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I was lucky to see Tacita Dean’s FILM (stills above from The Guardian) a few weeks ago. It was like watching the part of a novel where the heroine falls, and somehow, lying there, parallel to the horizon she sees her life “flash before her eyes”. Standing in the invented flickering, I wondered—what would I remember the most, will it be more specific or more vague than this, what things have I already forgotten that might return, what will be bright, what will be dim—how my own life would look then. And, why/of course/why: the proverbial way we might experience the passing of life is visual.

TNY has a good read about the making of FILM—Dean’s own fall(ing) heroine. You can read it in part here (or subscribe and read it all).

designboom has more stills and 4 mins of footage here.

And sometimes:

Sometimes, you will dismiss that one thing, that photo, that drawing, that performance you saw, that you were obsessed with for years. And then, ages will pass, everything else will change, and something will remind you of it and you will see it, know it, feel it again. You will understand now what you didn’t then. And you will know too, that it doesn’t mean that you loved it any less, for your temporary forgetfulness, but instead, maybe more so for carrying it with you for all this time.

This is what happens.

Looking, really looking, at art (some might say seeing, some might say feeling) is like this: It is like all the other really amazing things in life. (You know what they are. Everyone has their own. Though, really, there are few things that are exceptionally amazing. This is one of those things.) You do it too much and you forget how good it can actually be. Because there is so much—and not all of it is good, most of it is not—you become jaded. You don’t get enough and it is all you can think about—the good and the bad. Then, there is one photo, one drawing, one performance and you want to know all there is to know about it: why, how, what, when, who. It is a little bit like falling in love. It’s best, most exciting, when you don’t know why you like something. In fact, the thing you are looking at is something you might usually be inclined to dislike. (Really, those things that you know you like, you know why you like them, and by now you know, too, that you might get bored, it doesn’t end well.) But, with this, you cannot stop looking, cannot stop thinking. And so, in every other thing that you think about, talk about, read about, you start to see it in all of those other things, whether or not they, directly, have anything to do with that thing you are suddenly, entirely, falling for. And because of this thing you are looking at, before you realize what has happened, all of those other things have changed. And everything that you thought you knew is no longer the same.

All the other things I was thinking about…

…after dinner with Sarah McKenzie, Jen and Jeffrey, and over the weekend, that I could not get into the 20x200 newsletter:

All of those photographers who have taken pictures from the safety of hotel room windows when they are on the road and far from home.

The World Trade Center’s architect, Minoru Yamasaki, designed the buildings with narrow office windows, 18 inches wide, to make its occupants feel secure.

Safety, defined by security of body, employment, resources, morality, the family, health and property, is second only to our physiological needs of eating, sleeping, breathing and sex in the hierarchical pyramid that defines our most base needs.

Of the seven wonders of the world, the majority, four, are architectural monuments (also included are two are sculptures and one garden). In every modern revision of the wonders, things humans have built to house, to shelter and to divide out number all the others. Except, of course, for the natural wonders of the world which do not account for the thing we humans do (though we are a part of nature, right?).

When the Spaniards conquered the Aztec Empire, they built their church directly on top of the Aztec’s capital, Tenochtitlan. To add insult to injury, Hernan Cortes and his fellow conquistadors used the very stones from a destroyed temple to the god of war to construct the first incarnation of the Mexico City Cathedral.

In describing his photographs from Architecture, Hiroshi Sugimoto notes, “Early 20th-century Modernism was a watershed moment in cultural history, a stripping away of superfluous decoration… The spread of democracy and the innovations of the Machine Age swept aside the ostentation that heretofore had been a signifier of power and wealth. I set out to trace the beginnings of Modernism via architecture…. I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion testing for durability, melting away many of the buildings in the process…” (We now know exactly what they cannot survive.)

The rate at which we are building, making, developing and otherwise altering the world around us now has been reason for at least one physicist to posit that since the Enlightenment, human beings are responsible to a greater extent than other forces in the universe for the current shaping of the cosmos. For example, the topography and material constitution of the upper surface of the island of Manhattan, has more to do with economics, politics, and human psychology that it does geology.

The fall of the Twin Towers registered a 2.4 on the Richter Scale. You can hear an audified version of the seismic data recorded, created by sound artist Mark Bain here.

For us city-dwellers, living below light-leadened skies, in the absence of stars, buildings are what make us look up.

that was then

I was 21, beginning my senior year at a tiny liberal arts school on the West Coast. I was half-asleep with rhododendrons and Mt. Rainier out the window. The phone in the kitchen had been ringing for over an hour. As I was about to lift my limbs to finally silence it, it stopped. Jeannie, my roommate, came in and crawled into bed next to me. Her face a few inches from mine, she whispered, nearly crying, the United States has been attacked. Buildings in New York have been taken down.

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My new favorite color: traffic cone tangerine.

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Fire Island, July 4, 2011

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GPT Farmers’ Market this weekend: wheat round, eggs, kale, basil, Jersey tomatoes, green beans, sweet little strawberries + these flowers that I can’t remember the name for. Starts with the letter “c”.

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12 Bicycle Drawings by Christine Berrie

From the 20x200 Newsletter:

A few months ago, Jen and I were looking at a bunch of colorful and classically clean drawings from Christine Berrie and I got so excited when I saw 12 Bicycle Drawings. It’s clever and charming, yes, and emblematic of her most engaging work—to see more of what I’m talking about, browse her previous prints and pick up a copy of the latest issue of Dwell magazine, where she’s illustrated a full spread on Italian design.

But that’s not all I was thinking of. You see, I had been hoping to indulge the request of my sister Katie’s boyfriend, Travis, to feature more art that he might like. You know, like, more art with bikes in it. So I said, hmm, I’ll see what we can do. (He also asked why all of our prints don’t come framed and I said, hmm, I’ll see what we can do…)

A smart and articulate guy, Travis is always willing to engage in a conversation about art and what we do here at 20x200 but has been slightly resistant to the whole “art for everyone” idea. He is a fan of bikes and biking, though, and I know he’s not alone. There are lots among you who love Tatsuro Kiuchi’s Car Free (and rightfully so, the car-full world is crazy, even in the bike lane). And as you know, we love introducing people to art and collecting and supporting artists through something else that they already know and love—something that does not seem so foreign and inaccessible—like a favorite color, animal or sport. So after making it my mission to keep an eye out for more two-wheeled delights, I was so pleased to see Ms. Berrie’s bikes. We knew right then that this drawing would become an edition and put it on the calendar for this very day.

And then, just yesterday afternoon, Travis insisted that he and Katie take their mountain bikes up into the hills to ride (she loves biking, too). And, even though the skies above Bozeman, Montana, (where they live) were heavy and dark, and even though the car didn’t start after they had loaded up their bikes and their dog, Tigger, for the drive to the trail, he stubbornly persisted. Eventually, they were side-by-side, on their bikes and on the trail. And not too much later, they were stopped. Tigger ran out into the woods, and when he came back, Katie saw something shiny dangling from his collar. And Travis was off his bike and lowering himself to one knee. He asked Katie if she would help him make each next day better than the last, he asked if she would spend her life with him, he asked if she would marry him.

And my radiant, my sweet, my only sister (my fellow giraffe), she got off her bike, and she said yes.

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I got one of the best birthday presents ever in the mail today: a 4x6 photograph of a BFF’s daughters. A real photograph, on paper, with the date hand-written on the back.

They live in the desert outside of Taos, New Mexico, far, far away from me and most of the places I am ever usually at. She is the kind of friend I talk to once or maybe twice a year, though we drop each other voicemails or emails about every other month. And when we are lucky, we see each other bi-annually, and it is like the months and years never passed and we are back to where we were. I think of her often, and nearly every time I do, my chest feels bigger and the edges of my mouth turn upwards. She is like that ee cummings poem.

The thing about this photo is that I could tuck it into the frame of a mirror, somewhere I would see it nearly every day. I don’t remember the last time I stuck a photo to the refrigerator. Or taped it to the back of a door? Somewhere it would be a part of my life — the life that does not get updated in “real time.”