Examining A Point Of Interest

A. Bitterman

A. Bitterman is a local artist and the creator of Point of Interest. Point of Interest is intelligent, funny and thought-provoking. It helps us to think about our relationship with nature and what we view as important. For more information about Point of Interest, check out http://natureandsystems.com/. The exhibit runs until July 30.

Did you visit a lot of National Parks as a child?

Mostly Rocky Mountain National Park. We went to the same place every year when I was a kid, to some cabins along the eastern edge of the park. One of the great things about that was that we could access the park without bothering with the ranger stations and whatnot. We could just walk up a road and onto a deer trail or a horse trail and we were in the park. It was that easy. There were signs of course in the woods along the park boundary, and that was interesting to me as a kid. I mean, it was funny that there would be these signs in the middle of the nowhere as if “this” side of the woods was somehow different than “that” side of the woods because of a sign. That was the first time I remember thinking about the idea of a place as opposed to the place itself. I didn’t have the language then, but it was my first encounter with constructs. And the most interesting thing about that is that constructed reality can be a real as the material world, and sometimes more so.

What first inspired Point of Interest?

Point of Interest came out of two running concerns of mine. One is Land Art and the other is a deep fascination with Nature as a construct. I’ve always been drawn to Land Art, initially for its heroics. It has a very badboy/badass appeal – a kind of cowboy aesthetic – but with genuine theoretical concerns. The problem with Land Art in retrospect is that for all of its apparent resistance to the status quo and the market and the false boundaries endemic to a linear narrative, it was very much about the artist as a hero and I think that undermines its legacy. I think you can argue that artists like Smithson and Heizer wanted to destroy the house of Pollock and become Pollock themselves. It’s a classical scenario played out over and over throughout history – in politics, in religion, and in art. Destroy the regime, seize power, become the thing you hated. (Not that either of them hated Pollock per se, but rather what he came to represent.) In that sense, Land Artists were arguably the last of the great moderns, in post-war America anyway. They also ushered in the era of artist-as-critic and as such the narrative began to fragment, for better and for worse. But I’m getting too far out here. What’s great about Land Art is that it pushed the inside outside, both literally and figuratively, aesthetically and economically. It forced the art world and the viewer to come to it so that the work could be experienced actively, rather than passively. But the problem lies in the notion that Land Art needs be remote to qualify as such. That it needs to be removed from human systems to be effective, or even meaningful. I’ve always puzzled over this and again I think it ties into the hero problem – this romanticism – that infected Land Art early-on and arrested its development as a legitimate line of inquiry. So that’s how I came to rethink the Land Art narrative in terms of the ordinary scale of our daily lives. I have land. And beyond appearances, it’s no different than any other piece of land in the sense that it contains the memory of the earth in the same way that a single cell contains the entire DNA sequence of an organism. It’s simply our perception that limits our understanding of it. And once you begin to recognize the fact that Nature itself is a fiction (to the extent that we pretend it does not include the built environment,) then it seems obvious that the Land Art conversation has only just begun. Why not investigate my own land, my parcel, as a site? Point of Interest then is a part of this investigation. (It’s the summer installment of a seasonal series of Land Art pieces.) In this case I’m using conventional mediation strategies to create a simulation that will conflate the built and the natural environment.

The scope of detail on the exhibit is amazing. What was the first part of Point of Interest that you created?

Yeah, the project turned out to be much more complicated than I expected in terms of detail. The first thing I did was establish the theoretical foundation for it by constructing the text that appears on the etched plate in the center of the work. That was critical – for me, in terms of clarity, and for the viewer, in terms of gravity. It’s definitely the anchor of the piece and enables it to be funny without just being funny, if that makes sense. The piece and its premise were inherently funny, but that can be a trap. Humor can engage, but it can also drown out other responses.

What were the biggest challenges of designing Point of Interest?

Knowing where to stop. Simulating the national park thing was important but if you go too far it can, like humor, diminish the power of the work. I could dress up like a ranger everyday and that would destroy the work, I was trying to create enough of a simulation to enable the viewer to take the next step – to recognize that the absurdity of the work itself is simply a reflection of the absurdity of our everyday lives, and maybe not so funny. That almost everything we do is mediated in some way, or the result of a constructed reality that we almost always accept at face value. So the simulation is intended to set you free, so that the yard and the house can be seen for what they are rather than as property. It doesn’t mean the constructs are not there anymore, it just means that a different consciousness can be achieved.

Has anyone taken you up on the offer to listen to a Royals game or have a picnic at the exhibit?

Yeah, we’ve had some picnickers, and I’ve issued 20 back country permits to date. Of those, I’d say a dozen of them have shown up. It’s interesting – some people really get it and enjoy it and hang out and look around, and sometimes I go out and talk to them. But some people are really uncomfortable with it and come into the backyard and stand around for a few minutes and then leave. Why did they come back? I’m not sure.

Do you have a favorite response you’ve gotten in the guest book?

There’s one where a lady locks her keys in her car and she writes about some nice people – other visitors to Point of Interest – help her out. That’s sort of a classic parks situation, right? It’s also interesting to me that she locked her car when it was probably parked only a few feet away. It’s exactly what the piece is speaking to – our adherence to systems, even when it shouldn’t matter. Something poetic about that one.

What has been the neighborhood reaction to the piece?

Mostly neutral, and some positive responses. I think there would have been more resistance if

a) it was permanent;

b) it wasn’t funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation.

There was some buzz right when we started digging holes and setting posts, accompanied by a predictable amount of suspicion and anxiety about what’s to come. Part of that suggests there was a predisposition among some neighbors regarding our politics. But I think once they saw how well made it was, they were relieved. I’m still quite surprised though that no one has complained to me about it. There’s some pretty challenging content, about J.C. Nichols and his racist agenda, and the part about Nature being just “an idea, like god, and ideas can change…” Apparently, people in the neighborhood have more stamina than I thought, or else they haven’t actually read the thing, which is very possible too. Also, in the video which features local historian Bill Worley talking about Nichols and Armour Hills, we dropped in a film (behind Bill) of me lying naked on the roof of the house. Granted, you can’t actually see me clearly behind Bill, but if you go to the website for Point of Interest (www.natureandsystems.com) the original naked roof film is posted there. I was tempted to just drop that into the piece (sans Bill) just to see what the response would be, and maybe I should have? But I think Bill’s interview is terrific and serves the piece very well.

Is it hard to live your everyday life when you have visitors in your lawn all the time?

No, quite the contrary. It’s hard for visitors to visit while we go about our everyday lives. It’s funny because when we’re not around or in the house people engage the piece much more intently. But when we’re around and visible, or in the yard, they are much more guarded and much less likely to hang around or walk the trail or look for things on the map. Obviously some people totally get it and dig right in and consider it a bonus when the resident Homo vulgaris appears. But the majority of people aren’t sure how to act.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from doing Point of Interest?

It’s hard to get people’s attention no matter what you do. People like things to stay the same and they will go out of their way to filter out things that they don’t want to see or deal with. It’s depressing. I’d rather be challenged than ignored. At least then there might be a conversation about ideas, at some level. But as I mentioned before, this is what the work is all about – how we navigate human systems to the exclusion of the world around us – so in a way, this apathy sort of confirms my point. That’s why it hurts to see a little kid with a cell phone – not because technology is evil, but because one of the beautiful things about kids is that they are not entangled by systems like adults are and they help us see things we might otherwise miss. Once you start throwing too much technology at a kid, you’re stealing something from him. Almost without exception kids immediately engage Point of Interest without being asked. They see the trail and they’re on it. They see the earphones, and they put them on. They don’t have to be coaxed.

What are your plans for future exhibits? Where do you go from here?

I have a fall installment for the Land Art series brewing. It will be a gallery piece and will feature a 1/4 scale model of my house, a raised boardwalk, a lot of dead leaves, stop-action video, and two live squirrels. I also plan to partially submerge my actual house in leaves, hopefully in October.