One year ago today, I was in Greenland and ...

Ilulissat Icefjord, 2017

... fourteen months after I started reading it, I finished Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams this week. As it was published in 1986, the prevailing thought was wishing he would return to the far north and write a new book of what has happened since. So much has changed with the physical landscape but his meditations on history and our personal relationship with place have not. Here are four of my favorite passages with three images from the old iPhone.

From Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams:

"... we bring our own worlds to bear in foreign landscapes in order to clarify them for ourselves. It is hard to imagine that we could do otherwise. The risk we take is of finding our final authority in the metaphors rather than the land. To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then is to provoke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves."

Sermermiut, UNESCO World Heritage Site, 2017

"No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind; how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself. If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradictions were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."

East Greenland, Flight from Nuuk to Reykjavik, Iceland

"The edges of any landscape - horizons, the lip of a valley, the bend of a river around a canyon wall - quicken an observer's expectations. That attraction to borders, to the earth's twilit places, is part of the shape of human curiosity."

"It is in the land, I once thought, that one searches out and eventually finds what is beautiful. And an edge of this deep and rarified beauty is the acceptance of a complex paradox and the forgiveness of others. It means you will not die alone."

A Passage from "Apologia"

I encountered an old copy of Barry Lopez's essay "Apologia" in my office a few weeks ago. This passage will be my mantra this summer as I explore a new country that I never imagined visiting for the Autobiography in Water series: Iceland. I received a grant (another summer stipend much like the one that helped me produce From Venice Beach to the Venice Biennale in 2011). Let the research begin.

Walking, Dropping, Digging

There are two things I encountered in the last 36 hours that have led me to believe that I am not doing enough with my life and my art (those are intrinsically tied so I really mean my life).

Andrew Forsthoefel, “I’ve been travelin’, travelin’…(harmonica).” Bo Diddley (not shown), Pascagoula, Mississippi (image via)

Andrew Forsthoefel's story on This American Life is one. Traveling is what I love most and there's nothing greater than the road trip. I have spent extensive time making artwork while traveling but with the exception of a couple instances, I cannot say that what I made was meaningful to anyone else other than myself. There is so much to appreciate about this: Forsthoefel's fear of the unknown and reconciling this through two simple acts - walking and listening, his eventual success eleven months later, his reception from his family and those that he met along the road once reaching the Pacific Ocean, and what that he learned along the way specifically in relationship to age (and ultimately death).

The long version, Walking Across America: Advice for a Young Man, is well worth the listen.

Ai WeiWei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995/2009 (image via)

Yesterday, I ventured to the Indianapolis Art Museum to see Ai WeiWei: According to What? It is billed as a retrospective (though it feels incomplete). Needless to say, it is the biggest exhibition to come to Indianapolis since I have moved to the Crossroads of America and it was well worth the visit (despite my unwillingness to set foot into the museum due to its recent problems).

Why did Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn affect me more than any other work? It operates in the same sphere as this - it's a big old "fuck you" to the institution, the government, the culture - yet it is more subtle. It is also about taking a chance and not revering the past. If there is regret in WeiWei's triptych, it is not shown here. Three succinct images - a document of an action (was it ever repeated?) - that I can learn from in many respects.

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Barry Lopez's Apologia is an essay that I am reminded of more than any other read in the last decade. Every time I see road kill (which is too often), I think of Lopez stopping to bury dead animals for one year during his drives across the country. It's not this particular action that I am drawn to but the dedication.

Maybe that is what this blog post is about... the search for a meaningful experience to dedicate oneself to. Digging in a little deeper and finding a way to transform that action into a form that someone else can relate to as much as I was affected by the three works above... my challenge for the summer, the year, the rest of my life.