WRITINGS ABOUT THE NP

Contemplating the NP Part One- 2016

Since I began this project I have been asked “Why the month of November?”, “What do you do the rest of the year?” and “Have you seen the movie V for Vendetta?” Each of these questions unknowingly touches on a different area at the core of the project and is answered at the end of this text.

In the first ten years that I worked on this project I kept it mostly to myself because I was not certain why I was doing it. I knew that I wanted to work on a lengthy art project and intuitively I felt that the NP was worthwhile. The writing of this text is now part of the project’s process. I simply worked first and in retrospect am uncovering the meaning of the project. I trust my intuition to tell me what to do.

I started the NP in November 1989 by going to a river park on the outskirts of Chicago at dawn each day that month. This routine required discipline and commitment, something every artist should have.  I thought, “if I work this way it will mean that I am an artist.” I took a medium-format camera out into the landscape and worked just as the Group f/64 had. The following year I was back in Michigan photographing the bleak farm landscapes from the area of my youth. The next ten years I moved between the Windy City and the forests and farms of Michigan. The last two years of the project were completed in El Paso, TX. Looking back there are so many important subjects that could have been the yearly subjects of the project. There is also the unexplained void of the years 1999-2011, referred to as the “Lost” years, when I did not work on the NP. 

Whatever the NP turns out to be, it might take many forms, it might be many things. November offers many possibilities. It might be thirty fish, poems, friends, _____s, books or postcards. November or thirty or eleven or nine because November was the ninth month of the ancient Roman calendar. I do not think the month is dull. What one does with it is what can be dull. I am not trying to convince anyone of anything about November. I guess November is simply a point of departure giving me something to contemplate, something that maybe not many have contemplated. Does Stephen Hawking mention November in A Brief History of Time? So far, I have not written much about November, and that could be the problem. Up to this point the NP has mostly been a photography project, but who cares about photography anymore? It no longer matters to me as it once did. It now means so much more that I have to laugh every time I hear the word. I sometimes think that I left photography behind, that I basically gave up on photography. I did not know what to do with photography until I stumbled onto the NP and that wasn’t ever even doing that much. I just could not find a worthwhile art project until I found the NP. How could the NP be anything worthwhile regarding art? Experimental was barely even a main word. Or was it? Nature one year, Monet the next, wandering up and down the streets of Chicago and the bland, ploughed cornfields of the Midwest the next. Performance was carrying a camera on a tripod into the cold woods at dawn. Avoiding social engagement was social engagement. The NP was not meant to disturb, surprise or upset anyone. It had mild, altruistic intentions. I suppose, again, that most shake their heads at the NP. It is not at all outrageous, extravagant or wild. Should I just forget about it for a few years and then look back and see if it means something new? I am supposed to be finished with the NP. Why am I worrying about it?

It is now November 5, 2014 and I have started making one self-portrait photograph each day with my cell phone as part of this year’s NP. Today, however, I thought that maybe I could extend the NP to be spread throughout the year.  For example I could assign each day of November to a different day during the year. Why wouldn’t that be ok? November 18 could be January 3, November 2 would be August 4 and so on. I could conceive of some complex rubric with which to assign particular days of November to other specific days of the year such as: each day of November assigned to some specific date on which an important protest, boycott, strike or revolution took place. Why then call it the NP? Why not call it the Protest Project? Well, calling it the NP logically connects it to the previous years of the project. Calling it the NO-vember project could mean something else entirely also. Stressing the word NO emphasizes the notion of resistance, which is one of the foundations of the project. NO-vember could mean anything at all, even YES-vember, but then what would that mean? Why always worry about what everything means? I suppose what means what is what it is all about. Black can be white. White can be black. Right can be wrong and wrong can be right. Write can be read and read can be write. The NP can be a series of thirty protest songs.

I did not know that I would have a website devoted to the NP or that I would have books printed for eleven of the twelve years of the project. I did not know that I would restart the NP after ten years and add two more. I did not know that the NP would become part of my MFA program. I did not know that the NP would evolve into the practice of the (R)EVO COLECTIVO. I did not know it would live on after twelve years. I did not know that I would be writing about it for an art journal.

I do know that many things have changed since that first month that I started the project. I do know that many things have not. Racism is still a major problem in the United States. Corporate control over the US government is worse than ever, and thousands continue to risk their lives just to make it to the US to earn next to nothing in low-paying positions that most Americans would not consider doing. 

I did not anticipate what would become of the ever-increasing number of individuals working in precarious positions or what seems to be a populace that does not notice. I have not had to worry, but I am worried now. I am worried because unless something is done we are headed to an impasse in which the eventual outcome could be disaster. If art can make a difference this is a case in which it should. Writing about the NP is one way to speak out about some of the urgent issues, many of which are interconnected. I hope that what I am doing is right, but I do not want to sit around being silent any longer. I did not know that I’d be writing about the NP in 2014, but I do know this needs to be written. Is there poetry in the relationship of the text to the photographs and the years to each other as between Joel-Peter Witkin and Chto Delat?, or between Jean-Luc Nancy and Georgia O’Keeffe? Where do the images and letters all settle when gravity brings them crashing to earth, or when they are blown by the whistling wind and lifted into the air?

My conscious crotch, as the crotch of every worker in Western Europe laments the failure of all the efforts to equalize identity politics into a more forgivable mess. Post-colonial inequity was never a subject of the NP or was it? But how can everything be different?

Sleeping and writing, waking and walking are very similar things. Here is a methodology of a practice which works in reverse, but the start is not near the end and the middle is nowhere near the beginning. The “H” is not near the “J” and “I do not know” can not be found near “I do know.” I am ready to question authority and I am ready to collaborate. Something has to lead us out of this labyrinth of myths.

“Why November?” 

The NP is simply about the time of the year, but in the back of my mind I have often pondered “Could it be because of the Novembergruppe, the somewhat-revolutionary group of WWI-era artists, that I had learned about years earlier while studying at Michigan State University?” Upon further reflection, I may have learned while living in Chicago between 1989 and 1994 of the work of the Chinese expatriate artist Tehching “Sam” Hsieh, known for his endurance performances with and without Linda Montano, and such projects must have had an influence. I have not questioned my selection of the month, but instead I have focused on learning about it and on using its uniqueness as a resource of my creative practice.

“What do you do the rest of the year?”

I never thought that contemplating the NP would result in what it has: twelve months of photographs, thirty days times twelve, with the exception of 2012 when I made eleven photographs each day on the themes of the previous eleven years. Throughout the years as I moved from studio to studio it was an effort just keeping track of the project’s negatives, prints and daily data. Even if my practice wasn’t accomplishing much otherwise, I always had the NP to think about. I exhibited other work in a few group exhibitions during those years, but never any part of the NP. Was the cognitive ‘work” that I did at odd moments eleven months of the year in reference to this project “work”? What about the “Lost” years? Was thinking about the NP then work on the project?

 “Have you seen the movie V for Vendetta?”

The entire time I worked on the NP I had not seen this movie. I wish that I had. I finally saw it in June 2014. In this movie the main character “V” states “Remember, remember the 5^th of November,” referring to the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot of 1605. This revolutionary stance is important to the NP. In fact, if I had seen it it would have changed what I did because it would have inspired me along a bolder tract. That being said there is a stronger, more subversive, revolutionary intent to the project. It is not a commercialized commodity and will never be finished. It must be completely free from any social rules or requirements. It already has too many to struggle against as it is: the form of the Gregorian calendar, the grammatical structure of language, the scientific laws inherent in photographic chemistry or simply the html code of the website. Writing, reading, thinking and making will continue until the project ends.

For more information about the NP and to see the day-by-day photographs of the various years please visit the various pages included at the top of the website. This project is in ongoing development. Please send your thoughts, comments and ideas to cgerstheimer@yahoo.com.
Or click on this link to see/read the essay in the  ELSE Journal 01 2016