Owen Mundy

"If you engage in travel, you will arrive."
—Ibn Arabi, Thirteenth-century Sufi Master

"Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in the unfamiliar cities, the more one understood the cities that he had crossed to arrive there; and he retracted the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square in Venice where he gamboled as a child."
—Italo Calvino¹

Like Marco Polo in Italo Calvino's, Invisible Cities, the more I travel, the more I have come to know the place I am from. With this work, I'm considering a physical and mental distance as a way to acquire a new perspective of a place or culture.

The term, "distance," also has a second layer of understanding, in that art and the Avant-garde distances itself from the proletariat, or working-class people in society, critiquing culture, but only attempting to be understood by an extra-educated group, and consumed by an even smaller, privileged few. For example, the farmers of Southern Indiana have no idea who Matthew Barney is, let alone why they should care. The working class is continually left out of the critical agenda of the vanguard.

In an attempt to understand these ideas, I've created two physical markers using fence posts, objects of the working class of the culture where I'm from. One is on my parent's property, in the farmland of Southern Indiana and the other is in San Diego, California. On each post a plaque marks the distance from my origins in miles, reminding me that it was in Southern California where I first experienced the new perspective on the Midwest as a young Navy recruit, and also that leaving the place where we grew up can help to understand ourselves.

This is a live art, meaning, I intend to learn from the creation of this work. It is important that I am able to explain this work and justify the creation of it to others, especially those who live in Southern Indiana. Initially, my father had his doubts as to whether it was worth my time to create this piece. After discussing our experiences while traveling in the Navy and finding references in the stories to ideas in the work he began to understand why it was relevant. It led me to consider distance as a way to consider any idea.

It's important to consider the occupations of my grandfathers and their children as well as my class and social status as I learned to understand my place in this world and those that wish to create another kind of distance that separates the poor from the rich. I feel it has engaged my understanding not only of ways to acquire new perspectives, but also the methods through which to learn to share understandings with those that have been omitted from the discourse of the art market.

The poet, Lola Ridge, said to the anarchists, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, on the evening before their deportation, that "Only time / standing well off / shall measure your circumference and height." (Avrich, 357) Standing well off, as it were, is what I have done already. The realization of the importance of distance, and the communication of that to others through making and sharing this work will hopefully increase the size of my understanding.

1. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. London: Harcourt Inc. 1972.
2. Avrich, Paul. The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States. AK Press, Oakland, CA. 2006.