Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,45

great joys. Jerry deepened my understanding of the place he’s now spent more than eighty years in and paints with such love. Catherine moved to New York for a few years, and I first visited the city as an adult to stay with her (as a young art critic, I’d thought that I was probably supposed to move there to plunge more deeply into the art world or climb its career ladders, and when my writing began to be about western places, I was hugely relieved that I’d written my way out of that fate).

Perhaps you could tell a story the way children play hopscotch, returning to the beginning and going a little further each time, tossing your token into another square, covering the same ground in a slightly different pursuit each time. You can’t tell it all at once, but you can cover the same ground a few different ways, or trace one route through it. In 1988 I went to the Nevada Test Site for the first time, to join the immense antinuclear activist gatherings there that my younger brother was already helping to orchestrate. That was a path I would travel far on, meeting extraordinary people, and finding another route into the landscapes I craved, into a world far beyond San Francisco. A path, or a gate.

Out there in the Nevada desert one day the photographer Richard Misrach met me, walking up with his huge view camera slung casually over his shoulder. His big color photographs of places of violence and destruction in the American West had a major impact then and were the subject of some controversy, from people who thought he was glorifying the wrong things, perhaps because they believed that only the good should be beautiful, while he was interested in the tensions of a hideous beauty and the demands it made on us when the ethical and the sublime or beautiful are at odds. He became another artist whose work quite literally made me think—about that conflict between beauty and morality, the invisibility and pervasiveness of certain kinds of violence, the legacies of the conquest of the West, and what he often called “not the representation of politics but the politics of representation.” Later in the 1990s, I wrote the text for a couple of his books.

The support of these artists who were so much further along in their work and their sense of purpose and self gave me the confidence to move on from regarding myself as a critic and a journalist to trying on being a writer. Or rather they told me that’s what I was when they told me they wanted to work with me, and reminded me that that had been my original goal I had somehow backed down from. Criticism and journalism had felt like subordinate forms of writing in which you were always serving a subject and operating by constraining rules. To be regarded as a writer freed me to feel that anything was possible and everything was available.

One day an artist I knew told me that Ann Hamilton was making an installation in an industrial space in the city, and she was looking for volunteers to help, so I wandered down to Capp Street Project, a former auto-detailing garage in the Mission District. Ann had become recently and suddenly famous for her immense, ambitious installations, often involving vast accretions of small objects and materials, enlivened by performers present throughout the duration of the exhibition. She was only five years older than me, full of midwestern steadiness and modesty, but also an extraordinary confidence manifested in the sheer scale and effort of her works, at a time when many young women were making what felt like miniatures.

Ann had converted much of the budget for her show into pennies, because she was ambivalent about the lavish budgets for such projects. The 750,000 pennies that $7,500 dollars translated into would be put on display, then scraped up and taken to the bank to be washed, counted, and converted to currency that could be donated to an education project. In the meantime, she was filling much of the floor of the space with a vast rectangle—forty-five feet by thirty-two feet—of pennies laid down, one by one, on the cement floor “on a skin of honey.” Honey was the adhesive, but also a way of referencing another system of circulation than money, of putting together how