Wedsnesday 13 February
I am at the airport waiting for the sun to rise, which it does at 7:11am. I ought to have a compass. Rain is predicted, 100% at 11am. A woman at the priority advantage desk woke me at 4:40am to ask if I was flying some-where. I lied. I said something. She responded with mock support, You need to get to your gate, right away! They are boarding your plane!” I went back to sleep on the comfy couches right in her zone. Later, when I woke, she walked by once again. I looked her in the eye and she at me. We conveyed something deep and unfriendly. Still later I passed her again and gave her a wave hello. She said, “I thought you were flying somewhere. What flight on you on?” I said, "You're so cute" and walked by. I didn't get much sleep last night and am in no mood for her anti-transit attitude. I was at the airport from 11pm-7am and moved from my couches twice. They close the gates at midnight for cleaning and make travelers go to the arrivals. Anyway I survived and had a big cup of mud water at the bagel place at 6am.
I am at the airport waiting for the sun to rise, which it does at 7:11am. I ought to have a compass. Rain is predicted, 100% at 11am. A woman at the priority advantage desk woke me at 4:40am to ask if I was flying some-where. I lied. I said something. She responded with mock support, You need to get to your gate, right away! They are boarding your plane!” I went back to sleep on the comfy couches right in her zone. Later, when I woke, she walked by once again. I looked her in the eye and she at me. We conveyed something deep and unfriendly. Still later I passed her again and gave her a wave hello. She said, “I thought you were flying somewhere. What flight on you on?” I said, "You're so cute" and walked by. I didn't get much sleep last night and am in no mood for her anti-transit attitude. I was at the airport from 11pm-7am and moved from my couches twice. They close the gates at midnight for cleaning and make travelers go to the arrivals. Anyway I survived and had a big cup of mud water at the bagel place at 6am.
Is it light in the east now or in the west? I don’t know. The sky is tissue paper. I stole a trash bag from the airport bathroom and made a poncho for my pack and me. I am carrying a computer, an ipad, a hard drive and sandals. I walked east 13 miles in the city persistent rain. I’d brought a pair of $2 rain pants with me, but no jacket. A mile into my journey, someone pulled over to give me an umbrella, a woman with a baby. Deep gratitude. I referred to the four maps I downloaded as pictures to my phone again and again. No compass. Leaving an airport on foot is disorienting, unfriendly. I walked east across two major roads to Friendly Avenue, then Market. It rained and rained. I stopped at Carolina’s 24hr diner and ordered the Dinermite, two pancakes, two eggs, two slices of bacon and two links sausage. It has been raining since before I was born. There is a tin ceiling at the diner, a bust of Elvis, some metal product signs and a framed poster of Boulevard of Broken Dreams. The waitresses have southern draws. Is it light in the east or west? I don’t know. It is a tissue paper day. I walked for five hours, stopped for a coffee, then for breakfast. I heard frogs. I saw rabbits, a hawk, a tanager, crows and mud yellow rivers. I passed two other walkers before arriving in downtown Greensboro where people move about on foot. Elsewhere is in the heart of Greensboro, on Elm, south of Market.
The point of walking in from the airport was to familiarize myself with the city, but my god, did it rain! The pilfered trash bag from the airport bathroom did its job. I am in such deep gratitude to the woman with the baby who offered her umbrella. It instantly changed my mood. I was headachy and aggravated from my night at the airport. It felt like a warm welcome from the south. After my encounter with the woman at the airline counter, it restored my faith in humanity. I got four hours of sleep last night.
I saw a rabbit in the brush and a hawk in the fields. A black couple in a van with handicap plates stopped to ask if I needed help. “No, thank you. I am walking.” A white girl at Starbucks gave me a grande, though I purchased a short, because, she said, “You look wet, I thought you might need it.” Damn it’s a friendly world when you’re traveling. I heard the frogs, my friends. Now it’s time to get back out there with my little black roof and seize this friendly world.
Elsewhere is overwhelming, at first. The concept comes at you with a weight that cannot be denied. Nothing can be taken away and nothing can be added. A ship in quarantine. Things here can be transformed, deconstructed, augmented, rebuilt. At first I thought no way can I do a walking project here, this building is too alluring. I will have to stay and video everyday. A few more days I would come to see those spaces, art is installed everywhere in the building, are exhaustible and walking is possible.
It is generally cold in this draughty, old building, though we sleep warm and the food we make collectively is inspired. I keep finding new costumes though the costume shop is crowded with things, it’s daunting to go in there. The dust is incredible! Most of the hats are unwearable, broken. The racks are hard to pull clothes off from and push clothes back into. The drawers of the two cabinets are overflowing and uncloseable.
I am nursing an injury from before Christmas. There is a long list of things my injured wrist keeps me from doing, shaking my hands after washing them, undoing a back zipper on a dress, opening jars, doing push ups, crawling, performing downward dog, climbing trees, hanging from bars. First thing when I get back to Vermont I am going to see a doctor. It is either an badly injured tendon or a fractured bone. Not having healthcare keeps me from making the art I want to make.
I am the first artist awake everyday. Our rooms have no natural light. Cave dwellings! I’ve been sleeping poorly and waking early, before the sun rises.
I am just back from a long walk. I went out at 11am and decided to walk to the east edge of Greensboro, to familiarize myself a bit more with this city. Along the way, I met Jane and Amy and Baby and Margaret and joined the YMCA. That means I can start swimming and using the steam room and sauna. Yay! I helped save a big dog that was wandering aimlessly across four lanes of heavy traffic. Jane hugged me twice for that. “Baby” didn't want to go to the groomers. It took three of us a full hour to get “Baby” in the car. Heart on a string. Jane is a 60-something black woman living in south Greensboro. Amy is a large-framed, short-haired, white woman, about 55yo. “Baby” is a big, fluffy, matted brown and black chow mix.
I met so many friendly people in the east end of town. People wave and say hello, even the kids say hello to me. Men, as per men on earth, catcall from their cars and stoops. Testosterone and toxic masculinity makes an idiot culture of them. Alas.
I think I made a little breakthrough with my proposal this morning. There is a heavy old dial telephone here that connect to an iPhone. The audio from the iPhone then plays through the telephone receiver. I imagine carrying this old phone and inviting people to listen to the voices on the phone asking them questions related to love, the landscape, community & planning and then recording their responses. I imagine it playing some old phone sounds, dialing, a dial tone, ringing off the hook.
I have been thinking of ways to mark the route, or to not mark the route. Thoughts come and go. Nothing feels right. Today I thought to use a blowtorch to make dark hearts on the sidewalk where interactions occur, besides it wouldn’t work. I could use paint or pressure wash a heart, but I think the walk wants to remain ephemeral, conceptual, walked once by me or by a group.
It felt like a productive day and now I feel I have even more work to do to understand what this project wants, who its audience is and from whom I want to source the questions. Then getting all of that into a clean format that works on an mp3 player.
A heavy day of programming at Elsewhere. 10am check-in, 10:30am power clean, 3pm proposal meeting, 4pm artist portrait.
Wedsnesday 19 February
I brought my revised list of questions to Emily the Director of Elsewhere and mentioned to her a conversation I had with someone else about confusing personal/romantic love with community/landscape love. I was arguing not that we should or can compare those kinds of love, but that we can compare the ways in which we love. I mean we can desire, approach and occupy a space or meet a space in difference and maintain the difference. Emily said she never read romantic/personal love into the first set of questions I'd changed. My friend said he was confused by the personal language of love I'd been using. So I hold both readings of the questions and value both responses, recognizing no one person/gender/age/race has the right response, as none will have the same reading/understanding of any artwork/location/text. Your reading is valid. My reading is valid. And Emily’s reading is valid. So many of the artist spaces I’ve resided in these past few years have stressed the importance of recognizing our differences, our asymmetries as we intersect in spaces/places.
I brought my revised list of questions to Emily the Director of Elsewhere and mentioned to her a conversation I had with someone else about confusing personal/romantic love with community/landscape love. I was arguing not that we should or can compare those kinds of love, but that we can compare the ways in which we love. I mean we can desire, approach and occupy a space or meet a space in difference and maintain the difference. Emily said she never read romantic/personal love into the first set of questions I'd changed. My friend said he was confused by the personal language of love I'd been using. So I hold both readings of the questions and value both responses, recognizing no one person/gender/age/race has the right response, as none will have the same reading/understanding of any artwork/location/text. Your reading is valid. My reading is valid. And Emily’s reading is valid. So many of the artist spaces I’ve resided in these past few years have stressed the importance of recognizing our differences, our asymmetries as we intersect in spaces/places.
I attended the 12 o’clock community meeting at Beloved Community Center today https://www.belovedcommunitycenter.org/. It is on the community board at Elsewhere as a local meeting of interest. What an active, welcoming, supportive group! I was in the minority of course, one of three white women. There were nine others in attendance, male and female black activists from 20-70 years old. The walls of the room are covered floor to ceiling with black and white photos documenting the Greensboro Massacre of 3 November 1979.
While I was listening, because of my discussion last night with another artist about how I might costume myself during my walk, I took note of everyone’s dress. The activists at the Beloved Community Center were all neat, clean, conservative and in business attire. I was wearing a patterned, vintage, blue & white, fitted cotton dress from the Elsewhere collection over a pair of gray men’s trousers with rolled pant legs, a red leather jacket and black sandals. I did not feel out of place, but I do not know how others viewed me. All I know is that my heart was in it and I was treated with respect. I listened. I asked questions. I took copious notes. When invited to do so, I introduced myself and my LOVE LINE project. Some people responded to my proposal.
I made copious notes of what Warren and Nelson and Markesha offered by way of perspective, language, history, events and spaces that seemed relevant to it. Warren said there are different kinds of walks, the power walk for instance, the walk that asks, “Where does power exist in our city?” He extended that question to multiple areas, “Where is history, story, congregation, ethnology, love? Where do people talk about space? What is our experience of space? How do different people feel about our shared spaces? Then he offered his love/hate relationship with Cincinnati, having grown up in the West End there. He talked about his experience with the migration from the south and the people who came up and basically occupied the city (gentrification) and how they had a different experience of it, evident as they talked about their love in overwhelming terms of endearment. Now the people who grew up in those spaces are dying off and their stories being lost. We're left with a constituency with no memory of the place. This doesn't make for better city planning. It perpetuates a dominant culture.
Warren raised another potent question, “Where do poverty and love come together when you are oppressed? When revitalization happens to your city? When it is developed in somebody else’s imagination? When the city is rebuilt by someone other than the ones who reside there?”
Wesley, a local college student, intern at Beloved and an organizer for Cure Violence (a group that works to remove the stigma of gun violence by shifting the conversation from race to public health), talked about Healing Tuesdays at City Hall. His organization works on conflict resolution for groups affected by violence to break the cycle of endless retaliation.
Rev. Nelson Johnson and his wife, Joyce, were there. It is they who run the Faith Community Church. The Johnsons were taking part in a workers' march on Nov. 3, 1979, when they were attacked by Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Re. Nelson is a generous, gracious leader. He gave everyone a chance to speak and offered up this hopeful vision. What if Greensboro had the courage to lift up the light of the truth and our city became a destination city for building community? Joyce added her vision and interest in transforming this city into a better place. It’s what brought the two of them together in the 60’s and it’s what they’re working on now in 2020. I applaud them and will join again next week!
I had a difficult discussion with a fellow artist today, an Asian-American person who did not speak out when a black artist included her in a group of white-passing artists. Yesterday I tried out a draft of my telephone questions about love on her. She gave a comical response without answering the questions and today she told me why. She said she was put off by the questions. She didn’t have answers to them. She felt they were leading. The word love alone was leading forher. She doesn’t experience the world that way. It isn’t something she is prepared to talk about. I felt it was a valid response and I was grateful for her honesty. I said I was interested in talking about love in relation to the city’s history and in relation to the city’s public planning, but also in talking about how two beings meet one another in public space, in the world, and was thinking about embedding a place for love in our geography.
She knows there are racial tensions in this city, but isn’t personally familiar with them. Where she lives there are no black people. She feels it isn’t an issue that affects her. I asked if she was not educated about the issue from the news. Yes, but that is not my experience. She didn’t get why I’d walk the word L-O-V-E across a city. I explained it was my effort to face my country, a place I was afraid of, a place I was in disagreement with. So you’re doing this for you? Yes. I am doing it for me. And if I can inspire others to move past their obstacles to love by moving past my own, the way a broken man with a passion for climbing coming back to climb an unclimbed mountain or an ironman carrying his disabled brother on a grueling course inspired me… That moved us into a discussion I had once years ago where my hero is pitted against the disadvantaged peasant laboring in a field. Where my privilege in heroes is exposed. I wonder, must these heroes be held against one another? Goran Kropp, was my heroes in those days. I liked his independence. I like how he showed the climbing world it was possible to travel to the world’s tallest mountain under his own power, without an entourage, climb it without oxygen and later return to clean the mountain of the oxygen tanks many careless teams had littered it with. He worked within the system to change it. Let’s fight for worker’s rights and improve conditions for everyone AND let’s dream better dreams AND dream beyond our current reality. I wonder is this a good place for “and” where we are more comfortable with “or”?
Is art obsolete if it doesn’t produce measurable change and useful objects? Is art the privilege of the wealthy and nothing more? I thought art was alchemy, the act of creating, or re-enactment of creation, which requires no money, but intention. I have been arguing, with another colleague, that sitting meditation is not dropping out but improving our collective opportunity for a more compassionate world, not only because we are not actively harming one another when we sit, but because we are improving our memory, tolerance, self-love, compassion and energy levels. The artist I was talking with today feels that going to a spa to work out, to get a sculpted body, is obscene. I feel that thinking devalues the many reasons people go to a gym. The YMCA is one of the friendliest community spaces in Greensboro. People go for the community and for their health. For joy.
I want a world where we’re all so privileged we can be artists, one where art isn’t the culling of a few top picks and a disregard for the rest, one that values the creative act. This colleague said my work was white art, art without production. It didn’t grow beans. I felt stuck in my defense of it, but want to understand her. This kind of conversation traps me in a world where everything I do is because I am white, because of my privilege. Making art, walking, hiking, thinking about love, etc. I agree I have, and have had, privileges because of my race. In my work as an artist, I have uncovered many of these privileges. I feel I am working not to exploit them but to understand them and use them to empower others and give voice to my community.
I plan to walk tomorrow and continue walking until 9 March. Snow is due today. The temperature has been fluctuated from the low 40s to the high 50s. Signs of spring everywhere, bunches of daffodils in the dry woods, hints at cherry blossoms.
Comments
Post a Comment