America

Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project (2014-23)

The image above is the Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s haptic memory of the bathroom of the apartment he lived in for 18 years (but no longer lives in) on West 22^nd Street, New York, NY. Suh covered every surface and every object in that apartment with white paper; rubbed the paper repeatedly with coloured pencils; peeled off the papers; removed them; and then pinned them to boards, organising their placement by type. ‘Rubbing is like writing a diary’, Suh says. 1-to-1 scale representations of bathroom fixtures, smoke alarms, floor tiles. Not the original objects, but the shape of the original objects, displayed on the wall like a giant butterfly, or a taxonomy of the material culture of one particular domestic space. The objects are very nearly present, but their pencil-rubbing medium – a medium that recalls (for me, at least) a child bent over a brass memorial to someone in the historic past – declares that these objects are resolutely not here. The rubbings are attentive testimonies to a series of absences. (Do Ho Suh’s work is currently on exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.)

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In about the year 2003 I lived for six months or so in the south of America, in a city with a large university. I was floating: looking for a job in America although not quite sure I wanted to be in America (this was still soon after 9/11, and America was an alienating place; it was also a short time after my dad had died in England). A senior member of the university’s English faculty introduced me to a recently appointed younger literature professor, about my age. I liked her immediately. We had coffee and then lunch with the senior faculty member, and then just the two of us. She had been, or perhaps was, a poet, although she now taught literary criticism, and had a way of describing things that produced a mild jolt: a little shock of defamiliarization, even if she was only noticing the plates and cutlery on the table in the restaurant. Understanding my floating state, she asked if she could help to see if there was some teaching I might do. I was pleased we were becoming friends, or might be soon becoming friends. Then I heard from a mutual contact that she was ill, and had been ill since her teenage years: a form of cancer that never went away. She didn’t mention it, and looked and seemed healthy – indeed, beautiful – although she would disappear for chunks of time, not answering emails. Then I heard things were bad, and then, probably only 4 months after I first met her, I was told by a near-stranger that she had died. There were testimonials in the online student newspaper about her teaching and her dedication to her students right up until her final days. But because this was 2003, that online presence was slight and it soon faded in a way that seems impossible from the vantage of 2024. Back in England a year or so later (I had abandoned the idea of living in America) I would occasionally Google her, but the searches felt intrusive: not sanctioned by the brevity of my knowing her, and the nameless nature of our relationship which had existed, if it existed at all, as a promise for the future. For a while there were a few online articles, and then for a time no articles but a single photo of her from some point in the past (a contextless black-and-white image with no signs of where or when it was taken), and then there seemed to be no trace of her at all.