APRIL 2018
ORIGINAL PREMISE
In early February, when the everyday project had just begun to take shape in everyone’s minds, I was theorizing about what to do, and I happened across a recent poem by Ellen Welcker, titled “The Plan.” The poem, composed of lines that range from one to five sentences, was highly evocative for me, both in terms of subject matter and with the ways each sentence was penned: simply, elegantly, and full of longing. It heavily reminded me of a favorite book (and creative tool) of mine, Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects. Upon revisiting the book, I decided that I was going to try to create my own sense of affect with my everyday art piece. I enjoy engaging with art that plucks at the strings of my heart, art that stirs something unspeakable and unnamable in your chest, art that turns your body into an echoing cathedral. Taking Stewart’s verbal illustrations of classical life in the middle of the U.S. as a foundation, I decided that I would collect short phrases that people found particular “heat” in in their own everyday lives and build on that collective data to make it something bigger by engaging and interacting with it on a small scale.
On February 8th, 2018, I shared a link to a Google form on my Facebook page, with the following text attached:
Hey! I'm in a conceptual art class this semester, and we have to do a daily action. My plan is to collect enough sentences for every day from now until May 4th (the last day of classes), and film myself saying them in various places around campus/Haverford/Philly. At the end of the semester, I'm gonna piece them together to make a found poem. If you'd like to submit a sentence for me, fill this form out!
The Google form, titled “i’m collecting phrases!” had the following information outlined above the fill-in area:
hello! send me a sentence or a phrase because i'm making compiled poetry. it can be anything: a fact, a secret, your grocery list, a confession, the phone number of your ex manager at pizza hut, the instructions and recommended dosage of your favorite brand of ibuprofen. make it pretty, make it ugly, make it real, make it fake, make it art.
disclaimer/fyi: this is for my conceptual art class with john muse at haverford college
As the days passed, I received more and more submissions. However, I grew wary of the project I had outlined for myself. And not only that, but it seemed like something that I would quickly grow tired of. I tried to think of a way that I could get not only myself but others to engage with these small pieces of found poetry at any moment throughout the day, rather than just witnessing the recording or the submission. While at Staples one day, I was instantly charmed by the idea of the name tag, with a very generic “Hello! My Name Is…” and then a blank area. The idea of introducing yourself - myself - as the affect I was trying to create, introducing and solidifying myself as this temporal experience was exactly what I wanted out of this project. Motivated once again, I bought a pack of 100 name tags, all with easy adhesive on the back that I could just stick to my clothes each morning. I went through the responses to my earlier submission call and wrote them down on the name tags with a black felt-tipped Sharpie.
THE ATTEMPT
Starting on Monday, February 12th, each morning before I left my room I would grab one of the prepared name tags and attach it to my shirt, normally on my upper left chest. Every day, it was something different: a list of verbs in someone’s to-do list, the ingredients of a recipe, personal fears. At the end of the day, I would tear off the name tag and place it on a small legal notepad, two to a page, and affix it to the paper with two small pieces of tape in the upper left and lower right corner, labeling the date it was worn above it in ballpoint pen.
One thing I really enjoyed charting was the physical index left by the changes between a worn and unworn name tag. At the very least, each name tag would have small, almost unnoticeable creases and dents left from where the clothing had folded or moved on my body throughout the day. One some, the adhesive on the back had gradually worn away, leaving particles of wool or cotton on the back and making it unable to stay stuck to the article of clothing, prompting corners to peel. Others tore right in half while being removed due to the adhesive sticking to much. One, in particular, had not been removed before laundry and was washed onto the shirt, causing me to pick each individual “scale” of fragmented paper that was left clinging to the sweater over the trash bin several days after wearing it, as it was unsalvageable (tag read: “Hello my name is [I still find shards of my broken burgundy mug]”).
I was becoming more and more disenchanted with my original idea as the weeks went by, though. It just didn’t have as much of a (measurable) affect as I had hoped, for myself or for others. Few people approached me to ask about the project, and, when they did, it was simply to ask “what’s with the name tag?” or some variation of that, and were sated by a simple “it’s an art project.” It didn’t start conversations and it didn’t particularly push me to engage more with the quotidienne utopia on any level. Upon further reflection, the affect I was striving for in others was something more innately felt and not easily described verbally/with a stranger (my students at the school I teach at in Philadelphia (E.M. Stanton) didn’t even comment on them!), and therefore a lot more probably happened at a personal level for those that interacted. Frustrated, I chose to chase that feeling in myself by changing the methods of achieving this personal affect.
SECOND ITERATION
I reached out to John during our spring break, intent on reconceiving this project and updating it into something I was hungry to see. There’s a break in my catalogue of about a week and a half where I don’t wear a name tag and have not yet decided on a renovated project. I decide to go back to the very basics of what I want, and I come up with the interest in playing around with gestures that would hopefully evoke these imagined affects that I had been craving from Welcker’s poem and Stewart’s book.
THE ATTEMPT
The majority of my gestures are stylized, heightened versions of things I would be thinking of in the moment, or ways my body would be moving and I wanted to highlight it. I would get friends to videotape me, or prop my phone or laptop up against a pillow on my bed. After a brief meeting with John, I changed the focus to be more on spontaneous gestures that arose out of my everyday life rather than the specticalized ones that I was used to performing.
I found that I connected a lot more with my feelings of fleeting affect that I wanted to capture and hold, the echoing in the heart that I wanted to pin down and examine. By expressing thoughts physically with gestures, I found that it was much easier to have a sense of preciousness of the moment, almost, that feeling of bated breath.
One thing I wish I had done differently was that I would have been more honest to the timeline. As the day would go on, I would feel like something should become a gesture - a thought or a physical move I did - but would store it away in a mental list to repeat later as I felt uncomfortable recording myself at these random times. As I went on with the project, I forced myself to stretch these boundaries, filming gestures in class or on the SEPTA Regional Rail line from center city into Bryn Mawr.
Looking back at the compilation video, it’s interesting that although I couldn’t point out what specifically was being thought about or discussed in the moments, I do feel that innate sense of physical connection to the headspace I was in when the gesture was being recorded. There’s something beautiful about muscle memory and how instantly it can connect you to something, much in the same way that other senses do.