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...