Why Bother

August 13, 2009

Rev. Billy demonstrates outside of AIG headquarters. April, 2009

This is a photograph of Rev. Billy Talen, a local activist, personality, and grassroots organizer who has earned global exile from the Starbucks company.   Here we see him with a megaphone protesting the government bailout of AIG across the street from AIG headquarters in NYC to a crowd of curious AIG employees out on their smoke break.  Other than the dozen or so fellow protesters and a few unemployed photographers such as myself this protest attracted no crowds and was only picked up by grassroots media groups such as IndyMedia which are largely ignored by the general public.

One would ask, why did he and a few other fellow travelers bother to come out on a chilly early spring day to stand outside of a building on Wall street and voice their opinion?

Why Bother?  And why did I bother taking his picture?

Why Bother? was to be the title of my Grandfather’s master’s thesis.  His thesis for his undergraduate work in chemistry, Who Cares? was well received and allowed him to start pursuing a master’s at UCLA before he was forced to drop out and start supporting his family.

At least that’s how he liked to tell the story.

He does pose two essential questions, Who Cares?  Why Bother?  Like most other guys who liked to think they were real smart I indulged in existentialism during my late teens and early 20′s.  This was mostly for the association with ultra-hip Left Bank lifestyle (something entirely lacking from the suburbs of Southern California), drinking enough coffee to kill a mastodon,  smoking hand rolled cigarettes, and sitting very close to girls who looked like they walked out of a Godard flick.  And why not?  There were tons of the books lying around the house I grew up in so I didn’t even have to spend any money to dig on Camus.  Just pull them off the bookshelf and dig in.

The literature I could get into but the actual philosophy texts put me to sleep within 45 seconds.  They were completely opaque.  In the days before wikipedia I could only rely upon the encyclopedia for guidance which I found similarly full of a flurry of words signifying nothing.  All I could comprehend was that it had something to do with the attempt to address the eternal question of Why Bother.  It was distinguished from previous streams of thought because they considered using God as an explanation to be cheating.

To a 20 year old with a typical lack of appreciation for subtlety seeking to establish their own identity at the end of the Reagan era this sort of barely understood nihilism was pretty cool.  Especially if you were attracted to girls who wore way too much eyeliner and had well thumbed copies of The Stranger poking out of their bags.

Over a decade and two relationships with cheerful farm girls who almost never wear eyeliner later I’ve found myself confronted with The Questions yet again.  This time around I have wikipedia and an entire universe of Nietzsche fan pages on geocities to help me dig it on a slightly more nuanced level.   I also discovered that The Questions were now being crowded by more mundane but also more strident little questions.  How do you intend to make money with this?  Where are you going with this?  Are you actually any good?  Is this an efficient use of your time? Is this art?  So this is what you’ve been doing with all that time you didn’t spend watching TV?  Proud of yourself yet?  Rather expensive isn’t it?  Shouldn’t you be saving the money? Why aren’t you trying to get a gallery show?  You’re at least using this to convince girls to take their clothes off I hope?

This of course had to do with the thousands of dollars and years of my life that I had devoted to photography.   This wasn’t my career.  It wasn’t even a way to make a little extra money.  It was a sinkhole that large amounts of cash, time, energy, and rodinal were poured into.  There was no end.  There was no goal.  There is no win to be had.  No victory.  No triumph.  Why?

Why Bother?  Who Cares?

As artists we’re left in a very quiet room by ourselves.  Usually this is a literal statement.  Art is often a solitary activity engaged in during the dead of the night.  Most of us won’t make any money.  We’re forced to rely on the dreaded Day Job to get by.  There is no practical justification for what we do.  Yet we keep at it.

I really don’t have an answer beyond stating that I wouldn’t like myself if I didn’t do it.

Why else would someone stare down a steel logo of a financial services company bolted to a 40 story building from across a narrow lane?

Rev. Billy outside AIG headquarters in NYC's financial district.

Posted in Theory