RUMINATIONS: THE ARTIST'S PERSPECTIVE

Sheryl Oring

Los Angeles-based writer Sarah Shun-lien Bynum starts out this section of artists' ruminations with a lyrical ode to the typewriter. "Do I mourn the typewriter's passing?" asks Bynum, the author of two novels. Her equivocal response to the question could well be my own. "My senses certainly do," she says, "the computer cannot come close to matching its array of smells and sounds and tactile responses – but to make any further claims of regret would be insincere: every story, essay, poem, term paper, and piece of correspondence I have written since the age of fifteen I have composed directly on a computer." But that's not the end, not the last word. "What I miss," says Bynum, "is the feeling of purpose and clarity that the typewriter gave me, the sensation of being a smartly dressed assistant sitting at attention, fingers poised, in service of an important assignment."

To create "I Wish to Say," my assignment for the past decade has been to listen closely as people sit down at my desk and offer up their hopes and dreams, critiques and complaints about the management of this country. The typewriter draws them in and ultimately creates a physical record of our conversation. In a digital era, the physical imprint of the typewriter's keys on a small sheet of paper is a simple but powerful reminder that we are here and we have something to say.

The essays in "Ruminations: The Artist's Perspective" grew out of my desire to connect individual aspects of my work to the work of other artists. This started with a list of keywords. What is a "keyword?" As a noun, it is a way of classifying and organizing things, of understanding meaning. In common usage, it also appears as a verb. Decades ago, I once got paid to keyword magazine articles; today, keywording has become ubiquitous in our daily lives (think of Instagram and the like). Keywords help us to connect and understand relations; they help us to navigate an increasingly complex world.

Typewriter was an obvious starting point in my effort to deconstruct my creative practice into keywords. The list that grew out of this exercise came to include: look (as in "the look"), question, camera, archive, park, street, city, road trip, and dissent. In turn, these words led me to see connections in a diverse array of works. Santiago Echeverry, for example, engages with the look by using costumes to project the archetype of the drag queen in his powerful performance referencing the murder of a transgender prostitute in Bogotá. Echeverry, an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Tampa, writes, "The drag uniform was an empowering tool that allowed me to understand the tragedy of all of us who were being murdered, and who are still being targeted for being different." In my own case, my secretary costume helps me elicit responses toward political and aesthetic ends.

New York-based artist Chloe Bass ponders the importance of the question in her work. She writes, "I use questions to bring other people into my practice as quickly as possible ... What's important is that once the question is posed, the conversation can begin." For me, "I Wish to Say" began with the question, "If I were the president, what would you wish to say to me?" The formulation was crucial. It is open-ended enough to provoke contemplation and this in turn leads to well-considered answers. My interest in questions and the way they are posed goes back to my time in journalism school, where I learned not to ask questions that elicit "yes" or "no" answers. That stops conversation, rather than moving it forward.

From the very start of "I Wish to Say," the camera has played a role. But what role? Dhanraj Emanuel, a North Carolina-based photographer who has photographed the project for a decade, writes:

The role of the camera in this project is to contextualize the participants within the larger "public," thereby breaking down the public into the individuals who comprise it in the first place. Photography plays the crucial role of giving an identity to the text. Photographs give back to individual texts their individuality thereby distinguishing them from the series that tells a larger story.

My archive and the digital archive created by Hasan Elahi for his "Tracking Transience" project couldn't be more different. Elahi, who was falsely accused of being a terrorist in the aftermath of 9/11, decided the best way to prove his innocence was to document his life exhaustively and put it online for all to see. But the questions with which he struggles are connected to issues raised in the course of my project. While the physical "I Wish to Say" archive has power because of the way it connects to the personal, would it actually be more effective to scan the cards and put them all online? And by doing so, what issues of privacy would this engage? Elahi, an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Maryland, writes:

We're still in a transition between analog and digital, and for as long as we're in this state of flux, we'll develop a more sophisticated understanding of the consequences of living under constant surveillance. For now, at least, we still have control over what information we put forth publicly. Being mindful of how we do that feels like a good first step toward retaining control.

In the early stages of working on this book, I knew I'd like to hear what artist and University of North Carolina at Greensboro colleague Lee Walton had to say. I knew our work had certain keywords in common, and was eager to see how Walton would approach an essay as open-ended as this. Many of Walton's projects take place in city parks, as do mine, so that was a starting point for what ultimately became a provocative essay examining connections between the open space of city parks, soccer fields, and even an empty sheet of paper. Walton writes:

The open space of the paper is a place for something to happen, The function is indeterminate and undefined. It is an event space full of potential ... Ultimately, the drawing space is social and the power is vested in the artists. The world is changed in some way from our participation in this space. The game is changing too.

Parks and city streets are the most common locations for "I Wish to Say" performances. In cities, these settings are filled with people, without whom my work would not exist. The next three essays explore various aspects of the city, from the scale of the street (by Ed Woodham) to that of the neighborhood and the city (by Teddy Cruz) and then to a essay that recounts a 2004 road trip from Austin to Los Angeles (by Stephanie Elizondo Griest).

For Woodham, whose "Art in Odd Places" project includes a festival that takes place along 14th Street in New York each fall, the street is his "adopted studio-laboratory employed as an open and free performative space to study communication in the public sphere." Woodham walked the street from east to west and conjured images from the past decade of his work. At Second Avenue, for instance, Woodham recalls, "Passersby tie blue ribbons onto a chain link fence on an empty lot. Someone asks us both to slow dance – suspending time. Car horns. A woman wearing a white wedding dress leads a group of dancing girls dressed in white – all wearing the number zero."

Cruz, whose urban laboratory is centered along the United States-Mexico border, sees the city and its neighborhoods as the most promising site of creative intervention. In our conversations about art and public practice, Cruz always pushed me to consider scale as a crucial element of my work – and to imagine ways of unconventional ways of intervening into established political bodies. Cruz, Professor of Public Culture and Urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, writes that

a community is always in dialogue with its immediate social and ecological environment; this is what defines its political nature. But when this relationship is disrupted and its productive capacity splintered by the very way in which jurisdictional power is instituted, it is necessary to find a means of recuperating its agency, and this is the space of intervention that art and architecture practice need to engage today.

Griest, Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializes in writing travel memoirs. For this book, she recalls the meandering road trip we took together from Texas to California back in 2004. She was promoting a recently released book and I was starting "I Wish to Say." She writes:

Sheryl and I were road-tripping in post-9/11 America. Our nation had been embroiled in an unjust war in Iraq for a year by that point; in seven months, we would determine whether or not to halt the presidency of the man who had declared it. As former journalists, we knew the importance of bearing witness to a moment.

This first road trip with Griest was followed by several more. In 2006, I traveled to eight cities across the country, inviting participants to send birthday cards to President George Bush for his sixtieth birthday and in 2008 I visited dozens of cities and college campuses across the country as I took "I Wish to Say" on the road one more time. Another tour is planned for Fall 2016.

This section concludes with an essay on dissent by Ricardo Dominguez, a San Diego-based artist, Associate Professor of Art at the University of California, San Diego, and co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater, a group that developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico. Dominguez writes, "Dissent is always about the location and dislocation of one's social sense or (ae)ffective condition in relation to the embedded reality one finds one's self in, that is the influence of where and when one is born or comes into being."

"I Wish to Say" came to life through connections to a national network of free speech activists, all working to protect our First Amendment rights. The typewriter offers an invitation to dissent, to speak one's mind. Taken together, the essays in this part of the book provide insight into my work and the "I Wish to Say" project, while also offering glimpses into a wide spectrum of creative practices that exist in conversation with the broader field of socially engaged art. The concept of polyphony, or a multitude of voices, lies at the root of my research interests, and the artists in this section represent a diverse sample of the richly varied work being made today.

THE TYPEWRITER: An Ode to Its Smells, Sounds, and Tactile Responses

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

I remember the smell of our typewriter more clearly than I can remember what it actually looked like. It was probably a Smith-Corona, although I can't say for certain, and its color was most likely gray or tan or maybe even a neutral shade of green. Was there a heavy cover that snapped over it for carrying purposes, or did it have its own special suitcase? Was its body made of some sort of lightly pebbled composite material? Its corners square or rounded? The truth is, I don't think I could identify this typewriter in a lineup. But I feel sure that I would know it by its smell. As soon as you turned it on, the machine let off a wonderful odor. I've heard this described as an "electric" smell or as a mixture of "ozone and ink" – and I suppose that the smell generated by the powerfully humming motor and the warming of the ink ribbon was largely what I was inhaling – but I will say that this particular typewriter did emit its own scent, distinct from that of other typewriters I have encountered since.

My theory is that there were hidden smells embedded in the machine, smells linked to its provenance as my mother's primary compositional tool throughout her years in graduate school – the smoke from her cigarettes, her Prell shampoo, the mineral smell of the radiator steam in her parents' Morningside Heights apartment, the residue of the cooking oil that her mother used freely when stir-frying – and that by turning on the power switch, I was releasing the olfactory evidence of this former life of hers. That, I believe, is what made our typewriter smell particularly good.

So there was its smell, also its hypnotizing warmth and vibration – and I haven't even gotten to the pleasure of the plastic keys yet, each one with an almost imperceptible dip in its center. Keys that would need to be only barely touched before they answered you with a muted clatter and a line of perfect letters on the page. Letters perfect both in their shape and their spacing, marvelous in their ability to turn my words into something excellent, unimpeachable, and entirely official-looking. For a child frustrated by the unprofessional appearance of handwriting, the typewriter seemed heaven-sent, a miracle of the water-into-wine variety. Suddenly my limericks looked ready for publication. The same was true for the opening pages of my historical novel. Everything I wrote on our typewriter possessed a halo of authority, and I read and reread my words with detached appreciation, as if someone else were responsible for them.

All of which is why I submitted without protest to my mother's suggestion that I enroll in a summer typing course at the local high school. In the summer of 1984 I was twelve: too old for camp, too young for a job, and as for my mother, she was newly divorced, intent on instilling in her daughter the importance of marketable skills. Those long years spent writing art history papers had not equipped her with the marketable skills necessary to attain financial independence – another phrase she repeated urgently. That summer she studied for her real estate broker's license while I learned to touch type fifty-five words per minute, and it's a summer I remember as being a restful one, a period of relative calm before adolescence arrived and I became obsessed with asserting my tastes and opinions.

The typing class began at 9 a.m. sharp, as if to acclimate us to regular business hours, and was held in a first-floor classroom with enormous double-hung windows, propped open to let in the air before the day grew hot. We sat in rows, at compact desks, each with its own electric typewriter and a practice book held upright by a triangular cardboard stand. The room and its arrangement are still very palpable to me. About the instructor I recall absolutely nothing, which is unusual for me because at that age – in fact, at every age – I have wanted my teachers' approval above all else and thus made scrupulous note of them. But of the person who taught me how to type – a competence on which I depend daily – I cannot say whether this person was old or young, man or woman! The class seemed to run by itself. That was exactly what pleased me: how we operated in a dreamlike stupor, our minds blank, our fingers feeling their way over the keyboard, the room quiet except for the busy, soothing sound of metal rapidly hitting paper.

So little exertion was required of me, yet every day I was rewarded with signs of progress. Exercises completed, letters mastered. Nothing felt more gratifying than the ding of the bell and the carriage moving smoothly and heavily across the platen. In typing I had discovered a form of work perfectly suited to my temperament: neatness, accuracy, productivity, adherence to the rules, all performed in a state of drowsy relaxation. After I finished my exercises, I would walk home, eat lunch with my mother, then spend the rest of the day reading Agatha Christie mysteries in front of a box fan, with both of us satisfied that I was coming ever closer to acquiring a marketable skill.