Patrick O’Hare, Easton, PA.

I was at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center last week, on the steps of which I miraculously happened to bump into the charming Chris Mendoza, and on the streets of which my mom’s toyota’s rear window was busted open and gps thingy removed.

And on the subway from PS1 to Andrea Geyer’s talk/performance at Parson’s Democracy in the Age of Branding show, I read the PS1 newspaper, and was struck by these parts of the Patrick O’Hare interview.

First, the title:Things That Are Already There. It deserves some lovely arial in the wild action, because it states the obvious while pushing that somewhere else. For me (because everything I find interesting, I find interesting because it reflects something I think is about me), it is a positive way to point at where my doomed loops becoming spirals are meant to go:

• The dutch boy with his finger in the dyke, who has to pee
• “Eve, don’t eat that apple”
• a gerbil on a 45
• the skier at the bottom of the well

a page from my MFA thesis (20mb pdf)

It tells us to push for the everyday magic around us, without sounding like a corny children’s program or self-help book. Something revisited in the interview:

“Phong Bui: As an undergraduate student at SUNY Binghamton you studied with filmmaker Ken Jacobs who left an impression on you. What was that was like?

Patrick O’Hare: Ken would show film clips from the news and TV. Then he would analyze the commentaries and images through philosophy, art, and poetry. He really made you think about the craft and artistry of film but would also alert you to its intent and use in mass media and in propaganda. I think he gave me the tools of a skeptic.”
-Patrick O’Hare interview

The tools of a skeptic.

In his hands, those tools aren’t irony or cynicism, but a lens that focuses on media as deliberate without twisting it all into a marketing ploy.

“There always seems to be this kind of giant iceberg underneath the surface, which evokes a poetic tension that deals with the notion of modern efficiency and alienation, a service society and what that does to people. He really tunes in to the mystery and the ruthlessness of what appears to be transient and impermanent. But he does it with a grace and poignancy that appeals to me, and always with an understanding that this is a world where people live.”"
-Patrick O’Hare interview

This is a world where people live.

Patrick O’Hare, Johnson City, NY.