On The Importance of Getting There

Easter Island aka Te Pito O Te Henua (The Naval of the World)
Enormous monolithic human figures called moai
Open sky, fierce ocean, barren landscape

Easter Island is a place I have been wanting to go for a long time.  It’s far away. Very far away…. from everywhere. Whether you are in Sydney or New York-it doesn’t matter - it’s just as far. A tiny island, only 15 miles long and 7 miles wide (only 2 miles longer and 5 miles wider than Manhattan), it sits way out in the South Pacific Ocean and is the most isolated inhabited place we know of.  On the island are 887 moai in varying stages of production, many still lying on their sides in the quarry.  I am fascinated by these moai.  It’s been a dream of mine to be able to stand next to one of them and be awed by their presence.

I am currently in the preproduction phase for a documentary project that will take me to Easter Island.   Mostly this feels really exciting, but sometimes I start feeling a bit tired and I think- “Oy, (big sigh) - its such a big trip.  Is it really necessary to shlep all the way out there?  So many people have already done research on the island  - why not just look at their pictures and read their stories? I am sure that I can get the information I need from that and I can always go to the National Museum of Natural History if I need to see a moai.”

Well, this does speak on some level to a part of myself that likes to rain on my own parade, but more importantly, I think it brings up some questions about the importance (or not) of first hand experience.  Being part of this media generation where so much experience is mediated through television, photography, movies and the internet, at some point it seems that perhaps these secondhand experiences are really good enough, not to mention cheaper and in many cases more pleasurable. No jet lag, no bad hotels or bad food and I can keep my fantasy of what Easter Island is like intact because I would have never experience it directly.  

This past week I showed a video called Ways of Seeing to my new media class at the New School to introduce them to the impact of technology on art and our lives. Ways of Seeing is a 4-part BBC television series from 1972 narrated by the amazing author John Berger and is based on his book of the same name. In this first program Berger talks about how the invention of the camera has changed the way we see and experience images.  Because the camera can mechanically reproduce and easily disseminate images, the original looses its value.  In the program he uses European painting to demonstrate his point.  So, for instance a famous painting like the Mona Lisa has been seen by all of us so many times in magazines, on television, postcards and on the internet.  Does the meaning of the painting change depending on which of these contexts it is seen in?  Is there in fact any need to go and see the original?  Does the original have any value other than its market value? 

You can see the whole episode on You Tube, but here is a short excerpt:

After listening to my students discuss the program, I realized that the answer to these questions are quite personal.  For me, it is not necessary to see the original Mona Lisa. I am not a painter and I am not moved by the quality of a line or the stroke of a brush.  From my perspective it is just a famous picture and I can just as well see the Mona Lisa in a reproduction. Easter Island and the moai are another story for me though. Space and materials, context and form are very powerful for me in terms of objects. I think that experiencing the physicality of the objects, the smell, water and wind of the environment are essential for understanding what these objects are and finding out what I want to say about them.


This makes me think of philosopher Alphonso Lingis' book Dangerous Emotions.  In the chapter called The Navel of the World, he talks about his experience of traveling to Easter Island.  He watches the tourists and archeologists, thinks of all the reading he did before arriving on the island and concludes that the only way to understand the moai is by being there and paying attention to his experience. 

"On Te Pito O Te Henua (Easter Island) it was clear to me that the passions turned to fathomless distances that raised those stones into giant statues were drawn from the upsurge of the volcanos themselves, that those vacant eyes reflected the radiance of the skies, that the song of the winds and the seas was on those lips and that those great stone faces and their raiment held the color of the ardent lava and the restless oceanic depths." (Dangerous Emotions, pg 22)

So, in other words, it's worth getting there.