February 2008 Archives

This was inspired by a piece in the New Yorker about light pollution via kottke.org , I wrote it a while back but I never posted it.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the thought of becoming an astronaut. Not just for the thrill of floating in zero gravity and eating freeze dried ice cream. There was something compelling about leaving the Earth and seeing the sky for it really is - the billions of stars, the moon in all its glory. But really the night sky that had fired my imagination had been an amalgam of glossy hardcovers from the Air and Space Museum, IMAX films, and PBS shows like Nova. The stars were so dim in the suburb that I grew up in that all I could really identify were Orion and the Big Dipper.

As I grew older, I forgot about my obsession with the sky. Through college and my early adult years, I was living in mostly urban environments where you'd be lucky to even spot the moon. Perhaps that sense of wonder and excitement about "what's out there" dimmed a bit as well. I remember clearly though the first time I really felt like I "saw" the sky: I was in a small village called Bulungula on the east coast of South Africa. I wanted to cry for joy; I could have stayed out all night just gazing at the millions of points of shimmering light. I felt so tiny and in awe, it felt like I was spinning and the ground had dropped away. It was so clear and bright that you could see the clouds of galactic dust that blotted out the starlight from beyond the dust. And I really understood why the Milky Way is called the Milky Way.

Maybe the reason why we have become so careless and destructive of the environment is because we can't see the night sky anymore. We can't stand in awe of where we came from and what we're made of.

I recently attended a talk by Martha Rosler, an artist that's been making work since the 70s. I first heard about her work through a class I had taken long ago - her piece The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems  had always stuck with me; these were photos of the Bowery that I knew from when I was a child, and the dissonance between those images and my own memories and my experience of the Bowery now always strikes me whenever I'm walking down it to visit my grandmother. I noticed that throughout her work she's used the theme of absence to talk about many subjects, and it gives the work a sense of power that perhaps would have been lacking if it had been dealt with straightforwardly.

Instead of using images of homeless people or people being tortured or war victims, she uses other methods - collaborating with groups of homeless people, using the sound of falling dishes and excruciatingly loud grindcore music as the viewer crosses a space, a video of a toy soldier playing "God Bless America" on a bugle with its mechanical leg exposed. By not using those images, she is able to avoid the superficial shock that the mainstream media uses to numb people into inaction.