parents kept the land the old house was on, a few acres, and called it “the meadow.” Throughout my childhood, my dad would take me on trips out to the meadow, which became more and more overgrown as time wore on. There in the tall grass and trees we sometimes discovered curious human objects—a baby shoe, for instance. I wondered if it could have been mine, but my father didn’t recognize it. Who was leading their baby out into our wilderness? It seemed like these lost items were a fruit the land bore. Our expeditions were at once visits to nature, visits to our past, and ritualistic journeys tracing some parallel life in which the house hadn’t burned down and this was our house, our yard. There were primordial glimpses, too: we walked deeper, beyond the property—though I didn’t know where it ended—to a woods and a swamp, where we paid our respects to a formidable snapping turtle that once locked its mouth on a stick my father pointed at it, and would have readily done the same to any finger.
Going back to the meadow would trigger images in my mind, visions of “the old days.” Even now, I have a significant collection of infant and toddler memories, which I understand most people lose. I remember, for instance, swatting exuberantly at building blocks my father had stacked up for me to knock down. I also remember slithering under a Chinese rug in the living room and having my mother tell me I looked “as snug as a bug in a rug”—this was perhaps the first time I heard a rhyme, and it gave me a jolt of pleasure. I believe that I remember so much of my life before the house burned down because that time came to such an abrupt halt—the fire obliterated and yet distilled an era for me.
Later in childhood, I developed a savant-like ability to remember sequences of numbers. I could memorize a phone number by seeing it just one time, so instead of going to the phone book, my mother simply asked me for the number when she had to call the video rental place or Walmart, which she did with surprising frequency. And as a teenager I started imitating the voices of people I knew. To entertain my friends I channeled teachers at school, other kids, odd and beguiling characters I’d encountered. I became the opposite of a celebrity impersonator—I was an obscurity impersonator. As a lively bit of dialogue unfolded around me, I repeated it discreetly under my breath in order to memorize it exactly. Life felt like a story being told to me, something I had to listen to, study, and capture. I became nervously vigilant about keeping lost time alive.
In my adulthood I’ve managed to make a practice, and a career, somehow, of this nagging need to reconstruct certain episodes from my life. For example, I often write about jobs I’ve had, as something of an exercise in reclaiming stolen hours, a resurrection of vanishing images. At these jobs most people around me wished they were somewhere else, which, to me, makes the workplace into a ready-made theater of frustrated desire, the eye of a tornado of somewhere elses. I write about people I know. I write about my mother, for instance—or an abstracted version of her—and her ongoing dialogue with her cats. I attempt to critique this dialogue as art, which I suspect it could be, since I know my mother is still an artist, even if she hasn’t made much since the fire.
I write, too, about creatures and voices I imagine, and about experiences that quietly shattered me in some way, though they might appear trivial on their surface. I dramatize certain of these stories and perform them onstage, over and over. So nowadays, I often find myself in some club, delivering an Italian aria, of my own design, about an overdose on psychedelics I experienced years before. Other times I’m singing in a nonsense language I made up, derived from baby talk, about the harrowing final moments of a five-year relationship. Through all this, I keep coming back to what my brother said to me the night of the fire. Every day I wonder, “What is the meaning of ridiculous?”
EXHIBITION
Hello, and welcome to “Invisible: Longing and (In) difference: Nineties to Noughties,” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum! I am your audio guide!
This show is a two-in-one, simultaneously a group retrospective of work by contemporary artists who were young in the nineties, and also a generational exhibition presenting new voices of artists who are young now.
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Number One. Emerging artist Leah Cruise’s conceptually-based practice encompasses elements of performance and photography, and engages with the digital world. In the creation of this ongoing series, Third Party Favor, Leah logs onto Internet hookup sites such as Craigslist and invisibly mediates conversations. She begins by contacting two people who have compatible, and often extreme, sexual agendas. Leah then engages in two separate conversations, assuming the identities of both parties. She forwards the photos, “stats,” questions and desires from one person to the other. She edits nothing, simply acting as the facilitator of—and yet an intervener in—an electronic erotic exchange. Eventually, if and when a meeting place is determined, Leah drives to the named coordinates and discreetly snaps photos of the initial face-to-face meeting of the pair. From these shots Leah creates the images you see here, silver gelatin prints on pillowcases, which are sometimes saturated in spilt poppers and the artist’s own drool.
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Number Two. This is a pile of ashes left when, at the opening, artist Dan Buggins set fire to the previous piece that inhabited this same space, “Impossible Chair” an impossible-to-sit-in chair made by his contemporary, fellow aging Young British Artist Bruce Abel. Buggins, who entered the museum concealing a large can of AXE body spray and a box of kitchen matches, maintained that he was motivated not by any professional resentment, but inspired by works of the past that he admired, namely Rauschenberg’s erasure of a de Kooning, and conceptualist Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs.
“I was thinking about the word ‘chair’,” commented Buggins, “and I simply wanted to create and perform an anagram: I Char. I only wanted to char the chair! But I was apprehended before I could put out the fire at the moment I had planned …” Buggins was bailed out by the acquisition money he received from the museum, which added the pile of ashes, now entitled “Sit on This,” to its permanent collection.
Some viewers have sat on it, interpreting the title as an actual instruction! That is why the pile of ashes is very small now. The work, which resulted from the destruction of one piece of art, will itself be erased over time. Just imagine!
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Number Three. The reason the wall is blank and the sign says “audio guide only” is because this piece can be experienced only on the audio guide! You may have noticed a trend in exhibitions to provide as little text as possible, a withholding of information that forces you to spend more money purchasing the audio guide. Well, the Ridgewood collective Rumblebutt noticed this and thought, “Hey, why not deprive viewers of the object itself?” So the object is here on the audio guide. If you haven’t guessed it by now, the piece of art is my voice! Rumblebutt purchased my voice saying these particular words.
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Number Four. Now kindly turn away from the exhibit altogether. This is the rotunda. You must have passed through it a few minutes ago. It is populated by your fellow museum visitors, as well as by museum employees. These figures, while alive, tend to be only slightly more animate than the art that surrounds them. Here we see Jessica, slouching behind the admissions desk. She earned her MFA in new media two years ago. Jessica thinks about lunch before lunchtime.
Just a few yards from Jessica is the audio guide station. The audio attendants wear buttons that say “Ask me about the audio guide.” But why would you when you’ve already got me right here?
The newest audio guide attendant is Joseph. His hair is halfway down his back and in a ponytail. He has a glazed-over look. Even if
