Reconstructing One's Life
There's the idea that we are familiar with our lives. I don't think that's actually the case. We are only familiar with what we're familiar with -- everything else has simply disappeared from our lives. This is hardly an original observation. But there's great potential for creativity in it.
Of course, we usually do not want to creative with our lives (even though the propaganda we put out on social media is nothing other than a creative selection and re-purposing of aspects of our lives). We want to know our own history because for better or worse we define ourselves through it. The uncanniest moments in our lives happen when we are made to know about something that we cannot remember. It is as if a small part of our lives had been hijacked, and we find out that we are in fact not exactly who we thought we were.
Today, I noticed this towel. I had hung it up to dry after it had got drenched in yesterday's thunderstorms. Before, it had served as padding inside the little outdoor enclosure that one of the cats likes to sit it. The towel very clearly is mine. What are the odds of finding a towel that is made to look like a 100 Deutsche Mark bill in the US? OK, it is conceivable that you could find one in a thrift shop. But for sure, the last thing I'd buy in such a shop is a used towel.
In fact, I think I remember that I received this towel. I remember that it had been a gift from my grandmother, my father's mother and the sole grandparent I met in my life time (all the others had been dead for years before I was born). I also seem to remember that I received it through my mother.
But the more "facts" I seem to remember, the less certain I am that they are correct. Did my mother in fact make a snide passive-aggressive comment about either the gift or my grandmother when she handed me the towel? I think she did. But when I'm honest, I don't know for sure. It would have been in character (I grew up in very passive-aggressive family settings, which has fucked up my life to this date). But I'm not certain.
I also don't remember why I would have kept the towel, given that it's incredibly tacky. Who thinks it's a good idea to put an image of money on a towel? Who thinks it's a good idea to buy such a towel and to gift it to someone (my grandmother, but again, this is more in character than remembered)? And what weirdo then keeps the towel, even though they think it's the tackiest shit? Well, this weirdo apparently.
The more I think about it, the more my recollections become less that, actual recollections of events of things I remember, and more a reconstruction of something that is based on what I know for sure. What I know for sure isn't actually only knowledge. Instead, it's judgment more than anything. Maybe I kept the towel because it expressed a kind of judgment that I have constructed parts of my life around?
It's possible.
Things get truly interesting when photographs enter the world of that towel. I don't mean photographs of towels, but photographs as objects, made and owned by people. This is a story that plays out time and again, and often its most manic episodes happen in the country at whose core sits the belief that money matters more than anything, the United States.
New Yorker magazine just published an article about Disfarmer, and you absolutely want to find the time to read it. There are many staggering details in the article. Long story short, a country photographer gets posthumously discovered, first by chance and then by whatever this is called when the art-world vultures descend. The next obvious step is then for the equivalent of ambulance chasers to enter the fray. On Twitter, Bryan Formhals wryly described the story as being filled with "intrigue, mystery, grifters, lawyers, curators and long lost relatives", and that just sums it up so well.
When I went back to the unfinished draft of this email today, I tried remembering when I had started it. I was unable to. The mention of the thunderstorms didn't help. When it didn't rain yesterday (or was it the day before) that felt weird. Ever since the last heat waved passed, it has been raining. It feels like a very warm early October. It's so depressing.
As always thank you for reading (and looking)!
-- Jörg