night walk

before heading off to drown myself in toxic fluids last saturday (as usual), i stopped by tribeca to pay a visit to a woman with a suitcase.
that was pretty much all i knew about it--
as part of performa 11, a biennial performance art festival that usually takes place in november, someone named laurence wagner was going to carry a suitcase and walk around the block of canal, wooster, greene, and grand streets, starting at 8pm until she became too exhausted to go on.

these kinds of performances--endurance-based works that involve mundane, common enough behavior--is not entirely new; they got their upstart in the art world starting in the 60's with conceptual artists such as bruce nauman and allan kaprow, who did things like walk around a room for hours or throw mounds of rubber tires in a room.
and quite frankly, i've always been a bit skeptical about these kinds of performances. can these artists really shed some kind of interesting light on such an everyday activity?

and so i go.

then i realized i have a task to accomplish: to find this woman.
usually, when people go to see art, it's designated to a very specific location. you enter a gallery, theatre, etc., and there it is. i realized that even though (luckily) it was a smallish block, i still had to walk around to find her, after first locating the block itself.

when i arrived at the site, it was about 9pm, an hour after she started.
around and around i went, without seeing a lady with a suitcase.
and i also had an erroneous preconception that carrying a suitcase literally meant a piece of baggage suspended in the air (i imagined briefcase, actually, not full-on suitcase).
two women passed by, speaking in a language that i did not understand, and one was lugging a large suitcase behind her with the airport baggage claim tags still attached. i saw them, but assumed without doubt these must be some visitors or residents just arriving from the airport.
as i continued to walk around the block, i saw the same two women again, coming the same direction i saw them walking from before, and only then did i realize this was the performance.

and yes, how i was fooled by its mundaneness.
but it was so natural, so ordinary, she really looked like she was coming home, going somewhere with her suitcase, having just arrived. but in reality, she was going through an endless rotation around the same block.

once i confirmed that she was the artist, i joined her.
i walked around and around the block with her, sometimes talking, asking her questions, sometimes just scanning the proximities, smoking my cigarette.

then nature calls.
it struck me to ask her, what about going to the bathroom? has she needed to go yet? what is she going to do if she needs to go?
since it hadn't been too long since she started, she told me she was ok thus far, but she's not too sure what she will do if she really needs to go. maybe i'll stop briefly, she said, but i'm going to try to stick it out as long as possible without stopping.
i made it a point to go to the bathroom just before leaving the house so i would not have to go for a while during the visit.
but after only about twenty minutes, i needed to go, and had to leave her.

instead of returning to her after by business, i decided to meet up with a friend, and unfortunately was not able to check back later.
how long did she go on?
i don't remember the exact lengths of time, but i remember people telling me ten years ago that when the world trade center was destroyed, they had to walk from the financial district all the way up to their homes in washington heights or higher, because all of the transportation was shut down. but at least they could stop by somewhere to use the bathroom. maybe?
human endurance is quite remarkable; it can really push itself to the extreme when necessary.
so how long of a walk was considered necessary to this woman? how much was at stake for her?

the next day, waking late and hungover, i truly longed to get in touch with her to ask when she stopped walking. although the encounter was relatively brief, i shared twenty minutes of my saturday night walking with her.
where is she now? where did she go once she was too exhausted to continue? where is her home here?

i have to work out more of the particulars of my response to this performance, but it certainly broke my cynicism toward endurance-based performance art.

perhaps i will chew on it a bit more and post the remnants later, but for now, i feel ok in just recounting my experience.