one inch dwelling: Day 7: From Object to Tool

Taped to the wall above my desk is a promotional postcard from Poetry Magazine. A quote from the editor, Christian Wiman, reads: “Let us remember that in the end we go to poetry [or art] for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both. “ It feels increasingly challenging to fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them. Robert Pogue Harrison argues that Western civilization promotes ‘institutions of dislocation [I would add disconnection] in every dimension of both social and cultural existence’, and this has led to an ‘aggravated confusion about what it means to dwell on the earth’(198-9). In attempts to negotiate this confusion, I am exploring ways of knowing, documenting, sensitizing, and measuring to enrich my understanding of the space between myself and what we have come to accept as ‘the natural.’ To “more fully inhabit” seems to necessitate firsthand experience and a heightened sensory awareness of surroundings. This idea of full inhabitation is something I am exploring in my work. I would like to consider, speculate, and reflect on larger issues using my particular relationship to the natural world as a point at which to begin. I am grounding my investigations in two sites, which comprise one place for me. One site is my backyard from ages three to eighteen, and resides in my memory. The other site is a few blocks away from my current San Francisco apartment and is also functioning as a surrogate for that initial stomping ground, and the site for my project field research.

Wednesday, April 4

Day 7: From Object to Tool

I’m in the park pulling a collection of implements in a cardboard cart behind me. Since it is a beautiful Sunday, there are all kinds of people here, as if they all crawled out of the bushes, or just materialized. An older couple lying in the grass close to the pond, people on obscure footpaths, groups of young people crowding benches. Standing in bunches. I am happy to have a friend with me who understands my interests. It made it easier to pretend that my cardboard cart was just as normal as a German Shepard. It actually felt surprisingly natural to feel the subtle weight of the tools in the cart rather than having them hover around waiting, immaterial. Today a set of objects are becoming tools as “...it is only insofar as the object ceases to remain an object and becomes a medium, a vehicle for impressions and expression, that it can be used as an instrument or tool” (Grosz, p.80). Through activating these objects it completes their life cycle from initial conception in the park, to materializing in the studio, to returning to site to be implemented and perhaps documented.

These tools function to externalize, and communicate. They speak as much of their futility as they do of their utility. Although all have their specialized purposes, ultimately any one is inadequate to provide answers. They offer no precise readings, printouts, or analyses, but instead illuminate, or add a subtle depth of experience so that we may more fully inhabit that expansive inch between suspended body and earth.

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This object is at its best hovering one inch above ground. That small distance is the richest space, full with the complexity of relationship, with suspense, inevitability. When hung, the plumb bob has a consistent and specific relationship to the earth, to ground. Suspended, its precise tip specifies its distance from the ground. I too am suspended with just enough space to explore and measure the relationship between the ground and myself. Eventually, the possibility will close and I will participate most intimately with the earth. While the space remains, I want to examine that proximity and distance.