cloud seeding sounds wonderful. funny like stem cells. will you call up puppy dogs and the mustaches of cartoon characters? i would love to do some lawn poems on medians. that is a perfect spot. it is very labor intensive and slightly expensive though. this summer installing the lawn poem in wisconsin was one of the most gorgeous times i have had. i had to work fast (one week) and all but two days i worked on my own. stenciling the field with flour and digging out letters. precision and muscle spf 45 and still as tan as can be. when all the letters were dug out i took the gallerist’s truck deep into farm land to pick up the sod. i got so lost i had to flag down a farmer in his field on a tractor—there was no one to ask. i was at the corner of rt. q and rt. q. i was late and friends were heading up to help with the final steps—cutting and laying the sod. when i got to the sod farm they let me come out with them as they ‘harvested’. it was the most beautiful thing i have seen. acres and acres of thick green short chemically muscled sod being scooped up by an ingenious machine. grass is just terrible as a plant—roots too short to exist without additional watering and strains too vulnerable to every disease so chronically reliant on pesticides but i have the fondest fond spot in my heart for the sight and feel of it. a weakness. where did this come from? the love of lawns? perhaps the mansions in southampton where i would accompany my mother to work as a child. or just the green. anyway i filled the truck with rolls and rolls of sod and headed back to the exhibition space. the last song on the classic rock sated radio waves as i neared the field was sabbath’s hole in the sky which i turned up up up and then, odd miracle, saw my friends crossing the street about a mile away from the site. they were a motley crew against the fields and felt like the cavalry arrived to save the day with funny colors and awkward shorts. they road on top of the sod the last bit to the field and we worked for the next 7 hours. there is a lot to be said about audience. or there is a lot i think about in terms of audience when making films or writing. my film dogs is partially a treatise on my want and need for an audience. (spike says “i think it’s always conversational to me. i am always aware that i am trying to say something to someone and that someone is always my dream viewer. i mean, like the most sensitive, funny, aware audience i can imagine.”) in this way it is also a blueprint of the audience i most want. i want super receptors and i imagine they are there. in my film total power: dead dead dead the film asks the audience to repeat phrases like “i will die and my body will cease to move. there is much i want. i love you.” so in this instance i am very directly addressing the audience—imploring them to help complete the piece. how about you? where is your reader? love, stephanie
i don’t know what it says about our desire to **get shit done*** or ***fuck shit up*** (as a generation or as persons or as artists—or as artist persons of a certain generation, which we certainly are) to transpose the term intussusception onto our practice or our ills, though it does seem apt to think of our difficulty as one of having the telescope partway closed when what we need is for it to be extended open as far as possible, to provide the broadest and most distant, most telescopic perspective. or perhaps it’s not distant perspective we need, but more real local interactions on the ground—as your lawn poems are literally on the ground or in the
| 217