Is dispersed art a thing?
Before diving into this new round of mailing haiku to randomly selected people, many of whom are strangers from the internet, I organized the photos of the 1,001 postcards I sent out in the first round, back in 2012-2014 (and which can be viewed here).
Seeing all the photos together — so many images, so many haiku, so much accidental documentation of my life — was kind of overwhelming. But what hit me the hardest was the realization that the electronic records are all I have. The actual work — the art, the artifact, the physical handwritten postcards — are all out there, have all been scattered upon the waters.
Except for the documentation I have of the project -- photos and scans plus the texts of the haiku and the list of recipients -- it doesn't really exist.
Or does it?
So help me out. Is there a name for art like this, where a singular object is essentially composed of hundreds of parts which have been distributed whimsically into the hands of involuntary caretakers around the world?
Does such a project exist as a singular art object even in its atomized form?
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Meanwhile, here are this week’s haiku, and where they were scattered.
haiku 20220822 > Athens, Greece
weekend getaway we pretend not to notice the gnats
haiku 20220823 > Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD USA
jar after jar filled with nuts and screws I've become my father
haiku 20220824 > San Francisco, CA USA
spreckels lake tai chi cultivating the tao among the geese
haiku 20220825 > San Francisco, CA USA
hitchhiking fly what makes you think I'm going your way?
haiku 20220826 > Allendale, NJ USA (my hometown)
it must be friday the crash of the garbage truck dumping our bins
haiku 20220827 > London, United Kingdom
old metro transfer marking a page in a book must have been my stop
haiku 20220828 > Moncton, New Brunswick Canada
old metro transfer marking a page in a book must have been my stop
Whew! Another week, another seven haiku. How much longer can I keep this up? Subscribe and find out!
Meanwhile, I gotta get down to the haiku mine! That’s where I mainly spend my time!
I'm guessing you're familiar with the 1000 journals project? (If not, go asap: https://someguy.is/1000-Journals-Project )
This documentary inspired a (far more modest) project for me in 2009. I couldn't afford to travel, so I decorated the covers of 20 blank journals and passed them along to creative friends & family, with instructions to reflect and add a note, poem, drawing, artifact --whatever their preferred medium might be-- to describe their "happy place", then hand the journal off to someone else they thought would appreciate the process. The idea was, these journals got to "travel" on my behalf down a chain of random links, eventually coming back to me full of joyful, surprising, enlightening, and grateful perspectives. Ahhh, the anticipation...
Only, most never returned. I begged for years, but lost all but 5 or 6 journals, (two of which were handed back empty, and I got the others only because the users didn't follow the instructions.) It tortured me for a long while, knowing that the fantastic entries of talented friends would remain buried and forgotten under someone else's junk pile.
You might consider it a blessing, then, to know that your selfless little birds are appreciated wherever they land, without the sting of unrequited material returns.
And hell yeah, it's art. :)
-Jenny