AUTUMN VERSION

With the end of the lawn-mowing season came the final version of the Ghost Sanctuary. A less directive, more aesthetically decorative version of the sign, as well the completion of an informational pamphlet and a box in which to provide copies to passers by completed the work in time for our first open studio show here at the church. There’s much to say about all of it, but rather than belabor any points in lugubrious blog form, I’ll rely upon images of the finished work to do the speaking for me. Below you will find the exterior and interior designs and text of the brochure, which includes instructions for making your own Ghost Sanctuary wherever and whenever you may. Feel free to save these images to print out should you do so.

Thank you for your interest in this work. I had originally intended to document and write about it far more regularly, but it became clear that it was just something I wanted to do, pay attention to and let take its own natural form as a work that mostly only exists for people that come across it in the time in place in which it is placed.

SUMMER VERSIONS

I had initially imagined the Ghost Sanctuary as a durational piece that would grow and change throughout the summer. While this has remained essentially true, I’ve found that it actually became a bit more of a singular, completed work in the Autumn, but one built upon the versions of itself arrived at throughout the summer. Are these different? Maybe not. They feel like two different ways of making something to me, but I’d have to do some more thinking to express exactly why. Regardless, the sanctuary became much more about process, attention and meditation than about documentation, which I guess may be at the heart of the difference between how I initially conceived of it and what it ultimately became. Something which is, in retrospect, truer to its function as a monument and space for reflection, I think.

The first step in the summer was delineating the shape itself. Throughout this process I’ve been fortunate to have the help of my trusty and supportive partner Stephanie and our dear friend and studio neighbor Shea Meyer. Shea and I marked out a 40’ circle in the yard with flags, weed-whacked its border and set to finding a more permanent and sculptural way to mark it out for the final piece. Perhaps because the church was built by an iron magnate for his workers, there’s no shortage of cast iron fence parts and remnants from various versions of the building’s landscaping around the grounds. Outside behind the kitchen we found no less than 14 former fence posts rusting in the woods, having been stashed there after one of any number of cars careened through the fence at the bottom of the hill over the years. We figured 13 was the appropriately theatrical number of markers to delineate the circle, so we did the math, spaced them at equal distances around the circle and hammered them in. Next, I found some aesthetically appropriate cast iron finials and chose the correct rope for the Spectral Border. Quick to find, thanks internet, but slow to arrive, these minimal adornments were 1/3 of my overall aesthetic plan for the Ghost Sanctuary (the other two parts being a sign indicating the space and a box of pamphlets at the sidewalk level).

In all parts of the process I was concerned with walking a border between theatricality and a sort of minimal, unobtrusive stateliness of tone. This is a territory I find very attractive and spend a lot of time mining in my work, I think. The border between earnestness and staginess, the feeling of uncertainty as to whether something is deadly serious or a weird joke and what it means not to know the difference. On the stagier side of things was the first version of my sign. True to my initial idea, I wanted it to be an extremely blatant white-on-black-with-an-arrow style sign indicating the presence of GHOST SANCTUARY —>. After about a week, however, it became clear that the sign was working only TOO WELL when strangers started just walking into our home looking for the ghosts (something, I will add, they would never in a million years have done if it had been my intention for them to do so) at which point I took the sign down immediately to re-design.

Throughout the summer I whittled down the look and function of the Sanctuary. The most significant and frequent element of this work was the tending of the borders of the circle, which I did when necessary with a scythe, and only at dusk. Important to the appropriate painting of this picture for you is the fact that, at the bottom of our hill, just across the street, there is a bar. We’ve never been to this bar. There’s no conflict with them whatsoever, it’s just clear that it’s not, shall we say, for us. To put it briefly, we moved here during deep lockdown times, just briefly after the much dreaded election, and this bar was always quite open and clearly a safe space for folks that, it was clear, didn’t share our feelings about these two major issues of the time. At any rate, if one stands in the parking lot of said bar, the hill and the church is more or less the only thing there is to see. So, suffice to say, we’re aware of one another but maintain a respectful distance. However, when a large, unexplained circle appears on the hill and a small man in black appears at sunset to scythe around its border every night, it understandably draws attention from the regulars. This was certainly unsurprising, and the extent to which it was noticed and discussed remains outside my knowledge, but throughout the summer there were a handful of interactions.

As I was honing down what and how the Ghost Sanctuary was throughout the summer, the question of my own character (as the sole visible human element) was definitely one to consider. I decided on a uniform (all black, work pants, black button up shirt, wide brimmed black straw hat), but was unsure what I would do if anyone talked to me. Do I respond? Am I just me when I’m out there, or am I someone else? Am I even a person? One evening, while scything, I had an interaction that made me decide to adopt a rule of non-interaction. It wasn’t hostile by any means, it wasn't even rude or unwarranted. But the way it made me feel just felt contrary to the purpose of the piece. I wasn’t sure how to answer this person’s questions while maintaining the tone I wanted for the work overall, and decided it would be better to just be a human-shaped thing that cuts grass from then on. Here is a transcript of this interaction:

(Older man walks over from bar parking lot, smoking. Approaches fence and gestures to me)

MAN: What’s the uh…purpose of that circle?

ME: It’s a monument.

MAN: To who?

ME: The Dead.

MAN: The Dead? (smokes) Well…That’s kinda…odd.

ME: Well. Life’s weird.

QUESTION LIST

Once I’d spent some time with the idea it began to sort of unravel and rearrange itself. Things that had seemed funny before became more earnest, things that were flippant and reactionary pulled toward more fastidious and labor intensive directions. What had begun as a dumb joke about the futility of lawn maintenance started to feel more significant and compelling to me. I did some thinking about OTHERS WHO HAVE UTILIZED PUBLIC SPACE FOR ELEGIAC PURPOSES. I thought about what it meant to disrupt and draw attention to something about which people in the neighborhood clearly had thoughts and feelings, or at the very least a quotidian view of. At this point it felt prudent to take a step back from the joke of it. Not, I hasten to add, to abandon humor altogether, because absurdity is certainly one of the guiding principles at work here, but to just stop and ask some questions:

1. What does it mean to mark out space in one’s lawn explicitly and exclusively for the use of The Dead?

2. And who, in the midst of a worldwide Mass Death Event, in shadow cast by the rise of domestic fascism and during the overtures of what may well become the complete (if protracted) extinction of life as we know it on Earth, ARE The Dead?

3. What is useful?

4. What is simply confrontational?

5. Maybe more importantly: what is usefully confrontational, and what does the territory between those two things look like?

6. At what point does something become visible for people, and why?

7. Can something be simultaneously visible, unexplained, dissonant and beautiful?

8. Does delineated quietude read as an affront?

9. Does my role as the person who is visibly altering the lawn center me too significantly in the narrative of the work?

10. How can I minimize this, if so?

11. What does the version of me who works on the lawn look like?

12. Does distancing that version too greatly from my normal, daily persona just create more problems than it solves (e..g. Who would that character be and doesn’t creating a whole new, living character only put more distance between the viewer and the intention of the work?)?

13. What does the territory between the person I am in daily life and the person who maintains the borders of a neighborhood park for invisible dead people look like?

14. What are the rules of the enclosure?

15. How is it delineated?

16. Is a fence gauche?

17. Is a lack of delineation unceremonious and invisible?

18. What would a fence look like?

19. If the area is roped off, what does the rope look like?

20. What holds it up?

21. If there are fence posts, what do they look like?

22. What sort of finials are appropriately stately but not disruptive?

23. How does one direct attention in a roadside situation, particularly one that not only doesn’t require but necessarily prohibits interaction?

24. Is a sign stupid, funny, appropriate or all three?

25. I want a sign, but where should it go?

26. What should it say?

27. What should it look like?

28. Should there be an arrow?

29. Black on white or white on black?

30. How often should I mow the borders, and how?

31. Daily?

32. How long should I spend mowing the borders?

33. What time of day? Should it be the last hour of the day or a more fluid period of time that spans the end of sunset and the beginning of night?

34 If I use a scythe to maintain the borders, will the shorn grass create problems, maybe even catch fire in the sun if it lays too long?

35. Should I intermittently rake the shorn grass during the same time period during the twilight following the twilight when they’re shorn?

36. Do I work clockwise or counter-clockwise?

37. What do I say if people ask me about this while I’m working?

38. Can I listen to headphones while I work, or does that disrupt the image?

39. Does the image matter?

40. What happens when the grass starts growing back before I get to the outer edge of the lawn?

41. Should I photograph it? When?

42. Should there be a pamphlet?

43. How should it look?

44. What should it say?

45. What should the tone be? (Authoritative/Friendly/Informative/Absurd/Laconic/Somber/Enthusiastic?)

46. How should the pamphlet be presented?

47. Do all of these elements need to be finished before it is presented?

48. Should I tell other people about it?

A COMPLICATED RESPONSE TO A SIMPLE PROBLEM

The impetus for this project is, I guess, the fact that I’ve never been in charge of the maintenance of a lawn before. At least not as an adult. Every place that I’ve lived before now has been an apartment and usually surrounded by concrete and/or other buildings. When we moved into a comparatively massive, Neo-Gothic Victorian church in the Autumn of 2020, I think it’s safe to say that nearly every aspect of what I’ve come to understand as my homelife underwent a sudden and dramatic mutation. The realities of that are the subject of another story, but the particular aspect that pertains to the Ghost Sanctuary began to materialize when I agreed to the job of maintaining the church’s lawn.

The church we live in is on a hill. It was built in 1883 as the second of two chapels which stand side by side overlooking Mill Street on the South side of Troy, a small city in New York’s capital region, near Albany. Formally called Woodside Presbyterian Church, it was ordered to be built by Henry Burden, a civil war era iron magnate who made his fortune producing horse shoes and railroad spikes during the war, in tribute to the memory of his wife, Helen. You can find the whole story HERE.

It was immediately clear, once I became the person who could be seen mowing the very large, very slanted, very prominently visible lawn of our home, that people in the neighborhood have a lot of thoughts and feelings about not only lawns in general, but my particular lawn. The first several times I was out there toiling away trying to figure out how in the hell I was supposed to actually do this thing I’d apparently agreed to do, it felt like every middle aged male within a mile radius was involuntarily compelled to materialize and talk to/at me about the task at hand. Who had done it before, how they felt it should be done, the fact that it hadn’t been done for a particular period of time, the places they felt I was missing or was going to miss, etc. I found it both confusing and irritating to be honest, even though everyone was generally friendly. Why did they care? I don’t even care and it’s my lawn. I was only doing it because we’ll get fined if we don’t. But I’m clearly the outsider here, this is so much more their neighborhood than it is mine, and has been for generations. So I do my best to field their concerns.

That said: If you ask me, mowing lawns is a ridiculous waste of time, resources and green space. Why on earth would we insist upon close-cropped KENTUCKY BLUEGRASS when nearly every other conceivable option is both more interesting and more beneficial to the ecosystem? Not to mention the galaxy of products, gadgets and vehicles that exist to burn fuel and sow poison in service to this most boring and labor intensive of ground covers. It’s a truly American endeavor and I, for one, despise it. I try to mitigate my distaste for the whole concept by using only electric mowing devices and no pesticides or chemicals of any kind. But still, it’s the principle at work that goads me. And it doesn’t stop there because our lawn isn’t just a regular lawn, it’s about an acre of historically protected, often steeply sloped and groundhog-perforated land that terminates at the bottom in a rusty, cast iron trap of a fence upon which I’m fairly certain I’ll be discovered impaled some sweltering afternoon after having finally failed to catch myself from tripping while mowing.

One day, while complaining about all of this to some friends (as I can be heard doing from approximately April - October), I jokingly said that if I just marked out a big circle on the hill and made a sign that said “GHOST SANCTUARY” with an arrow pointing at it, nobody could argue with my refusal to mow within its border. See? It’s a GHOST SANCTUARY. Prove it isn’t. The next day was a mowing day and I found myself stuck on the idea. Once I was done, I got a drink and a sketchbook and put down some broad strokes.