Desire From Down Here

“The reason why you make a work of art, if it’s a true work of art, is that it’s a proposal of some sort, a proposal for a way to see, a proposal for a way something might be structured. It is a proposal for a way for your mind to respond to your eye –– If the work of art is successful, if it penetrates, it becomes part of the world and is absorbed. Then it’s no longer a proposal, it’s a reality. A fact.”

 – Michael Heizer, 1984

I’ve always had an outsized fear of driving, but when I was called back for a seasonal guide position at a little-known contemporary art museum called Glenstone tucked away in the suburbs of Maryland, I was compelled to face my fear. It was never the driving that deterred me, more so the possibility of getting lost. Like a misaligned compass, my own sense of direction often betrays me; the magnetic pull to take a right turn or keep going straight often lands me at an opposing pole of my original destination. Even so, my callback from Glenstone was a break in the clouds I’d been searching for. I was resolved to overcome my fear if it meant being in the presence of some of the most revelatory works of our time.

The role of guides at the museum is to facilitate the experience of Glenstone’s core values, which are anchored in the belief that art is essential to life. In the realm of museums where verbose gallery text inundates museum-goers, Glenstone’s approach is simpler. Each artwork is accompanied only by the title, artist's name, materials, and the year it was conceived. Any additional insight can be accessed through interaction with guides. Glenstone’s model of direct engagement with each work of art creates a space for personal reflection and revelation, a rare affordance in the context of everyday life crowding in.

Over the course of a month-long training, we had time assigned to read about the different artists and their works in the museum library, which housed a rich repository of artist monographs, catalogs of arts magazines, and pocket-book-sized crash courses in art movements from Gutai to Arte Povera and more. In my mind, getting paid twenty dollars an hour to make a ninety-minute round-trip commute every weekend in exchange for a crash course in art history of post-WWII art and artists was worth it.

Before working on the floor, we shadowed more senior guides to get a better sense of how we could facilitate meaningful encounters between visitors and the works of art. McKinley and Tia gave us an epic backstage tour of Glenstone, including the empty spaces in transition where we could see the marks on the wall where works had been hanging previously. They were brilliant and generous in their insights, but also shared their real take on challenges: “It can be overwhelming to stand in the room with certain works,” Tia started, “and sometimes it’s not all good. There are some artists you’ll be drawn to and others that don’t speak to you; you may even struggle to be in the same space with them. Always take care of yourself first,” they offered.

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When I started making the forty-five-minute trip both ways, I adjusted my seat to be as close to the steering wheel as possible. I played only instrumental music so as to not get distracted, and gripped the steering wheel tightly. I’d even considered getting a “first-time driver” bumper sticker, to be given grace for any slowness or unsavory choices I made on the road.

My first day of training coincided with a torrential downpour. I left early and drove slowly through the flooded pools of water flanking the road’s edges. I stayed vigilant with my glasses pushed far up the bridge of my nose and my body rigid in fear of hydroplaning and losing all traction.

I made it to my first day of training with no incident, but peeled off and took the wrong highway on the way home. Being on a six-lane highway at end-of-day DC rush hour was far outside my comfort zone, and my panicked brake work upended the contents of my unzipped backpack to the floorboard. Cursing aloud in the moment, I wondered why I was giving myself such a hard time. Was it really worth grinding out a lifelong fear of mine to take on the job?

Hanging up the keys at the doorway, I arrived home to a bouquet of sunflowers on the kitchen counter and a note from my husband: “For the sexiest Suzuki-driving docent around. No matter what you do, follow the sun! I believe in you.” I tucked the note in the pocket of my museum uniform, resolved to try again the next day.

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I didn’t grasp what Tia and McKinley had meant until standing in a room of Félix González-Torres[4] [MW5] ’ works. Situated at the corner of the gallery, a pile of specially made blue and white spiral candies wrapped in clear plastic collects up against the wall next to the gallery text naming the work: Untitled (Lover Boys). Under the title is the artist’s specification for the pile of candy, “Ideal weight: 355 lb”, which was the combined weight of the artist and his partner. The year Torres was completing the work, he was losing his partner to AIDS. Visitors are welcome to take a piece from the pile as they walk out, and the combined weight of all the candies gradually dwindles after a busy day at the museum. The act of giving oneself away in the very midst of unfinished grief felt like a chest-opening gesture of undeserved generosity. The twin capacity for love and loss overpowered all my faculties to the point of tears, a sudden breaking open.

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What I was most surprised by was how the works occupied my imaginal subconscious as I went about my days and weeks. Images flooded my mindscreen whenever I closed my eyes: the first few minutes before falling asleep, meditating, making love. Following my first week on the museum floor, Michael Heizer’s Compression Line flashed in my mind’s eye in afterimage as I was reaching climax – the point at which the narrow-lined steel cavity converges at the center against a backdrop of blue sky and green grove of trees.

It wasn’t rare for an image to flash up for me like that – during sex, I was only fully sensate and able to access pleasure with my eyes closed. Words and visuals of physical flesh often felt like a peripheral distraction . My mind would travel through my subconscious and yield back some allusion to an embodied sensation, different images far from our sex. I would be washing dishes when I’d notice the buds of my poinsettia plant sitting on the ledge secreting slick nectar. On a visit to the aquarium, I’d lose track of time visiting an octopus behind two-inch plexiglass, watching its delicate capillaries pulse open and close. Walking through the forest, I encountered unevenly swelling tree burl tumors, wanting something more from elsewhere they didn’t have within. A carousel of images like these engulfed my mind’s eye as I was close to reaching an impossible pleasure. My consummation is always a work in progress, my eyes shut tight wrangling a montage of every flower, every animal in want, multiplying my own.

Of all the works to flash up in my mind, it was curious to me that Heizer’s Compression Line would appear. I didn’t know much about it, except that my fellow guides shared distaste towards the artist himself. Heizer’s reputation as an arrogant asshole and his failure to recognize the historical and ecological context to large swathes of ancestral indigenous land he created his land art on was all I’d known. Even so, the unlikeliness of steel touching steel seemed to be my mind’s fixation. I followed my fixation like a clue.

Installation view of Michael Heizer, “Compression Line”, 1968/2016 (image courtesy of glenstone.org)

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Vigilance is a posture we ordinarily relinquish when in the company of friends. Otherwise, unfamiliar circumstances, people and surroundings warrant an alertness, staying on guard; but the familiarity of a favorite song, dear friend, or well-traveled road opens us up to ourselves.

My memory of one night fifteen years ago, or the absence of memory, is something I’ve been trying to open myself up to.

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INT. Off-campus apartment – NIGHT

Dimly lit living room of an apartment. In the room are familiar friends and less-familiar friends of friends, people SUSAN met on an alternative spring break trip volunteering at food banks.

DISSOLVE TO

SUSAN sitting on a tan couch, wearing a black dress with a sweetheart neckline and repeating squirrel prints across the fabric. In her hand is her first and only glass of wine of that night.

CUT TO TOTAL DARKNESS

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Vigil, vigilant, vigilante[18] [19]  all stem from the idea of keeping watch at night. Whether holding vigil by a patient’s bedside in their final days, a candlelight vigil in reverence of a loved one’s passing, or staying awake, alert and on guard to ward off potential threats, a trace of sacredness and violation exist all within the realm of the root word. 

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CUT TO

SUSAN awake again –– in a dark basement, disoriented. Feeling around, she finds the head and hair of another sharing the same bed. When SUSAN asks what happened, FRIEND OF A FRIEND responds: “I thought it was consensual”.

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It’s the hours of dark screen, the void of that night, that I try to piece together, traveling back in time. No matter how watchful, prayerful, or alert I am now, the night remains unwatched. An unresolved dark spot of memory where I hold vigil at the bedside of my earlier selves.

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INT. MOVING CAR – LATE MORNING

Inside a wood-sided Oldsmobile-type car, they sit in silence. SUSAN in the passenger seat, sitting with a hollow knot at the pit of her stomach, stares out the window. FRIEND OF A FRIEND turns off onto the main campus road toward dormitory drop-offs. The only sound: hot summer air blowing through rolled-down windows. 

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Several months in, my drive home looked different than when I’d first begun. I dialed up Janet’s “That's the Way Love Goes” at the end of a workday, windows rolled down, body loose. Feeling the breeze graze my face and dips in the road sent my stomach aflutter, in a good way. At some point, I began to feel embraced by the road I was traveling, knowing it intimately. My drives to and from work made the switch from second-guessing my own directional intuition to recognizing visual markers guiding my path like old friends. Dropping down into a deeper register of the body, I was sensate to the nature around me, without fear of getting lost. A momentary letting go of my own body’s rigidity and learned hypervigilance.

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My relationship to desire is like magnets repelling to the opposite ends of a box – on the other side of desire, disaster feeling like an inevitability. Like a compass whose needle spins out, I question the very magnetic field I exist within, struggling against myself to find my true poles. I am always most comfortable when I can exist on the outskirts of my desire because it always seemed to cost too much, too much at stake. I’ve lived afraid to allow myself to want, living under the premise that I wouldn’t ever get to live the life I want, a line diving down the asymptote of my every decade without ever meeting or crossing the axis line. I was always more comfortable with my life as a curve approaching infinity.

For any body that has been the site of wreckage, desire can feel dangerous: life-threatening, a banishment from your own divinity, a crossed wire confusing pleasure and shame, a lifetime of perpetual estrangement on some remote island of the body and mind.

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Perhaps it is neither possible nor advisable to be fully rid of one's own vigilance. But to reclaim desire, what if what we needed was to be truly beheld by another––even if that other is our very own selves? To know what it is to have someone keep vigil at your bedside regardless of the hour, willing to see you through your night of unwatched darkness?

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I came to the museum while it was in a state of transition. Glenstone’s largest space holding collections was temporarily closed for renovations. During this time, works on display were taken underground to be stored in the archives for a year. Walking through spaces of transition afforded me a rare, behind-the-curtain view into what goes into staging works that would eventually be seen by the public eye: how an Ellsworth Kelly field of color could stand impossibly tilted, barely touching the ground at a single point. Tiny holes in the wall that bore the weight of triptych canvases painted by On Kawara. In the absence of artworks along the walls, the markings left behind at each installation site gave clues for how such possibility-defying works could be put on display and sustained over time.

What I hadn’t quite registered was that I was also tracing empty spaces within myself where I had once been. The questions I wanted to ask of each transition space mirrored the questions I’d been trying to untangle for myself over several years time: how does the work exist differently in the world when in archival memory, unwatched? What is omitted from my seeing, outside the frame, between the walls, or the ground below it? What does it take for the work to appear as it does on display? How can it possibly sustain over time?

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Proposing new ways of seeing and insisting on their reality is transgressive as much as it is aggressive. Heizer used words like intrusion, assault, scar to describe his works, though you wouldn’t know all the tension and violence existing under Compression Line just by looking at it. I didn’t mean to write about the liberatory possibilities of pleasure, but I did mean to look underground. I wanted to understand the site of the scar, of assault, of intrusion.

Overlooking Compression Line eight years after its installation, it’s deceivingly simple – the earth opening up along pristine, clean lines, touching with such precision at the center of red-hued sedimentary rock. But the making was a repetitive process toward a possibility-defying outcome; and not without violence. In Heizer’s words: “The action is underground. It’s like I took a razor and opened up the earth.”

Compression Line was a fraught project to begin with. The entire body of the 75-foot-long, 10-feet-deep parallel-sided steel trapezoid is interred underground. Packed on either side with constant pressure from the weight of the earth, the measurements of the rectangular steel siding are engineered to cave in to touch at a common midpoint. To pull it off would be a feat of physics, vulnerable to the speed, wetness or dryness, and evenness of the soil being put down and compressed into the ground. The unseen force underground is what makes the conditions possible for the artist’s vision to be realized.

Throughout the three-day installation, the possibility of the steel structure buckling under all the earth’s friction created an atmosphere of pins and needles for everyone on the build site. Engineers walked off the job based on the impossible physics required to realize Heizer’s vision. But by the third evening of Compression Line’s installation came a surprise: the installation crew describes being overtaken by emotion at the unlikely moment the two walls moved just enough to touch. There at surface midpoint, several millimeters converged just enough for a small kiss; a work of art defying all rational outcomes.

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Pacing in the presence of these artworks, they offer me back an alternate way of seeing. In ways I have been ill-equipped to face the wreckage on my own, my half year of encountering works of art on Glenstone’s grounds dislodged what Rainer Maria Rilke would describe as the images imprisoned within. These images help me to stay with the trouble in ways I wouldn’t be able to if I was confined to looking directly at it, offering a third site beyond the boundaries of my own body, a zone to recover debris.

Image is where I find a truth that resounds, unencumbered by logic. From the image, I find courage to carry through to another side. Faith is fraught for a person like me, needing assurances, certainty of safety–but following images and shapes I see catalogued in my mind, my body reopens again to possibility.

In many ways, writing this is a proposal that maybe I can have a different relationship to desire than I’ve come to believe––one where I am not eternally pining up the spine of desire, but some unlikely promise that there is room for possibility of what I want. That what I want is not just possible, but inevitable.

What I propose is a counter-act of transgression: not stopping at the seeming simplicity and beauty of a small kiss at the surface, but a reclamation of damage as inextricable from the underground tunnels of my desire. Some kind of dead-center certainty of my own unchangeable worth that only a pain and a past like mine could arrive at. A razor-cut into the earth becoming a scar, a stitch that becomes a site of transformation; an aberration with its own capacity to reach toward a side unseen and cross itself, making more room for others like it.

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By May, the sideways rain and whipping winds of spring unfurled to ivy, honeysuckle and greenbrier vining every bridge, electrical pole, and underpass on my drive to the museum. Any verdant overgrowth within the panorama of my windshield saturated my line of sight, my eyes craving all the green they could see.

By the end of my time at Glenstone, my first panicked commute home transformed into a portal. In those forty-five minutes driving home, I traveled the images collecting in my mind’s eye with windows open. Hot summer air fragrant with night flowers came rushing in, easing the knots and rigidity I carried in my body anytime I stepped into the car. It was not a portal of easy serenity, but a dark passage to sit alongside my fear of getting lost, losing traction, and unreliable sense of direction, all accompanying me in the passenger seat. Somewhere in the six months as I passaged through green portals and underground tunnels, I was creating the capacity for something new; a remapping of my own magnetic fields of desire.

From the recessed hollow underground, my desire reaches up toward the shaft of light coming down from above. It’s not the unlikely kissing point between steel at the surface that bears witness to my desire, as it is the conditions under it which make the miraculous possible. A proposal towards a new reality. There, deep down at the marrow-center of the underworld is where I find desire begins.

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SUSAN MOON is a Korean-American poet writing at the intersections of language, art and mythology. She has written for several publications, including Hobart, Cream City Review and Honey Literary. More information can be found @smoon1211.

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