Five Mules Waiting to be Rescued: Documenting the Multiplicity of Avenues in the Human Experience

by Kent Howie and Kathleen Quillian

Kent Howie has a certain way of doing things. His most favorite way is to just let something happen and see what comes of it. He doesn't necessarily neglect craft or effort over concept, he simply privileges chance over intention. In the spirit of Cage, Nauman and Beckett, he truly appreciates the spaces in between the framed and carefully constructed compositions. Somehow he manages to make the things that most of us tend to overlook or neglect, seem strangely appealing.

For this project Kent was asked, as usual, to submit a piece for his column ("The Rat Papers") under the theme of the issue ("transitions"). As usual, he chose to work collaboratively and after a lot of soul-searching, he decided that he would give me a shoebox full of photos which he had found on the sidewalk a long time ago for me to me to pick which, out of the hundred-or-so in the box I thought would be good to exhibit. So I looked through them and chose two sets of ten images--one set from the 1960s and one from

the 1970s. I then gave these to Kent and asked him to write about how he felt about the pictures that I chose in particular from the box that he gave me.

Whether it was the subject, the composition, the juxtaposition of the images, our particular preferences, or all of these, something happened between the efforts of the two of us that narrowed down an infinite amount of images and possibilities to these 20 photos in particular. These images somehow appealed to us enough to "choose" these particular images over the others. Is this, I wondered, any different from a curator choosing between images to exhibit in a gallery by an artist who has been invited to exhibit there? The curator does not have the same attachment to the images as the artist does, so why and to what extent do the images appeal to the curator? Can the images be as relative to the curator as they are to the artist who chooses to capture them in the first place? Does this also apply to found photos--in particular found family photos? Do family photographs have the same amount of value as art photographs? Different? And when those images are then discarded, what is the value then? Here is where Kent and I come in--artist and artist, curator and curator, two pairs of eyes, one shoebox full of images and a little experiment in curating someone else's family photographs.

This project examines that space between art and life, artist and curator and chance and intention.

—Kathleen Quillian, June 2005

Move the images in the gallery around to create your own compositions. Or just go picture bowling with them. Also, make sure to read Kent's text at the end of the page.

I found a cardboard box filled with photographs on the street in the Mission in 1998. There was no name, no address, just location and dates written on the back of half of the photographs. These photographs are really very hard to speak about and to put into words.. There are two groups of photographs and I somehow believe they belong together so that's how they stay. I just look at them and I feel they are constantly reconstructing themselves and they have their own memories. I like them almost as much as I like my own family snapshots. Just the idea that I rescued them from oblivion is interesting to me. The objective-subjective reality is that the photos can be used or not used but I much prefer them as they are. I wouldn't like it either if I died and somebody placed my photos in the street and some artist came and found them and added music to them. That's just me. I much prefer to leave them as they are. Is it homesickness that gives birth to adventure? Is it homesickness I see in them? Or the idea that they're like the five mules waiting patiently to be rescued. Maybe it's that they convey to me the human experience.

—Kent Howie, May 2005

"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-imposed is this immaturity when it's cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage..." —Immanuel Kant

"Nothing is the cause of so much hopelessness as the fact, that at another time there were grounds for hope." —Pushkin