The first-floor windows of the Life Sciences building sit one step above sidewalk level, flush to the floor. They are recessed far enough in from the outside edge of the building to allow an elderly woman in a heavy, hooded blue coat, a black “I (Heart) SF” sweatshirt, and a patterned dress over jeans to sleep there.
The woman sleeps surrounded by her possessions, which, so far as Goshkin can catalog from his seat in the café across the street, consist of a shopping cart, several stuffed large plastic bags, a yellow blanket, a rug depicting a horse on hind legs, an umbrella, two tubes of glittering steel pipe, and a crooked, leafless tree branch as tall as she is. Once she has awakened, the woman begins to move her belongings to the sidewalk.
She arranges them as if assembling a train. What connects the cars of the train is unclear. So is how it will move forward. She takes her time, sometimes removing an item from a shopping bag and adding it to the exterior, sometimes shifting items she has placed in one position to another. Two placards face the café. One contains the single word “Play” and the other shows two figures in silhouette, one large, one small, like you might see on a traffic control sign. Inside the café seven tables are occupied, one person to each, one laptop in front of each person, each laptop engrossing the person before it.
At one point the woman interrupts her rearranging to return to where she had been sleeping. She collects several loose pieces of paper and a plastic cup. She drops the paper into a waste receptacle on the corner and empties the cup into a brick-enclosed flower bed. She returns to her structure-in-process and finds a place for the cup. When she finds more pieces of paper on the ground between her structure and the waste receptacle, she picks them up and places them in a pocket of her blue coat. Occasionally, she gestures, stiff-armed, her index finger pointed like a pistol barrel at nothing in particular. Before Goshkin has finished his doppio, the woman has seated herself in the middle of her structure.
When a man nears his parked car, she shouts, “This my stuff; ain’t nothing here for you.”
…
Goshkin has been reading Lawrence Weschler’s book about Robert Irwin: Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. A nephew had requested friends and relatives to give him a book that had been important to them as a college graduation gift, and Goshkin had given him this. He had read the book three times in the first years after its release and now, having learned of an edition expanded by 25-years more of conversations between Irwin and Weschler, was reading it again.
In this reading, with the expansion of his own additional years, Goshkin saw the most significant thing about Irwin was his ideas. Once you realized – as Goshkin did – the full implications of Irwin’s progression through his lines and dots and discs, enhanced by his studies of Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Sartre, to an expansion of Duchamp’s “Art is anything an artist says it is” into “Art is anything a viewer perceives as such,” reducing even Irwin’s “Ceiling Scrim Matching Blue Skylight Pattern” to just one more “Madonna and Child,” the woman’s construct became as much art as a defilement of the neighborhood and her repositioning of her tree branch an aesthetic choice rather than madness’s compulsion.
…
The next morning she was gone.
Erased?
Deleted?
No, beginning a new draft elsewhere.
For there she and her structure were, across the street, on the sidewalk, in front of a taqueria. How had they made the journey? With the assistance of assistant curators or United Van Lines?
Was the sidewalk in front of the Guggenheim already scheduled?