Into the Wild… of a Beer Garden

Editor’s Note: in an attempt to work through the implications of having gone half-feral up in Alaska, Tessa is currently using the Seen to explore stories about people who are remembered for disappearing. 

“Tramping is too easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal… I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up.” –Chris McCandless

You’ve probably heard at least something about Chris McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp. Popularized by Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild (and later turned into a movie of the same name), the basic sketch of McCandless’s story is a familiar one: middle class white American male drops out of his mainstream life and, in a blurred amalgamation of spiritual inquiry and mental illness, eschews all material comforts to strike off into the wild. Eventually, he dies alone in the ruins of an abandoned bus in an isolated stretch of Alaskan wilderness, leaving behind an iconic self portrait:

Responses to McCandless’s story vary drastically depending on who you ask. Down here in the Lower 48, there’s a tendency to romanticize what he did: he is usually seen as an intelligent, competent individual whose death was the tragic result of a few turns of bad luck. But up in Alaska, he is mostly viewed as an idiot whose ill-advised pursuit of spiritual union with nature failed to show adequate respect for the land, and whose death perpetuates a dangerous romanticism untempered by the brutal pragmatism necessary for wilderness survival.

For better or for worse, McCandless is remembered as a polarizing archetype of The Man Who Disappeared. Ironically, McCandless’s story has been co-opted to support many of the values that he fought in life: first a successful book, and then a successful movie, his story made a lot of people a lot of money. And “his” bus? Well the original is still out there in the wilderness. But the one from the movie?

Well.

It’s in the beer garden of the 49th State Brewing Company. And you can go visit it (click on the image to view a version large enough to read the text: it’s worth it):

The Possibility of Escape

“We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life go to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it is there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope…” –Edward Abbey

Hello Seen readers. I have returned from Alaska. Sort of. Physically, I’m back. But I’m not entirely convinced that I returned in spirit. I spent the last month bicycling over mountain passes, hiking across the tundra, and drifting on the ocean while thinking about the human need for escapism.

American culture romanticizes the frontier. We fantasize about running away, about striking out for the horizon and sloughing off our layers of tame sophistication as we disappear into the vastness of the unknown. And for most people, it stops there: the siren song, for all its plaintive beseeching, doesn’t claim the physical self, only some echo of the spirit.

And maybe this is why we are so drawn to the stories of the ones that really DO escape, who drop off the map. My time up in Alaska made me want to revisit one of my favorite books from childhood: My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George. From the book jacket:

It’s a wonderful little book that is half instructional manual, complete with drawings of native plants, and advice on how to burn a hollow indentation into an oak stump in order to tan a deer hide. My ten year old self yearned to follow Sam’s path, to make my own tree-cave home and fulfill my need for friendship by training my own peregrine falcon. But for all my restlessness and the romance of the book’s feral austerity, I always knew that it was just a fantasy.

For the next few installments of the Seen, I’m going to be writing about people who took the leap and truly disappeared. In keeping with the Alaskan theme, I’ll be starting this series in the relatively near future with thoughts on Chris McCandless of Into the Wild fame. Unless, of course, I disappear before then…

The Seen: From Alaska

Hello The Seen readers. This post is being written from a tent pitched somewhere near glacierview, Alaska. I meant to post this before I left, but that didn’t happen. And it seems somehow fitting to be doing this from on the road.

I’ll be taking a break from the seen this month as my bicycle and I are doing some wandering up in Alaska. So I wanted to do one last seen post that was about both the geographic location I am in, and the notion that rememberance usually focuses around beginnings and endings. Middles are often lost in the tumult, perhaps because they lack the dramatic punctuation that allows for specific memories to take on the quality of myth.

Take, for example, Grizzly Man. I know almost nothing about what his life living with bears was like; all I know is that he got eaten by them. And thus everything about the long period on which he actually managed to cohabitate with bears is reduced to static: his story is eclipsed by its own ending.

And with that, dear readers, I’m going back to radio silence. I’ll be back in August with very strong thighs and very funny tanlines. And hopefully a still-full canister of bear spray.

A Question of Storage

Changing Big Questions means changing our Off Paper image, and for our new question of How Are We Remembered?, we have selected an Off Paper image that is a little tongue in cheek: the warehouse scene from the ending of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Although we are half-kidding in our choice of image, there is some truth to the fact that every adventure, regardless of how epic it may have been, ends with the question of storage. All of Indiana’s over the top trials and tribulations– the submarines! the explosions! the Germans! the snakes!– are ultimately reduced to a forgotten artifact in a forgotten crate in a forgotten warehouse. And we don’t even have a decent image of that warehouse– just a grainy film still.

Isn’t this how remembrance ineluctably goes? It’s like TS Eliot said in Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.” Our experiences are only as enduring as our ability to document them, and the passions of our personal investments are reduced to piles of papers shoved in a box, to digital files on rapidly-obsolescing storage systems (floppy disks, anyone?). The themes of memory and documentation are nuanced and complex, and we look forward to sharing the questions that arise as we ask How Are We Remembered? 

Who was your first hero? An Introduction

When I was a kid, I loved building tiny reading nooks. The landscape of my childhood was populated by a series of idiosyncratically constructed libraries: the corrugated cardboard bookshelves I installed in my dad’s old van, the bedside table and diminutive chair that I tucked into the corner of my closet.

I would spend hours organizing my books according to shifting hierarchical ranking systems that reflected my mood, and I loved the challenge of arranging them in relation not only to other books, but to the larger context of the events going on in my life. The perennial favorites were books that evolved with me, the titles that possessed the versatility to walk in tandem with me as I shifted from childhood to adolescence (and maybe to adulthood? I still mostly think of myself as very tall nine year old who just happens to like men and bourbon), unfurling seemingly endless layers of whatever it was that I most needed.

Nothing—book or otherwise—has consistently touched more points of my life than Bill Watterson’sCalvin and Hobbes. Simply put, Bill Watterson was my first hero. And book tangents aside, first heroes are what this post is about.

The Project Room is in the process of switching between Big Questions. We’ve spent the last year and a half basing our programming and written content around Why do we make things?, and as part of that line of inquiry, we asked contributors to respond to the Quest(ion) prompt What was the first thing you ever made?

In June we are moving to the next Big Question of How are we remembered?, and are changing the Quest(ion) accordingly. As you may have guessed, we are now asking Who was your first hero?

We spent a lot of time trying to come up with the right Quest(ion) prompt. It needed to be broad enough to be a universal experience, but specific enough to evoke a strong personal response. We threw a lot of ideas around and none of them quite worked: it felt a bit like trying to artificially impose a nickname rather than allowing circumstances to naturally give rise to it. But we knew that we finally got it right when Jess bounced Who was your first hero? off of me, and I instantly had an answer.

I became an artist because of Calvin and Hobbes. When I was back home visiting my family recently, I was digging through the attic and found an old childhood sketchbook. It’s from an era when I was apparently deep in my knights/dragons/princesses-in-need-of-saving phase, but it is also full of drawings of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips.

Bill Watterson’s comics were my first introduction to the liberating quality of my own mind, to the idea that imagination was limitless. I didn’t understand the nuances of Calvin and Hobbes when I first began reading it, but rather saw my own experiences and passions mirrored in Calvin’s curiosity, independence, and stubborn refusal to conform to external expectations. I also share Calvin’s deep love of dinosaurs.

I first saw in Calvin my own joy of play and forward motion, and as I got older and grew into the conflicted ambiguities of a less binary world view, Calvin and Hobbes was right there with me. Calvin’s experience of finding an injured raccoon and coming to terms with its death was one of my first introductions to mortality: 

And watching the intimate conversation between Calvin’s parents after their house is robbed eased me into the terrifying and universal realization that our parents don’t know everything, that they are real people wrestling with their own sets of fears and fallibilities:

Later, as I began growing into the idea that I was an artist and tried to figure out what that meant, Calvin and Hobbes helped me navigate the pretensions and jargon endemic to fine art in order to find a way to my own voice:

Watterson’s veiled jabs at the structures of high art inculcated me with the still-held belief that sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself as an artist is to go play outside and poke things with sticks:

When I turned eighteen, I got my first tattoo:

Watterson’s little red wagon scenes are some of my favorite strips. They perfectly capture the exuberance of momentum, and offer a physical proxy to some of my most deeply held beliefs. Calvin’s wagon rides taught me that if you’re going to do something, you put the force of your full self behind it and see it through to the end. Hobbes had a habit of jumping off the wagon at the top of the hill, but Calvin was never daunted by uncertainty, and watching him emerge time and time again from ravines and bramble bushes reinforced my dedication to the notion that the hardscrabble journey through the forest is always worth the inevitable crashes. But perhaps most importantly, Watterson’s wagon scenes instilled in me the notion that just because something is heavy and complicated does not mean that it can’t also be really funny.

My parents of course hated the fact that I was getting a tattoo, and they asked me how I could possibly know that I’d still like Calvin and Hobbes thirty years from now. Unlike the lines of my tattoo, which have naturally thickened and blurred over the years, my response has not changed: If I ever reach a point in my life where these messages don’t resonate with me, I will know that I have taken a very, very wrong turn somewhere along the line.

Every time I think that I have wrung everything I can out of Watterson’s work, some new layer emerges and I am proven wonderfully wrong. I have recently begun a creative transition from painter to graphic novelist, and as such, I am revisiting Calvin and Hobbes from a technical perspective. Now I turn to the strip with a fine appreciation for the nuances of Watterson’s brushstrokes, and my palpitations of delight are for the fluidity of his panel design and his incredible ability to capture the trembling potential of an open landscape.

When I told friends that I was writing this piece about Calvin and Hobbes, they questioned if it was really accurate to say that my first hero was Bill Watterson: they thought my hero was actually Calvin. But Watterson obliquely taught me that there is no real division between an artist and the work that they create, and this understanding is something I turn to over and over again. There is something beautiful and brave in watching a mind struggle with itself, and I have profound admiration for the way in which Watterson used Calvin and Hobbes as a vehicle to dispel his own misanthropy and remind himself of his capacity for wonder.

Bill Watterson’s work reminds me of who I want to be both as an artist and as a human being, and he remains the rare exception to the general rule: he is a hero who, for me, has never fallen from grace. When Watterson stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, I unabashedly admit that I cried myself silly. But I ultimately hold tremendous respect for Watterson’s commitment to his own sense of artistic integrity and his decision to end the strip on his own terms. It was a perfect exit.

I keep the last strip of Calvin and Hobbes taped to the wall above my drawing table. It is my absolute favorite piece of art, and it speaks for itself:

Would you like to answer the Quest(ion) and tell us about your first hero? Email me and let’s talk.

A Three Year Timelapse Video of Gender Transition

Your fearless leader (AKA Seen Moderator, AKA Yours Truly) is running around like a chicken with her head cut off this week, so this Seen post about transitions is gonna be short, literal, and absent of commentary. Watch this timelapse video of a three year process of gender transition from male to female.

A Failed Essay on Failure

The topic of failure seems to be drifting in Seattle’s creative ether. I first started noticing the recurrence of failure while staring—somewhat tipsily—at the season playbill for Annex Theater. There was a quote on the cover saying something to the effect that Annex Theater’s motto is, “Fail spectacularly, drink, and fail again.” Seattle artist Kira Burge has been hosting a book club for artists (it’s called “Artists Read Too”), and their first book—selected from MIT Press’s Contemporary Art Series—was Failure. Burge was interested in the failure inherent in the act of making, and wanted to bring that private struggle to the forefront of the conversation. Local poet Joe Milutis just published a new book entitled Failure, a Writer’s Life in which he intentionally mistranslates poems written in languages he doesn’t speak. Jenny Zwick, a Seattle-based sculptor/photographer/installation artist, altered a series of trophies to read You Are A Disappointment To Yourself and Others:

This seemed like a whole lot of local failure, and I was interested to know who else was working on the theme. I was curious about the connections between failures, how the individual islands of personal failure fit within the context of a larger landscape. And so I put out a blanket call for thoughts on failure. My plan was to read over other people’s failures and draw parallels, to take something of a core sample and extrapolate a topographic map of failure in Seattle.

Well. I failed to do that.

The thing I learned about failure is that it is fiercely personal: it does not lend itself to overarching characterization. The failures I received were, for the most part, clustered around the topics that one might expect, in the areas in which we are all the most vulnerable: failures in love, in careers, in lives carried to destinations not of our choosing. But the means of expression were wildly different, and I am admitting defeat and abandoning my initial plan of creating a cohesive survey of failure.

Instead, I want to unpack my failure to write this piece, to explore why this survey on failure failed.

Joana Stillwell, a video and installation artist that I met on last summer’s Long Walk, wrote about how her understanding of failure is intimately tied to her own unrealistic expectations, particularly around the idea of productivity. “If I was bored, tired, or inactive,” she explained, “it was my fault that I wasn’t enjoying myself. I always had to be engaged in an activity or I would be wasting my life. This idea put a crazy and exhausting amount of pressure on myself to be and have more. Consequently, I had really high points that would follow low points and instead of understanding that there was a balance, I decided that if I worked harder at it that I could just have high points. I don’t know if it was greed, stubbornness, or fear that was behind this attitude. I eventually outgrew this idea although I’m still exploring it in some of my work.”

Stillwell’s point—that we experience failure based upon our own internal rubric—is something that came up in almost every response I received, and this is the crux of why it is impossible to truly comment on someone else’s failure. We can recognize a blatant external failure when we see one: the engineer’s bridge collapses, the politician resigns amidst the sex scandal, the high-profile celebrity marriage comes to its abrupt end, devolving into a morass of custody battles and shocking allegations. But what we will never be able to see is the response below the surface, the way that each person funnels that failure through the black box of their own processing. That is the interesting part of failure, and it is not something that one can convey in a briefly written response to a vague prompt: this is simply a failure of medium.

So how do we have a meaningful conversation about failure? As part of The Project Room’s programming for Failure, we’ve been hosting Successful People Talking About Failure, a series of presentations that is precisely what it sounds like. Each speaker has had a distinct and idiosyncratic take on the topic, but in each talk there has been a fascinating difference in perception between presenter and audience.

Genre-spanning sound artist and McArthur Genius award winner Trimpin—who moves his hands more than any human being I have ever seen—got through the majority of his presentation before mentioning in an offhand manner that the whole reason he began building bizarrely experimental instruments was because he had been forced to stop playing traditional ones. Trained on the horn as a classical musician, he developed an allergy to the metals in his instruments, and he literally could not touch the tools of his trade. For a while, he made paintings of the instruments he could no longer bring to his lips, and eventually he began crafting his own. The interesting thing?  It had not occurred to him to see this as a failure.

Trimpin seemed almost surprised by the audience’s interest in this aspect of his presentation, and if we hadn’t pressed for further information, the whole story of his allergy and subsequent need to abandon everything for which he had been trained would have been nothing more than a brief anecdote. To Trimpin, this was just a part of his story: he had so fully integrated this failure that it had ceased to be one.

This malleability, this openness to dialogue and reinterpretation, is precisely what is needed to really talk about failure. Failure needs to be a conversation, an open ended question to be placed in context. Because taken as discrete snippets, failures feel strangely irrelevant and incomplete—drifting islands of misplaced intimacy with no larger story to anchor them.

And that is what I learned in failing to write this survey of failure:  it is through taking the time and attention to closely explore one individual failure that we gain a sense of the structures and universalities of collective failure. The process does not work in reverse: taking a brief look at a large cross section of failures only serves to remove the impact and importance of the theme. It was the wrong approach.

So. Lesson learned: this essay wasn’t a failure, it just didn’t turn out to be what I thought it was.

And isn’t that how failure always functions? In his response to my call for failure, Marion Dawahare—who I met in passing at a friend’s brunch but stayed in touch with via facebook— talked about how he didn’t view the disintegration of his marriage as a failure because, while the life of his relationship died, that vibrancy was “passed on to our daughter. She is 6. She is every bit as bright and brilliant as the life of my relationship with my soon-to-be ex.” Things do not work out in the ways that we had planned, and we have the freedom to choose our own perceptions and responses: we decide whether or not we have failed.

In a sense, reading people’s failures was an oddly uplifting process. Most respondents seemed to have a healthy relationship with failure, an understanding of it as an inevitability to be acknowledged but not dwelt upon. Paul Nelson, a Seattle poet and director of SPLAB (spokenword  Performance, Resource and Outreach center), summed it up nicely: “Fail seven thousand seventy times, write poem number seven thousand seventy-one. You will still have failed, but with a certifiably human sweetness that makes you forget for a while that you have. This is the best we can get.”

Thanks to Greg Bem, Matt Spencer, DK Pan, Joe Roberston, Suzanne Tidwell, Courtney Hudak, Carrie Dresser and Chance Reschke for sending over your thoughts on failure: sorry I failed to include all of you.

Your Art Show Exhausts Me

This week’s failure is self referential. Discussions of the Seattle art scene invariably lead back to conversations about insularity, and whether or not you think that Seattle is a small town (let’s not open that can of worms, mmmkay?), there is undeniably a subset of Seattle’s creative ecosystem that is codified enough to be mocked. First Thursday Art Schlock, a Tumblr dedicated to lampooning the failures of Seattle’s art world with pop culture .gifs, arrived on the scene last spring and has been helping us laugh at ourselves ever since. Much like watching Portlandia and then staring uncertainly at the bird on your wallet, the humor makes you wince because it hits juuussssttttt a little too close to home.

Ostensibly, First Thursday Art Schlock is an anonymous endeavor. The project is clearly run by someone within the arts community, and if you don’t know who is behind it, it’s thrilling to look at your art world friends with delightful paranoia and rampant conspiracy theories, wondering if they’re secretly .giffing snarkily by night…

A personal request to First Thursday Art Schlock: can you please make a .gif about the joys of dating other artists and then having to go through inter-community breakups where you have to divide Seattle’s various cultural institutions to avoid each other?

Here’s a sample of posts for your enjoyment:

When an artist skips events to focus on work and, as a result, is soon forgotten about

When no one bids on the piece I donated to your auction

When the Painting Gallery Finally Tries Something Different

Steiner and Stratmann: Thoughts on the Failure of Abandoned Homes

Failure is a condition that is often intimate and internal, an emotionally-based point of view that is not always detectable from the outside. But architectural failures are visible: they quite literally lack the façades to hide their collapse, and so perhaps it should come as no surprise that two of the featured artists for our Failure series present—in very different ways—the physical disintegration of homes.

Over the past few months, we have featured Veit Stratmann’s documentation of the hauntingly failed city of L’Aquila. Now, in a complementary counterpoint—a counterpoint made stronger for its unplanned synchronicity—we will be introducing the work of New York based artist Gaby Steiner. Steiner describes her project, Public Home, as a book

…about a man who lives on his property without the protective walls and roof of a house. The house was demolished a few years ago due to potential collapse by New York City housing officials. Since then his furniture and personal belongings remain on the ground and in the open air…Jerzy Sulek came to New York in the 1970s from Warsaw, Poland, as a trained architect and his story today illustrates the paradox of public exposure and visibility alongside loneliness and isolation in society. His private life is exposed to the elements and on public display to everyone passing by. This situation is symbolic of the precarious position of the human condition in contemporary urban life and the vulnerability to constantly shifting relationships between public and private realms. It also poses urgent questions about ownership and personal autonomy in an era of diminishing property rights.

Steiner’s project documents the living situation of Jerzy Sulek, an architect who lives in Greenpoint, New York. A few years ago, Sulek’s house was demolished by the city because it was deemed structurally unsound. But rather than leave his property, Sulek simply moved his life outdoors, and he continues to live as though his life is still contained within the parameters of a home. Shoes lie in patches of dirt as though arranged on a closet shelf; a weight bench perches in the snow, sitting in such a state of assertive normalcy that one almost imagines it is set up in a garage or basement.

Both Steiner’s and Stratmann’s projects are about the failure of framework, about reinforcements eclipsing the very things that they were meant to support. In the case of L’Aquila, the structural salvation of the city became too imposing to leave any room for its actual inhabitants. “The city,” Stratmann writes, “is physically present and even largely accessible and potentially functional. However, that which bestows sense and form to the city—life and the temporality that life generates—has disappeared.”

And in the case of Sulek’s inverted house, the architect continues to live in a place that is no longer there, shaping his movements to adhere to the echoed constraints of phantom walls. “This property in Greenpoint,” Steiner explains, “is defined as ‘vacant land’ by the Department of Buildings in Brooklyn. The home of this man does not exist.” Sulek’s life is entirely inverted, and he lives in a state of heightened vulnerability with his intimate routines on display for any passerby until night comes and he can live unobserved under the cover of darkness. Sulek’s private life continues as it always has, but without any context to shelter it.

These two projects perfectly bookend each other: Jerzy Sulek inhabits a state of life without structure; the residents of L’Aquila, structure without life. But both projects pose the same fundamental question: how does one respond to the failure of an abandoned home?