Art you will never see
To work and create for nothing… to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that, fundamentally, this has no more importance than building for centuries— this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions.
- Albert Camus
sometimes
the worst thing about public art
is not the art.
- Diogenes
It is important to understand that the Opacity Project has no relation to either the Mendacity Project or the Atrocity Project, both of which receive stable, institutional funding levels and enjoy the participation of the military, the media, and in some cases entire nations.
Please keep this in mind.
Interventions
I am not the end (2006)
excerpts from The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert written in chalk on a staircase
July 14th, 2006
6 am - 9 am
3400 Point Grey Road
Vancouver, Canada
In these times when, to express ourselves well, we must speak in a way that others do not.
- Joseph Joubert
Memento mori (2006)
epitaph for an imagined drowned lover,
text on copper, fixed to a tree on a beach
May 2006
Vancouver, Canada
What we do not write for those who do exist
we write for one who does not exist.
If all life is a struggle then you were the one who was always alive. Others saw your beauty, or your intelligence, or your humour, but they did not see how you were always gasping for breath, always struggling. For those who could understand anything it was that you were drowning— you were always the drowning one. What they did not know is that you were never truly drowning because you could breathe underwater. In fact, not only could you breathe underwater but you could not breathe above the water. And so your entire life was one of attempting to extricate yourself from those who wished to keep you from drowning… those helpful ones, those saviours who were doing nothing but killing you.
Exhausted and numb you persisted while your eyes, blue accusations that could not be ignored, disclosed your truth. Your entire being was an embodied incomprehension, your presence an exasperation— I can breathe underwater.
But I recognized your struggle. And though my approaches were sodden with farewells I tried to hold you. Always slipping from my arms I could never truly embrace you. But how could I restrain you from moving towards your proper place? To greet you was to take leave of you, I knew that. And so when at last you freed yourself from every attachment and committed yourself to that far and fatal shore how could I follow you? When every attempt to comfort or to understand was suffocating you how could I allow myself, an incommensurability, to accompany you into depths which were for you alone? You once said that love, if it has any justification at all, must tolerate and support transcendence… must be able to breathe underwater. If true I should be able to follow you, to find you— if only timidity and the mundane were not my birthrights. No, I know that the eternity that you were cast into is one from which I must be forever excluded.
You said to me once at the ocean’s edge, “the sea is where living begins for those cursed with life. Just listen, you are known here and are always being welcomed… it is a homecoming”.
I have listened and I have heard nothing. I am always listening. But there is only the silence that has taken your place, the stillness that has succeeded your struggle. If love has any justification maybe it resides in an ability to say no to time, to reject its edicts and scourges and instead to endure, if only to declare, I remember.
The Prince (2005)
excerpts from Gargoyles, by Thomas Bernhard, written in chalk on the street
July 14th, 2005
5 am – 12 noon
4000 W 8th Ave
Vancouver, Canada
The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.
- Thomas Bernhard
“They are people who carry their torment into the streets and thus make the world a comedy”.
This continual, outrageous truncation of the mind…with the hapless impotence for which they are made they inhale their daily life primarily into their bodies and secondarily into their heads in the form of hundreds and thousands of dismaying intellectual kleptomanias.
- Thomas Bernhard
It is 5am. Kneeling for the last time. Behind me, behind the row of trees, a military base is sleeping. Toothless, humbled and incongruous now, a preparation for a threat which never came and which never will. An appropriate place to begin.
Comedy. This is the first word I write. Something which should not be forgotten… especially when one is kneeling on the world, pleading with it, or wrestling with it.
A streetlamp illuminates a morning that no longer has any need for it. Beside it is a red sign that says STOP. And so I begin… to end. At this intersection, on this hill, this series of chalk performances will cease. At last, I have reached the end of the end.
At the end of the end serpents speak simply, without the adornments and stresses of temptation or seduction. At the end of the end time puts a hand on your shoulder and asks you, as you both peer into the void, if you like what you see. At the end of the end…
People seem aware. For this performance, its place, not only geographically but ontologically, seems evident. There are no confrontations this time, no negotiations for the use of space, no insults, no disdain. What I feel is a politeness, an acceptance, and a genuine concern for what is present… the why? of my actions at last transfigured into a yes.
Daybreak (2004)
excerpts from Daybreak, by Friedrich Nietzsche, written in chalk on a staircase
July 14th, 2004
4 am – 10 am
2000 Lamey’s Mill Rd (False Creek)
Vancouver, Canada
The triumph of the ascetic over himself, his glance turned inwards which beholds man split asunder into a sufferer and a spectator, and henceforth gazes out into the outer world only in order to gather as it were wood for his own pyre.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
One encounter…
Me (to an old man, nearing death and joyless) : Good morning
The old man : I don’t think so… (looking at the chalk)… is this really necessary?
Me (to the joyless and death-near) : Not only is it necessary, it is crucial.
another encounter…
A gardener, or plant mechanic (middle aged yet also near death and utterly joyless) speaking so that I will hear him, so that I must hear him, says in the voice of a father who can only chastise : Someone has too much time on their hands.
Me (to myself, as I am exhausted and do not have the energy for confrontation) : if chalk dust and scrapes and dirt and spit are what time is then yes, I have a lot of it on my hands.
Utopia (2003)
The Mechanism of Utopia, by E.M. Cioran, written in chalk on pavement
July 14th, 2003
9 am – 6 pm
2099 Granville St.
Vancouver, Canada
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other, without hating each other to death? As a matter of fact, they do hate each other, but they are not equal to their hatred. And it is this mediocrity, this impotence, that saves society, that assures its continuance, its stability.
- E.M. Cioran
It is the morning of the 14th and it is raining. The poster for Utopia had a leaf in a puddle so I must have known. In fact, it was more than rain. It was a deluge. It was such that I felt something wanted me to say I’ll do it another day. But there is no such thing as another day and so I did not say this. I improvised and decided to do as much of the essay as I could in the pedestrian tunnel. It is 9:00 and I start. After two lines, after writing doomsday chaos, one of the city workers who is landscaping the park outside stands at the entrance to the tunnel and asks me what I am doing. I tell him. He asks me if I have to do it and if I have permission. I say yes to the first question and to the second, after considering saying God gave me permission, I answer no. He asks me if I will stop and I tell him that I definitely cannot stop. Someone has to clean this he says. I will clean it for you after I am done I answer. But he tries to explain that he doesn’t want me to do his work for him. I thankfully don’t understand and continue writing… How can so many human beings coexist and the worker says if you don’t stop I will call the police. I tell him that he should do whatever makes him feel secure. A complex aesthetic discussion ensues involving graffiti and chalk and ephemerality and he seems a little confused by my allying myself with little girls drawing hopscotch patterns on the sidewalk and all the little kids advertising their lemonade stands using chalk that is clearly sold as sidewalk chalk. Either we are all criminals or none of us are. The discussion ends and I keep writing. The worst is over. Now all I have to do is write on the ground for eight hours. The other workers seem either to like or not care what I am doing so perhaps they will talk him down.
There are many people who pass through this tunnel. It is a place that is truly a no-place, a u-topia. People use it to get from here to there— as soon as they arrive in it they are out of it. It is an architectural representation of transition. With all the people, there and then not there, appearing like spectres, their echoes surviving them and lingering with me for a while longer, I discover something, another reason why I do these things. Since the writing is so slow and methodical each word or phrase seems to juxtapose itself with whatever is happening around me, with a person or a conversation or a sound. And this happens continually so that not only am I writing, and thinking about the text, and picturing the ramifications of this text in this location in this city on this day in history etc. but I am also in the midst of beholding a supreme collage in endless flux. This is very exhausting, more than I would have thought. All my other projects were in less-travelled areas and so this added dimension was absent thereby limiting the mental exhaustion.
But let me take you back to the tunnel for the conclusion, or completion. I have about an hour and a half left before I reach the end of the tunnel and I am beginning to feel a little off. People have been talking to me and I am having trouble responding coherently. At this time a woman missing most of her teeth approaches me and points back to a man unloading a guitar in the centre of the tunnel and asks me if it is alright if her partner plays. I tell her that it is not my tunnel and he can do whatever he wants but I appreciated her asking. She tells me he plays country and western. And he does. Six songs, maybe five and a half… over and over: there’s a hole in the bucket, the bucket, the bucket. His voice was not good at finding the right notes, a bit of a blind voice you might say. I suppose that since the deluge didn’t stop me one final hurdle had to be thrown my way. But, I managed to crawl over this hurdle and reached the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately I was only able to do thirteen of the eighteen pages of the essay but, as the blind voice in the tunnel was reminding me you’ve gotta know when to fold ‘em.
Total Domination (2002)
an excerpt from The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt, written in chalk on pavement
July 14th, 2002
8 am - 8 pm
101 Water St. (rear)
Vancouver, Canada
Once the moral person has been killed, the one thing that still prevents men from being made into living corpses is the differentiation of the individual, his unique identity.
- Hannah Arendt
The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth. The world of the dying, in which men are taught they are superfluous through a way of life in which punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in which exploitation is practiced without profit, and where work is performed without product, is a place where senselessness is daily produced anew.
- Hannah Arendt
It is not so much the barbed wire as the skillfully manufactured uneality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ultimately makes extermination look like a perfectly normal measure. Everything that was done in the camps is known to us from the world of perverse, malignant fantasies. The difficult thing to understand is that, like such fantasies, these gruesome crimes took place in a phantom world, which, however, has materialized, as it were, into a world which is complete with all sensual data of reality but lacks that structure of consequence and responsibility without which reality remains for us a mass of incomprehensible data. The result is that a place has been established where men can be tortured and slaughtered, and yet neither the tormentors nor the tormented, and least of all the outsider, can be aware that what is happening is anything more than a cruel game or an absurd dream.
- Hannah Arendt
Gleichschaltung !
The Grand Inquisitor (2001)
a chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, written in chalk on railway ties
June 2nd and 3rd, 2001
noon - 5 pm
Seaforth Park
Vancouver, Canada
For the mystery of human being does not solely rest in the desire to live, but in the problem—for what should one live at all? Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Low tide (2000)
the essay To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die, by Michel de Montaigne, written in chalk on rocks at low tide
July 30, 2000
11am - 5 pm (low tide to high tide)
on the beach behind 3095 Point Grey Rd.
Vancouver, Canada
video stills by Joen Snowden
Discurse (1999)
An urban intensification project
Marathon readings of entire books in unlikely locations
The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard
July 17th, 1999
Noon - 6pm
Angus Drive
Vancouver, Canada
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
Sept. 25th,1999
3pm - 7pm
on and under the Burrard Street bridge,
Vancouver, Canada
People have asked me what is Discurse ? what is its point?
And so I tell them
Discurse does not have a point... it is blunt.
And to further clarify things, I allow Friedrich Nietszche to speak for me:
“Every drive that desires to be satisfied
expresses its dissatisfaction with the present state of things”.
and
“To desire that something should be different is to desire that everything should be different”.
No more remains to be said, except for the obvious—
Discurse is, of course,
a protest.
Pedestrian Guidance (2001)
Helpful advice for those with both feet on the ground
June 2001
Burrard Street Bridge, north side, walking east to west.
Vancouver, Canada
Disextinctionary (1999)
individual words from an English dictionary hidden in fruit
and left for insects and other animals to feed on
1999
various locations in Vancouver, Canada
Here lies buried the hope that animals, birds, insects… whatever is able to eat… will at the same time as ingesting their meal, acquire words and eventually, language.
This work is based on the following conclusion, which is the result of a lifetime of research:
humans will rarely listen to another human but will listen to a talking bird.
"Animals love people who talk to them" - Joseph Joubert
The following are the words that have been furtively introduced to animals.
I have also indicated the alimentary form of each word’s concealment:
anguish : bread
atonement : plum
boundary : banana
clarity : apple
distress: grape
erratic : donut
failure : tuna
gratitude : apple
homecoming : pear
incomprehension : cherry
judgment : bread
kill : prune
loss : donut
mutiny : grape
necessity : orange
nescient :grape
obligation : date
poem : blackberry
question : cheese
renunciation : grape
solitude : pear
tear : bread
torment : apple
utopia : blackberry
vitriol : chocolate
woe : raspberry
yoke : tomato
zenith : apple
Aidez-moi (1999 -2000)
water-based ink written on rocks at low tide on beaches throughout Vancouver.
1999 - 2000
various locations in Vancouver, Canada
Au revoir (1999 -2000)
ink on leaves, blowing down a street near you.
1999 - 2000
various location in Vancouver, Canada
Dispense (1999 -2000)
installation of weeping stations throughout Vancouver
1999 - 2000
various locations in Vancouver
Vancouver, Canada
existential relief avilable for everyone
The anti-room (1999 -2008)
a concentration of dark matter
1999 - 2008
a secret location
Vancouver, Canada
Objects were placed in the same public location over a long period of time.
No photos were taken and no record exists of the objects used.
They may or may not exist.
The anti-room may or may not exist.
It is a concentration of dark matter.
It is somewhere in Vancouver.
If you can find it you are welcome to stay.
Statements and Speculations
A performance is not a rehearsal. It is not a practice. The only thing that differentiates a performance from a rehearsal is its irrevocable presentation to the public. And so, if one is interested in the nature of what is being expressed, in the possibilities of what can be encountered, it is important to examine the relationship of the performer and the public.
The performance format has been borrowed: the lecture, from education; the speech, from oratory and politics; the spectacle or invocation, from religious or ritual sources.
The spectacle or invocation is of particular concern to an artist since in such a format the public is composed entirely of believers, or those who want to be believers.
And so, what exactly is such an audience?
This is the question, the margin, I am exploring in the Opacity Project. In the performances and interventions which comprise this project I do not want to depend upon a borrowed performance format. I wish to create, not only objects, but a tenuous space in which an encounter with art may occur, unnanounced, to those who do not expect it. The power of art
The transformative power of art resides in its ability to effect an authentic response in those who encounter it. The problem with the borrowed prmats of performance which I have mentioned is that the art is not truly encountered- an event is planned, promoted, a venue is chosen, a specific number of people pay to witness something to which they will respond in predictable ways- the art is not authentically encountered. The art is stripped of its power, rendered limp. And the world… well, the world will never be more than a barren place.
Patients with unilateral neglect either do not respond to objects located in the contralateral side of space or do so only after long pauses, or coaxing. When approached from the neglected side they may not orient properly… As one can imagine, it is nearly impossible to function in everyday situations following the onset of unilateral neglect. (R.B. Ivry & L.C. Robertson)
Perhaps, without knowing it I have contributed to the disorder I find here. (J-J. Rousseau).
There is nothing beautiful except that which is not. (J-J. Rousseau)
At any price we must keep those that have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace. (E.M. Cioran)
How many brave individual actions are buried in the crowd of a battle ? (Montaigne)
The public will soon disappear, art will follow shortly after. (E.M Cioran).
More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all- in order to become public. (Kierkegaard)
The heart knows that what was straight when it was hidden must appear crooked when it is displayed. (H. Arendt)
The imagination of completes its work by disguising it own activity. (E. Scarry)
If there was such a thing as the public I would probably abhor it. (J. Christ)
In a society such as ours a subversive art would successfully resist all attempts at representation. This implies a difficulty, if not an impossibility, of interpretation. To be effective a subversive art would necessarily function in opacity.
A public that seeks permission for the use of a space is asking for an extension of a pre-existing privilege. If all privacy is privilege then such forms of public art are not exactly what they proclaim themselves to be. Their space is private, perhaps unavoidably so.
To make art that is experienced as futile is to create something that can reveal what is blind in those who behold it. Everything that is persists, however briefly. To experience something as futile is to miss its persistence, its particular and perhaps peculiar strength.
