Art is everywhere, an invitation

[ partial view from the balcony in March of 2023 ]

I

There is something special about writing letters, especially by hand. The slowness of mail is a practice in trust. You have to believe, or at the very least, hope that the receiver knows your words will come, in time. The rush of everything else has long tricked us into thinking everybody is waiting for us to reply—to perform the perfect pirouette in return. 

Tomorrow, January 20th, I have to write a letter to my share house company about possibly moving out of the apartment. I’ve lived here, in this narrow room with a view I love, for almost 7 years, so we’ve become rather familiar with each other. There is paint on my walls, and dents in the furniture that will have to be tended to if I leave. I think the staff have known about the seasoned states of my room for a while, and somehow their acceptance has softened my own self-judgment for what might seem to other, less understanding people, like a “mess.”

Years ago, at another junction when I was considering leaving Japan, a dear friend shared her thoughts on Leaving A Place. 

“Everything becomes more precious just before leaving.” She said, though I’m paraphrasing. 

“You begin to see every detail—that was there all along,

 for you, and with you—so differently.”

And then they bid you farewell. Those little details.

[ kitchen sink, early morning in early (left) and late (right) March 2023 ]

From the beginning of moving to Japan in 2013, this was always meant to be a temporary state. This is a subject I return to because it’s how I’ve lived for a decade, contending with expectations of others, and extending the temporary into a mountainous range of territory that can be described, in short, as un-contained.

Temporary places. In-between-ness, The city and her aloneness, I took a train to a new place,

Temporary relationships. Under construction 工事中、 Of the overgrowth in places not meant for planting & Birds and bread and honey

Temporary life. Watch a city disappear 

[ partial view from balcony in December of 2023 ]

II

I returned to the Mori Art Museum last weekend. I hadn’t been there since December 24th, 2021, when I first discovered the works of Etel Adnan.¹ As with each exhibition, the space has transformed. It was a strange, but pleasant surprise to recognize that I was standing in the same room Adnan’s work had once been in, now almost entirely changed with its newly erected walls, dim lights, and unfamiliar shadows. 

Down a constructed hallway, left unpainted and unfinished on purpose, and around the next corner, I met Agnes Denes’s work for the first time, 1982 Wheatfield–A Confrontation. The word, Confrontation, stuck with me, as did the images of the wheatfield that she, and a group of volunteers, created to replace a landfill that had formed as a result of the World Trade Center construction in Manhattan. Accompanying the images was a poem she wrote about the “confrontations” or interactions she had with people throughout the making of the project. The awkward, the beautiful, and the truly uncomfortable and difficult.

Making something, saying something, especially something that needs to be made/said, is never a straight line paved with congratulatory flowers. People don’t like confrontation. They never have. / We rarely do, [at first.]

“Amends within capitalist societies are associated with guilt, which are associated with reparations, which is associated with zero sum. This means one will lose something: my checkbook, my reputation, my tenure track job. My peace of mind. My comfort. My belief that I am a good person. This reflects upon larger themes of personal reconstruction: are the mistaken to be given a chance to be redeemed?” 

Writes Hala Alyan, in The Power of Changing Your Mind, published in Time Magazine on January 17th, 2024. 

“What one is looking for is an opening—which almost always manifests as curiosity.” She writes. If we bring Alyan’s words to the concept of Denes’s Wheatfield, one might say art is an arrow that points to that opening; A door, A window. Art works as a Confrontation with oneself and the world. Two acres of it.

One of the reasons why I’ve stayed in Tokyo for so long is the will, or, attempt to meet and understand various kinds of confrontations. Which is very much one of the roots that makes Swallow, swallow. This body of work asks rather simple but important questions: in this moment, and in this location, what is happening? What are the frictions in myself/ourselves? Can we name them? Are they meant to break us open into something new? 

“My decision to plant a wheatfield in Manhattan,” Denes said, “instead of designing just another public sculpture, grew out of the longstanding concern and need to call attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values…” [The Guardian]

Now is a particular moment where art, words, and stories are being censored, coerced, or silenced. This can open us up. Let the silencing be the conceptual art piece needed to move us, if we haven’t been already moved to do so by bearing witness² to ongoing catastrophic loss of life and limb. If art is an arrow that points to that location, and people are actively distorting or removing the arrows—where are we?

If shame or fear is somehow stopping or shrinking us, re-imagine them. Give them another name. Fina³ once told me that “Shame is just an invitation to connect.”

Imagine what else can be true in the same vein. Endings may confuse us by appearing to be closed. But what if endings, too, are just actually invitations for something else to begin? An orientation, or, re-orientation to connect with truth, to live in it. Peel away what has been layered onto the body—that which does not allow the body, or anyone to be—burn the script they had you eat, use the ashes of old, heart-breaking understandings on your fingertips

to draw

the all and the everything

on windows

so that they may open—reminded of what they really are, of what they are meant to do: what are Windows meant to do? aren’t they meant for allowing a room to breathe? aren’t they meant to open? let light in?

surely,

that is what

a heart is

for

Old parking space covered in moss, from Above a Fireplace / Art is Everywhere piece June 2023

New audience from Above a fireplace / Art is Everywhere piece June 2023

有刺鉄線. from Above a fireplace / Art is Everywhere piece June 2023

The intersection of arrows and leaves from Above a fireplace / Art is Everywhere

Not my house, but near my house from Above a fireplace / Art is Everywhere

1. Lebanese-American poet and painter. Read: “To Be in a Time of War”

2. Bearing Witness by Hala Alyan \ Spoken word via The Meteor

3. Fina is a pseudonym for a friend, seen here in an entry from last year, Letter to Fina