It Is Difficult

Don't you hate when you think you've picked up on something totally original and it ends up you've stolen something from someone that they didn't even make up? No? Well, it's not that humiliating actually because we are all kind of stealing from everyone all the time. The detective work I had to go through (not really that hard) ended up being slightly more interesting than my project.

In '03, during my Reed days I skipped to the other side of town with the good ole art department to hear a lecture by Alfredo Jarr. For those of you who don't know his work, Alfredo Jarr is a Chile-born New Yorker whose contemporary installation-performative-temporal work deals with political current issues around the world. Unlike so much of so-called political art Jarr's imagery speaks directly to human suffering or complicated layers of just living in a visually stunning powerful way. My favorite pieces include a work he did in Europe (country?) with a group of locals whose only source of income in the town was a paper mill. There was no cultural place of community gatherings so he built a gallery/library of sorts entirely out of paper made at the mill. The entire community helped to build the building. When they were finished they invited the press and a government official to the opening of the community center. Then he promptly burnt it down. The claim made was that a community could not just invite an outsider artist in to produce a sense of "art" or "community" in a region where these practices weren't already sustained in some way. Another project, speaking a little more directly to a specific political-social situation was a performance he orchestrated on the border between the United States and Mexico. A hotly disputed topic and an equally sad location was the setting of two violinists, playing the same tune on either side of the fenced border. Families of people who had tried to cross the border illegally and died doing so gathered on either side. A simultaneous moment of silence was observed and then a massive net full of balloons was released, rising above the border and mingling, for everyone to see. It was unbelievable just seeing the pictures.

The name of the lecture was "It Is Difficult". At the time I had no idea why. It is difficult to be a mill worker? It is difficult to be an illegal immigrant? It is difficult to be alive? It was so broad and such an intense phrase, it had to mean more than any reference I could draw between it and the intentions of the pieces he shared with us. It stuck with me since then as a good phrase. A stocky phrase. Something personal and universal all at the same time.

When I began cutting letters out last summer I didn't know what kind of phrase I wanted. This one simply popped back into my head after so long of being stored. It perhaps came after a conversation I had with my dear and only friend in Santa Cruz, Colin. Colin and I liked to talk about how difficult it is to talk about being, existing, the inability and destructive powers of words to reference awakening and indeed enlightenment. Colin so often liked to remind me that my ego was way out of line. We always ended these conversations with confusion, silence, but a tingly feeling of closeness that happens only when two people try to communicate with each other with little success.. Once he simply ended by saying, it is difficult. And I agreed. It is difficult.

I produced the mirage of dancing letters in my yard shortly after Colin and I had that conversation (in the same yard) picnicking on tofu something under the avocado tree. It was really the only semi cool meaningful thing I made during my stay in Santa Cruz. Is this because I was an emotional wreck? Is it because my studio was the corner of our 10X6 living/dining room smushed in between the door and the couch? Is it because it is indeed difficult to make, to breath, to live?

When I started posting my pictures I realized I had no idea why Alfredo Jarr had named his lecture that. I went to his website (www.alfredojarr.net) and immediately discovered that his opening page starts "It is difficult" as if a typewriter is directly typing courier font right onto the webpage. But it continues, and I'll type the whole thing here:

it is difficult
to get the news
from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for lack
of what is found
there

William Carlos Williams


William Carlos Williams! Now I'm not a very smart or well-read person but I do know the joys of WCW and the excited look my literati hubby gets when he talks about WCW. With a quick google I found the name of the entire poem-- Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (1955) --of which it is only one short stanza.

I have no idea what the entire poem is about. I think it might be about WCW's love for his wife. Unfortunately it is still sitting in my stack of books to read underneath Crime and Punishment and my yoga homework assignments. I have a feeling I will find meaning in it however. This is one of those searches that reeks of promise and direction. I desperately hope that what I find there will shed light on my making. Perhaps it will replay my anguished search for an outdated light bulb for my SA retro lamp that never ended up working anyway. But hopefully it will inspire something clever, illuminating, or just validating. I'm still wondering if it is really that difficult. Stay tuned.