Jack Slavin
Four Documented Attempts To Climb Hills, 2021
Looping Videos
Variable Duration
There is a guy named Sisyphus. He is dead, but since he is a character of ancient Greek mythology, he is immortal in the sense that he lives on, not only in the underworld, but also in the famous and constant retelling of his punishment in the deep abyss of Tartarus. He’s pretty much in hell. Sisyphus is often associated with rising and falling, much like the waves or cycles of the day, due to his eternal punishment. Every day in the Grecian equivalent of hell, Sisyphus must roll a boulder to the top of a hill; when he almost reaches the top, the immense rock rolls back down to the bottom of the hill. This is repeated daily, as it tends to be fashionable for Greek gods to involve eternity in their objectively cruel caste of punishments.
Here’s where I come in. Many aspects of my life feel like a Sisyphean punishment. Although life is far from hell, it is definitely absurd and monotonous at times. Right now, my life is school, and this past year has been spent in the heat of college applications, repeating a process of personal writing and self marketing that got old pretty quick. I’ve started to see that the track of school and education is very similar to the punishment of Sisyphus. You spend years at a certain level of education, only to transition to a higher level, and so on. School pretty much just exists to prepare you for the next level of school. So, if high school is my grueling effort to push a rock up a hill, the college application process is standing atop that hill and watching the boulder of high school just roll back down to the bottom. When I start college, I am just restarting the cycle of pushing a boulder up the hill.
Although this seems like a negative and oversimplified view of school’s purpose, you can’t help but admit that everyone who has gone to school has at least once sat in front of their homework and questioned the point of their education. After all, the current educational system is quite absurd, and the mind-numbing monotony of near constant study can definitely break you down in the same way Sisyphus’ punishment was designed to do.
So there is this philosopher. His name is Albert. Albert Camus. He is best known for developing a realm of philosophy we know as absurdism. It exists contrary to nihilism and is based on the belief that life is absurd rather than meaningless, and in that absurdity we can find meaning and joy within our lives. In his book The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus argues that Sisyphus is in many ways similar to us, and that Sisyphus’s hopeless struggle in the underworld is similar to the absurdity of our own lives. He suggests that while Sisyphus’ struggle seems tragic and hopeless, it also gives him foresight into what his future will be like, giving him power over his own fate. By taking his challenges head-on he subverts the fact that his punishment is designed to break him down, giving him power over his own life and freedom within his confinements. Walking down a hill after a getaway boulder, Sisyphus can rest after a hard day's work and find meaning, joy, and contentment. Camus says, “One must imagine Sisyphus [is] happy,” since his approach to his life is now in his own hands.
Alright, let's talk about my art. This project was born out of a transitional space in my education: the college process. Although I am excited about the next step in my education, I was pretty pissed about having to apply to college. The four videos I filmed document ways of subjecting myself to absurd monotony in a similar way to the punishment of Sisyphus. The first is a video of water being transferred from bucket to bucket using a structure built specifically for that purpose. The contraption I built to transfer water made the project even more absurd. I could have just used buckets normally to save a lot more time and water. It took hours to make the structure due to the fact that I was using only hand tools to cut and join the wood. My second video consists of me repeatedly posting papers over each other on an alley wall. The information contained on each sheet is lost in the layers of paper and wheat paste that covers it. In my third video, I sew shut all of the openings in various t-shirts thereby rendering them useless. The fourth video shows me dipping various mops I have made in glue and leaving them to dry. Like the shirts, they also have been rendered useless after the glue dries. They are capable of fulfilling two roles before their now limited lifespan dries up: becoming an unnecessarily large glue brush, or spreading glue around in place of water, making a larger mess than before.
By subjecting myself to the laborious repetition I filmed, I embrace some of the monotony within the contemporary track of education. The monotony I sometimes claim to hate becomes a part of exercising my control over and freedom within my own life. Because I own my education (in more ways than just this project, I actually love school) in the same way as Sisyphus, I have grown to love my education. And, by accepting the fact that I am fated to participate in the monotony and endless labor of education (and then probably the monotonous labor of a job after that), I can explore within the absurd confinements of my own life and find joy and meaning in the occasionally monotonous grind.