What the hell is water

September 28, 2022

Just a quick note. 

I was lucky enough to recently visit the Art, Land, Community symposium organized by Sky High Farm with the Judd Foundation, and part of the reason that I felt lucky for it was because the panel I attended included Linda Goode Bryant. If you are unfamiliar with Linda Goode Bryant, she is an artist and community leader, but also the operator of Project EATS, a now teen-aged NPO that brings food sovereignty to NYC neighborhoods that have been marginalized by our predatory and exclusionary food system. Back in 1974, she founded the gallery JAM (Just Above Midtown), to create space for artists of color who were routinely excluded from the art scene. She did all of this as a single mom. She is a badass. 

Her contributions to this discussion were many, but she especially shared one thing that has stuck with me, which I’ll paraphrase here. When Goode Bryant first moved to New York, at some point in her early years in the city she looked out her window and realized that nearly everything she perceived, everything in her eye’s view, was a rectangle. Buildings, sidewalks, parking structures, cobblestones - everything. And that rectangles are, absolutely, not found in nature. Perhaps near-rectangles! Perhaps rectangle-esque shapes - but not rectangles. Rectangles are a strictly human shape. But walking through town, we do not perceive rectangles. We perceive the landscape that the rectangles make up, the people around them, the activity they support. But the rectangles fade completely into the background. And also, they are everything. 

Her question, which I have been thinking about since, was: How does something become so dominant that it can become absolute? 

There are so many self or societally-imposed dominating traditions, structures, paradigms so commonplace that we don’t even notice them. And so since she asked this question, I have been thinking: what are our rectangles?

At the same time, a book I am reading right now mentions David Foster Wallace’s famous Kenyon commencement speech, which opens with the anecdote:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

So I wanted to quickly share that, as we approach the end of this first fashion month that feels like a regular-degular fashion month for the first time in a long time, I’ve been trying to perceive all of the water and the rectangles.