations, they hacked opened all of the large crates of drugs and dumped them overboard.  After that, we started drinking coffee.  Close your eyes.  Open them again.

It is morning.  You awake to the rawness of the world.   It is an insubstantiality.  A collection of wisps.  An emptiness that fills one with exhiliaration of flight.  The breathlessness of dread.  You do not see its bones for it has none. By mid afternoon, you may have negotiated, and wrangled, and constructed and willed into belief enough of a world so that by the evening, you may dance.  So that by night you may sleep.  But tomorrow morning you will walk up to find yesterday’s action, yesterday’s resolve, and yesterdays’ construction as transparent and formless as air.

If it’s raining, then listen to the rain.  Or listen to the sound of rain we have provided for you.  Now, I can hear the rain. Walk forward.  I suddenly arrive at a futuristic bus stop with curved blue glass awning and weather worn wooden seats.

Have you ever wished you could get on some starship and go and never come back? Just get aboard and go.  Travel the galaxy.  See interesting planets with aliens.  Observe their habits.  Interact with them to some limited extent and then get back on the ship and go to the next place.  Home as a memory, but life as a trajectory.  But life here is really no different.  The only thing missing is the annoying nausea of space travel.  Which, given how no one likes spending too much time on public transportation, is probably ideal.  Plus here, one can breath the atmosphere, have lattes, and even communicate sometimes.  And, there’s the Internet.  So it’s great. Here I am on this planet, observing the aliens and their habits, but never at home.  Perhaps I’m the alien?

At the next intersection, walk to your left, find a natural stopping point, and pause for a bit.  Smell the air.  Look at the ground beneath you and walk around.  Look at the street.  And I continue on, walking past imaginary murals and taquerias, stand in front of a church that dissolves into a wall of bougainvilla, sympathize with the lone bicyclist on the road, and think about Al Gore… This chain of subtle and softly spoken instructions to continue moving under the rain incites more memories, more musings, and more chimeras.  At the end of the dérive, I arrive back at the Parliament of Reality, alone and with no consensus with my other selves as to what was experienced or achieved.  Maybe I shouldn’t have done this in the rain.