Kate Schneider

Table of Con­tents | Arti­cle doi: 10.17742/IMAGE.SA.12.1.13 | PDF

Have you ever found your­self in the throes of a project and won­dered, “What the hell am I doing?” That was me at hour five of what would be eight hours of scrap­ing and peel­ing thir­ty feet of 24” x 36” posters off a brick wall in down­town Wind­sor, Ontario.

The posters are part of my project, Trump­grabs or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love My Exis­ten­tial Fear, which is an evolv­ing archive and pub­lic-art­work cat­a­logu­ing the over­whelm­ing news alerts I receive on my phone’s lock-screen since Don­ald Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion in 2017. For Struc­tures of Antic­i­pa­tion, I installed the archive of 1,100 screen­shots in three loca­tions in Wind­sor and Detroit. And, in a move that some questioned—which in my naivete I claimed was ethical—I promised the landown­ers I would remove the works at the end of the symposium.

Fast for­ward to the de-install: near­ly in tears with hands ripped raw, I was peel­ing small bits of paper with myho­tel key­card from Com­fort Suites Wind­sor and deflect­ing drunks who were ask­ing, “Why are you sand­ing a brick wall?” That morn­ing, I thought this process would only take an hour. I brought a buck­et of warm water and a spray bot­tle, and launched myself into a process of wet­ting the posters and gen­tly peel­ing them from the wall. But with each round of sat­u­rat­ing, the posters wouldn’t budge, with only small frag­ments peel­ing away.

Antic­i­pa­tion is a hoax. There are many things we can antic­i­pate; I knew that it was going to be a humid day. I brought water and snacks in case the de-install took more than an hour. YouTube told me that I need­ed to soak the posters in soapy warm water. I brought a buck­et of warm water. We can guess what will hap­pen to our future selves. We can make plans to mit­i­gate future issues, but the major­i­ty of dai­ly life is beyond the reach of antic­i­pa­tion. And, if we could actu­al­ly antic­i­pate all the facets of our lives, we would like­ly fall into some antic­i­pa­to­ry exis­ten­tial hole.

Don­ald Rums­feld, the archi­tect of the sec­ond Iraq war, said this about antic­i­pa­tion (or the Bush Administration’s inabil­i­ty to find weapons of mass destruc­tion in Iraq in 2002): “[…] as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”¹ I, my friends, while in the pur­ga­to­ry of peel­ing, was deeply in the unan­tic­i­pat­ed ter­ri­to­ry of unknown unknowns.

Pos­si­bly I could have antic­i­pat­ed this. But this antic­i­pa­to­ry void is part of the messi­ness of the artis­tic process. I also don’t have any beau­ti­ful­ly pack­aged wis­dom or grand ideas on art for you. All I know is that I am deeply in the known unknown ter­ri­to­ry with Trump­grabs. And, I’m ok with this. I think.