Well, I truly want to bring Dirt to Nauru. I wanted to when I was working there, but knew it was a futile effort, a naive act of paternalism, and generally just bad development. But here I realized that art let me off the hook. I know it sound derogatory, but shit man, art gives me a viable method for getting the funding (with a clear consience) and doing this act that I, personally, want to do.

Well, what you are showing is perhaps how fruitless those efforts of development are. That, even though the intentions may be the best, the execution leaves a lot to be desired and ultimately the “natives” are not helped at all. Thus, making an art work, which does not have to be “effective” as an effort in development, is accurate and sincere in representing what you believe is flawed with development “missions.” Ultimately, an artwork is about creating meaning, about representing an idea, whatever that representation may be. Thus, your act of bringing dirt to Nauru, although “useless”, is full of meaning and purpose, and thus, “usefulness”. And that, I think, is the point of making art.

There is no problem with you acknowledging that there is pointlessness in the physical act, but the motivation behind the act is not pointless. Logically then, the act was/is never pointless. This is why your cynicism, in the words of Catherine, short-circuits your work, because there IS a point you are trying to make, but you deny it by asserting the obvious (that the work/act is pointless). With that optic, most EVERYTHING is pointless, except those things that keep us alive: food, health, shelter, sex (we do need to reproduce to stay alive as a species). The nice thing about being human is that what is seemingly one thing can be another, that there is subtlety in our construction of reality. Yes Robbins, thats it: be aggressively subtle (hah)

c.