a wall pitted by a single air rifle shot

My favorite piece of art that I've ever seen was at the MoMA in New York City. I had spent nearly half of my day wandering through the whole museum, I love it there. I had seen Van Gogh and Picasso and Monet (!!!), and although I have a soft spot for impressionists, there was another piece that I liked even more. It was a plain room. It contained a few paintings that were basically just colorful squares, and an odd sculpture that looked something like a puddle of crayon wax and pieces of metal. On the far wall in large black letters it read; A wall pitted by a single air rifle shot. So I stood there, and I looked. I searched for that single pit, a small groove that would show where the wall had been hit. After several minutes I stopped obsessing long enough to read the description. Much to my dismay, I read that the script of the piece was a ruse, that there was no air soft rifle hole. There was no pit at all. For a moment, I was furious. Livid even. Why would it say there was a blemish when there wasn't?

I think about this more often than I'd like to admit. I think about what that wall was trying to say to me, what it was trying to say to everyone. I still don't know, but I don't want to know how its supposed to be interpreted. I don't want that because I know what it means to me. I searched for an imperfection on that damn wall when there wasn't one, I stood far away and I stood way too close to that stupid dumb wall, only to find out that there was no flaw in the plaster. I think I do that with a lot of things. I search and I search for flaws because I am lead to believe that they exist, but not everything is flawed.

So when my mind wanders to that wall in the New York City MoMA I smile now, because it reminds me to come back to earth and stop constantly looking for flaws. I love you, and even if you are across the world from me, there's still not pit in the wall from an air soft rifle.

Lawrence Weiner - 1969