Menjivar Mark - The luck archive : exploring belief, superstition, and tradition

THE LUCK ARCHIVE

Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

CONTENTS

HARRELL FLETCHER

There was a time in my life, a couple of years in my late twenties, when I got a little obsessed with finding lucky pennies. The pennies had to be found face up on the street or sidewalk, and I would always put them in my right back pocket. I felt like things would go well for me when I was in possession of one of these pennies, so I was always on the lookout. When something important was about to happen or I was waiting for news of some kind, I would walk around frantically looking for a faceup penny. I would relax only when I found one. Eventually I decided the practice was going too far. I didnt really believe in superstitions, so I decided to break my lucky penny habit. It took a while, but eventually I did, and so far there have been no major changes in my fortune one way or another.

There continue to be other persistent examples of superstition that I havent dismissed. One is particular to the small agricultural town of Santa Maria, California, where I grew up. At some point before I was born and prior to the construction of Twitchell Dam, water flowed in the Santa Maria River. The riverbed, now dry, is the dividing line between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties. When we were children, my older sister Martha told me that if you held your breath while driving over the bridge that connects the two counties, you could make a wish at the end. Not only have I happily continued this practice, but Ive shared it with my young daughter on the rare occasions when weve been back to Santa Maria together. I like the aspect of minor physical endurance to the wish-granting situationyou have to earn it. There is also the unspoken sense that if you dont hold your breath the whole time (the bridge is just long enough, maybe a quarter mile, to be a slight challenge, especially for a kid) something unlucky might happen. I think the main reason I like the bridge wish process is that it gives me a moment to ponder, as Im entering or exiting my hometown, what I want to have happen in life, at least for that moment. Many wishes from the past have been about family wellbeing, though few family members still live there and my sister Martha has been dead for over a decade.

Another superstition I contend with is the number 13. I dont recall when I learned the number was bad luck, but it has cropped up for me in all sorts of situations. As far as I can tell, it has never caused me harm, but I have a hard time seeing it as neutral. Recently, while going through a horrific divorce and custody battle, I switched lawyers and then discovered that the new ones office was on the thirteenth floor of an office building. Things were already looking bad, but I decided to get past my psychological concerns and move forward. The situation turned around and concluded favorably (other than all of the money spent on legal bills), so perhaps I need to reconsider, or relinquish, the sense of poweras I did with my former lucky penniesthat I have given the number 13.

My father always told me to think positive thoughts. He had an anecdotal story of using his positive mind power in his twenties to cure a case of potentially fatal stomach ulcers. He believed that positive visualization could achieve anything but mostly suggested I use it for hitting home runs when I played Little League. I did hit a lot of home runs, but its hard to say exactly what positive thinking had to do with it. Could luck be somehow manifested through intention, and could lucky objects, traditions, and rituals be ways we formalize that intention? Ive heard that people who consider themselves lucky lead happier, more fulfilled lives than people who dont, or than people who dont believe in luck at all. But what about all of those rabbit footrubbing slot machine players who lose all their money again and again? I suppose this is part of the intrigue about an abstract and subjective idea like luck: its transient and inconsistent at best.

Marks idea to develop an archive about luck is intriguing. It reminds me of the list of statistics I saw at a Vietnamese war memorial museum that included among the number of dead and wounded a line about how many old people were left lonesome because of the loss of their loved ones. The number seemed hard to verify, but the sense that these people existed and suffered was made real by the attempt to quantify it. So it goes with luck. The exact whats and whys and ways of it are impossible to pin down, but Marks efforts to classify them still help us grasp its elusive mysteries. He uses participatory methods and a variety of forms to create a collection that didnt exist before except in its nebulous parts. I recall a similar impulse with a web-based project that I produced with Miranda July and web designer Yuri Ono in the early 2000s. The project, called Learning To Love You More, asked the public to respond to assignments, seventy in all, that Miranda and I came up withfor example, Take a flash photo under your bed, Describe what to do with your body after you are dead, and Record the sound that is keeping you awakeand to turn in a report to be accumulated and shared with the public on our website. Through this process, which relied heavily on the generous contributions of people from all over the world, we were able to create archives on topics that we were interested in but that we couldnt find anywhere else. In a similar way Mark has created something from nothing, and about something that may be nothing, or may be more important than we could have known had he not made it for us.

Marks work in general uses photography (and various other media and approaches) to explore aspects of life that are normally hidden from view. He functions as an unorthodox documentarian, one with agency to affect and activate the people and subjects he documents. In the past this kind of intervention was considered against the rules of documentation; lines were drawn, at least theoretically, between photographer, subject, and audience. But now, especially with the advent and acceptance of socially engaged art practices, it is possible to operate transparently, as Mark does, in more involved, inclusive, and participatory ways. Mark has used his practice to investigate everything from the food in peoples refrigerators to the effects of civil war in El Salvador.

The book in your hands is just one incarnation of the ongoing Luck Archive. I look forward to seeing how this project and Marks other endeavors continue to confront, reveal, and connect into the future.

MARK MENJIVAR

A few years ago I walked into the Hyde Brothers bookstore in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and found a small book from the 1940s called 1000 Facts Worth Knowing. When I opened it, I discovered 4 four-leaf clovers pressed between the pages.

Finding the clovers made me begin to think about luck in my own life. As a middle school basketball player I believed it was bad luck to put my right shoe on first. To this day I still put on my left shoe before my rightand I do the same with my kids shoes. About the same time a girl told me it was incredibly lucky to look at a clock when it read 11:11 and that you should make a wish right away. The more I thought about luck critically, though, the more I questioned whether it even existed.