Imagine that you’re standing in line to pick up your prescription at the pharmacy, right? There’s someone in front of you, and he asks if you can hold his spot for a minute. He wants to pick up a pack of Ace It - test taking gum. Sure, you say, no problem. Now, it’s hella busy in there, right? Everyone is getting really frustrated because the woman at the counter is chatting with everyone as if no one else is wasting their lunch hour in that line, but when the guy comes back you’re only a few spots away from the register and the guy behind you protests. No, no, he says. She stepped out of line. She’s got to go back to the back of the line.
So this guy is really, really selfish. That’s just not the way the game is played, right? It’s understood that people are allowed to leave lines and come back if they ask and if they don’t take way too long. If they don’t abuse the privilege and screw things up for everyone. Most people would feel really embarrassed around someone with the brass to be so gauche. In fact, you might even decide to defend your decision to hold the guys spot and let him back in.
A line’s “justice” is mostly policed by its members, but many of us sort of feel like the protesting guy. We hate it when anyone ahead of us slows us down. When we’re in line, we love it when people ahead of us have to step out and leave their spot for good. When confusion happens, we are very tempted to use it to our advantage to jump a few spots ahead in line.
That’s our selfish individuality, but civilization has created a endless conventions and traditions that we’ve all learned to follow, such that, if everyone does really follow them, life works as optimally as it can for everyone. Lines capture these conventions so well. Lines are at once both cooperation and competition.
Israel Horovitz wrote a play about five people waiting in a line. It’s called Line. It ends in Philadelphia this Friday, and I saw it today. The same company that did Grace, The Luna Theater, put it on, and this one was comparably good. Imagine the scenario I’ve described above and then multiply people’s willingness to be unreasonable about their place in line by about 100 times and you’ve got the basic concept of this play.
The whole set is just some tape on the floor. Otherwise, it’s five people jockeying for position in a line for… well, you never quite know. They all really want to be first in it, though. You know, before the crowds come. They want to be first so badly that they are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to move up a spot or two.
It made me really uncomfortable to watch the misbehavior. The thing is, as unbelievable as the actions might have been, the emotions that motivated them did not seem unbelievable at all — at least to me. The only disbelief I had to suspend for this play is that people really could lose the inhibitions that make them behave. It’s not so much.
I hate watching people so uncivilized that they are willing to ignore basic conventions of cooperation for whatever their petty little immediate desire might be. When I hear stories of old women fighting over Christmas gifts at Macy’s, for example, it makes me want to go all Kaczynski and bug on out to a log cabin somewhere. That’s precisely Horovitz’s point, and the production reminded me of Best in Show, the movie about the American Kennel Club’s signature competition and the barbarous behavior of its competitors. Best in Show was so good that I never, ever want to see it again. Line was much the same experience for me, so good that I suffered.
Just kidding! I got a rise out of you, though, didn’t I?
Kurt Vonnegut has a great little story about Free Will. In it, God creates a world with just one inhabitant, and he endows that inhabitant honestly and truly with complete free will. Every day, that one man, wakes up in the morning, jumps in the river and when he comes back out, he yells something different. Every day, and every day God is watching intently because he can’t wait to hear what new and crazy thing his free man will say.
I think most people believe they are living that life now, that’s how far the notion of individuality has gone. Tony Judt wrote about the effect this sort of worldview has had on us as a world community in his recent essay, “What Have We Learned, If Anything?” in the New York Review of Books. He writes that at other moments of great social change, people continued to spelunk the past for lessons as they plodded into the future, even if it felt like the terrain had very much changed.
Now, though, he writes, we seem to believe that we have entered a new dawn, such that there is not need to do anything with the past but memorialize it, because it’s all so different now. He was struck, for example, after 9/11, by the readiness to “proclaim novelty on every possible occasion.”
Here’s one piece of the explanation he gives:
Most people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a near infinity of data. But in the absence of any common culture beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the fragmented information and ideas that people select or encounter are determined by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests. As the years pass, each one of us has less in common with the fast-multiplying worlds of our contemporaries, not to speak of the world of our forebears.
… What is significant about the present age of transformations is the unique insouciance with which we have abandoned not merely the practices of the past but their very memory. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.
He goes on to dig into some of the implications of this reticence, and I recommend exploring them. It makes for more comfortable going, after all, if History hiccups hard enough that study may be set aside as entertaining, at best, but no longer usefully informative.
I’m glad Judt’s essay came along, because it does a good job of making the point that when we as individuals let our individual hearts mislead us into a false sense of uniqueness, it has consequences for a whole community. See, the only way you could really truly ever have free-free-free will is if we did live alone on our own planet with our own food supply and our own cool little river to jump in (yes, you would have to have the river), otherwise, your will can’t ever completely be your own. You’ve got others to think about and others are thinking about/influencing/controlling you.
See, you and I are not really the organism. We’re just organs in the real organism: humanity. If we fail to internalize the lessons of the old, old stories, if we fail to reach each other, if we fail to understand that just because there is space between us that doesn’t mean there is that much difference, we’re going to hurt ourselves. If we hurt ourselves, we hurt each other.
We need to teach our solo, prideful little hearts humility. We are very, very much not alone.
People my age (turning 31 this year) have a strange perspective. We became adults as the Internet became very, very real. That means, we’re old enough to remember when people weren’t so easy to keep track of but young enough to understand just how much technology has enhanced our interconnectedness.
I have been haunted lately by people I will never see again. People who drifted out of my life before Friendster accounts and blogs gave us a permanent way to find each other through an eternal on-line address. It’s surreal, because I know that if I met them a little later in life, I never would have lost track of them. I met them too soon, though. I can’t even remember some of their names.
There’s the woman I was friends with in my Women’s Studies class my Senior year of college. She was a non-traditional student. Jocky. Intense. Totally devoted to theater tech. We hung out a lot. Then we didn’t.
There’s the crazy Christian girl from my Freshman year. We met up again during one of my low points later in college and used to go grocery shopping together. I remember walking her back to her all women’s dorm and telling her that her high-powered executive dad was robbing money from his workers just because his contacts were scarce and the workers easily replaceable — not because he added more value. She said she was going to be a doctor working in Africa by now, but I guess I’ll never know.
Another, Andrea, was an erotica writer I met over email and hung out once in Florida. We were penpals and phonepals for a while and then it tapered off — for good.
I will never forget the time I went on a first (and last) date with this woman who used to sing and dance professionally on-board cruise ships. I wore sandals because I didn’t have a good pair of brown shoes. I will never stop being embarrassed about this until I have a chance to laugh about it with her, but I probably wouldn’t even recognize her if I saw her on the street.
There have been others. People I remember. People I drove away or disappeared on or just lost track of. Nostalgia has always been a sort of drug to me, but I’ve been using it lately. Some of these people are getting reborn in stories I’m writing. I’d almost like to show them how I see them as I turn them into characters, but how?
Here’s a haunting image: let’s imagine one of them finds one of my stories later, published in some random magazine or journal. She reads it and mulls it over and (because she only vaguely recalls me as well — she doesn’t recognize my name) feels an odd affinity for the character she inspired, without realizing that she is reading about herself.
On May 31st, you can look for me in the Frank Rizzo Parking lot near the Italian Market in South Philadelphia. I’ll be there all afternoon for The South Philly Biennial, an art show collaboration in my favorite part of our city.
When I used to work for Institute of Contemporary African Visual Art, I learned about the whole phenomenon of biennials. I don’t know why it is that the art world likes to run their shows every two years, but they do.
occurring every second year; “they met at biennial conventions”
It’s great that the Barat Foundation has seen fit to put a homegrown biennial together in one of our neighborhoods. It looks like they are going to have some very exciting participants and cover a lot of artistic ground. You can read the initial press release here.
This is the first exterview I’m doing to complement an interview at implicit art. The interview deals with some artist and whatever artistic experience allowed me to discover them. The exterviews, which will run here, are meant to deal with everything else. Still sorting the format out, but I hope you enjoy the following discussion with David Kessler. I met David at the opening of his showing of video and paintings from Shadow World, a series of videos he’s doing in Philadelphia’s Kensington Neighborhood, beneath the elevated train.
TTWP:David, you’re an artist who’s getting some richly deserved attention in our city for different projects. An artist has to show a lot of personal initiative, especially to be in as many projects as you are. So, when I say the phrase: “evil dilution of my attention span,” what sorts of things do you think of? Trader Joe’s? Certain Web-sites? Seinfeld re-runs? Polka parties?
DK: These days anything that can distract me, i don’t typically find evil. I spend literally every day working on something. I like to take breaks and do other stuff but those things
have to almost physically pull me away. With one exception, the damn Internet! Lately I’ve been nostalgic for the days when I had no computer and walked around with a sketchbook. Simpler times when I didn’t have to wear glasses all the time and i had no chronic back pain.
For years, I could honestly say that I didn’t like computers and I had no real use for them. I don’t know when that all changed but now I’m spending about 10 hours a day or more on one and a great deal of my art is made on it. Now that I have this “all in one - wonder box” in front of me, being distracted is only a click away. Every time a video track is rendering, I check my email - even if that render is under a minute, even if I checked my email a minute ago. That’s bad. That is evil.
The horrible part is that I don’t really like the Internet. Sure it’s useful and the idea of it is like living with Real Magic but very little of it enriches me in any way because I don’t really go out of my way when I am on it. if I can’t see it on my Google homepage, I probably won’t get to it. I pay the most attention to what i am putting into the internet not what it is giving back to me. In that way, it is a very expensive, evil magic mirror bent on my destruction.
It’s really been bothering me and I am working on it. I deleted my Myspace account. A good choice. I recommend everyone does this.
TTWP: This is a great way of putting it. I feel much the same on all points. One in particular: at my office I use Yahoo! Messenger because it tells me the very second that a new email arrives. Does that keep me from going to my email 6 times a day and hitting “Check mail”? No. It does not.
That said, I very well might not know that your work existed if not for the Internet. I found you because of “Under the El,” probably through artblog, but I’m not sure. The truth is, I’m more likely to keep track of an artist I discover online (and bookmark somehow) than I am to keep track of one I like at a gallery.
When did you decide to get serious about this whole Internet thing and enter the blogosphere? (or are you in the vlogosphere?) Did you hesitate? What sort of reservations did you have?
DK: There is no doubt of the power of the Internet. To be able to reach so many people and be found by anyone interested. The choice to go there was an easy one, but it wasn’t really like “I love what these video bloggers are doing, i want to do something like that.” And I can’t say that when i started posting Shadow World online that I thought very many people would see it. All through 2006, I was working on what turned into a feature length documentary, If You Break the Skin You Must Come In.
It was an insane project that had me directing and editing as well as being video and documentary instructor and it was being produced by two large institutions that each had very different ideas of what the film should be from each other and from myself. It was a great experience on many levels but also as great an experience as one could have under the conditions of being violently mad at one person or another everyday for a year can be and it was the last thing that i wanted to do again.
I started Shadow World almost at the completion of If You Break the Skin as a way to do something by myself and for myself. It was to remember why i liked filmmaking again and to make art without someone disagreeing with my intentions. And the Internet - to be able to get something out into the world in a day or so and not after a year of labor and hopes of screening and distribution. It really just made sense. I started a blogger account and just started putting them up. Since then, i’ve really started to embrace video blogging as a tool for my own work but only slightly as a community.
TTWP: I am so tempted to talk to you more about this whole Internet Community idea here, but that would be way too logical of a progression. So, you said earlier that you work just about all the time. Then you also said you did a brutal project where you were angry at someone every day. If that’s the case, you must have had some escape routes. Where do you go when you need to get away from your work? Or, you want to keep working, you just need a change of scenery. Where do you go, what are you looking for and what changes when you get there?
DK: that gets hard because my studio is my office. I do all my work whether it is for myself or for a client there and my studio is in Old City where there is just about no place that I enjoy minus a coffee shop. It definitely feels hard to escape sometimes and when i think about escaping, it’s usually far away. I can refocus on a different project or I will often try to find a movie to watch but I think my only real escape is to find good company and good conversation. I think really, as long as I have that in my life there is little else that i need. I’m fortunate to have moved into what is turning into a really great community of artists and people whom I deeply admire and think of as mentors. So now, for the first time in a long time, when i need to get away I can actually just go home. That, or the bar.
TTWP: OK, God just came down from Heaven and said: “David Kessler, you get to live you’re life over, but you can’t go to Art School because you’ve already done that and you know what that’s like and I’m letting you keep all your memories from your first go.” What do you decide to do with yourself? You’re allowed to cheat and worm your way back into Art, you just aren’t allowed to take the direct route.
DK: I’d probably skip art school anyway. It’s really fairly pointless and I have my memories in case I really need to draw upon any of that. I don’t know that given the same circumstances I would end up doing anything differently if I wanted to. If I had a choice in the matter, i would never have gone to public school, probably would not have grown up in America.
I would have learned several languages, could play an instrument and have found a way to be more comfortable in my own skin at an earlier age. I would have found more opportunities to fall in love, and I would have more interesting stories to tell. But i grew up in Northern New Jersey, so I listened to heavy metal and felt like an outcast for most of my youth. Was there ever any alternative?
