On December 31 Emma and I were walking home from the vintage store where I finally offloaded some things from college that I thought one day would look good on me. It felt great making those things go away. Knowing some young person was going to try to deal with a scratchy pink wool sweater felt even better, because I knew they would make it work. Or they’d keep it in their drawer for 30 years and then someone else would get it.
We were walking through the dark up a street we don’t often go, past a service door to an overpriced upscale grocery store across the big road from the cheaper grocery store that had been around forever until there was a suspicious fire that burned up the whole place and then it was shuttered for years and is now a store nearly devoid of people but full to the ceiling with cans and boxes sitting on metal shelves, silent witnesses to each others’ expiration dates.
So there’s a lot of trash on the street and as Emma and I were walking & chattering excitedly about our vintage sales and repurchases, she stopped dead in her tracks, words stuck before they could emerge from her mouth:
Mom…mom…momomom—MOM…
and she pointed and grabbed my arm while she was pointing towards the base of the scrawny street tree.
Those rats…they’re…they’re…
and she gripped my arm tighter, and with horror:
…they’re MAKING LOVE—
and we stopped dead in our tracks and in about 5 seconds it was over and we swiftly jaywalked across the street and I said something random like well how do you think all those rats just keep multiplying all over Brooklyn, and I asked her why she used that phrase, and she said what do you want me to say, they were “having sex?” And I thought, I guess I would have just said they were fucking, but I wouldn’t want my kid to say that, so I had to agree that her choice of phrase was appropriate in polite company. Which I certainly am not. But the effort was noted.
And we laughed about it all the way home, running and dodging more rats scuttling this way and that before us.
Now I’m in Oslo to prepare an exhibition and go to some conferences and I can’t help but think about the issue of trust and life in America. Granted, I am an outsider in this culture, but there are some things that feel so palpably different it’s hard not to point them out. It also makes me think about what the myth of individualism does to people, and how deeply I’ve been affected by it.
Small things I notice here: people move from job to job without terror in their hearts, because their health insurance isn’t tied to their place of employment. So nobody seems super freaked out when they have to go find another job. It might be difficult, or tiresome, or annoying, but it does not represent an existential crisis for the person or their family.
Imagine being able to trust that you’ll be ok. The same is true for education. It’s free. People I’ve talked to describe how they are going to get another degree in something because they can. It’s not going to break the bank, nor is it necessarily a guarantee of some kind of leap upwards in an imagined class mobility. It seems to be something people do because it’s important for their job or for something they want to do later. Or because they’re interested or curious. But because there’s no tuition, it appears to be accessible, at least to my undoubtedly starry eyes.
Another thing I noticed yesterday was that I wanted to go to the school library and it was closed and I thought, damn. And then I tried my keycard and the light turned green on the keypad and there I was, all alone, in the beautiful library. Later I was talking with a friend and she told me her local branch of the public library is the same. Even when it’s closed, you just swipe your library card and you can go in. She said she loves walking by when the library is closed and seeing people in there, reading, relaxing, looking out the window.
And I couldn’t help but think about all those people in New York who, because the whole city budget seems to be going to yet more increased security; police clustered in every subway and every corner, day and night, parents & kids can’t go to the library on Sundays to read or take classes or use the computers because budget cuts means the libraries can’t be open at all that day. When our library is closed, there’s a steel grate and a lock on the door. Lately there’s a couple of police standing outside too.
In the meantime, am working hard on preparing the show coming up in March (see below for a few more details). Making decisions, particularly about photo print sizes and projection screen sizes, is the hardest. But earlier this week I had the privilege of making certain parts of the exhibition concrete by printing some photos and testing projectors in the space.
Decisions got made and I felt pretty good about them. Every time I wander away from what made sense, or overthink to the point of dizziness, if I take time to sit with what I know, I do come around to the right decision. It takes a long time. It requires dealing with the cringe factor.
I don’t know where the term came from but I’ve used it for a long time. It’s a visceral feeling, like you’re overdoing things or you’ve added too much, or the edit is too didactic. The cringe factor is when you feel your body pulling away from the work even as you look at it. You’ve made a video, you know what’s coming, but every time you get to that part you veer off to the side like trying to swerve around the discomfort, like it’s roadkill or a rat.
You can ignore the cringe thing but it gets stronger every time you look at the work. You try to convince yourself that it has to work because it’s there and because that was already decided. And if you leave it there, you get that twinge every time. So you might as well deal with it & try a new cut or take out whatever was causing it.
The people you trust most will tell you these things, or rather, they say out loud what you already knew but didn’t want to admit. I am lucky to have some of those people in my life. It’s hard (for me) but important to get brave about asking, and it’s a different kind of asking than asking for permission or reassurance.
Someone I don’t know asked me to watch a video of theirs not long ago. I watched it and I used questions to try to express honest feelings or suggest redirecting some of the impulses in the work. Not sure if that was what was being asked of me. But it was a strange experience because the piece was just right. Every element in it registered in my brain as correct, meant to have meaning, the meaning was given, and there was nothing amiss. It checked all the boxes of what the art should be. But it left me cold. And I still wonder how or why that happens.
The only reason I can explain is maybe that the intensity of the maker comes through the camera, through the edit, through the work itself and I don’t know how, but it does. I will never forget sitting in the cinema watching Chantal Akerman’s last film, No Home Movie and she had died two days before and so of course the experience was very sad and very charged, but that first shot is so long, I mean several minutes long. Just that first shot. It transformed me.
I see it right now in front of me: a tree being battered by the wind. And it goes on and on, way way longer than any shot “should.” And you’re sitting there watching that tree and after a while it is no longer a tree, but it’s a life, you don’t know whose. And then you just know but you don’t want to admit it but the tree is the filmmaker, or the filmmaker’s subject, or the feeling between the two, but also still a tree.
And then the tree is you, adjacent to your life, because you feel so much with this tree just being blown and blown around and it’s skinny and tough and holding on by its scrawny stubborn roots and then you know the tree is what the film is about and that the filmmaker who decided to leave this shot way too long is trying to communicate all these things and, while your intensity in the audience will never match theirs, there is a kind of communication going on from behind the camera, from beyond the grave.
And some durational shots are just boring. And you can’t know which or why. You just have to trust it.
Next week I’ll go see the new Frederick Wiseman film, Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros, since I mostly miss his films in when they’re in theaters. So the four-hour Michelin-starred French family owned restaurant film will, I hope, in addition to being excellent, grant me an oblique go-ahead to keep making things the way I believe in.
Another friend and I were talking recently about how seeing other artists’ work, in the best-case scenarios, gives us permission, or at least confirmation that we’re on the right track; that there’s some bit of hope for what art might be able to do. Given the state of the world it is hard to hold onto that at all ever. But it’s all we got.
And the rats.
Thanks for reading.
Happy to announce that BUNKER will have its Norwegian premiere at the Oslo Architecture Film Festival in March. I’ll also open a solo show at Galeri ROM at the same time.
And if you’re not in Norway, you can still see BUNKER on the usual streaming platforms, Amazon Prime, Mubi, Metrograph-at-Home, and Projectr.tv
I love hearing these snippets from your life and from inside your head ❤️
I know the cringe thing so well! Same with the "correct", perfect even, but leaves you cold. A mystery, except for that possibility you describe, that the energy of the maker passes through the medium to the viewer/the reader. Thanks for this post