Degree of Difficulty                                                      an installation by Andrew Ellis Johnson

 

‘Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever…’* but what place hath reflection ‘in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is’**? 

                                                                                                                                                              *Melville  **Psalms 63:I

 

Degree of Difficulty, a multimedia installation, is a contemplative chamber of mirage, of salvage, of dust.  It consists of a “swimming pool” with a three-meter high dive at one end facing an elevated lifeguard chair at the other.  The pool’s edge is marked with numerical depths, starting with the regulation 12’ at the high dive end and deepening infinitely at what we expect to be the shallow end. The numbers, in fact, run parallel to a flat plane of dried, cracked earth, which covers all elements of the installation.  Above the pool is a watery lighthouse beam of light that vacillates between the high dive and the guard’s chair.  The sound of gurgling, choking, drowning, pleas for and offers of help, punctuated by the cries of frogs, crickets, and crows (representing water, land and air) runs on an 18 minute CD sound loop.

 

Degree of Difficulty, at first glance, evokes leisure.  However, even in the context of sport or recreation, the situation is permeated with expectation—waiting for the plunge, scanning for those sinking.  In a larger economic context, Degree of Difficulty acts as a metaphor for our inaction in times of crises, our precipitation of cataclysmic events, our withholding in face of desperation.  Our state of perpetual preparation, our constant vigilance, the heightened state of anxiety is conveyed in a drought-stricken arena where the beckoning of distant siren calls are distinct, but their origins removed, their voices disembodied, their exotic allure not immediate enough to compel action.  The benefits of willful ignorance allow psychological barriers to remain intact; we are high and dry without thirsting.  Amidst the commotion, we remain isolated and nothing really happens.  From the lifeguard chair, the panoptic overseer sits, omniscient, but not omnipotent.  From the high dive, the observed becomes absurd in the bleak humor of a suicidal moment. 

 

The gallery visitors may become poolside judges assessing the “degree of difficulty” (a term for competitive diving) based on the complications of contortions in a downward fall.  We diligently mark down the tally of the latest splash.  This place “where no water is” is an open stage awaiting the viewers’ narrative, their projected drama, their response to “You don’t want help, I’ll help you”.

 

The dimensions of Degree of Difficulty may be adjusted to different gallery sizes and configurations. It is complemented by a cycle of 18 drawings of life vests , entitled Until Human Voices Wake Us, also made from cracked mud.  These drawings could be exhibited alone, with the same sound loop, and/or with smaller distillations of the installation.  One version would have the high dive looming over a galvanized steel basin.  Another would present the steel basin with numerous microphones (one for each life vest drawing included) submerged in water.