2004.OCT.08: THE SECOND HAND LUNGED FORTH AND PRICKED ME.

Do we even use or feel time anymore?

The moments that involve an understanding between action and time are dwindling. Time is only spent now, as if it were a currency for advancing other means. With the branding of hours, minutes, even seconds, time can no longer be appreciated as a worthy end in itself. Everything within this lush expanse has been petrified to commodity so that time is only valued because it is a source of fear - a fear of losing it, having it stolen. Time is not a concrete enemy, ticking away on the wall. It is more primordial than that, and the rhythm is infused organically to our bodies.

But no matter how much I try to divorce and resist this idea of "time is money," it is nearly impossible to function without attributing a quantitative value to every minute of my day. I sit at the computer, with slight absurdity, in my powder blue pajamas. Reindeer sled through a snowfield from the nape of my neck to the bottom hem of my slumber trousers. It's almost as if this image of snow covering my body should somehow protect me from the chill outside. If I am winter, then the cold cannot shake me. I have been wearing these pajamas the full day, and so mentally, I have been sleeping in some corner of my mind all along. Even my meals, all consisting of jasmine rice, harmonize into my ensemble; the white grains puff like chubby flakes of snow.

I am realizing this distress between emotional experiences of time and concrete time for many reasons. Aside from donning my perpetual snooze suit, I have been reading my lover's accounts of my stay with him in Korea, while the flickering mentions of London arouse scents accutely missed. To the equation add my lover's absence (currently in Toronto) multiplied by a day spent sorting through hundreds of digital photographs from the past year. One year spent in four different continents conflated to the monitor of virtual folders labeled London, Paris, Athens, Suwon, Tangier, Seattle, Vancouver, Berlin.... A gap of perhaps 20 pixels separate these cities from each other; space is also distorted and flattened. What a strange thing when time and distance can be shaved into such simple abstractions of categories. Here is my life, my time, hiding in a manilla icon.

There is a pain that accompanies the reflection of these images. They function like portraits of deceased loved ones - existing to help you grasp onto a quickly fading memory, but simultaneously it unleashes the forces of nostalgia and longing for what has passed. It is an addiction to remember. As long as we will the object of our memory to live with us, so it will continue to radiate its euphoric and destructive gaze. Writing functions in a parallel way, although the surface of the image is replaced by the field of language and text. I am particularly held and ultimately winded by my boyfriend's writing on the possibility of paths. In it, he details my strategic steps of entering into an art realm where I can possibly make work, receive support, and flourish. An element of that sacrifice requires some roots to be sown in Chicago or the West. It interferes with a more fluid lifestyle between different places in the world that may not have a solid art culture (or is it merely market?), and assumes the dissolving of the individual into a firm societal solution.

In opposition lies the caravan style of living wherever opportunity offers its home. I have talked with Jin Soo, who believes that the artist needs to find response from within and not rely on stimulus from their environment. Performance artist, Teh-ching Hsieh, who will be visiting Chicago from New York, must have an interesting position on this. He has endured a single thirteen year and many year-long performances. Many of these performances occupied a very limited amount of space for the entire duration. For this reason, he still glows with an aura that many no longer believe artists possess. I have corresponded with him in the past and hope he will remember me in person. He is someone that lives in time, and does not merely spend it.

An evening ago, my professor Greg Bordowitz, confessed to one of the appeals in being an artist. There is an ability to gracefully shift between the classes, and this mobility offers a true sense of liberty. He verbally expressed something that I have been physically feeling all along. Of course there are other means to achieve this, especially in America, but there is a long-term interest in the peculiarites of an artist or poet that eclipse the physical abilities of a star athlete. Talent in music and acting are similar, although different myths are embedded in the personas of musician and actor. Celebrity and beauty offer mobility but eventually arrive with iconoclasm and envy. Most achievements in the sciences and business are too functional and lack the sensual quality to entertain rich and poor alike.

It is 4:16 am, and I feel like I am just rising.


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