TEMPERATURE: 61 degrees
WEATHER: sunny with some clouds
# of OTHER PEOPLE: 0
STEPS WALKED INSIDE THE BUILDING: 223
TOTAL TIME SPENT INSIDE INSTALLATION: 3 hours
“…the most salient feature of inquiry is its open-endedness. It is pursued for no reason whatsoever; it is the project of the passionately curious.”
—Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
How do you get to know a piece of art? How do you seduce it? It is, of course impossible. But then, isn’t it also impossible to seduce a human completely? Can a person ever really give herself over to you?
The echoes in here sound like a cathedral, my steps like the steps fo monks. I sit in a square of sunlight listening to my stomach, waiting to be caught. Caught how? Caught writing?
I am scared of the dark side. I take pictures of myself in here that I will never publish to remind myself that I exist. I relax my thighs into the cold concrete. The sun gets in my eyes. What place does a body have in a space like this? I hear faint beeps. I know i am not supposed to touch anything and I want to touch evertyhing. The scrim—a thin membrane of fabric reminds me of a woman’s stocking.
Then, quickly, I get over myself and watch the light creep up on to the scrim. I see a triangle of light move from the floor up onto the white scrim. I pause like a lemur and tell myself I will wait and watch it for as long is it takes the small triangle to fully transition to the scrim. The small triangle becomes a larger triangle which eventually grows another corner and begins to have the makings of a parallelogram. I remember that light can be material. The shape emerges out of nothing but a bright pool at the base of the scrim. Staring at it I do not know how much time has passed. Sunlight moves as a pace we can almost see, but not quite.
Today I looked out windows. Here’s what I saw and how it sounded:
Footsteps
Hi Again Bob.
I can’t say that I realized how much time I would be spending alone here.
When I look out the door on the dark side, the one that faces outward, the first one you encounter after you enter, I see this house that’s apparently on the market for $250K. Somebody the other day whispered to me (whispers) “it’s a piece of shit.” And it looks like it. Ramshackle, rundown, piles of debris and wood, what seems to be the cap to a flatbed truck and a garage with some broken windows, a falling apart shed and an old steel barrel, plus a kind of beige silvery colored car. There’s a toilet too yawning open towards your building. Marfa’s a weird town.
Over on the light side now. took a break to take some pictures.
It’s the kind of installation that makes you feel bad when you catch yourself thinking about yourself because it asks you to pay attention
Footsteps
Close attention.
It’s the kind of place where you feel like you shouldn’t be talking and you definitely shouldn’t be talking to yourself. Looking out the windows on the light side the landscape is more expansive today. Grass—yellow in February. Sky—blue. Trees in the distance—dark green and brown. A piece of plastic or paper caught on some scrub about fifteen paces from the edge of the building. A structure over to the left. A road and more houses to the right. The punctuated red of a stop sign at the end of the road reminds me of one of those collages by David Hockney that I just saw at the MET. The sky makes swirls today.
I look to the end of the hallway and the light coming through the window facing me reflects in gradients of blue onto the concrete floor extending almost like a Japanese screen painting or a more lighthearted Rothko or maybe just some smears of paint going from darkest blue to white along the ground mimicking somebody’s palette somewhere. From this angle the floor of the light half of the space looks like some kind of underworld, a watery abyss that I can peer down into but not enter. Why is that light so blue I wonder? When everything in here is so light. What refraction occurs to allow that color gradient to appear? I’m walking towards it.
Footsteps