A Time and A Place

Schrödinger's experiential art

Author

Jesse Raub
September 23, 2024

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Other writing:

If an art falls in the forest, and no one is there to see it

Carvaggio’s “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” 1602

I use, as a bookmark, a slip of old-fashioned Japanese receipt paper. It’s a reminder that, no matter where I am and what I’m reading, a bigger world still exists. That everything is placed in a context of when and where, and that the power and pain of an imaginary world has its limits. I know exactly when and where I bought that receipt paper. It came in a booklet, a simple dark blue cloth binding along the top edge, that I picked up at a stationary store in Tokyo. The store is located in the Spiral building in Aoyama, just a few floors above a tea shop I always visit when I go. The tea shop wasn’t able to seat us, but agreed that we could come back in 30 minutes if we wanted to wait. While waiting, we went upstairs to the stationary store. While at the stationary store, I picked up this small booklet. Its pages are a blueish teal. Its binding, like I mentioned, is a bonded blue cloth along the top edge, forming a spine holding each slip in with a small strip of adhesive.

Each slip has writing in Japanese that I can’t read, along with an open rectangle in the middle and open space below. “It’s receipt paper,” my brother explained when I showed it to him later. Japan, for all of America’s perception as a high tech country, is still very much analog in many places. When you go to a small shop, one that’s been around for decades (rarely longer than that, due to the American bombing of World War II and a long history of earthquakes), you might be asked to pay cash. When you do, the shopkeeper might pull out a receipt booklet and write out what you purchased and for how much.

It’s not common—don’t get the wrong idea. The last two trips I’ve been to Japan have been mostly driven by my credit card slotting perfectly into the chip reader. My booklet of receipt paper is a relic, but it’s not one completely devoid of modern use. I, for one, use it every time I reach for a new book on our bookshelf.

I have a process: I pick a book (like, say, Exhibit by R.O. Kwon, which I finished this morning), and then I walk into my office and peel off a fresh slip of receipt paper to mark my progress between the pages. When I finish a book, I leave the paper. It’s a record that I have, indeed, been present in the life of the book, specifically this book, the one I am holding, and that the next book I read will have its own life and own marker. If I was smarter or more sentimental, maybe I would write my name and when I read the book. I could mark time this way in my life, month by month, by how long it took me to finish everything I read and how long between books I spent time floundering around on the couch, unsure of how to live in art.

Maybe it’s just that I can’t read the receipt paper so I’m not sure which part should get the date and which part should get my name.

I have a habit of losing myself in fiction. Of feeling the world too strongly at times. When it gets to be too much, my fingertips pluck the teal slip from the back and place it where I paused. I look around me; I take in my surroundings. I remember what it was like to buy the receipt paper booklet with my credit card just before I walked downstairs to have tea. I open the book again.

We like to think that art is forever, that a painting on the wall of a museum that’s been there for four hundred years will continue to exist for four hundred more, but in reality, the art doesn’t exist if you’re not existing with it. When I wandered through the Uffizi Galleries last week trying to stumble my way to the Carvaggio room, I casually brushed past statues chiseled out a thousand years ago. A thousand. And in that time, some were buried, locked in old chambers, covered up in collections. The carved marble figure of a man can both exist in a space and not exist, to us, which brings about odd questions of consciousness and what we experience and how we can experience it if we’re not there to bear witness. Will Earth exist when humans are gone? What does that say of the consciousness of trees and rabbits? What’s a painting to a pig in a field?

Art, as we try to define it, is simply an expression of some form of humanity. An attempt to capture something that otherwise would be boiling inside of us. It’s a way to bridge the understanding between two people: the person who made it and the person experiencing it. In that definition, art can’t exist if there’s no one experiencing it.

I experienced art in Florence. Carvaggio’s “The Sacrifice of Issac” kicked me in the stomach. The use of shadow, the intense diagonal line of the angel through Abraham’s arm, bisecting the canvas with action. It was good, to me, to experience this art even though it meant spending hours in lines and wandering through rooms full of framed pieces that made me feel nothing. For a brief period, however, I knew exactly how Carvaggio wanted me to feel, 400 years later.

With Exhibit, I can guess that I felt exactly what R.O. Kwon wanted me to feel. The story follows a woman haunted by religious guilt and how it affects her relationship to her devout mother, her devout in a different way husband, and the ballet dancer she meets at a party. I’ve never been haunted by ghosts who were involved with my Korean ancestors; I’ve never been introduced to BDSM by an injured dancer, and none of that matters. In the story, in me reading the story, I live inside the emotions of Jin and her struggles to balance how she feels towards a husband who is compatible in every way except the ones he is not. I purchased the book from my local bookstore, the one just across the street from my house and next to the vet clinic where I bring my dog. It’s a signed copy. Here’s To Us, says the inscription from the author.

The power of the story comes through how it was written, and how it was written is what pulls you into its pages. Jin pens endless letters to a God she no longer believes in and revisits them as things are falling apart. The text, however, is written to Phillip, her husband, at times. Even in telling her story, her life, Jin needs a witness. She is a photographer, after all, and her biggest breakthrough comes from a series of self-portraits documenting the aftermath of her sessions with Lidija, the dancer.

When the pages became too heavy to turn, I would pause my reading. Against my fingers, the slip of Japanese receipt paper feels weightless. I’m there in my front room, looking at a wall of bird portraits and hanging plants. I’m in Tokyo, waiting for tea. I’m staring up at a wall at a mostly black canvas. I’m in Marin County, at a friend of a friend’s mansion, having a hot knife tip pressed against my wrist.

Jin, Lidija, and Phillip all live the same lives on the same pages of each book printed until someone new reads the lines and finds the spaces in which they become entwined in the fiction. In that moment, the fiction becomes a new truth, one that’s lived out by each new reader as they step forward into a life imagined for them. A life imagined that they can experience.

No art, in that way, is ever the same twice. It’s an experience for each person to live in and make their own, the interpretation of each piece reliving and reviving new and terrifying ways of existing. I’ll never see “The Sacrifice of Isaac” the same way again. Exhibit will be different the next time I read it. Art is forever a conversation, but only in the moments that you are actively engaging with it. That is to say, art creates new meaning only when experienced by an audience.

Here’s to us.

Read

If the above wasn’t enough, then here’s more about why you should read it. Kwon’s prose is stilted, poetic, and jostled. Told from Jin’s perspective, the story unwinds in the way someone tries to recall their own history: brief flashes of an image embroiled in twisted emotion and an attempt to understand one’s self. That alone makes Exhibit a masterpiece: it’s a story told the way we tell stories, and in doing so, tells the reader more about the narrator in the things that are unsaid. Exhibit is about discovery, and it’s a way to dig through to find your own process.

Watch

Fury Road was always going to be an impossible act to follow. It delivered exactly what people needed at a time they didn’t know they needed it. It was a movie dedicated to frenetic action and a simple story of survival and telling that story through that action in the most practical and tactile way possible. Furiosa isn’t that: it’s an actual movie. It has a narrative, and that narrative is one people don’t want to be challenged by. In Furiosa, the action is staggering because of how it builds into the story itself. People have been mixed or middling on this movie: they’re flat-out wrong. It’s a triumph.

Listen

I’ll probably write an entire newsletter about this album but it’s the only release of this year I’ve been listening to nonstop. An anxiety-ridden, mechanical and efficient experimental version of rock and roll twisted through repetition and hints of dance music. Just genuinely inspired and truly unlike anything.

Consume

In and around Florence, the best things I ate were the sandwiches. And those sandwiches come on schiacciata, a thinner, crispier, and chewier version of focaccia. It’s easy to make if you do any amount of bread baking, and slicing it in half gives you a perfect and thin canvas for all types of cured or roasted pork, cheese, herbs, or whatever else you want to improvise.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.