Keep Shop (2020)

06.03.20

My Companions and I have been rather underemployed lately. My Companions’ hermetic lethargy was beyond my capacity for empathy, and so when we received an invite to mind a shop on the Lower East Side, I wrapped my Companions in the plastic sheeting they have become familiar with. With deep sighs they held their collective breath and allowed themselves to be disinfected and sealed up for transport. A feeling they have become used to.

Instead of traveling to the icy precipice of the Continent, we are traveling further inwards, to the hot tip of the center of the Earth (in the swamp of July), sandwiched between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. There lies a store, Essex Flowers, which does not sell flowers and is certainly not located on Essex Street.

We are not allowed to open the shop; we are merely minders. Reminders, perhaps. To remind those that cannot be here what we did before, what we took for granted. The doors must remain locked, and so everything will turn ever inwards, sweating it out for five weeks—until what? The return of the Normal? We will have to wait it out to see.

When we open that gate and enter, the lights must be turned on using a circuit breaker. The set of circuits we flip ominously reads “MASTER”, reminding us that we are merely pawns of our employers, a cooperative that have hijacked this benign moniker of a flower shop, who will all be watching us from the copious camera surveillance they have installed.

We are not even sure what kind of store this is, what compensation we might expect, and what is even expected of us. I feel that maybe we are on our own.

This place is empty save for a black theatrical curtain, a ladder, and a wireless router. There are no work stations or retail displays of any kind, so for out first task, we set about building a hybrid of both, which my Companions declare a “bed”, but after some discussion we declare The Platform, since that could clearly connote a plateau where objects, ideas and individuals can project their presence from, and can be judged from some theoretically objective perspective.

We open the shop to ourselves NOW

07.01.20

The Owners of this establishment have set up cameras to monitor us as we work. One is positioned directly above us, and nothing can hide from it. All interactions form a compositional record that can be tracked. My Companions, a superstitious lot, have taken to calling the drone above us the “God’s Eye” because of its total vision, and our inability to perceive the myriad eyes that gaze down from afar.

Additionally, the Owners have requested we wear an action camera, so they may see as we see, and see in detail each and every decision we take.

We learned yesterday that not only could they see us, but also hear us through the camera mounted upon our head. We couldn’t take anymore exposure, and I’d never agreed to be Heard... only Seen.

We find our bag of miniature tools and I remove the tiny screws on the camera housing. We hope that snipping a few wires to the microphone circuit board will solve the problem. No such luck: instead we use a pair of tweezers to rip out the soldered connections to the mic. A quick check and we are good to go... no sound.

Perhaps this is the first test of what the Owners will permit on their watch? We’ve yet to suffer any repercussions.

The Embedded Foot Print

07.02.20

With no one here to illuminate what kind of business this is, and no evidence of what this space was used for, my Companions and I have searched for evidence of what has transpired here.

Aside for a few quotidian items (a wireless router, a ladder and a black curtain) the only presence we could find was a footprint well planted into some dust on the floor.

The foot that embedded itself into the floor was located facing a wall in close proximity, and was clearly not wearing a sock or a shoe. Who would wear no shoes in a public business ?

We decide to preserve the print of the foot using a piece of plexiglas screwed to the floor. In this way, we pay homage to those that occupied this shop before us, and with little else to go on, it will serve as a reminder that we follow others. All we can do is retrace the aura of this place, and piece together what commerce was conducted here. When we hand the keys off to whomever will mind the shop after us, we must have a shop for them to inhabit.

07.03.20

We have created a workspace and a display, and yet all we have to show for this effort is ourselves. As we prepared for our latest collective endeavor, we forgot about how we had once grown so distrustful of one another.

I naturally fill the roll of mediator of the group, and try to make peace through constructive activities, yet as soon as the construction is over, we putter about. This platform begins to form our social dynamics in a measurable, observable sample: I attempt to separate those of us who harbor frictions, with our collective backs towards one another.

For every cluster I create, I observe a range of underlying issues. I find my companions alternately angry, depressed, resentfully, or indifferent. I pair them so they may feel proximity but not bear down on one another, hoping they will congeal into the mass we have been in the past. But they keep their backs to one another.

If this platform is for inventory, and we are occupying the platform, then we must be the product. We have no interest in inhabiting this island alone. So we must displace ourselves with a new inventory, one without all this self pity and doubt, without group recriminations, and without any discernible history.

We need to spruce this place up with a good bit of desire, for our current state is one of existential malaise. We must find something to keep shop FOR. Perhaps we must consider the place where all this started, what it was that gave birth to this collective entity. Maybe it will have to be a metaphor we utilize, since we have no customers. With no customers we must commence commerce in the realm of the theoretical, the metaphysical.

We must make arrangements for what will come during Week Two.

07.07.20

Gluing petals... When we returned from the Off Season, we’d had enough of that bleak winter palate. Gone are the browns, blues and grays.

On our daily commutes to work, we have been pilfering flowers. We keep a large tote and a pair of scissors on our persons, and keep our eyes peeled for the dwindling July supply of flowers in the public parks, highway medians, and overgrown properties.

The colors of the flowers are hot and humid, and they mirror the baking tenements of Chinatown, where we unload the flowers into our Shop. The fragile beauties dispense of their petals and leaves and stamen as soon as they have been contained. They ruin themselves, and we cannot abide. So we commence to gluing them back on, and restoring them to the way we remembered them.

We are unwilling to just let them fall apart. The thermal adhesive seems to send shivers down their stalks and perhaps induces some sort of internal hibernation in the flower itself. This perpetuates it’s death shedding and the more we glue, the more petals they lose. It’s a sisyphean cycle, with no end.

But my Companions revel in the small focus of Petal Replacement, and it seems to give them a purpose. We have found a labor so fragile and fleeting, we are enraptured by it.

Somehow, this sick inventory will have to be preserved and I set about making plans to capture it, in actuality or artifice.

07.08.20

Things seem to be getting worse. This weekend was aimless and ominous. The explosions continue to jolt us out of sleep. There are no cheers of celebration, or any human voice. Only the sounds of eruption, followed by stony human silence.

Whatever blind optimism we had upon arrival has detached, like the scalp from our face. Did we think we could open up this store, and let the Others in? And show them what? Our total incoherence? Dying flowers with spiderwebs of thermal adhesive drooling from their shriveled husks? Rotten apples, orange peels, spilled coffee grounds? The oil residue of Cous Cous salad?

In our furor to set up shop, we’ve become damaged again. I packed a small surgical kit, and prepare for a patch of the hairline where the forehead starts. I swap my head with one of my Companions head, so that the Owners do not see me for who I am. It is important that the clients see only the veneer. Once I am sheathed in the face of my Companion I set to work stitching myself back together. The First Person Cam strap has done a number on my forehead, and the tension has torn me apart. The surgical thread is strong, however, and soon I am ready to swap heads back to my Companion. Reattach the strap and we are ready to open the shop, and keep it closed.

07.09.20

We began the week in a dour mood, as if the only thing that gave us joy was work itself. But the negativity that came down upon us in the humid swelter was from the outside world. Inside, and together, we find a calm in the structure of Business Hours.

My Companions and I have concocted a work ritual: each morning we process the previous day’s activities, and then make and pack our lunch. Our downstairs neighbor has seemingly abandoned his apartment, and so we hop his fence and snip some of his flowers, taking care not to rip Our Hands on his roses. It seems that so many buildings are empty of their residents, so as we travel to Our Job we snip their flowers that grow through fences or trickle out of flower-boxes, since there are no eyes to watch them.

This ritual allows us to honor the Inventory, which must invariably be produced, or we will lose our identity as a Shop. If we have nothing to show for Our Work, then we are merely occupiers, and occupying an unopened place makes us merely a rumor.

We unpack and arrange the flowers, getting drunk on their vibrant presence. They are more beautiful than anything we could make, but in this July heat they wither and die almost immediately. So we treat them like they were raw material, harvested from the ground. They will undergo a refining process, in which we will convert them into new, more durable material. Through this conversion we will honor them as they pass, allowing our artifacts to hold onto to their presence.

Perhaps we could have left them alone, and untended, in their planter boxes. But why did they rip themselves from the ground, shoot up, make those brilliant petals, and then OPEN UP to say hello if they did not want us to posses them?

07.10.20

Birthday Flowers, 2020, inkjet transfer on plaster and canvas, acrylic, 23.5 x 16 x 9 inches.

We produce our first object for Inventory, documenting the Birthday Flowers, which have long since withered and turned brown. My Companions suggest we dry all the flowers we bring into the shop so that we might maintain some sort of indexical record of what flowers were found along our route. My Companions, always obsessed with time and its unrepeatability, want the dried flowers to serve as markers—like scratches biding time on the wall of a prison cell, their dried stalks slash vertically down from the ceiling.

I remind my Companions of more practical matters, and work on the inventory below on the Platform. My Companions, with their blank stares aloft, are not really much help. I have a blind spot for everything but Our Labor, and my self esteem is completely invested in Our Product.

We will not rest until the owners (if they are even watching the God’s Eye) a sense of Our Inventory.

07.11.20

My Companions are hoarders. Their idealism leads them to sentimental ends. With their silent, but ever hopeful gaze, they look up. There they demand something to look up to. The current of fluorescent tubes is not enough.

They propose we preserve our raw materials, drying them from a lattice of string lines near the ceiling. These drying flowers will serve as an index for every forage during our Work Commute. Pilfering flowers is a serious business. We pause our daily commute to hop over bike lanes with a pair of scissors to snip.

My Companions want to know if, since we are technically working on our way to work, we can be paid for Our Commute. They’ve become fixated on Making A Living from this new enterprise. I must remind them that we are not open for business, we are only maintaining Business Hours.

Trying to reason with them is impossible. On our daily commute, I point out the myriad businesses with their gates pulled down, the Available signs hanging from raggedy awnings. So many transactional things are provisional: tape over clear vinyl with little interface windows; delivery bikes and chairs piled up inside the storefront; tables surrounded by reclaimed shipping palates in the parking lane. Nothing is right here and nothing is truly OPEN, and so all my Companions and I can do is try to recall— with our actions— what business was like. We pantomime what it is like to run a flower shop. It matters not how corrupted the enterprise. It doesn’t matter that we are not Florists— we have seen what florists do: the labor and the product may change, but their goal is the same. They keep the shop.

WEEK THREE

07.14.20

Our Hands have become worn by the shop work. We have only been tending to the business for two weeks, but building the Platform, pilfering flowers, organizing my Companions, and working in the Inventory have taken a toll.

We have had many occupations in the Former Times, most of them using our hands. The big, burly work of hauling 2x4s, ripping plywood, and cutting and scoring drywall pales before the surgical precision of pain inflicted by sewing needles and the rose’s thorn. Construction injuries are often obvious and superficial, whereas the invisible pricks of pins and fibers burrow and fester and swell for days.

My Companions, so introverted and internal, cherish the damage as another marker of time. The pigments of the flowers have infiltrated our Second Skin, to the point where it becomes impossible to distinguish between the maker and the Inventory.

Word of our endeavors here has reached as far as Providence. @rndy_b writes us an inquiry into our product line, with an aside: “As a kind of hand-art fetishist myself, I'm fascinated by the strangeness of your gloves' parameters - the way your 'real' fingers get tangled in the material (physically, but also reflected in the scanned imagery of tangled palimpsests), the kind of webbing that occurs between your thumb and pointer finger, and the cartoonishly goofy hinderance of them. They are like the caricatured clown shoes made even more comical by the utility of your activity, you are doing manual labor / building worlds - rather than running from rodeo-bulls or waving at kids.”

We know nothing of clowns or kids. We have grown into these Second Skins, and an objective observer might decide we were matured beings. We know nothing of the world, or how to build it. With our torn opposable thumbs, shredded armpits and crotches, and peeling scalps, we seek only to SUSTAIN. We remember, collectively, so that we may deny the present. We are the perpetual “were”... somewhere between a sentiments such as, “They were here, but now they are gone.” If we can catch on to a dangling thread, we can follow the trace of the garment’s shape, before it comes undone.

07.16.20

Halfway through our time here, and we have accomplished a good deal. We have filled an empty space with flowers cut, dried, dying and dead. We have preserved some, frozen in stone, forever stuck in the final moment of their sprightly glory before they are strung up on the ceiling to frazzle downwards, blowing in the myopic currents. We are stuck with them, in this space, with the doors locked and the windows papered over. We have displayed them on the Platform, and we have kept the cameras rolling, so that the Owners can monitor our progress. We have been late for our shift a time or two, but no Customers have complained as there are none.

My Companions are not helpful. Like agent provocateurs, their idealism and skepticism lead them to undermine Our collective goals. They care little for the Inventory, and have made a mess of the Platform. They insist that the Platform should birth other, smaller platforms, and that we should erect them to show the Owners our Inventory, to prove that we do not idol. I insist on quality control, and so set about getting my Companions to think about the art of the arrangement. But they undermine me.

They have become suspicious of me again. I insist: it is We not I; that We are here and we should fulfill our contact. We have the keys and the lights and the space and it is our duty to maintain this place. This ecosystem will fail without us as the caretakers. Perhaps they think I’ve set us up for another terrible Season, and instead of bringing us together as a cooperative, the end will only lead to resentment and division. We must maintain the shop, for we can not imagine what happens after the shop. Everything we have known is transactional, even though we attempt to exist communally. We toil here, collectively, but for whom? The Owners are the ones watching, making copies of the keys, inviting the minders. They keep the lights on. But where are they? I have no good answer for my Companions.

07.18.20

Yesterday I called in sick. My Companions indicated they would run the shop without me. When we arrived this morning to open the gates, we found two Tote bags that appear to have been fabricated while I was away. My Companions seem to think all is normal, but their blank expressions give away nothing.

I review the surveillance footage from yesterday, and count the number of workers. There are five of us on any given day, tending shop. Yesterday there were also five Companions here, although I was not here. I can not reconcile this.

We see through our own eyes ( or the First Person Camera’s approximation of them ) that we opened the shop on time, and set about making tote bags, complete with Our Hands holding an Anjou pear sewn in, Our Initials embroidered upon the side, and a floral Thank You bag, printed by a stray flower directly onto the canvas.

Now my Companions’ residual paranoia has burst into my consciousness. How could I be both here and not here, how could We as a group continue without me? My eyes betray me: the video documents my own hands making tote bags with no recollection of their making. I touch the bags and inspect their stitching and have no muscle memory for their construction. Was there an imposter here, dressed as we are dressed? An infiltrator of our collective identity, wielding our hands towards malign commercial activity? Tote bags for what? Our Inventory is beyond material, so what possibly could these bags contain? Are they meant to smuggle contraband in and out of this store?

Like an astronaut in an air lock with a puncture in my space suit, impending dread creeps electrically through my body. We have been infiltrated, infected, I am sure of it, although I cannot prove it. Will this be our undoing ? If the doors open suddenly, the parasitic air will enter our suit and we will inevitably suffocate from the air out there. Best not to leave the shop, even for a minute, an hour or a day.

07.21.20

A saturating heat has descended and suffused the store. Everything wilts, including my Companions. The flowers, with their acrid expulsions, have unleashed ants, hornets and unknowable insects that seem to ooze human blood when my Companions swat at them. The flower stems drip watercolor-like pigments upon the walls, like candy drool pouring from an over-stuffed mouth. The vibrancy of the flowers deepens the feeling of suffocation in this hot house.

During the Off Season, my Companions would babble on about Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters. Now their chatter is of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. In their reactionary tendencies they always gravitate towards the troubled artists, but in this case they remind me of Van Gogh’s simple desire to decorate before guests arrive. For that is why he painted the Sunflowers: to greet Gauguin in his guest room, upon his arrival in Arles. The idealism of the perfect stay, the founding partnership that would spawn a great artistic commune— would of course unravel quickly as Van Gogh became unbearable to collaborate and cohabitate with.

My Companions, fairweather friends eternally, love to use metaphorical stories to illustrate the obvious: that we have come unglued in the heat. Our unit has broken apart like a glass jar, and my instinct is to mend it, and then find a solution to the aesthetic atrocity of the mending later. They prefer critique and to leave it at that.

It is our fourth week here and my Companions want to break down the Fourth Wall, and expose the Owners, in the interest of transparency. I beg for a bit more time, so that it becomes apparent we have not shirked on the Inventory. That way the Owners will have nothing to criticize.

Other than the mess. I have a feeling that the brilliantly-hued rubble can only grow from here.

07.24.20

Our fourth week draws to an end. No word yet from the Owners. No customers or browsers on the street. Just my Companions and I, and a mounting pile of utility bills.

The platform has become clogged with material. We can no longer distinguish between what was imported and what is to be exported, what was found and what was made, what was discovered and what was manipulated. We are at a loss. We feel the loss—of something—but we can not grasp what is gone. Perhaps, in our frenzy to Maintain, we hadn’t noticed that what is missing is maintenance itself. We thought for sure if we tended this shop, that our gesture would serve as a reminder to continue. But no one is tending the Shop out there, and no one is maintaining much of anything at all. It is not enough to merely pantomime, lest we become zombies.

The lack of distinguishable product in our store means we have utterly failed at the most basic metrics of commerce. There was no daily drawer to count, or transactions, or questions to answer. There was only the perpetual synthetic hum of the spine of fluorescent tubes above. Occasionally, empty trains rattling along the Manhattan Bridge, their drivers mirroring our activity here. Containers and their drivers, with a destination, but no freight.

Based on the quantity of unopened utility bills, my Companions suspect we won’t have long to meditate on these thoughts. They add to the general clutter. Once again, our mess becomes a metaphor for our mental conditions. We try to settle what is unsettled—by rearranging.

The wilting continues in the heat, and so in efforts to prop this enterprise up, we decide that we will have one last push at keeping shop. There is a peeling apart window box, where perhaps the former Inventory was once showcased. It is not refrigerated, so I doubt it contained flowers. The only clue are some abject little pictures of bodies, which my Companions feel echoes their sentiments about zombies. I don’t know what kind of business would peddle this horror, but our arrangements, however fraught and indecisive and tangled, might perhaps send a signal: we are here. We are sweltering.

WEEK FIVE

07.27.20

We present our Inventory. Four weeks after arriving at the shop, we have been without certainty that our activities had any direction or reception, but now we have broken through the Fourth Wall.

The window box is large and illuminated. We divide the box into 6 shelving quadrants, and place our arrangements delicately within. We dust the shelves and small platforms, and position every product well, so that they seem to interact socially within the confined space.

My Companions imagine we are like old-timey bakers, arranging the daily breads and sweats in a hazy hive, showing the thoroughfare what we made in the twilight hours. Perhaps, if someone thinks this is a store, they will come and yank on the door handle and pound on the glass demanding to be let in, while we cower inside with our masks and gloves afixed.

An occasional walker passes and glances at us working away in the window box. With their masks clamped to their faces, their blinking eyes offer no indication of interest. Just a glance like a searchlight in the dark, intent on avoiding obstacles. Their unreadable expressions remind me of my Companions with their frozen quarter-smile, seemingly compliant but always resistant.

In the evening, when the cooler air rolls up from the river (it’s not that cool), we open the door to the shop and look at what we have crafted. Eleven arrangements of various sizes and colors, each derived from the gaps in city infrastructure where things are allowed to grow, untended and reaching up for light. When we were lucky, in amongst the weeds we found a lily, a rose or a crop of coneflowers. We sought them out for their colors, and ensured that our palate would be diverse. We wanted the Owners to be satisfied with our labor, but also that we’d have something to match any hypothetical customer’s taste.

We cannot open the doors. We cannot let you in. But you might tap on the glass, clicking on the one you might desire, and if you close your eyes, you could imagine dragging it from the glass, adding it to your shopping cart, and going about your thoughtless and unencumbered day.

07.28.20

How long does it take before an unfamiliar place becomes unnoticeably common? The kind of place, when you wake in the dark, you can migrate to the bathroom blind, and flick the light switch with your eyes closed.

How long before the space feels suffocated and sick, filled to the brim? The kind of place that become irredeemable, and needs to be thrown away, leveled, and purged of its past.

So much of our time is spent dwelling in space. Festering upon it. We have sought it, always, in the places where the Others cannot be found. We move about, occupying the time, the room, the Platform. Just when we feel we have succeeded at keeping the shop, it occurs to us that we are merely one shop on a street full of shops, in a city that is the world’s most massive shop, in a massive countrywide shop. This stacking set of shops are not as we remembered them: their presentations have eroded, their business is slowed, their inventory looks tired. Many of them have become Available, as if suddenly the supply of space has become abundant. Where did all the occupiers go? We look into the towers of privilege, where the Owners live, and they are empty. The doormen and the service elevator operators, like the shopkeepers, carry on the pantomime is their duties, but for no one. It seems as though the Owners have abandoned us.

So instead, we colonize this space with our bodies and our Inventory. Having filled the window box, we have freed some space. It is the Air of Accomplishment. So we have a little party, celebrating the putting of things in their places. For if each and every thing in our microcosm has its home, it’s little room, and a bed of its own to rest... then we have redeemed this space.

But a creeping thought occurs to me: that we are each so alike, our thoughts and mannerisms so similar—we cannot know an objective truth. We have only Our Opinion, and bounced back and forth amongst our collective, that opinion is the only thing we have. How long before that opinion multiplies, clogging up the shop, until this place become irredeemable, and we have to throw it out ?

07.30.20

The lights went out. The unopened stack of electric and internet bills that my Companions viewed suspiciously turned out to be the bad omen they perceived. The electric company has shut us down. The pile of letters from the management company must surely mean eviction is not far behind.

Without consultation, my Companions had packed an Emergency Light in our kit before we arrived. We are not entirely sure what that is, but it has now come to save us from blindly stumbling through the Shop in the dark.

I was blind. My Companions hurl accusations at me, certain that my Delusions of Grandeur have allowed me, once again, to commit us to folly. Where did we get these keys? Who invited us to hold these Business Hours? What are we doing here, and what shop are we even trying to keep? For if there is no shop, there are certainly no Owners. And if there are no Owners, then the no one is watching us from the camera above (the God’s Eye). And if there was no one to monitor us, then any action we have taken has been complete artifice, and worse still—a total farce.

Humbly, we set about removing the God’s Eye from the ceiling in the red cast of the Emergency Light. For a time we let the camera swing about from its cable, while our group descends into chaos. My Companions request to leave immediately, and will not acknowledge the mess we have made. They feel no attachment to the Inventory, and want to be rid of the whole Enterprise. They want to leave it and make it someone else’s problem.

It is true that this space is disgusting, hot, crawling with bugs and beetles and cockroaches. There are water bulges behind the paint and the bathroom is one of the worst we have seen.

The flowers on the ceiling are dying, leaf crunch sifting to the floors. The sound echoes in the shop, and in our ears. It feels a hallway in the head, after a horrid earthquake. My Companions, untethered and pursuing individual errands, become obsessed with hydrating the place and begin to string up gallon jugs of water, as if the mere presence of water might revivify the place. They believe that the jugs are talismans, that will set forth a torrent.

07.31.20

Our time is up, it seems. The lights have gone out, and the water has been turned off. We work still, but by Emergency Lights, which are running off of battery power. My Companions believe we will only have a few more days of illumination before we cannot see. My Companions no longer trust me, as my delusions and ambitions have landed us here again, in a location that will not have us.

I cannot let go. Before, we toiled to create a Shop as we remembered from the Former Times. In desperation, I now insist we conjure the Shop as it was in our memory, just a few days ago. Can you recall a recollection, uncertain if it has any basis in reality?

All the flowers are dried and dead, suspended from the ceiling. We begin to cut them down, arranging them—filling empty vessels and ruptures in the Platform. The dried flowers had served as an index of our time, and now we undo what we did. We are working in reverse, pantomiming the pantomime.

It is clear our time here is finished. There were no Owners, and we made an Inventory for no one. There were no Customers, no Watchers, no Co-workers. Only Us, in a feedback loop of theft, labor and death.

We have been served our eviction notice from remote powers we cannot grasp. They will shut the lights, the water and change the locks. The only way we might still hold tight and keep this shop, is to hunker down and never leave our Office, while the petals and stalks crinkle to the floor, turning to dust beneath our endlessly restless feet. There, we will shuffle in the dark, open eyes conjuring a world once populated by vibrant and death-defying color. It matters little to us if it never existed at all