The Beauty of the Ordinary: Leslie Jamison and Sam Youkilis

Still from Sam Youkilis's "10:13 A.M., Tribeca"

One of the most captivating artworks I’ve seen this year is Sam Youkilis’s short video loop “10:13 A.M., Tribeca,” included in newyorker.com’s brilliant “April 15, 2020: A Coronavirus Chronicle” (April 27, 2020). It shows a masked florist assembling a bouquet of purple lilacs. Nothing dramatic happens. The florist stands at his workbench efficiently and matter-of-factly fitting a bunch of lilacs together, cutting the stems to make them even. And that’s it, the sequence starts over – fifteen seconds of seemingly mundane life. But it’s not mundane. Youkilis captures a slice of visual poetry simply by training his camera on an urban scene that most of us would walk right by. But once we’re shown it, we see the beauty.

Leslie Jamison explores this subject – the extraordinary in the ordinary – in her recent “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020), a review of the MoMA exhibition “Private Lives Public Spaces.” She describes the show as follows:

An exhibition called “Private Lives Public Spaces” comprises a collection of home movies showing everyday scenes: one child pushes another in a sled as the day darkens around them. Lace curtains billow in a breeze. A woman mock proposes to another woman at a lawn party, kneeling on the grass and laughing. A middle-aged man in a suit and tie rides piggyback on the shoulders of another middle-aged man in a suit and tie. Boys take furtive sips of Manischewitz at someone’s bar mitzvah, their glasses glinting in the ballroom light.

Jamison says,

It would be a lie to say that I was blindsided by the beauty of the ordinary at MoMA; more truthful to say I’d gone looking for it. By the time I stood in front of those home movies, I was nearly a decade into an ongoing fasciantion with the grace of ordinariness: an increasingly insistent belief in un-extraordinary lives as sites of meaning. For me it began in twelve-step meetings, listening to the voices of strangers in other basements, in distant cities – riveted by stories of clichés that my literary training had taught me to understand as banal. Recovery was teaching me that every life held profoundity. Banality was just a call to look harder.

“Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!,” she says, and we must try to catch it. Certainly that’s what Sam Youkilis did in his “10:13 A.M., Tribeca” – a wonderful act of attention.