letters to your future self (LTYFS) 3
September 4, 2010
Grey morning sunshine. Its Saturday, Sept 4, 2010.
You’re @ the australian centre of contemporary art (acca) around the corner from your home in Southbank. Its the second weekend since your return from Europe and you’re still mulling the issue of roots or more specifically your lack thereof. But this feels like a home of sorts. Like love in a bun. For now.
You venture into the Bianca Lester exhibition. Its mounds of dirt, concrete slabs, stone walls, broken plywood, balancing objects and playthings you’d expect in the projects or downtown Sarajevo circa 1997. The artist with her pink quif and rectangular glasses sits in the corner observing. We fiddle and poke. We disappoint her with our lack of creativity. The internet has ruined our sense of play and heads hung low, we retreat to the video installations in the adjacent gallery.
You’re watching a video installation piece by Francis Alys ‘Paradox of Praxis 1′ (1997). A man is pushing a slab of ice across the streets of Mexico’s DF (Distrito Federal). Its so hot, the water trail evaporates instantaneously and after a while the block is easy enough to kick aimlessly along. Finally, with the ice barely a shard, he stops and some boys crouch around laughing as it melts into the concrete.
‘Sometimes creating something leads to nothing.’
True. But your reading is perhaps slightly less fatalistic (artists have such god complexes). Rather than the man, you project yourself as the ice block. We’re fresh and obstinate to begin with but as our youth fades and the environment we’re born into takes hold, we glide, we’re kicked. By our 30s we’re diminishing at a faster rate and by the time you seep into the ground, you’re lucky if you manage to leave a little happiness as you do.
Yesterday, you sent around a recording/video of a Brooklynite couple, Annie and Danny recounting their love from their first date to the poetry of goodbye as they deal with terminal cancer.
You still cry thinking about it.
You’re a little insatiable, a lot impatient, and while you doubt that this generation is capable of such love and joy, you realise that’s all you really need to create in this life. And you shouldn’t aim for anything or anyone that seeks less.
Create, inquire, blossom. And love yourself a little more darling.
Lv, N
—- Sent from my 3 mobile
