a hole

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.  
—Edna St. Vincent Millay

"This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was."
— W.G. Sebald

Found

Yesterday, I bought some industrial shelves from a woman who runs a sewing and miscellany shop. She had posted them on Craigslist, which I've loved for the past year because it is affordable and eliminates the more mysterious aspects of a market economy. I've found most of the sellers I've dealt with to be kind and interested in someone using their discarded items that they themselves have no further use for. I suppose that plays off of my own sentimentality: that even things discarded are carefully passed on to another specific user instead of thrown out or anonymously donated.
The shelves are great, a much-needed addition to our cluttered workspace. It was somehow comforting to know that they came from a similar situation: of being filled with fabric, old vintage items, miscellany. The woman who sold them to us showed us a wooden box of cards she had found. She had not seen them in a long time, hidden somewhere on the shelves before their dis-assembly. She was collecting playing cards she found on the street, in the hopes that one day she would have a full deck. It was a curious exercise in ordering the chaotic, and also putting faith in the random. It's beautiful to think that the found cards would not all be the same, that there was an entire deck of mismatched cards laying on streets, waiting for someone to bring them together. Like all curated collections, the order may come from the collector. It is sometimes their role to find the meaning in the accumulation.
After we had loaded up and paid, she said very seriously: "Now remember, take time to set up your shelves and organize. It's very important to do that."

Magnetism

"All of nature in its awful vastness and incomprehensible complexity is in the end interrelated - worlds within worlds within worlds: the seen and the unseen - the physical and the immaterial are all connected - each exerting influence on the next - bound, as it were, by chains of analogy - magnetic chains. Every decision, every action mirrors, ripples, reflects and echoes throughout the whole of creation. The world is indeed bound with secret knots." -Valentine Worth

Seeing is believing

Great article in the New Yorker today regarding the methodology of those who authenticate the work of old masters.

The art historian Bernard Berenson described his talent as a “sixth sense.” “It is very largely a question of accumulated experience upon which your spirit sets unconsciously,” he said. “When I see a picture, in most cases, I recognize it at once as being or not being by the master it is ascribed to; the rest is merely a question of how to fish out the evidence that will make the conviction as plain to others as it is to me.” Berenson recalled that once, upon seeing a fake, he had felt an immediate discomfort in his stomach.

I was thinking about it as a nice analogue for how I (or other artists, for that matter) make an artwork. Over a period of time, abstract connections that make sense on what seems to be an instinctual level are made into words. It is almost as if the response to a life load of knowledge can materialize rather quickly, but the means to communicate why that makes sense takes longer than the formulation of the idea itself. To make a unique idea that is unique to an individual universal enough to be communicated is an interesting process, a primary function of the clunky tool we call language.

Health, history, horses

I'm finding that all this moving around has made me very aware of my experience of cities, particularly how I adapt to them both physically and psychologically. The pace of life here is different, slower than in larger cities I've lived in. (There is something to be said about the reduced stress on the immediate envorins that smaller populations have.) The freedom of time and movement has allowed me to indulge in a kind of regional wanderlust.

We recently took a drive to Saratoga Springs, now famous for it's annual horse race. Originally a fort built on the Hudson River, mineral springs thought to have medicinal properties caused settlement to develop around the site. By the 19th century, it was a major destination for those suffering from a diverse list of ailments ("From Lung, Female and Various Chronic Diseases"), who sought relief from the specific mineral properties of about 110 different natural springs. As modern medicine phased out the popularity of hydrotherapy, only the Roosevelt Spring is now still open for use. The rest of the original site, built in the 1940's for public use, is now a park.


The comparison of types of "watering holes" was apparent to me on our visit, and I couldn't help but make the relationship between contemporary consumptive practices and a prior generation's pilgrimages for a bath. The 19th c. notion of traveling to the rural springs for rest from the physical stresses of "the metropolis" involved engaging with a space and a community in an act and environment specific to the physical location and removed from the behavior needed to navigate a city. The park-like setting of the original bathhouses was a space built more for a slow contemplation. In contrast, Saratoga as it is now exhibits a more contemporary list of leisure activities related to consumption: eating, drinking, and shopping at boutique stores. All of these activities were somewhat expensive to engage in, and exhibit a much more quantitative form of leisure, i.e. you can probably calculate your fun quotient by using your receipts. Furthermore, many of the stores are chains or sell a displaced good (Mexican food or Rastafarian gear.) It's as if the space is simulating a unique experience, but really acting as a surface for what is known. As posited by Robert Misik, "Public places that are only pseudo-cities, backdrops of the social in which one can indeed be active, but only in a peculiarly passive way."



What will be the next face of cities? Saratoga has retained it's visual appearance as a city built in the 19th century, yet has had to adapt to the rapid change in use of urban centers as shells for global culture. And now with the connectivity provided by the internet, a physical location for interacting, sharing information and trading goods and services is not necessary. We no longer need to go anywhere. And yet our cities still exist and function. People still move to them, live in them and work in them. If not centers of commerce, then perhaps our communal activities can become truly about communities again. The High line project in New York, for example, re-imagined the detritus of industry as open space for community interaction. In places like this, we would be entering back in to the "real", where we could experience the phenomena of lived space as dictated by users, not commercial interests. If we are hoping to experience a combination of a density of human interaction and the opportunity for contemplative space and time, it seems a viable solution. I guess as long as people can use a laptop to order their groceries and check their email there, it would work.

Depth perception

"...even Marx understood that 'technologies created ways in which people perceive reality, and that such ways are the key to understanding diverse forms of social and mental life.' Not only did technology change the aural experience of social life, encouraging active manipulation of sound and enlarging the concept of aural architecture, but it also influenced spatial cognition, sensory perception, and social dynamics. The industrial revolution was also a sensory awareness revolution." From spaces speak, are you listening? by barry blesser and linda-ruth salter. Image above is Hogarth's Enraged Musicians.