Breach of Close

Rob Kennedy, Possible Uses of Disorder

The space he had been given was a windowless, high-ceilinged room, one of several century-old unrestored structures built around the courtyard. It was more a stall than a studio. Slabs of plaster had fallen off the wall in places, exposing like an open wound roughly hewn stones of the outer masonry wall.

As I stood in the courtyard I could see a figure moving in the depths of the dimly lit room. Peering into the space I could see that the only light came from the screen of his laptop and a tile of light thrown on the wall from a small projector on the other side of the room. Hunched over his laptop in the dark, his chest of tools set open against one of the walls, he looked a little like a smith in his forge or a shaman in his tent. Except he wanted company.

As I entered the room he got up to greet me. He told his name (Rob Kennedy) and how he had gotten here (he was sponsored by the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow as an artist-in-residence in the Remap 3 contemporary art platform that is taking place in Athens until the end of October) and explained a bit about the project. From what I understood it was an installation in progress that was being shaped by the encounters he had with other artists and visitors while here and by the space he worked in. The installation was slowly incorporating pieces of the immediate environment of his exhibition space—the objects he had found lying around the room and outside in the courtyard—and of the broader city environment.

One piece, a video installation he had brought with him from Scotland, or at least the core of the work: a small projector, a screen and a video loop.  The rest was found here. The projector was set on a folding stool he found in the space, laid on its side with a tile wedged between its legs. The screen was propped up on a precarious arrangement of bathroom tile, butter knife and sheets of printer’s paper, all also found in the space.  On the screen one saw a continuous loop of a short vintage clip showing an old man walking to a city street corner, accompanied by the monotonous repetition of a snippet of a child’s nursery rhyme.

Kennedy describes the project in this way:

Starting from a point that is an arbitrary zero and by way of reciprocal discussion something rudimentary begins to appear. What it gives shape to will be an accumulation of this language as it is translated both on paper or screen and through actions in physical space. This initial impetus will be developed locally according to use and re-use, relying on the contingencies of circumstance to foster a variety of (in)conclusions.

I was intrigued by this idea of re-combining used objects from a familiar environment with the chance finds of a new one, this quite literal idea of translation as moving across. I wonder if the artist was aware that the makeshift base of the installation, the acute precariousness of the support it provides (but for how long) might have a particularly trenchant symbolic significance in a country whose economy is about to implode.

But I am even more fascinated by how the story he tells in his space is being shaped in its telling, how the conversations he has with others and the objects he finds in the city will find a place in the installation and by their very incorporation into the project, change it. Kennedy’s installations are both recursive and outward-reaching, self-referential and open to new encounters and the “contingencies of circumstance”.

I envy him his residency though I’m not good at living out of a suitcase for a long period of time. Some people can. Jörg does it half the days of the year. And my friend Joanna says she wouldn’t even need the suitcase. She swears that if she were rich enough she’d spend her time travelling around the world, from city to city—without a suitcase. She’d board the airplane with her purse, having arranged beforehand with the hotel concierge—being filthy rich she’d only stay at the kind of hotel which would have a concierge who could serve as your personal shopper—to have bought her the  clothes and toiletries she’d need for her stay in the city. She’d be a traveler-in-residence. Like Kennedy’s installations, she would acquire, use and then divest herself of the objects of local use—subject, of course, to the contingencies of circumstances.

“Wouldn’t you miss your things?” I asked her, thinking of her 8-room flat in Brussels, or perhaps more of myself. I wouldn’t be able to reach such an extreme state of dispossession. I can strip down the excess in my flat but at least for now there’s a threshold of things I need to have around me. I need to be surrounded by my books and music, maybe not all of them, agreed, but some.  A favorite sweater. A pair of fraying jeans that have taken on the shape of my butt and legs like a mold. The things I cook with. These things make up part of my life. Or maybe it’s just that I feel more me when I’m with them.

“Darling, I’d be seeing all these marvelous places and meeting all these extraordinarily interesting people, why would I ever miss a sofa?” she said.

This post originally appeared in somewhat altered form in What’s Left of Nathan. The blog is part of project that documents acts of dispossession: each day an object, or set of objects, is thrown or given away. The text that “accompanies” this act may be  a very short story about the object itself; other times it explores ideas about the place and meaning of things in our lives and homes, the connections between objects, memory and desire.  The photograph to this text comes depicts an earlier (2010) incarnation of the installation on view at the Athens Remap 3.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (www.endurance-junkie.com)

“I want to be writing about the colors of the sea,” Natalie said, “but I keep seeing a man in Spandex running tights.”

We were on the beach resting after our late afternoon swim. The wind had died down and the sea was a shimmering sheet of stained glass in panels of emerald, turquoise and sapphire. It was early September and the stream of the island’s tourists, never many even in high season thanks to the relative inaccessibility of the island and the deliberate scarcity of hotels and rooms to rent, had thinned to a trickle. The inlet was practically deserted, and the handful of others with whom Natalie and I were sharing the beach with could hardly be heard; we all spoke in hushed tones, a reverential counterpoint to the gently lapping of the sea against the pebbles at the shore’s edge and the bleating of goats in the fields behind us.

The man Natalie was talking about was the Prime Minister. He had run in the sideline 10 km split to the Athens 2010 Marathon last October. He had showed up at the starting line in knee-length Spandex running tights, hi-tech sun goggles and a pair of orange Phillips sport headphones that connected to his Apple i-Pod nano. I know they were Phillips headphones because I have a pair just like them. In fact, I also have Spandex running tights. Except that when I put on the gear and go out for a run, no one pays me much notice, even if I look a little ridiculous in the tights. When the Prime Minister goes running in this gear, it is an act of considerable symbolic power. Many people notice.

We had swum at Natalie’s insistence to the islet at the opening of the bay. “I want to see the beach from the sea, from the outside in,” she had said. I would have been content to swim back and forth along the shore, and told her so. “Why would you ever want to do laps in the Aegean?” she asked. It was more a scolding than a question. “You know, that’s exactly something he would do,” she said. She meant the Prime Minister.

I judged the distance to be only a half a kilometer and Natalie is a good swimmer, so she could easily have done it one her own, but my innate cautiousness and an equally ingrained sense of outmoded chivalry dictated that I accompany her. And she was right. From the islet we looked back onto an amphitheater of gentle foothills blanketed in a mauve and silvery green thicket of thistle, sage and lavender. The hills sloped down to a broad swathe of pasture before ending in the allée of sea-pines that stood like sentries at the back of the beach.

Wanting to see it from the other side. Perhaps that’s why she’s a writer and I’m not. That’s why she’s haunted by the man in the Spandex tights. She needs to write about the crisis, to understand it, to give voice to her anger.

“What was he trying to say getting dressed up in his superhero costume for a 10k run?” she said. “A fucking 10k run! So typical. So over the top.”

I don’t know what message the PM wanted to send, but it can’t have been what he intended. (It is too disturbing to think that there wasn’t any intended message or that he didn’t even consider that a message could be sent.)

The gear, which, together with his running shoes, cost the equivalent of the starting salary of an unskilled worker, was the kind worn by competitive athletes and early-adopter fitness buffs with a penchant for technology. There were a couple of reasons you might wear it. You might wear the gear to look the part or impress, though few of us have the butt and gut to pull off Spandex. But most of us wear it for comfort. It is much nicer running 10 km without your balls chafing against a cotton jockstrap and sweat dribbling down and stinging your eyes. And comfort, in turn, might give you an ever so slight competitive edge over the guy next to you when he starts bleeding in the crotch. The edge is mostly psychological, though. The gear cannot correct for more fundamental problems of endurance, gait and flexibility.

In different times one might admire the man in his running gear. Yes, here’s a man of who takes care of himself, a man of determination and self-discipline who doesn’t care what other people think of him. One might think that these qualities are the ones he brings to task of governing the country.

But what most people saw, I think, was a man outfitted in expensive hi-tech gear, awash in the music coming from his playlists on the nano and oblivious to the sounds of the crowd. And most people probably thought, this is how he governs the country. They saw a man who put too great a faith in technical solutions to what is fundamentally a political problem. They saw a man out of touch with what was happening around him, a man who literally does not hear what his people are saying.

If he had been listening, he would have spearheaded a concerted effort to bring even a handful of corrupt officials and politicians to justice. I am not naïve. I know that graft on its own does not explain the massive public debt that Greece has incurred. It does not on its own explain the appalling waste in the public sector and the stifling bureaucracy. And I know that the conviction of a hundred embezzlers and tax-evaders and bribed officials will not right the economy. Yet I also know that the country is seething with rage. I hear the voice of anger every day. I hear it at work, at the gym, on the trolley, at the grocer’s. I hear it from friends who teach at university and the guy I buy flowers from at the farmer’s market. It is impossible not to hear the anger. And it is not just anger at salary cuts and tax hikes, the loss of jobs and the curtailment of pensions. I hear, too, the sound of righteous indignation over the perverse injustices of a tragically dysfunctional economy and the asylum accorded to those who have plundered the wealth of the state.

There is much I do not understand about this country, and perhaps in this way the PM and I are alike. At times I can even see myself in him—his uneasiness with the demonstrativeness and immediacy that seem to characterize Greek public behavior, his awkwardness with the finer points of the language, his embrace of technology and technocracy—though this could all be sheer projection. But unlike him, I do hear the anger.

“Greece is running a marathon of its own. Together we will finish, and quickly, I hope,” he declared at the start of the race.

Yes, the marathon is a test of endurance, a matter of pushing beyond what you thought were your limits, and in this way the metaphor captures some of what the majority of Greeks are now experiencing. But only in part. If the marathon is a struggle, it is a solitary one: even if tens of thousands of other runners are doing the course with you, you are running on your own. Marathon running is not a team sport. Yet it is precisely this sense of committed collective effort for a common purpose that is required if the country is to emerge from this current morass of recession, stifling taxation and unemployment.

Leadership forges such a vision of common purpose not in rhetoric alone but more importantly in acts—including acts of primarily symbolic significance—that can persuade ordinary women and men that all are contributing their fair share to reforming and rebuilding the country. But we do not have this vision. We know that the privileged are not sharing in our sacrifices equally. We have no evidence that corrupt officials are being brought to justice. We see that the public sector remains bloated and inefficient. We witness the announcement of reforms but hear nothing of their implementation.

Technical solutions are needed, of course, the infrastructure and technological equivalents of the runner’s Spandex and hi-tech goggles. Tax evasion and fraud can’t be addressed if IT systems are too antiquated or unsophisticated to mine the databases in ministries and agencies to cross-check assets against income. But the problem is essentially one of political leadership and vision. Without a leadership willing to confront entrenched interests, slash waste from the public sector, responsibly privatize state assets and liberalize the economy, there will be no development.  But will is not in itself sufficient. Any measure that seeks to uproot privilege, any measure that threatens vested interests will be sabotaged further down the line of command and at the front. Reform is bound to fail if will is not accompanied by political savviness, alliance-building, and broad public support.

“Greece is running its marathon,” the Prime Minister. Did he not see the cruel irony of the metaphor? There is no captain on the marathon. We are all on our own.

The metaphor ultimately doesn’t hold. We are not running a marathon. We are, instead, on a long forced march, uprooted from a place that was never ours to begin with, a virtual land of false prosperity and hollow promises, acquired through promissory notes we could never repay, a parallel world to this land of pebble beaches and terraced olive groves, of honest toil and decent people. Under the watchful eyes of our troika guards, we are trudging along a course that leads us to ever more treacherous, ever more barren ground. There is no goal in sight, or if there is one, the line keeps being redrawn, farther and farther away.

Stephen Shore "Main St. and 2nd Ave., Valley City, South Dakota

My mother used to take my brother and me with her when she went grocery shopping, but we never made it through the sliding glass doors. She’d lock us in the car while she shopped. I asked her about this many years later. “The two of you were always fighting. How could I take you into the supermarket?” she said, in a tone that signified it was almost too obvious to bear mentioning.

Nowadays, she would have taken us in with her, however rambunctious we were. It’d be an opportunity to talk about sustainable farming and fair trade and dolphins being mistaken for tuna. Nowadays, she might even get arrested for leaving us locked in the car. Or she’d be too terrified someone might kidnap us, even with the doors locked.

My mother hadn’t been afraid. I imagine she never read or heard of anything like that happening so it never occurred to her that it could happen. But it’s probably more that she simply couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to steal two boys who always seemed to be fighting among themselves. In fact, she couldn’t imagine anyone stealing chidren from a suburban supermarket parking lot.

The Cold War stripped average Americans like my mother and father of the naïveté that had informed their world-view: they now knew the enemy outside the gates, the one that lay on the other side of the “Iron Curtain”, the one that, as my grade-school history teacher told us, had bombs which were engraved with the name of our small town and which they would launch at the first sign of relaxed vigilance. But it wouldn’t be until the next generation—my generation—became parents that the enemy within was identified, the pedophiles and desperate wannabe mothers and de-institutionalized psychotics that lurked in suburban schoolyards and shopping centers. It was then that mothers no longer locked their kids in the car in a suburban supermarket parking lot.

My sister-in-law chauffeurs her daughter everywhere: to soccer games and choir practice and ballet lessons, though the field and the church and the dance studio are all just a short bike ride away. She says you can’t just let a kid bike off alone, it’s too unsafe.  “There were all sorts of sick people out there who prey on kids,” she once said.

I first though my sister-in-law was just over-protective and slightly paranoid. But then I realized that all the parents were chaperoning and chauffeuring their kids around this quintessential American suburb of well-kept lawns, swim clubs and playing fields. It’s ironic. The specter of a society built on the fear of the ever present danger posed by the enemy within, a society in which each person’s movements were watched by the omnipresent eye of the guardian state—the  specter that figured so prominently in Cold War ideology, had, in some small and bizarre way, come to pass. But there was not one eye, but many.

 ***

On June 4, 1964, eighteen months after the end of the Cuban missile crisis, American television aired an episode of the short-lived and creatively daring sci-fi series The Outer Limits. It was called “The Special One”. Written by Oliver Crawford, a Hollywood screenwriter who survived the McCarthy blacklist to write for such shows as Perry Mason and Star Trek, the episode is about a middle-class family whose son is enrolled in a special government-sponsored program for the gifted. One evening a stranger arrives at their New York City apartment. Dressed in the inconspicuous, reassuring Brooks Brothers suit of lawyers, corporate accountants and government functionaries, the stranger announces that he’s “with the government” and has come to provide extra tutoring sessions to their gifted son for a special yet unnamed project. After a brief conversation about the program, during which the parents learn that the doses of radiation to which they had been exposed while themselves employed on a government project was responsible for the mutation that resulted in their son’s unusually high intelligence (“Oh I wouldn’t worry,” says the stranger, “I would be proud”), Mom and Dad send the stranger and their son up to their boy’s bedroom so that the two can become acquainted!

I’m not sure which was more disquieting: the naive faith in the putative good intentions of the State—how can it be wrong if it’s the government?—or the absence of the fear of predators that now seem to be such a mainstay of contemporary life. Of course, the stranger is a predator, an alien on a mission to recruit bright kids to be part of an advance phalanx to prepare the way for the colonization of the planet, arrives at their New York City apartment

The episode, like the series as a whole, encapsulates much of the uneasiness of Cold War America. We sense the fear and fascination surrounding atomic. We can read the post-Sputnik anxiety about “falling behind” in the arms-and-science race: the Washington office that houses the Educational Enrichment Program, a program designed to protect and nurture the brightest young minds (“just like wildlife and other natural resources”) is on the same floor as the Department of Education’s “Industrial Development Division”. But it is the enemy in “The Special One”, the stranger from beyond that has infiltrated to within, that inspires the greatest fear.

Many episodes of the Outer Limits feature a monster—aliens in the shape of crabs or ants, huge pulsating brains and luminous blobs—but the alien in this episode is practically indistinguishable from ordinary Americans, at least until the end when he unbuttons his shirt to reveal a throbbing vulva-like breathing appendage in his thorax. The character does have the slightest of accents, a vaguely English, vaguely elitist accent, stiffly correct but lacking in the idiomatic expressions and rhetorical devices that mark everyday language. The kind of accent someone is trained to acquire. A foreign agent, say. A Soviet foreign agent. An agent with the power to influence the free will of his targets to the point where they would kill (read, sacrifice) themselves at his command.

The father gradually comes to suspect that something is not right with this stranger, who soon starts coming at the oddest hours, often unannounced and never apologetic for the intrusion. Dad becomes concerned that his son is spending more and more time alone in his room with the stranger, sacrificing even baseball in order to devote himself to the “project”, a part of which unbeknownst to the father involves mastering the intricacies of the aliens’ climate-change (!) device. Even before the father sees the alien dematerialize and pass through the apartment walls he’s convinced this is not an American educator.

In the end it is the son who saves his father and the apprentice who bests the master. The climax, played out at night in the boy’s bedroom, is rich in psychological and ideological sub-texts. The only sources of light in the room come from the glow of the alien’s climate device that the boy holds in his hand and from the moonlight at the window, on whose sill the father is perched, struggling to resist the alien’s silent command to jump. Just as his father is about to leap to his death, the boy activates the device to alter generate a cloud of feather-like particles that alters the composition of the air in the room. The alien begins to suffocate and begs for mercy, which the boy naturally grants (this is, after all, is a story of an American hero).

The episode played perfectly on the American angst regarding Soviet expansionism and the toxic ideology they perceived fed it. The Soviets had a plan for world dominion, we were told at school. This was many years after Joseph McCarthy’s infamous speech in which he announced he had the names of 205 members of the Communist Party who were “shaping policy” in the US State Department, a speech which launched an era of scare-mongering, security review boards and blacklists that would costs thousands of persons their jobs, including ironically the screenwriter of this episode. Though McCarthyism had long ended when the episode aired, the vein of anxiety that the Special One taps is not all that different from the one that ran through the anti-communist hysteria of the Second Red Scare.

The alien dematerializes and leaves for his planet, sans climate-changing device, which the boy tells his father he will deliver to the government so that they reproduce in the thousands to repel any future alien attack. The family heads up the stairs for bed. How they can even think of sleep after what they’ve been through that night—a near suicide, a cloud of feathers, and a dematerializing alien—is only part of the marvelous implausibility of the whole episode . But to bed they must. The boy says half-jokingly, “I need my beauty sleep. Tomorrow I have Little League.”

Yes, the boy is once again his ordinary self. He is a hero, but one who rejects his specialness. “You could have been a god,” the alien tells him in a tone that is both accusation and disappointment. But the boy doesn’t want to be a god. He doesn’t want to be special. He wants to play baseball.

***

I didn’t play baseball as a kid. I wanted to. Not desperately, since I knew (or at least was convinced) that I was too uncoordinated. But I wanted to play. There were ways of being special that made you a hero in junior high school and there were ways that made you an outcast. Not playing baseball was one of the ways you didn’t want to be special.

So I wanted to play and was envious of my brother, who did. But I was more envious of the way baseball brought them together. I wished I had a purple uniform like his, the one emblazoned with the logo of the local drugstore. I wished that the local newspaper clippings with the game results that my dad pinned on the corkboard above his workbench had had my name, too, along with my brother’s.

And then there was the other way in which I was special, though I couldn’t give a name to it then. But I understood enough to know that there was something unusual about my feelings for my friend Will. I knew I had to keep it secret. And for the rest of junior and senior high, I did. Though I didn’t make elaborate efforts to “pass”—I didn’t have girlfriends and never talked about girls with the guys on the track team—I was still the careful alien.

It is no accident that the language that the conservative right (and not only the right) employed in their hate campaigns against gay people was often similar to that deployed in their rabid anti-Communism. Both are depicted as infiltrators intent on recruiting the innocent into their ranks.

No one recruited me, of course. I sometimes wish they had. It would have been helpful to have had a guide and tutor. Someone to tell me that I wasn’t special, that there were many other boys who felt just as I did. Someone to show me a world in which a man could love another man and that this love was something beautiful. Something special.