How to be alone
“No man is an island” — John Donne
Seeing (but not meeting) US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton up close during her recent trip to Manila, one thing struck me: she is one attractive gal. I mean, not to sound like a sexist porcine, girth-challenged utterly celibate column writer, but man, she did have that kind of appeal. Sex, I mean. (Hey, Bill didn’t only let her do his homework — they did manage to find time between physics and home economics to build Chelsea, their daughter.) In an attempt to assuage the demands of a possible cougar fetish with the former First Lady (just like that unfortunate construction worker who had such a crush on her he died of a heart attack during her first visit as US First Lady in 1994) I trawled the interwebs to see if such a disturbing yet not entirely alien perversity had taken root in my character. But finding no hot pics of her in my Google image search, my ardor detumesced only slightly. So I did the next best thing. I read her book.
It apparently took 15 women (and one man) to write Hillary Rodham Clinton’s treatise on raising children, It Takes A Village. With this in mind, it’s cooled our desire (if there was any at all) upon reading her safe as milk prose (and we’re not talking Captain Beefheart here). It’s as inoffensive as a press release and, as Martin Amis pointed out in his review of the book, no one would bother reviewing it as a work of literature (even under that oxymoronic genre “self-help” at that) nor would read anyone it if they didn’t need to. (Like book reviewers or bored housewives). Basically what the book says is this (Ta-dah!): We are all responsible for our children — society that is. Wow. Roll over, Beethoven.
Somewhere between getting useful marriage or companionship advice like, “Brisk walking, hiking and bicycling are all good exercise and are great ways to spend together,” or great parental anecdotes like, “From the time (Chelsea) was a baby, Bill and I took turns in reading to her and praying with her,” I kinda remembered why I wasn’t as giddy about her apparent arrival as somebody perhaps like Sen. Loren Legarda would be, phoning everyone or anyone just to get a photo-op with Mrs. Clinton. (Or an “audience,” as they put it; climate change is happening and we women can stop it if we band together!) As you can glean, this is potent stuff. And yes, it is banal. The crush is gone. And all the photographs or footage cannot help us recover our enthusiasm. Not even another trawl through obviously faked naked pictures of her. Maybe sometimes it’s best no one takes photographs of the object of your seeming affection at all. That might keep the music playing; maybe that’s how you make it last.
Tammy David’s photo-series “It Takes An Island” is the antithesis of this. Rather than taking the rest of us (i.e. society) to task for not looking hard enough and seeing their self-importance, she’s taken self-portraits to document a life that actually enjoys the solitary pleasure of its own company. Flawed and raw, as much as Clinton is dull and inoffensive, the photographs also celebrate the banal — but rather its incorporation into the tedium that stitches together the fabric of our lives.
David doesn’t take pictures of herself. She is not fond of pictures of herself, she admits. Yet she presents her intimate self in these photographs: a life lived in ordinary time. There is no grand narrative, no highs and peaks but the satisfaction of a bowl of porridge eaten, a book read and a bit of exercise is enough. Revelatory as much as it downplays its own importance, it is a peek into the life of one of the country’s most promising young artists. It is banal, yes; but then this is potent stuff.
Above all, it isn’t set out with an agenda: a bleeding heart or an invitation to take a riverboat to its darkness. The horror. Rather, it is an invitation to view normalcy, whatever that means, and to see something to simply observe and contemplate in the way the mystics did: not as a search for meaning as much as a respite from it. The mystics savored these non-returning moments, away from profundity and into the reality of the un-retouched fact reflected back at us. If other animals do not need a purpose in life, as philosophers have asked, why do we? The contradiction though is we pine for one. Can’t we just be happy to see?
After all, as David’s work illustrates, aren’t we large and mysterious enough islands unto ourselves, much less for anyone else to ever figure out?
* * *
Tammy David’s It Takes An Island will be part of a three-person show entitled ‘Strip’ at the Silverlens Gallery (www.silverlensphoto.com). Other participating artists are Veejay Villafranca and Jake Versoza. It will run from Feb. 19 to March 13.
