Place
(Where I Am is What I Am)
The source of all work in Nihil begins with the specificity of place and my relation to it. A route must be fashioned as a means of limiting the overwhelming choices, in terms of where one might travel, within a given set of boundaries. The primary information from which all work is derived is the immediate world within my reach and in my line of sight.
Because the Nihil structure emerges as a response to composer Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabulation system for making music, I lean on him again for thinking about a route which will structure how I navigate through New Mexico, where I live. Pärt often uses small drawings or glyphs as a starting point for structuring a work, and so I overlay his sketch of a tree on the map of the state, because only this drawing (of all his drawings) can come close to following roads that run through the state.
All along the way, I make drawings of what I see. I collect objects left behind in forgotten and abandoned spaces, especially objects I don’t understand. I take photos once in awhile to aid memory. In abandoned structures, I measure windows, doors, and walls with a measuring tape. I take liberally with the ideal of returning what I find, though changed through the process of working with it. Some places become sites for the installation of future work.
I sit for meditation when possible. The ideal is to be with reality and not in abstraction. Yet always there is a sense of thinness, as in a veil which has a front and back. Scale and enumeration seem suspicious. I do not know what I believe here. Is what I see empty or full? Is it many or a continuum? Is it happening now or has it happened already? Is it just one possibility of the world or the only? The attitude in Nihil is that if I thought I knew, it would be a lie. It is better not to know. Yet a place has a certain identity that can’t be ignored. It asserts itself subtly.
I begin with the idea that I only want to draw what’s there. In little time, I become too aware of how I see, of how certain things, shapes, patterns of light, etc. repeat themselves.
To become aware of how I see where I am is to become aware of when I see what I am.
In this place, my only real identity is to be found as yet another among its contingencies.
I want to see without prejudice, but seeing itself is a prejudice. The visual cues, traces, echoes that arrest me do so because they retain a familiarity I can’t begin to explain. Even as I might well be in a canyon, ruin, forest, or desert I’ve never before encountered, I see because I remember. Poet Louise Glück wrote it:
“We look at the world once in childhood, the rest is memory.”
The ghost in the landscape is shaped out of of my own life, translocated from time to space. Or my consciousness was never my own, but a small piece of something dislocated from within itself. Or there is no one here at all. I’m always at Lethe waiting.