Response to and Exploration of...

 

“Savaging the Sea #20,” 2020. - Nina Katchadourian and Catharine Clark Gallery

Rob Walker's Art of Noticing newsletter turned me on to this art project that focuses on a multi-week meditation on a single subject.  It is a "response to and exploration of" a "fascination" or "obsession" of an artist.  It reminds me at once of a religious contemplation ("40 days contemplating the stations of the cross..") and it reminds me of IFS (or other psychotherapy) that tries to revisit sticking places in memory, not to excise them, but to explore them.  

And the repeated nature of it makes it feel like an archeological dig.  What happens when you contemplate (and "respond to or explore") something for 3 days?  15 days?  What comes up -- what buried, antediluvian rotten thing (or shining thing?!) -- is excavated after 38 days?  (which seems very close to the 40 days of Lent)

To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World,” is a Nina Katchadourian's gallery show that was inspired by the artist’s obsession with a book called Survive The Savage Sea, an account of a family that survived 38 days in small lifeboat on the Pacific, after their vessel was destroyed by Orcas. This book was read to her as a child in the 1970s, and evidently she never got over it, re-reading the text year after year. You can see a short “orientation” video here.

I watched a video of a Zoom-event gallery walk-through, in which Katchadourian shows and talks about the work she’d made about the book. To create the show, she spent 38 straight days making visual, audio, and video responses to and explorations of the family’s harrowing experience and ultimate survival. In the process, she spoke daily to Douglas Robertson, one of the family members (he was 18 at the time of the incident) who later wrote his own account. You can see the whole walk-through, and Katchadourian and Robertson in conversation, here.  More details about the show and project in this New York Times article  

To consider a scaled-down example of what I mean, this is why the best installments of The New York Times Magazine’s Letter of Recommendation series are the weirdest ones — I’m not particularly interested in semicolons, or collecting old issues of Sassy, or Arby’s. But I’m interested in hearing from someone who is genuinely passionate about those subjects.