Up and Down and Back Again: (un)doing Our Relationship with Success and Failure

Adam Forrester

According to Greek mythology, Sisyphus, the king of Corinth, was punished for cheating death and disrespecting the gods by being forced, or rather compelled, to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down again, for eternity. If you’ve ever successfully fixed a paper jam in a printer and reprinted your document only to have the cursed piece of machinery jam once again, you might have thought about Sisyphus and his boulder. Maybe you’ve cleaned before a dinner party. Then you realize once the party’s over and all the guests leave, your home is messier than before. Perhaps you’ve taken an incorrect freeway entrance ramp and driven in the opposite direction you need to go, only to find out the next exit is more than fifteen miles away.

Andrew Bird opens his most recent touring set with the song Sisyphus, containing the line: ‘Did [Sisyphus] raise both fists and say, “To hell with this,” and just let the rock roll?’ Bird goes on to describe his version of the myth in which the rock crashes down below into a house that Sisyphus once had, but lost long ago. Bird proposes that Sisyphus’ burden (the boulder) would demolish his house, once he let the burden go. But, Bird reminds us that Sisyphus doesn’t live there anymore, so perhaps it doesn’t matter if his house is destroyed.

Last week, I talked with the woman that works the cash register at the market down the street from my home in Atlanta, Georgia as she rang up my groceries. We chatted about existentialism and Sisyphus. She said Camus was really where it’s at. ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy…his rock is his thing…his fate belongs to him’ (Camus). If you start to look for it, you may begin to see Sisyphean echoes everywhere in contemporary life. Some days, grid-lock traffic on the downtown connector feels about as futile as rolling a boulder up a hill and letting it roll back down again, and again, ad infinitum.

According to Tibetan Buddhist oral tradition, nearly a millennium ago, a Buddhist yogi by the name of Milarepa took on some similarly futile acts. He was made to build nine-story high towers, only to be told by his teacher Marpa to ‘tear down this tower and take the earth and stone back to its places’ (Lhalungpa). Milarepa and Sisyphus embody a maker and a doer respectively. Milarepa constructs his towers. Sisyphus rolls his boulder. Yet they also take on the role of the undoer, a pair of CTRL+Z cheerleaders, if you will. Milarepa tears down his towers, Sisyphus’ boulder rolls back down the mountain. In both cases, we don’t know what the inner monologue might have been for each undoer. Andrew Bird suggests that Sisyphus, in a moment of discontent or even all out exhaustion, lets it all go. Camus writes that Sisyphus could have actually been happy to take on this futile endeavor. Camus might suggest that fixing a paper jam or driving in traffic wasn’t torturous or futile. Andrew Bird’s Sisyphus might say ‘to hell with this,’ close the printer drawer, and walk away.

In 1997, Francis Alÿs’ made a video work, Paradox of Praxis 1, that begins with these words: Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing. The 4:57 m:s video consists of various clips documenting the artist pushing a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City. The performance lasts for about nine hours. As the (much shorter) video unfolds, Alÿs has to stoop lower and lower to continue to push this solid block of ice, leaving a trail of water behind him that soon evaporates. The ice block eventually loses enough of its mass that Alÿs resorts to kicking the block around pedestrians and through traffic with his aptly donned Chuck Taylors. Eventually, by the end of the video, all that remains is a small cube. Alÿs lets the cube rest on the warm sidewalk until it turns into a small puddle of water. In the final frames of the video, we see children smiling with curiosity, pointing at all that’s left of that large block of ice, and waving to the camera. The block of ice eventually becomes a small puddle of water. The puddle of water eventually evaporates into the air.

Francis Alÿs, Still from Paradox of Praxis 1, 1997. 4:59 m:s, Video.

One paradox contained in this work relates to the (im)permanence of the ice block itself. The puddle of water at the end both is and isn’t the ice block. The water vapor that the puddle turns into both is and isn’t the ice block. Later when that water vapor condenses and forms rain water it still is and isn’t that ice block. But when that water is collected, frozen, and formed into an ice block again, the new ice block both is and isn’t the original ice block. Sometimes making something leads to nothing, or perhaps sometimes making nothing leads to something.

I once had the opportunity to observe Tibetan Buddhist monks creating and destroying a sand mandala. The entire process is a well-planned ceremony, and the apex of the ceremony is the moment when the intricate sand painting is destroyed. There’s a specific order in which the image is destroyed, and historically the sand collected would be placed in a bag and poured into a nearby river so as to spread the positive impact of the ceremony to anyone down river. This action of creating the painting and destroying it is performed to emphasize, among many other Buddhist beliefs, the notion of our own impermanence.

The rock is shoved, then falls. The tower is built, then unbuilt. The ice block is solid, then melts and disappears. The sand painting is created, then destroyed. Many contemporary situations are akin to these Sisyphean loops. We may even be able to draw parallels between our own lives lived and the life and death of a block of ice. For nine hours, Francis Alÿs is in partnership with his ice, his metaphorical boulder, but then it melts and takes on another form. Dust to dust.

I look toward these kinds of doing/undoing actions as opportunities for understanding contemporary life. These kinds of experiences are so rich and revealing that, for the past decade, I have embedded the Sisyphean loop in my own life and practice. In my video series Adopted Obstructions (2012 – 2015), I created several video works that are intended as responses to the Sisyphean loop. In the series, I take tools of labor and attempt to negate their function.

Still from Inhumation, 2012. 2:02 m:s, HD Video, Courtesy of the Artist.

I dig a hole with a shovel, then bury the shovel in the hole that the tool assisted in creating. I build a boat and sink it. I chop wood and nail it back together. I build a place to sleep for the night, then burn it down the next morning.

Still from The Deluge, 2015. 5:07 m:s, HD Video, Courtesy of the Artist.

In all of these works, my ambition is to investigate the act of unbuilding or undoing. In these works, the physical labor involved in deconstructing something that I’d previously constructed led me to a more positive perspective regarding topics like success and failure. In making this work, I’ve allowed the myth of Sisyphus to have a role within the core substance of my every day. I’m aware that inviting failure into one’s life, or having an affinity for a story about a mythological figure rolling a boulder up a mountain over and over is—well—odd. But, I think there is something that we can learn from this ancient and absurd act. The Sisyphean loop, Emma Cocker writes, is ‘part of a generative or productive force, where it functions as a device for deferring closure or completion, or can be understood as a mode of resistance through which to challenge or even refuse the pressures of dominant goal-oriented doctrines.’ (266)

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t set them for myself, but I’m not very fond of goals. My relationship with goals is complicated. The word goal conjures up memories of being a young adult, swimming in self-proposed or (more often) socially imposed goals: career goals, exercise goals, diet goals, romantic goals, financial goals, and so on. Many of the goals I set early in life were never met, and for a long time those unmet goals felt like failures, and those failures felt like tragedies. Within our contemporary society, goals are golden. Anything less than achieving a set goal—that is, failure—seems unacceptable. This binary win/loss approach to goals shows up in all aspects of contemporary life, but let’s take a look at its role in our love affair with sports.

The night the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series in 2008, I was visiting friends in Philadelphia. I’ve never witnessed such a raw display of elation. It began as sheer shouts of joy erupting everywhere in the streets. Strangers were high fiving and hugging each other. As an outsider, it felt like I was welcomed into the celebration with open arms. It was a celebratory moment for everyone in the city. However, I soon witnessed celebratory crowds turn into riots as people climbed up street light poles, ripped aluminum signs from their posts, and pulled street signs out of the ground. Small fires began to burn, car windows were smashed, and a group of people were rocking a tree back and forth that was planted along the sidewalk. Eventually the group achieved their goal of breaking the sapling, and the crowd in the street erupted in applause. It was time for me to get back to my friend’s apartment.

I wasn’t in Vancouver when the Boston Bruins defeated the Vancouver Canucks, but the aftermath of a loss for the home team in Vancouver sounds a lot like the aftermath from a win for the home team in Philadelphia. In response to their home team’s loss,  Vancouver fans flipped cars over, burned cars, smashed windows, and more (Furlong).

A rioter dressed in a Vancouver Canucks jersey cheers while a car burns, created June 2011. Photo by Elopde, Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

On February 1, 2012, after a 3-1 victory by Al Masry at Port Said Stadium in Port Said, Egypt, local Al Masry fans stormed the field and attacked the loosing Al Ahly team players and fans. By the end of the attack, more than 70 people were dead (Kirkpatrick).

Fans want their team to achieve the goal of winning, and when the goal is achieved, fans often erupt in mayhem. Equally, when the goal of winning is not achieved, chaos and destruction can erupt as well. While massacres like the one that occurred at Port Stadium are somewhat rare, the fact that these instances occur at all is horrifying. I’m not so sure goals are the most healthy aspirations for us.

Another issue with setting goals is that, in many cases, the goalposts are in flux. I had a goal of getting a college degree, but once obtained, a bachelor’s degree didn’t seem like it got me a better job with better pay. A graduate degree now tends to be the preferred education mark to meet. Owning a home seems like a reasonable goal, but so many post-graduates who are now drowning in student debt (including myself), are unable to save enough for a downpayment on a piece of property. Meanwhile, with goalposts continuously on the move, rent and housing prices skyrocket.

Setting goals might be useful if the supposedly democratic systems that encapsulated the steps to obtaining those goals were actually democratic. Goals are misleading. That’s because there is this implication that we can (or should) achieve them. An inability to meet those goals is generally seen as failure, and failure is generally looked upon as something to avoid at all costs.

I can envision the adage, ‘failure is not an option,’ painted on multiple gym walls in cities across the US. Or perhaps that was the mantra playing on repeat inside the mind of a fan who decided to reject their team’s loss/failure (or embrace their team’s win/success) by breaking things or harming another person.

Flight Director of NASA’s Gemini and Apollo programs, Eugene Francis ‘Gene’ Kranz’s memoir, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond, also showcases the axiom. In the context of the incredibly dangerous act of space exploration, failure does have a different meaning. In space, one mistake could be life-threatening. Comparing the small margin of error that is crucial for surviving space exploration with someone’s motivation to complete a certain number of sit-ups at a gym is a bit of an oversimplification. But for all intents and purposes, we don’t like failure, we love success. Obtaining goals makes us giddy. Failure to achieve goals can cause distress.

The Sisyphean loop is an embrace of failure. It is anti-goal. It is anti-celebration. It allows failure to be a perfectly viable option, if not inevitable. It is opposed to participating in systems with movable goalposts, with policies that favor one particular demographic over another, with unobtainable aspirations. It inverts the goal-driven lifestyle and refuses to accept the notion that goals are in any way meaningful or important. This is why I chopped wood and nailed it back together. This is why I sank the boat I built. The sole purpose of a boat is to float. To intentionally sink a boat is to invert, negate, and undo its intended function. To reject a goal oriented society is to negate the power and authority of goals altogether. In my work and practice, I’m striving to negate the power that goals can hold over us. The act of (un)doing is how I hope to heal our broken relationship with success and failure.

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Atlanta, Georgia, where I currently live, is known as a city that rose from the ashes of the Civil War. As far back as 1900 until present day, the Atlanta city seal has depicted the mythological Phoenix rising out of the flames of a fire. The Phoenix, according to mythology, is a creature that cyclically regenerates itself. That is, the new bird emerges (or is reborn) from the ashes of the old bird, over and over, generation after generation, in a never-ending loop. I live in a city with an identity tied directly to a mythical cyclical loop. Sisyphus is smiling.

Flag of Atlanta

Atlanta’s city leaders have always supported the narrative that Atlanta is in a constant state of rebirth. Bolstering that narrative, Atlanta has had some devastating fires in its history. Union Army General William T. Sherman burned much of the city to the ground during his March to the Sea in 1864. It took some time, but Atlanta rebuilt itself. The great fire of 1917 left over 10,000 people without homes. Atlanta rebuilt. And just like the Titanic was touted as an unsinkable ship, so the Winecoff Hotel of Atlanta claimed to be ‘absolutely fireproof’ in advertisements and on its stationery (Spignesi). The Winecoff Hotel fire of 1946 was and still is the deadliest hotel fire in US history. 119 people perished in the fire, but Atlanta rebuilt. The building still stands today as a four-star hotel with a different name.

These catastrophic fires have nudged the city of Atlanta to align itself with the myth of the Phoenix, a cycle of birth, death, rebirth. I often wonder if the Phoenix myth of constantly being reborn is contributing to Atlanta’s insatiable appetite for progress. The city seems to be engaged in a cycle of birth, death, rebirth that is fixed upon its buildings being built, razed, rebuilt. In Atlanta, warehouses and neighborhood homes are torn down to make way for new condos advertised as ‘STARTING IN THE MID – $500’s.’ Old factories that once housed artists’ studios are sold and turned into chic retail outlets where Atlantans buy furniture for those aforementioned condos. In Atlanta, entire blocks of Black-owned business were bowled over to make way for an interstate.

American interstates are often sinister examples of urban progress, physically reinforcing segregation across the nation and Atlanta is no different. With little to no effort to hide I-20’s intended purpose, Atlanta Mayor Bill Hartsfield stated that the roadway was to serve as ‘the boundary between the white and Negro communities’ (Kruse). Yes, Atlanta can rise up from the ashes of its scorched past, but what is lost with the metaphorical rebirth of each Phoenix?

When it comes to urban renewal, Atlanta, like most American cities, has a puzzling approach. Recently, in the name of progress, the city opened two large stadiums, the Mercedes-Benz Stadium and Sun-Trust Park. During the same time-period of urgent stadium construction, the city also imploded two large buildings, the Georgia Archives and Records Building and another stadium, the Georgia Dome. The Georgia Dome was completed in 1992 and destroyed in 2017. This stadium could hold 80,000 people. It was the home of the Atlanta Falcons football team. It hosted the Superbowl twice. It’s also important to note that the Georgia Dome was also where I saw Beyoncé perform as part of the Formation World Tour. The structure held some important memories. The Georgia Dome cost $214 million to build, and had been standing for only twenty-five years when it was destroyed.

On the other hand, cities like New Orleans, Louisiana briskly removed their confederate statues, and in Montgomery, Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative built the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. At the same time, metro Atlanta holds onto relics from its past that could be removed or rethought. Stone Mountain, a suburb of Atlanta, is home to the largest confederate war memorial in the country. Completed and dedicated on March 3, 1972, the memorial is a 90 foot tall, 190 foot wide, and 42 feet deep bas-relief of three Confederate leaders carved into the face of a natural quartz monzonite mountain.

Stone Mountain was the site of the 1915 rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. There’s a Georgia law on the books that prevents people from defacing/removing/altering the carving at Stone Mountain. I find it telling that we have a law that protects a confederate monument, carved into a boulder a century after the war it memorializes, that does little more than perpetuate the erroneous lost cause narrative. And yet, no protections are afforded to historically Black neighborhoods in the path of an interstate, or corner stores that are worth more to developers as condos, or an odd white, windowless building nestled in between downtown’s skyscrapers, or so many other lost structures.

The Georgia Archives and Records Building was completed in 1965. It was imploded fifty-two years later in 2017 to make way for the Nathan Deal Judicial Center. The Georgia Archives and Records Building was unique, it was ‘austere and monolithic, the white, windowless marble clad mass of the archives [rose] above the more classical pedestal — a union of classical proportions and mid-century modern minimalistic expression’ (Kahn). The Judicial Center is a brick building with windows and doors. That’s all I can say.

I had a strong affinity for the old Archives Building. It was nicknamed the White Cube, and its windowless marble façade was a key component of the downtown Atlanta skyline. So, when I learned that it was going to be destroyed, I knew I had to attend the implosion. It felt like more of a duty as a citizen of the city of Atlanta, an opportunity to say goodbye to an old friend, a ceremony, of sorts.

On that hazy early morning in March of 2017, I brought my video camera and sound recorder to the implosion. I wanted to document the event. What I witnessed (and filmed) that day still troubles me. As I filmed the building implosion and captured the audio from the bystanders that day, I was taken aback by the inordinate amount of celebration that erupted when the building collapsed. No cars were flipped, no fires were started in celebration, but the crowd’s reaction was still confusing to me. I saw the event as a somber one, as a moment to reflect on how ‘demolition of historic fabric is a loss to our city’ (Kahn). However, I was an outlier. Most people in attendance that morning saw the building implosion as an invitation for howling.

Still from Archive, 2017. 2:12 m:s, HD Video.

I don’t recall any cheering or celebration when I witnessed the destruction of a sand mandala. It was understood that this destruction meant something greater than what we were seeing. As I stood on the site overlooking the imploded building in Atlanta, surrounded by cheering onlookers watching the cloud of construction debris hanging in the air slowly waft toward us, I was confused by the crowd’s celebratory reaction. My experience that morning was almost as if I had seen someone applauding in the middle of a funeral as the casket was lowered into the ground.

In response to my experience, I produced a 2:12 m:s video work, entitled Archive (2017). Viewers will see clouds of rolling smoke and haze for much of the work’s duration, and by the end of the two minute looping video piece, the building that was demolished, The Georgia Archives and Records Building, emerges from the haze fully intact. As the film unfolds the viewer may become aware that my process involved separating the ‘visual and sonic content: the former unspooling backwards while the latter moves forward. The resultant work functions as a digital surrogate in place of the now absent analog marble and steel form.’ (Wasserman) In this work, the Georgia Archives and Records Building lives on, rendered only in pixels.

In filming the footage of the implosion itself, reversing it, and pairing that with the diegetic audio recording of the crowd’s celebration, I undo the undoing of the Georgia Archives and Records Building. Archive is intended to question our appetite for progress, our drive to make all things anew, and our automatic celebratory response to the destruction of our own ephemera. We like to see explosions and destruction, even if the explosion is part of the history of our city, even if the destruction happens to the opposing sports team or its fans. There is at the heart of humanity a deep desire to conquer, to win, or to destroy by whatever means necessary. However, in the midst of it all there are those, like Sisyphus, who may be perfectly content with their boulder. Sisyphus never wins, but he never loses either. He knows that the ice block will melt again, that the boulder will roll back down the mountain again. But he also knows that it is going to be taken up to the top again.

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Bibliography

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brian. New York, New York: Vintage International. 1991. 121-123.

Cocker, Emma. ‘Over and Over, Again and Again.’ 2010. Contemporary Art and Classical Myth. Eds. Isabelle Loring Wallace and Jennie Hirsh. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2011. 266 – 267.

Furlong, John; Keefe, Douglas. The Night the City Became a Stadium: Independent Review of the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup Playoffs Riot. Vancouver, British Columbia: Government of British Columbia. August 31, 2011. 13 – 24.

Kahn, Michael. ‘Rediscovering Atlanta’s Architecture: The Georgia Archives Building.’ Atlanta, Georgia: ArtsATL. September 19, 2016.

Kirkpatrick, David D. Egyptian Soccer Riot Kills More Than 70. New York Times. February 1, 2012.

Kruse, Kevin. Traffic. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Eds. Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein. New York, New York: The New York Times Company. 2021. 408 – 409.

Lhalungpa, Lobsang P. The Life of Milarepa. London, England: Compass. 1979. 49 – 50.

Spignesi, Stephen J. Catastrophe: The 100 Greatest Disasters of All Time. Citadel Press. pp. 2004. 267–269.

Wasserman, Andrew. ‘Restoring the Archives Building: An Interview with Adam Forrester.’ Atlanta, Georgia: Atlanta Studies. October 2, 2018.

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Adam Forrester received his MFA from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia.  His work has been screened and exhibited nationally and internationally as well as featured by NPR, The Bitter Southerner, ArtsATL and VICE Magazine. His documentary film work has been distributed via World Channel to public television stations across the U.S., and screened at DOC NYC, IFF Boston, ATL Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, indie grits, and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Adam makes work about bizarre myths and mumbled truths. From time to time, he reminisces about the moment when jelly shoes and reebok pumps were popular. He is (mostly) based in Atlanta, Georgia.