tension, a sense of inbetweeness

nicholas b jacobsen

tension, a sense of inbetweeness 

Borderlands, AZ

November 7, 2018

        Immediately, I was struck by its sculptural beauty. The equidistant spacing of the raw, rusting, steel bars; the shadows cast on the road running parallel in the midday, mid-fall light--it seemed like Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Christo and Jeanne Claude had all collaborated on a work of minimalist monumentality. Immediately tailing that feeling was a feeling of self-repulsion. How could I find something so violent, so racist, and so authoritarian beautiful? How can something's visual presence mentally block its political/social/economic presence so easily, and for that moment, so completely? 
        We left the border fence and went to a park in Nogales, AZ where met to talk about our impressions of this place. When I brought up my visceral reaction to the fence as an object, Paco spoke about Trump's rhetoric of a "big, beautiful wall" and how he had just put this in with all the other ridiculous things Trump says. He'd never considered that some might find it beautiful. 
        Granted, the thought/feeling was only briefly isolated and then immediately met with the conceptual/contextual layer, but it was so much visceral and immediate. So much so that I actually uttered aloud, "it's so beautiful," when we rounded the corner and it first came into view.
        I wonder how much the normalcy with which we all live with the wall--those whose everyday life is lived in proximity to it and those of us for whom the wall is only a part of our mental/political landscape--allowed me to be able to forget about the many other layers this object exists within and only notice it as a piece of land art, an immense sculpture rising out of and mimicking the curves of this mountainous landscape--a line that undulates when facing it and runs land-surveyor straight when looking down it's length. It's straightness and equidistant spacing seems to communicate an order, an almost natural order to its existence, as if it were meant to be there. The way it followed the curves of the land, no matter how steep, also lends to this sense of naturalness, its supposed inevitability, its normalcy. 


        
        As a line stands inbetween two places (at least two) it holds so many inbetweens. This line holds surprising feelings of everydayness--clothes drying on the line, grasses waving in the breeze, school kids yelling and playing, mountains climbing, pigeons flying, trash piling. Simultaneously it hold feelings of heightened alertness with military airplanes and helicopters, border patrol trucks, huge steel bars and plates, doors with bolts as think as beams, cameras watching, alarms alarming. These simultaneous and dissonant feelings, sights, and sounds create a tension, a sense of inbetweeness. 

Everything is fine--You're being watched. 

        Pigeons rest on this line as they would any other tall structural ledge. Cats pass through like any other fence. Persons are blocked, threatened, arrested, and/or murdered. Families are separated. Children traumatized. Laundry dries in the warm autumn sun.