Ritual and Personal Space

 

To combine ritual and personal space, I sat in front of my closet everyday for 10 minutes and wrote down my thoughts. Almost every thought was about my closet, though there are a few that strayed away as I wrote in a stream of consciousness style. Throughout my writing, I went back and forth between worrying that I wouldn't have enough to write and wishing I had more time to write because I had so many thoughts to put down. In total, I wrote 145 individual thoughts. Having done this, I'm still not sure if it feels like both a lot of thoughts for one closet and not many thoughts at all. 

I found it curious that I could think so many things about a single closet. After all, it's just a box with doors and some fabric and plastic inside. But in letting my mind wander around my closet, I realized I attach a curious amount of significance to those bits of material. Inside, personal meaning and relational attachments and environmental concerns and design structures and color trends and a million other topics worth pausing over exist. Who would have known? And to think this is just one person with one closet in one room. 

Even more, I became aware of the complexity of the mind and its thought processes -- of my mind, at least. Every thought flowed into at least two others, or connected to three others, or brought up a couple more conflicting emotions, or even led to a few new understandings of various social structures. All from staring at my closet for 10 minutes. 

I thought a lot about how to document this project. The idea of documenting a performance (especially if you consider Kaprow's sixth rule of eliminating the audience entirely) is intriguing because the artist/performer has complete control over what the audience knows. I can't ever convey to the audience how or what my mind thought over the course of those 10 minutes. But I can visually communicate the striking amount of ideas that come from one thing. Plain and simple: here is a list of what I thought. If I add a title, "The Cumulative Closet Thoughts", the list gains authority... or at least becomes something worth having a title.

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