What Were You Thinking?!
The hard question behind her polite smile was clear: what were you thinking?
My first impulse, as she continued to look through the images, was to promptly defend myself and my work. My second impulse - the riskier one - admit something closer to the truth: I don’t quite know what I was thinking. Even now, two years after that exchange, I still don’t quite know.
I was reminded of this recently after posting some images from that same project, Nonne ibi, on Instagram. One plain-spoken critic went right for it: “Dude, your work is just creepy. Super. Creepy.” Which is another way to ask, minus the polite smile: what were you thinking?
Well, dude, I still don’t have an answer.
But this is because - I’m discovering - it’s the wrong question to ask. The more useful question is this: what did you bring? I like this question not only because it suggests answers, but also because it’s honest about the experience of engaging with art (or people). It admits that the work rests on an ever-shifting middle ground between what the maker brings to it in its making, and what the viewer brings to it in its viewing. In this exchange, the distance between what the maker and viewer bring telescopes near or far, either into connection or disconnection.
And, maybe, answers!
An example: eight years ago I spent several dreamy afternoons at the splendid Acropolis Museum in Athens. Many of the objects displayed were long-buried as trash; there were too many votive offerings and gifts to the gods for the temple attendants to store so landfill became their destiny. Treasures all, they were lost and then found, restored to daylight, containing as many mysteries as scars, and untouchable. In the middle of the museum was a glass-encased restoration workshop. Visitors could watch a team of technicians clean and restore five of the caryatids of the Porch of the Erechtheion from the Acropolis mount.
Several of the statues were loosely wrapped in plastic sheets, held closed by bits of blue masking tape. As the light moved, the faces and figures of these stone women appeared and then disappeared through the translucent sheets and then the windows of the workshop. Eyes and ears and hair and breasts and hands, fragments of a being there, and then, as suddenly, not there.
A few years later (because I believe every home should have a portrait bust) I purchased two portrait busts, good reproductions on clearance. One, an old bald blind man, was thought to be Homer, even though no one knew what Homer looked like or if he even actually existed. The other was a dashing young man, his head resplendent with thick curly hair, his neck turning as if his name had been just been called: Lucius!
The busts arrived packed in clear plastic bags held closed with masking tape. I remembered those caryatids from Athens, how they came into view, like figures in a fog, before vanishing. I had been wanting to make some black and white images. The busts were white. In the apt phrase of my colleague, Peter Michael Martin, it was a moment of opportunity.
So I grabbed my camera and went to work, not thinking too much about it.
Another example: I don’t know how many times I’ve been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art during my twenty plus years in New York, but I do know that on certain days, when despair insists it’s my closest companion, I make myself go and sit in the museum’s Greek and Roman sculpture court. I’m not there to be inspired; I can’t even say that it makes me feel better (whatever “better” even means).
I go to be surprised.
I’m surprised that so much that was lost - and thought irretrievably lost - was found. I’m surprised that so much that should have not survived, survived. Glassware from the ancient classical world just shouldn’t be here in 2019. A small carnelian signet ring, incised with a cameo of a loved one, dug up by a farmer plowing an Italian field shouldn’t be here either. To say nothing of the carved marble torso of an heroic athlete, a figure ready to spring into action thousands of years later.
I want to step away from the sentimentality of this thought, but there it is. Against all odds, survival. Unexpected unpredictable survival. The past not past, but unearthed, shivering with tenderness, secrets and strangeness, scarred and near, but still untouchable.
(There and not there.)
Each object quietly carries the burden of its survival: chips, cracks, or nicks pitting a surface; a nose or fingers, broken off and forever missing; stone seams exposed, variegating a face, distorting features which, somehow, remain recognizable. Damage, and the implications of time’s violence, is hallowed into beauty.
We accept and embrace this damage. We look through it to imagine, to see what once was there, complete and whole; to see what remained and what, even now, remains. It’s the way we long to be looked at by another. It’s the eyes through which we hope to be seen, eyes clear and forgiving of wrinkles and the wearing work of time, eyes which see and know the hidden age we are inside always.
I’m not saying I thought all of this when I saw those portrait busts packed in their box, wrapped in clear plastic, and picked up my camera. But I’m not saying I didn’t either. What I will say is that I suspect I brought this along with me. And it brought me along with it as well. I took the pictures. Much later, I found their name: nonne ibi, which is Latin and means there not there. (Say that out loud and it suggests another meaning: they’re not there.)
Dude, what were you thinking? I don’t know. Does it matter? Ask me instead as I will ask you: What did you bring?
Perhaps this:
I once saw a marble grave marker in a museum. Its surface was badly worn but letters remained. There were no embellishments. No elaborate carving. Only words. The wall text translated the epitaph which was for a young man who died unexpectedly. I can’t remember his name - (I’ll call him Lucius) - but I still remember the words: He enjoyed wine. He wove vine leaves in his hair.
I knew everything I needed to know about Lucius. I knew why he was so dreadfully missed. Conjured before me, seen through layers of time and distance, of being lost and found, of disappearance and remembrance: Lucius - there and not there; Lucius -carried in an echo of the archaic eternal hymn offered up to human longing: they’re not there.
(Click on image to see full size.)
