experiments in forgetting that we are all the same

There’s this study I always have been fascinated by, which I’ve probably mentioned in this blog a few times in relationship to any number of thoughts I have going on, that involves people’s preference in laundry detergent. The outcomes play out like this: if you get a random selection of people to enter a room one at a time and they are interviewed with one of the questions being what their favorite laundry detergent is, the answers will pretty much be equally spread across major brands that are advertised and sold in the area. If you do the same interview process, but behind the interviewers you place a picture of a tidal flat, people will heavily be skewed towards saying that their favorite detergent is Tide. In both cases, when asked why people like the detergent they do they will tell you, with conviction, why they like the one they do over all others.

Today waking up to strange statistics like people in Florida voting 60% for raising minimum wage, but also voting 53% for a president that doesn’t support minimum wage, this social experiment drifts into my mind. Texting with a friend this morning he wrote me, “It’s like no one cares about policy as much as aesthetics.” I think this is a painfully true statement. The arguments across party lines sound like people arguing over how their favorite sports team is better because of their amazing defense, even as they continue to lose game after game. The arguments are not about the policy that allow us to live in civil relationship with our neighbors and supports our vision of the world, but instead about backing the person who’s affect seems to create an outside image of ourself that we feel akin to. 

It’s a bit like an Instagram account packed by photos of our failing relationships dolled up looking as if they come from a newly found honeymoon phase or the healthy lifestyle we are not actually living; we parrot and advocate for people we think show something about our inner selves that we feel needs to be seen by others and isn’t; or maybe needs to be seen by ourselves but we can’t seem to put our finger on how to display it. 

Policy never enters the equation.

I was at a friends place in Montana a few weeks ago and another friend of mine, who is quite progressive, got into an argument with me about why wearing masks isn’t important. He always wears masks usually, but here in this setting we were surrounded by some friends that didn’t believe in doing so. He slipped easily into rhetoric about the reasons masks aren’t important. As I looked at him I wondered about that Tide experiment and the way we are so quick to align with others.

Today I wake up and the thing I feel most is not anger, but a realization to this need to align with others, especially in an age where our comments and persuasions are expressed on platforms that push us to flock together; that make our minds get a bit drunk and wander into bar fights. It’s a frustrating future to look at with these mechanisms of ours at play. And I don’t really know what to do about it, other than look inward and try to root out my own self deception and to continue to talk to others in the tone of curiosity and attention to detail.

While in Montana I met a guy named Tyler. We talked about saving turtles in the Congo, the environment, and guns. We talked a lot about Trump, who he supported. And we sat there, him in his NRA shirt and me in mine that said “Abortion is Normal” and tried to find middle ground. We did listen to each other, but at the end of the day his viewpoint was one of feeling that a side of American politics had screwed him and now he had a bully in Trump who would fuck with these people. He didn’t like Trump, but he liked what he did to those that he despised.

I can try to put a salve on my soul by grabbing onto values of self awareness and trying to see my own deceptions, but I’m presented with the uncomfortable reality that other’s pursuit of defining themselves as an individual and finding value is by striking out with violence and vitriol.

We are a country expressing maximum American Individualism as it was first created: an individualism founded in racism and capitalism. It doesn’t seem too surprising that this is where these founding values have taken us.

tools


I want to be somewhere between a red, milwaukee angle grinder and a japanese hand saw laying atop a pile of walnut dust. Instead, I am dirty fingers on a laptop keyboard.

jigs


This is a jig I made for welding caster wheels centered onto the end of a 1" square tube: It's not so pretty to look at, but it got the job done. Each wheel ended up square and mostly centered without having to do a bunch of tack welds. When I was a kid and making things in my Dad’s shop I never got why he wanted to make jigs for making repeated pieces. I was under the impression that to measure each thing was a far superior method to creating than to put into the world the visual turbulence of a jig that I then became coconspirator with, like small robots building up to become a larger robot.

It is now with joy that I make a jig; push a few things together and weld or screw or staple like Michael Jordon taking free throws: eyes closed and tongue out. Absurd confidence.

But maybe the creation of jigs at all times is a bit like camouflage: it makes me disappear in the flow of my work; the texture of my hands starts to become the texture of the material and my heart beats at the rotation of a flywheel. There’s this give and take between to jig and not to jig; to be consumed or to stop the flow of the river and float above the mangrove.

For two years I’ve wanted to write a book How to Become a Failed Artist in Five Years. And for two years I’ve almost started. At first I didn’t start because I was scared I would ruin it. Now I’m scared to start because I don’t think I remember the details and point to what I was trying to write about. And I’ve been wondering about this tension in me about forgetting, but also wanting to honor the original scope of what 2-year-ago-Mark was thinking. Maybe I built a jig in my mind and then never used it and now looking back at it is a bit like this jig in the photo with no context: haphazard cuts and some charred wood.

This whole process feels a bit like snakes eating themselves, where the jig then becomes something to talk about and observe. Like that guy who wrote reviews of Pitchfork reviews. Maybe making jigs isn’t only about process but scale. Jigs at a certain scale are not just a tool, but also an idea themselves: a dedication to seeing a process have a concrete step.

Like most things we do, though, steps flatten or steepen. Stairs turn to slides turn to elevators. 

leopards and hairless camels.

I used to go to this zoo in the winter on days I wasn't in the studio. No one went in the winter and the animals all forgot about people and the feeling was a bit like being in a sequel of Jurassic Park (not the one with the first occurance of the Pterodactyl... I didn't like that one) where the buildings felt abandoned and utilitarian: minimal set design. 

There was a camel that was losing its hair due to stress or illness, that laid on the ground in a mirrored position of its lips: limp and forming to that which it was placed upon. Skin on teeth and rocks. Next to it was an aquarium-like cage that contained a leopard that was also stressed but paced endlessly in front of the glass, packing the dirt into a trench.

In college, I once had an anole that I placed in a cage with a hamster I also had. They seemed to get along. Then one morning I woke up and the anole was dismembered and the hamster was pacing like that leopard, packing down the wood shavings to a density such that a newspaper could have been printed on it.

The leopard did once stop pacing when I came to visit when it was snowing once. It stopped and then seemed to point it's paw in a direction that said "over there". At this point it, too, was starting to lose hair.