Column 3, Row 4

Interview with Dan Reidy

“Living With A Quale”

LENDING LIBRARY CONVERSATION WITH DAN REIDY:

(The Lending Library is part of The System Project’s POPc. A select number of participants are lent an artwork that is part of the visual component of the event. They live with that artwork for six months, thinking about it and the larger issues. And then they are interviewed and those thoughts become part of building of thoughts that POPc is created to establish.)

The Following Interview was conducted both over the phone and then in an attempt to re-create the phone conversation, through a series of emails during the week of January 13, 2014. The Lending Library participant is Dan Reidy:

DR: You said – maybe we could think of reality as a sandstorm of information. The way I tried to understand this was based on other things I understood you to mean. A sandstorm is a big thing that is made of countless particular things. I thought a grain of sand would be a notion, a specific notion. Maybe 'notion' is the wrong word. I thought, “Who am I in the face of reality?”, and I pictured myself as a desert traveler who endures this terrible stinging and abrasive wind. It was a very heroic imagining. My headscarf and tunic were flapping behind me as I leaned into the onslaught. In this imagining I was alone, but now I think if you and I were heroic desert travelers leaning into the wind, we would be pelted by uniquely separate grains of sand.

I don't think that was necessarily the point you wanted to illustrate. I think maybe you meant that the thing is bits and impossible to take in at once.

Maybe an inconspicuous reality that has to be sought out.

DS: Yes, I think we are talking about the same thing. This individual drawing that you had was one of the 72 drawings that composed the whole image (the always-the-same Giotto). Each one then is a kind of “quale” – a particular bit of data – a phenomenal individual entity that is a particular color, a particular place, at a particular time. (C1P1T1) Yours was Col. 3, Row 4.

So when we were talking about how reality comes to us, it seems to me like we’re confronted with “a sandstorm of data” all the time; what art does is sort that data for us, choosing some over others, and putting that selection into a useful package that then makes it meaningful to others. It’s a way we deal with all that sandstorm.

Your comment earlier, when you said, “Yes, that sandstorm that just pock-marks us”, really made me laugh. I had never been able to articulate that – the kind of fearful part of the sandstorm – but you were right.

DR: We were also wondering about the word 'knowledge' as opposed to 'information' or 'data'.

DS: The “knowledge” and “data” distinction that you made was important and difficult. I don’t quite know how to separate the two and how to give them each definitions that don’t lap over into the other. I believe that they are significantly different and I think you were on the right track when you wanted to say that “data” was just the raw stuff, and “knowledge” was what we made out of it. Is that right?

DR: I think so, it’s boring semantics, maybe – but we’re both teachers so we’ve seen data turn to knowledge in our students’ faces. It is as clear to me as if a cartoon of a light bulb turns on above their head. I have had both wonderful and fully disappointing students who are receiving the same data. Maybe it’s on the us (the recipient) to transform it.

DS: The final point of our conversation – and I want to follow up on this – was how making art was really a gift to others. It is a way that we say, “Here, this is how the sandstorm hits me. I hope this is helpful to you.” In that, it’s really – in its best moments – an act of love. Often it looks like (and maybe is) an act of narcissistic self-love, but in the best of moments it’s a gift to others. Anyway, that’s how I hope it can be. And that’s what I want this project of mine to be.

DR: It is love none-the-less; but narcissism I think is a really a loathing because of the perceived lack of love. Longing and love and sadness (“sad” is way too small of a word), are not as quantifiable as data as is the location of your toilet or what date the Arena Chapel was completed. Maybe the impulse to make art is to both understand and to share your understanding. I don’t know, I have thought of the impulse to make art as a selfish thing in the past, and still sometimes do. I do think Van Gogh had his life and had such endurance and the results of his endurance (his paintings) are truly a gift. They help me sort my own (?) stuff. I would love to think the work I do in this way, that I’m helping and it is my intention to help, but I have a hard time getting there. Maybe intentionality is my sticking point with the idea that my art is a gift or a kindness or an act of love. Although, I don’t ‘intend’ to love my wife, Wendy, or Rowboat (my dog). I just do. I love the idea, but I will have to think more about art as an act of love. Maybe it’s that we add an agreeable bit of sand to the storm with every work of art we put out there.