11. harm of will

 

Just a short post about feeling lonely.

Let’s start with a specific moment of loneliness, maybe it will blossom into something more as I put words to it.

I was at Trapholt (Kolding, Denmark) recently for their exhibition Connect Me, which is a collection of artworks exploring viewer/participant/audience dynamics in unnerving ways. This ranges from a conversation with an AI which entices you to sell your data (A Faustian Friendship, Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, 2022) to a kinetic sculpture informed by facial recognition which takes inspiration from the viewers gender (Cat's Cradle, Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault, 2020).

I was surprisingly moved by a very simple work. Approached from afar, traversed by the galleries deep walls, there is a tree in the distance. It looks filmic - somehow flattened by smoke and lighting effect. As I get closer it pixelates, it is not a tree at all - it is a screen, maybe it is not even a real tree, it is a digital affectation of a tree. There are two metal rods standing in front of the tree - they are kind of ugly, they have little plastic light up things on the end that look a bit like these toys you can buy from a man selling things out of a wheelbarrow on New Year’s Eve.

I am very guilty of going straight to the little placard that sits beside the artwork, even if I know it will spoil the magic. So rather than break tradition, I do that - I read what I am looking at. There is an instruction: the artist invites you to hold hands with someone and each place your outside hand on the metal rods. The gallery is quiet and I am alone, I am not long enough to touch the rods without a partner, so I sit by the image of the tree, slightly sulking - I wait. I don’t like to miss things. I also don’t like to build up suspense and be disappointed. 

There is a kind of theatricality to my waiting. It is exciting to hear people behind walls that never join me. It’s honestly also boring. It’s not charged in a way that it could be. It takes my mind to a transactional place - I wonder if it’s worth it. I start to question if this is interesting to the artist. My lack of ability to participate. Or if, in fact, we just assume that people do not go to art galleries alone. Then I come towards loneliness, embarrassment even. I am sitting here waiting for a video of a tree to do something. Is it interesting? 

It’s funny with the body. If this was a gallery full of school children, I would be very much in my chest. I enjoy to see young people in their honest critiques (bored, amazed, fleeting). But, they also make me feel confined. I’m getting old and boring perhaps? When I’m alone I feel it much more, it sits in my stomach, the area it occupies is more spacious somehow. It’s kind of sad with nothing to be sad about. It’s confronting. To be so happily alone until it is signposted to you - that you’re by yourself. That’s kind of scary. I’m in a random town. One hour from my hotel. My phone has 5% battery. 

Two people come and they touch the rods. The tree blossoms. I’ve watched its pixels for so long it’s not exciting - I’m painfully aware this is no more a tree blossoming than I am. It has made me cynical! That’s kind of exciting. I am reminded of the freedom of my aloneness. I watch this couple move quickly through the space, perhaps an agreed tempo - a looming commitment that they have to attend. But it reminds me of the apologetic quickness of being around people, not getting to see things properly for the desire to move through the space together. I move as I want. I think when I want. I sat and waited.

I don’t know that it points to any revelations? Should I open a museum you can only come alone to. Should I choreograph random strangers as museum buddies, awkwardly blundering around art they care too much or too little about?

Should I reflect on why I’m feeling lonely? Have I been too long in a country I don’t speak the language of?

Connectivity is definitely something I can feel sensitive around, so it can also point to a successful exhibition. I can feel how much putting words to it makes it a thing - both digesting and embellishing. It has become more true than it was and it also resembles a lie - the line has become thin. That is something I’m encountering in my research - these moments after. Where we can be so critically engaged to a thing we have lost the ability to understand it. It is also a question of when the feeling is designed to take route, making work that sits under the surface of the skin or work that directly slaps you in the face. The slap is interesting because it can also come with numbness if you hit too hard, that I feel so much the body stops the feeling - it becomes senseless.

Directly before writing this I read two chapters of Choreographic Objects: ‘The Body Is a Thinking Tool’ (Respini) and ‘Ideas Moves Us: Consistent preoccupations and explorations in the work of William Forsythe’ (Sulcas). I wonder what the relationship to this text is, I’m sure something of the tone, tempo, language, familiarity and philosophy is shared in a way I cannot notice right now. It is too fresh. Maybe this relationship is more interesting than that towards my fabricated blossoming tree - it is an unprocessed unconscious connectivity - it sits at the extremities - ideas that are not lodged in the brain but are tingling away through the fingers as I type. Seeping into connection.

photo one - ett dockhem, arvida byström
photo two - blooming, lisa park

photo three - blooming, lisa park

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'harm of will' - björk, vespertine, track 11