WESTERN EXPANSION

Spatial Transgression as Relational Practice

The roads in America flow to places that function like new countries. Heavy white lines. Truck stops performing as landmarks. No matter what state you’re in there will be dozens of hollowed out mobile homes pushed back from the road, isolated but not always abandoned -  topographical iconography. There will be many unremarkable things, which isn’t the same as the sameness that you will also encounter. The roads through Texas are (to put it childlike) my favorite.

Romanticising the notion of vastness and the cars surrounding metal, aluminum and plastic forming layers of your own illusory Knowledge Project, where finally you become an Observer and it is only your job to make observations and the energy you gain from that kind of freedom - the sheer relief of Neutrality. So many pressureless hours. Oil rigs and highways where you can go unbelievably long stretches without passing another vehicle; both drivers looking, wondering what the other is doing out there. 

Enormous plains of cornmeal colored dust bleed dryly towards carcinogenic steel shafts that thrust themselves into the earth in a routine, missionary motion. Men with oil on their shirts, round stomached and rough skinned barrel past like live wires in their trucks; men whose job is to softly coax crude out of the arteries of the earth with thick bruised wrists and cratered necks. Lying to it, but before we notice, everything is potential.

It starts with a sound. The quick shuffle of feet moving heavy in a cattle line towards the wonderment, everyone vying and jockeying for their own selfie space. The air is choked with khaki shorts and bright white cotton socks to hide spotted legs. The black haired girl standing on the railing nearly topples over when the child bumps into her, right into the shallow pool of still, green water below. Maybe she’d hit the water and return home like Moses in a wicker basket.
Becoming an Observer is a form of living between various meanings of dialects. In-flux, or an influx, or the backwards moving shadow of a God-like ability to create and shift and arrange lives. An outsized effect. Susan Sontag wrote, “To photograph ... means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and therefore, like power.” The public self is performed through driving - this is important - but photographing involves the ability to create the performance of others.
 
The transition from medieval to Renaissance art was, at least in part, about man’s venery for this kind of knowledge. Suddenly, one’s own observations of the world meant something salient, no longer utterly subject to the world devised by God - but now a world that supplied bodily dominion and discernment without him. 

But your body is broken, it fails and falls into calamity. Here now is your new body: the car has been called democratizing, a brute force mechanism capable of carrying - no matter who is behind the wheel - any body to any place. But not only is this not true, it is in fact, the inverse; an atavism to Cortes, Jackson (Andrew), Moses (Robert, this time). A brute force mechanism capable of carrying any body across unfamiliar terrain, capable of propelling forward any such body that chooses to encroach upon new space. This car a knowledge machine, its external shell guiding you towards greater and greater potential; a spatial allowance to transcend subjective planes of wilderness. And now what can you do? How will you wield its power?

Then I’m back in my car in the dark like always, driving lazy circles around a parking lot in the middle of nowhere with no cell service. Returning to something elemental in the task of heaven building, like all those long histories of making knowledge that were and are, always, somehow, wrong.

The rotation of wheels, the materiality of concrete of potential potential potential,
forward please,
ahead please, again. Again, again.

At the Love’s Travel Plaza on I-20 west, a blot of yellow-red on a Texas late night navy, your hand on the curve of the handle but between the door and the pump, a nervous, shaking boy stands gesturing for you to open the window for him.
“Hey, Hey!”
You roll down, pulling out my headphones, “Hey, so. Hey. What are you are doing out here in a place like this in the middle of the night?”

He’s smiling, but you’re very conscious of the camera laid out on the dash, the laptop precariously tilted upward and buckled into the seat belt on the passenger side like my techno-mechanical child. He motions for you to come over to his trunk trying to sell me perfume, his car surrounded by his boys and you panic, putting the car in reverse to drive backwards through the nothingness 18 miles to the last truck stop, annoyed at you own feelings of unsettlement.

You want to feel tough in Texas (re: stoicism: a wholly different ritual form) but you’re back in that place where being smart feels shameful. Inside this vast nothingness you push yourself to permit and even enjoy discomfort - pushing the seat back at night, one hand clutching your phone. You sleep in the driver's seat ‘just in case,’ but you know if just in case ever happened you’d have no chance, no matter what seat you slept in.
The boy in his white tank top serves as a reminder of another you knew sometime in your past. The one with the tattoo in Old English across his pink and white spotted back, holding hands in parking lot, the pitbull with the chain around its neck, kissing on the bridge past curfew, setting your watch back, the ribbed white tank tops he wore (“wife beaters,” what we called them before we knew better). You had little in common save for your financial destitution and a mutual group of equally mismatched neighborhood friends.

You think of the fruitless attempts to retain ties to old lives you lived, those people you were, one foot still on the side of that chasm even as the gap grows increasing wide, even as you, yourself cause it to. When the boy in the white tank top posts videos of himself lip syncing to rappers from your old town, videos riding around the city with pills, guns, stacks of cash in the back seat, only ever hitting you up occasionally to ask if he can hold $20 despite the fact that you haven’t seen in each other in real time in nearly ten years, you feel both self-righteously satisfied and ashamed when you tell him you don’t have it either.

Hey, Hey, but what are you doing all the way out here in the middle of the night?

The problem with the Futurists (besides the fascism and the misogyny and the general barbarism masquerading as bravery) was the idea of glorifying both speed and objectivity. Machines on concrete require specific discipline because of their many false flags. When Moses traveled to Egypt it was on the wrecked faith the size of a toenail. For Marinetti, the faith-based assumption was that forward momentum could only be propelled by methodological destruction, whether intentional or as a progressive byproduct. 

Our knowledge machine provides us with a particular kind of performance as we careen down the road to make our public declaration. Becoming an audience itself is an act of spatial transgression, both temporal and physical in form. The intimacy of the space of the car and the possibilities of it’s architecture fuels the performative nature of our manifesto - our devotion to objects instead of spirits, yet mirroring the sanctification - making a declaration, making a negation, making a time-shifted genealogy or a new topographical landscape, the secular manifesto becoming its own sacred text. 

And what can it tell us about redemption (if in fact, this is even a possibility) of the sin of the original audience manifesting our destinies? 

The artist and writer Renee Green has deemed these types of negotiations as “the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, whose trajectories now intersect.” 

“Sometimes,” she said, “it's necessary to move outside of the world one seems designated to inhabit in order to gain another perspective about what one is doing. A ”second language,” or possibly even more, is needed to enable a rethinking of established notions.” So, then, with our new second language of piston hum, pastoral lens and languid democracy, how shall we function as the New Observer - the Observer who occupies the realm of both subject and object, are we salvation, redemption, some kind of different freedom?
Or perhaps, maybe simply the same problem wrapped in new skin. 

Well, which is it?

I pick at the hairs on my leg, one propped up against the steering wheel, the other nearly out the window in a type of vehicular yoga. Here’s all I really want - to be rid of the complicated array of restraints my own mortality places on me. Isn’t that what neutrality really is? Isn’t that what the lack of it takes away? What I’m actually doing is collecting paper cups of coffee from the nearest truck stops after I’ve woken up from their parking lots every morning; the least I can do is contribute towards the rent. I enjoy the sigh of rural places, mountains and empty sky, but still I have never been as keen on camping as I am to spend 90 nights in a row sleeping in a rotating set of parking lots. My own concrete wilderness. 

We are people, not always rational, but there is nature taking us in anyway. The insects crawl across the glass, the tall poles stay steady, holding the night up with their electric spotlights. Everyone who desires to be neutral comes in and out of the gas station. 

This American knowledge project began with bodies laid out on the pavement: wagon, railroad, concrete, lens - from east to west. And now it is our profane destiny, our inexorable duty, our peculiar virtue to ensure that eidolon becomes realized. A cognate biography. 

This machine brings knowledge, and simultaneously, neutrality. The chance, suspended in time, suspended of being, to occupy all of yourselves equally, all at once. A suspension of being, if by nothing else the fallacious and categorical act of driving. Even perhaps, a chance to transcend guilt. The magic of being nothing. Schrodinger would be proud. 

There are, as Kara Walker observed, many “ways in which mythologies are used to justify themselves. But even attempts at objective observation are still informed by your own subjectivity.” And yet, there’s something about being vulnerable like that; closing your eyes in the parking lot, baring your body to the stoic beauty of the dirt stretching out into infinity and the bright round moon and having them look back down upon you placidly, indifferent about what happens to you in the night. And finally, you earn the privilege to contend with your own mortality. 



Finally, objectivity.