Deborah Fisher

Breaking News: Reality Is Actually Elusive

I was talking to a good friend yesterday about how tricky it is to work with information. It's irritatingly elusive by its very nature.

If your job is to do a physical task, you can tell when it's done and you can tell whether or not you've done a good job. Either it stands or it doesn't. It's not about you, you're just responsible. Information, on the other hand, is fundamentally about you. To do things with it, you've got to understand it. This is as true for a file clerk as it is for a lawyer. There is no reason to file a bunch of printouts of crappy jpegs on copy paper with no identifying information about what this image might be. There is no reason to keep all the different parts of oh, an audit. Or an assesment. Or any other important event when information was produced in different little stacks behind the file cabinets, as if this information were acorns and the filer a squirrel.

I've been confronted a lot lately with this fact: information means different things to different people. This is really a blog about everything I do that is not art. It's an attempt at unifying my scattered existence and finding meaning in everything I do. But everyone else has it categorized under "art blog."

So there you go. It's everywhere.

This relativity, this idea that everything means different things to different people, is more of an engine in everyday life than I thought it was. In fact, the further I get from Socrates, the more I see that it was an almost monastic situation. Sure. There were people, emotions and expectations. There was lots of relativism. But the park itself exerted such a huge physical presence--such an overwhelming set of facts--that it always won. There are people who have worked for Mark for a long time who still see the park as it existed fifteen years ago. They have a strong relative truth. But it is so obviously not true (not because they are bad people or wrong, but because the park is so dynamic) that it was always easy to see what "right" is.

What I loved most about the park was the way it chopped relativism off at the knees. This is going to sound harsh, but I watched it dash the hopes of information-driven artists and smiled. Not because I delighted in their pain, but because I loved the way the park told the truth.

In fact, I learned many painful lessons about how to align yourself with what is true from that park myself.

I don't see that strong force anywhere else, even crossing Broadway over by Union Square. Pedestrians are smaller and squishier than cars, but the laws

(information)

surrounding us are so strong and are numbers are so huge that we walk in front of cabs with impunity. Like we are fucking Superman.

Labor Creates All Wealth Part I: Garbage

I left my decidedly unglamorous job at Socrates Sculpture Park about six weeks ago, for another part-time dayjob that pays more than twice as much. Where I am not in charge of the trash, or otherwise doing anyone else's manual labor.

I'm respectable now. Clean fingernails. And not only is my bank account literally bursting with joy, I also get an opportunity to understand why I write, and the nature of this blog.

I've been quiet these days, and it's because I have more in common with Dishwasher Pete than I thought I did. I have no desire to bag dead cats or hump hipsters' art in every sculpture park in America. But for years I have been writing to work through the space between how stupid we all conceive manual labor to be and how rich, intricate and relevant the world of a laborer actually is.

Not having any manual labor to do or any trash to manage has left me without much to say. My back hurts less, but I feel intellectually dislocated.

Understanding labor and garbage are the most serious, most interesting intellectual and political inquiries I can imagine undertaking. We (in the broadest sense) have gotten so accustomed to Others doing manual labor and hauling our refuse Away that we cannot imagine what on earth you can learn from your trash hauler. Why it's important to understand exactly what happens to the dumpster after it leaves your park. Or why tires are not allowed in dumpsters--how pernicious they really are. I don't think it impacts your driving habits to know that tires are not merely dirty and smelly and flammable, but that they're also an impossible shape to throw away. That they collect water, which means they collect mosquitoes, which means disease. And that they also rise up out of landfills because they trap air the same way they trap water.

That you can't even recycle them unless you expend an amazing quantity of energy shredding them and removing the steel belting.

I don't think this knowledge, as knowledge is meaningful in terms of actual miles logged and why. You know what I think is meaningful? Learning all this from your trash hauler, because you and he are fishing tires out of a dumpster for two hours. Because he won't leave until the tires are, once again, your problem.

There are a number of intellectual problems attached to labor, so right now, to get fired back up, I want to focus on garbage.

Away does not exist. It's a myth. Nobody understands that Away is a myth except the person who is in charge of making things go Away. Nobody. The myth of Away is just too powerful and seductive, and there are too many other things to do. And there is nothing more important to our collective future as a race than understanding this myth as such. Not in a talking about how cool environmentalism is while sitting in traffic in your landrover sipping a frappucino kind of way, but in an implicated,

dare I say "dirty handed,"

kind of way.

The bottom line is that the human race is never going to survive unless we enter some kind of collectivist global kibbutz phase, in which everyone, globally, takes turns growing food, building towns, and throwing away the inevitable waste produced by these ventures. Think Jimmy Carter building a Habitat for Humanity house, but bigger. And not for feelgood reasons, but for intellectual reasons. Because practical ignorance and the collapse of fact and process into myths like Away is exactly what makes unsustainability possible.

I mean rampant.

I am selfish and I am expedient. Nobody loves the idea of Away more than I do. And because I have managed trash and talked at length with John Corrieri (my favorite dumpster philosopher) about where it all goes, I am physically compelled to reuse my metrocard. I actually do try to plan so that I don't need to buy anything "to go." I work to remember a canvas bag. Not because I am reading The World Without Us, but because I have had my refuse refused and had to figure out some other place for it to go. Because I have been responsible for the amazing volume of smelly waste less than 1000 people can create in a few hours while they watch a movie in a park.

I work in an office now. Like civilized people. My new employer is a beautiful human being who cares tremendously about a large number of things. Huge heart.

Prints out every single email, reads it, and then shreds it.

This behavior is not a function of not caring. It's a function of not knowing. Or of having only a conceptual knowlege of the word "waste." Someone else who's in charge of Away.

It's a function of delegation.

I am not better or more careful than this person. I have merely lived through a different set of practical experiences that I was allowed to be intellectually curious about.

It's not just garbage. We do ourselves a serious intellectual disservice when we lose control of what we make--when we turn it into what is made for us. When we don't question why and how, but merely expect it to work. The manifold myths of labor are even more pernicious than the Myth of Away.

More on this later.

I Can't Stop Thinking About That Damn Speech

What if this is actually how the Obama campaign rolls now?

What if every single cry of "Unity" or "Yes We Can" we hear from this point forward is backed up with proof that we are actually divided and in need of common vision?

And that Obama understands exactly how the tattered remains of this democracy almost punish the individual would-be participant in favor of lobbyists, and understands that it takes more than YouTube to repair this basic structural problem?

What if instead of merely appearing risky, Obama actually took a substantive risk every single time he opened his damn mouth?

He is on the verge of actually becoming powerful by speaking truth, and this is a rare phenomenon in this relativist time. I hope he doesn't blow it.

Bravo!

If Hillary Clinton calls this speech "pretty words", I don't know what I'll do.

It made me weep with relief to hear someone stand behind an American flag and talk so openly, so substantively and with such an eye toward action and change about race. The anger and blank difference that divides black and white people is shamelessly exploited in politics. And that same anger causes such pain in real people's lives.

This is what politicians should be talking about.

Humans Are Puny

If you haven't already read the story, it's tragic. I guess the first, most practical moral of the story is that cranes are really dangerous.

But the New York Times images are also a really interesting story about scale and structural desire. In the pictures, humans surround themselves with a huge quantity of material that, if it's organized correctly, can house hundreds. But if it's not organized correctly, even for a second, it just becomes weight, and does whatever it is weight does. One slip and earth and Newtonian physics win.

You look at photos like this, and you see the scale of our endeavors and dreams and compare that to our actual size and weakness, and you wonder how we got this far at all, and who on earth we think we are. Don't you?

Understanding Time I

Sculpture is generally seen as time-avoidant or merely three-dimensional. After all, it just sits there. But nothing could be further from the truth.

First of all, it sits there and waits for you to interact with it in all four of your dimensions. You animate a sculpture by walking around it, giving it a parcel of your time.

And second of all, a sculpture doesn't "just sit there" any more than "empty space" is empty.

Any time we put any thing into the world, the world immediately starts interacting with it. Air and salt corrode the thing. Sun bleaches it. Hot and cold make it expand and contract. Ants and termites eat it. It gets covered in mold. Microbes turn wood into soil, and seeds blow in and start turning into plants, and the roots undo more of your work. Making something--anything--fucks with the earth's existing sense of equilibrium, its drive toward timelessness. And so the earth immediately gets to work on reducing it, turning this thing you made back into earth again. We can't see sunlight doing damage. We have a hard time isolating what it is in the air (the wetness? the salt? the oxygen?) that makes steel things rust. So we say that time happens to our things and makes them decay.

Using sculpture as a lens with which you view time, you first get to see that space and time are inextricably linked, that you cannot have a spatial appreciation of a thing without moving about it in time. But you also get a window into what time means on a much, much larger scale. Time is a way to talk about the way the earth is processing the arrogant act of you making a sculpture, as surely as it is processing your arrogant-ass house and the road it sits on.

Equilibrium v. Stasis

Shame on every single one of you for not rushing out to buy me a copy of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman! It's blowing my cranium apart--I'll probably be talking about it at length over the next few weeks.

Weisman is talking about my favorite topics:

*The relationship between the earth and what we put on it
*The forces the built world exerts on the earth
*How puny the built world is in relationship to the larger earth-system it sits in

This book sheds massive quantities of light. The biggest, most important idea reavealed so far is that the earth and the built world are structured around different needs. The earth craves equilibrium--we all see this. Everything goes somewhere until it can't go anywhere anymore. Newtonian physics is largely about describing how equilibriums are maintaned. Humans crave stasis. We want what we build to stay put. We want to be alive forever like Egyptians. We want monuments. We want the targets to stop moving. We want to stop constantly battling the effects of entropy on our houses.

There is an opportunity here to understand the difference between building from a standpoint of stasis:

and building to understand and achieve equilibrium:

Both are impossible, but they are impossible in very different ways. I think that trying for equilibrium opens the builder up to a better understanding of how matter unfolds in time, but that's a huge topic. More on this later!

Architecture of Desire

I know I've been a real one-note kantor these days... but what else can I do? The election is really, really interesting.

If there is a thesis to this blog (or for that matter, my art), it is that the structures we create are not exactly rational--that they come from inside our minds, and are therefore limited in scope, desire-based and often aggrandizing. And that in order to work they most pose as logical, legitimate things.

This is as true for an architecture of ideas as it is for the engineering of a building. What's the difference between calling Ohio and Texas the only important states and deciding you need millions of slaves to work for twenty years to build you a huge stone mausoleum that represents a ray of sunlight?

(I know that there are real differences, and they are interesting and discussable. This is a legitimately open question.)

I dub Hillary Clinton this week's Mad Architect Of Desire.

And I think Stephen Colbert plays this paradox like he's fucking Glenn Gould.

Structural Truths And Democratic Primaries

Seth Godin and Marc Ash are both arguing that it's time for Clinton to throw in the towel because she has no mathematical chance of winning more delegates than Obama. This is a practical argument, but in both Ash and Godin's writing there is also a hint of fear, and I think this opens a window. Ash thinks that Clintonian fear of losing is enough to further break the democracy itself. Godin envisions a more acute breakage. He stresses that Clinton would, in the process of winning the primary, "risk the entire Party."

Rather than wring hands, I think it's more interesting to watch this situation play out. Even though Godin and Ash are right, and it might end badly.

Democracy is a structure. It's interesting to see exactly how much stress you can put on a structure before it breaks. It's one of the only ways to find a truth everyone can agree on. Either the bridge is above the river, or it's in the river--know what I mean? It's a true no-spin zone. And it's about the only way to see how powerless we humans really are. We are powerful enough to build literal and symbolic structures that are larger than ourselves. But these bridges, internets, democracies and economies are not really extensions of us as individuals. We don't wield or control them. They are separate from us. They aggregate our desires and become powerful entities in their own right.

Perhaps rather than say "more interesting to watch," it's more correct to say that all we really can do is watch. To ask Clinton to bow out is to misunderstand our relationship to our democracy. It is to wildly overestimate the power of one person (Clinton) or a few (Ash, Godin & fils) to be more rational than the structure we created.

Clinton will keep going because she's still got broad support and because she's still got a strong desire to win. Democracy is an armature for that desire as much as it is anything else. She will also keep going because we, the people, are just so mad to exercise our democracy--it's an armature for our desire, too. It's exciting to watch Clinton v. Obama because we have been so powerless for so long and we feel so powerful right now. This process is certainly not rational. And if it breaks the election badly this year, then all we can do is learn an undeniable, unspinnable lesson about the nature and limits of this beautiful structure.

1000 True Fans

This is more like SELLOUT material, but whatever. It's an interesting, hopeful read. Kevin Kelley's optimistic take on the "long tail" is of special interest, I think, to anyone who considers oneself fighting for or against avant garde status.