![]() ![]() “Lineup” is just one of the breakout works featured in the sweeping retrospective “Gary Simmons: Public Enemy,” which is currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago before traveling to the Pérez Art Museum in Miami later this year. Decades later, the provocative installation is still all too relevant in a society where police and civilians make deadly decisions based on the clothes worn by Black youth. Who did gallerygoers picture wearing them, and why? “Lineup” made implicit the stereotyping of young Black men, but it also made viewers complicit in their own assumptions. The shoes were familiar brands - a mix of Nike, Adidas and Reebok - but devoid of human presence. ![]() And you feel for the fir time a sweet absence.Thirty years ago, the conceptual artist Gary Simmons arranged eight pairs of gold-plated basketball sneakers in front of the minimal black lines of a police height chart, screenprinted on the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Perhaps you notice the soil, the rocks, or the river, taking back some of that which it has loaned to you or perhaps you see the regeneration occurring in your daughter, if you have one, as she walks around, growing stonger. You find yourself as you have always been, square in the middle of the metamorphosis, constantly living and dying: becoming weaker in your strength, finally. It's so subtle.a trace of energy departing here, a trace of impulse missing there. We watch and listen and notice as the land, the place -life- begins to summon its due from us. You trade your life for the privilege of this experience-the joy of a place, the joy of blood family the joy of knowledge gotten by listening and observing.įor most of us, we get stronger slowly, and then get weaker slowly, with our cycles sometimes in synchrony with the land's health, though other times independent of its larger cycles. You can rot or you can burn but either way, if you're lucky, a place will shape and cut and bend you, will strengthen you and weaken you. “I live here on the Prade Ranch alone-already years beyond the age my mother was when she returned to the ranch-to the particular elements of the earth: soil, water, carbon sky. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude-and regret. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union-what pieces life took out of you. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.Īnd so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter: He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. “What young people didn’t know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm oh, what young people did not know. And sometimes I wish I’d enjoyed it more on the way, and worried about it less.” I wish the time hadn’t gone so fast, though. ![]() I knew Douglas Adams, and I knew Roger Zelazny, and I knew John M Ford, and I knew Diana Wynne Jones… do you know how lucky that makes me?Īh, I’m rabbiting on, and I sound a bit more Pollyannaish than I’m intending to sound: I know the downside of age and the downside of time, and I am sure that the view from age 51 is not the view from age 71. I miss friends who have died, but then, I’m glad that time gave them to me, to befriend, even for a while, and that I was alive to know them. Sometimes I’ll do something like An Evening With Neil and Amanda, or the 8 in 8 project, and completely surprise myself. I have a wonderful wife whom I adore, watched three amazing kids grow into two delightful adults and my favourite teenager, an astonishing number of grand life experiences, I’ve made art I’m proud of, I have real, true, glorious friends, and I’ve been able to do real good for things I care about, like freedom of speech, like libraries. I’m happier than I’ve been at any time in my life these days. There are things I miss about being younger - chiefly the ability to pull all-nighters and keep working and working well and being smiled at by girls I didn’t know who thought I was cute and I wish I had the eyesight I had even five years ago… but that stuff feels pretty trivial. “I don’t ever remember being afraid of “oldness”. ![]()
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