On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

“No door through which to enter, no door through which to leave,” says the speaker in Julie Carr’s fascinating new collection Real Life: An Installation. The book is organized in five movements (with interludes) that blend genres, transforming poetry and prose into linguistic constructions of art and fact. Carr attempts to productively dissolve and rework the line between art and reality to make “art in conflict with real life,” as one of the book’s epigraphs suggests. An installation, by definition, is a three-dimensional work that is site-specific and is designed to transform the perception of a space. Carr uses language to create imaginative, fictive constructions and explores how each collides with a common American reality: racism, sexism, capitalism, the human body, motherhood, gun violence, poverty, and politics. The book is intersectional in the way that each American problem becomes a performance of “the punishment of brute / fact” as each inherent problem in our country is linked and inter-connected to each other in often complex ways. It’s in the performative nature of the work itself that leads Carr to define the function of art: “All art is entertaining on some level, entertaining a darkness, or a delight, entertaining a spirit or an arrogance, entertaining a rage.”

The repetition of “entertaining” here is not an accident. The reader is transformed in this book into a spectator. Reality, or the reconstructions of it, becomes the spectacle. These poems and fragments prove the mind itself is performative, creating drama through its interactions of self and world. And with that, the question of the book is born: does the reality that constantly creeps into art erase or diminish the imaginative realm? Or does the imagination enhance reality toward truth? In Carr’s book, both are attempted as experiments through various language installations but neither seem to fully succeed. And that’s precisely the point. It’s the performance of the clashing that creates the art. Take her piece Installation 10:

Enormous projections of the inside of your own body. Heart and lungs

on the right side, stomach, liver, kidneys on the left. The wall before you

shows your brain, behind you, your womb and whatever might be inside it.

If another person enters the room, the images will no longer be clear–for

the inside of that person’s body will be superimposed over yours.

In each of the Installation pieces we are given a staged scene to consider, one which forces the spectator to question the installation’s plausibility and abstract implications. If this is not an installation that could exist in reality, what is the reason for that? How does that connect back to our American failures? In this piece in particular, how does the body, specifically the inner body, become seen? How is a body violated? How do we make a body feel erased? Much of the book centers around the speaker’s experience with pregnancy, abortion, motherhood and the ways in which politics have violated these otherwise private acts/rights. Carr states, “This is the central confusion of real life: / The body as erotic object, the body as food, the body as hunger, the body as victim, the body as perpetrator.”

The book does shift back and forth between these personal themes and direct statements about the nature of politics in current America, showing the difficulty of weighing our own selfhood in a country that does not value the self. Early on, Carr juxtaposes the American spectacle of an election against the implications of political ideologies: “As tax cuts seen as best hope for jobs/ As fires rage in Texas, California/ As incarceration blooms data.” The election permeates the collection and constantly moves the speaker’s attention away from the personal as if the “brute facts” of the political public are too overwhelming to ignore. She states, “The candidate is an installation artist” and “As all in red, the candidates debate–their faces red, their podiums red, red as the red wall behind–//it seems they debate/ in an inferno.” The color performs itself as a cinematic rinse, the candidates become the players, we, the audience that must either be entertained by them or endure them.

The shifts between subject and theme create instability for the reader, just as they create instability for the speaker (who does seem to desire some semblance of stability). She lives in a world where creating art is a backdrop to diminished health care, mass gun violence, soaring homelessness, and worsening natural disasters: “Every day I stroke the keys. // Fires in Texas. Flood in Montana, Colorado, Iowa, North Dakota, Nebraska.” The question of how we create art in difficult times is not a new one, but Carr is able to construct the complexities of this task through the blending of art and fact, reportage and poetry. In a piece called “What do you own? What owns you? she says: