It's awesome weather today. It's FINALLY warm out -- not hot yet; it's about in the 70s. It's moist, though, like summer. I love it. My studio windows are open. I went for a run this morning in the park and it was misty and overcast and just wonderful.
I'm feeling stressed about our upcoming studio visits -- I have very little to show in terms of objects. I was hoping I would have the room built by now, but I'm not ready. I need more time with the people and the recordings. And I need more time with the site. I think that is really what I need to know about -- it's a site-specific installation, after all, and the piece centers around the problem of place and displacement. The problem with the site is, I don't know what it is. NPS has given me a space just outside of Castle Williams, which is not my dream spot, but which I actually find very interesting. I think I can make a lot of it. The piece will change, but that's OK, since the piece isn't solid yet anyway. The thing is, it seems like the space they're offering me is currently fenced off and filled with dumpsters. Hmm. I was like, 'Is this right?!' I went out to look at it yesterday and at first was so upset, but then I thought it was pretty funny. In an insulting sort of way. I don't know if I'm supposed to say it, but I have this horrible premonition that the powers that be out here have a very different aesthetic than I do. Or maybe it's just all a big misunderstanding.
It's a fear in general, though. That those necessary and important to me resent what I'm doing. Or, there's this sense of confusion that is coupled will alienation. Or maybe the work just sucks. I overheard some women who work here on the island talking on the ferry yesterday on the way back, and it was so disheartening to hear the way they were discussing our projects. I'm not saying "they just don't get it," but a little more generosity of spirit, or a little more space before judgement would be nice.
But back to the Fear In General. It's more a fear of being misunderstood. As esoteric as things can get, I think the point is to be understood, and to understand. Or for me it is. I think. I hope. I tried to explain a recent performance to S the other night. He tried to understand, I think. But I had also recently looked up his ex-wife, who is, at least in my mind, about as opposite to me as could be. She is a publicist who used to be a dance writer who at one point I think used to be a dancer. And man, she has a very different aesthetic than I do.
So. Fear. It makes us withdraw from each other and push each other away and judge each other. Well. Glad I figured all that out. I'm on one of the last chapters in the Foucault, which is called 'The Great Fear.' He describes how the perception and treatment of insanity came full circle, when the insane were sent to live in sanatoriums that previously were built for lepers. Then and there developed a paranoia and general fear that these sanatoriums were filled with bodily disease and "bad air," which endangered the nearby towns, causing greater separation and a general sense of disgust and terror. It also was the beginning of a medical treatment of insanity -- not out of kindness, but out of fear of its spreading. F says:
" ... fear and anxiety were not far off: in the reaction of confinement, they reappeared, doubled. People were at once afraid, people were still afraid, of being confined ... But now the estate of confinement acquired its own powers; it became in its turn the birthplace of evil, and could henceforth spread that evil by itself, instituting another reign of terror. ... There prevailed, then, a sort of undifferentiated image of "rottenness" that had to do with the corruption of morals as well as with the decomposition of the flesh, and upon which were based both the repugnance and the pity felt for the confined."
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