Talking back

Clearing away a lot of bramble from the past, online bramble mainly, Fragonard style and ugly thickets too, I am reminded of the way that artworks, hanging artworks, big museal artworks, spoke to me so intimately during the quicksilver years, til upon making my own they became more like fistfuls of sand. 

Quick tune-up

How to reclaim your art practice from the wanderings of the evil eye…sharing in community to ward off further as It is Out on the Town right now:

Once you’ve gotten over your life as a Zucchini (inevitable passage point), listen to Frank Sinatra singing My Way about 500+ x a day. 

Bonus content: Three Coins in the Fountain (Dean Martin version, he needs redemption and calling on him can help do it!)

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Future discussion of Howardena Pindell, Agent Orange, green juice, Gary Null, female artist accidents. A Pindell I haven't forgotten, Songlines: Labyrinth (Versailles), from 2018 show at Matthew Marks, Painting Now and Forever...

Reruns

After a little while, having turned in my thesis, writing feels good again, though it coincides with a wave of asphyxiation and despair surrounding my paintings and visual projects, very normal, and certainly helped by keeping the taxi light of language turned on. I am nonetheless as terrified as ever that it is the language light that people like me for, and that I will forever be catching up within the paintings themselves.

That said, my work is always and necessarily about potentials. In spiritual practice, potentials are both imperative (choose your own adventure) and misleading—once I trust and allow these to flower (knowing it is a choice, to allow), they often lead me skipping down the primrose path (borrowing from Mearsheimer on Ukraine...how cursed), to miss who people really are, seeing so very much who they could be, their full expanse. It is nice then, with people, to operate more from non-intervention. In art, though, at least the kind I do, you intervene, make things happen, produce. In that sense, potentials are ideal, they keep things rolling. Within the fixity of production, they enable the kind of perma-protean state I love. 

My truly favorite thing—a lot of people's favorite thing—is to move letters and lines and ideas around or across an open surface: a canvas, a digital page, in the realm of conversation, energetic propinquity, whatever. That is where I am at my best, most integrated. The serene agape of whittling a work down to a totalizing (totemic?) nub. Giacometti's ravenous thumbs, sculpting without end. 

So unsurprisingly I become agitated when, for reasons often celestial and providential, that surface grows musty or closed in, when a tenet of total freedom does not seem possible, or overwhelms while failing to lobotomize—as the way one ought to feel, for instance, during sex. Being in pursuit of that strain of half-liberated, half-lobotomized joy, downloaded from the skies in thanks, the lows are low and the highs high. Why not solve for the polarities within. Not that I even have a Big Joan and a little joan, per say. Too twentieth century! Today's splits are not spatial, but simultaneous. Repeating myself, on the same old tip, one walks about in equanimity, seemingly so neutral, with an inner life all the more congested. My Zoomer problem, and ours. How's that for vintage.

By spring—painting the outer in stripes starker and more vivid.

Rainbows

Rainbows are these days very important. It started about two weeks ago. Don’t yet ask me why, an early conjecture would be that some beyond are perhaps using them to communicate with us. Then there are the old symbolic meanings. What comes after the storm. An arc of hope with a fat hazy middle. Contours faint, usually we only get a glimmer. But now, a whole story. Of peaceability possible again, albeit somewhat at a distance. Auguring light. Leaving all shades of news aside, thinking instead of D. H. Lawrence, his first big novel, from 1915: unconceivable changes weathered, so much technological thrumping and still, the single human heart grows wild and through its reaches, generations go on…

You see

 

The visit

I go to visit my sister at her dorm in Cambridge. By the Dunkin Donuts in the train station I spy a former classmate from afar, she doesn’t see me. Not a real person, I think, neither one of us is, albeit for different reasons. At my most snooty then, I am disappointed in what has become of my sister, she knows this. Like a person who does not see, so beholden to the whims of the throng. Absorbing all their pent-up neuroses, their imposed conventions and dictates. Golly, to be like everyone else. A few years later she will show me her sea sponge dance, I will understand what has really been absorbed, what has been serviced and by then, perhaps transmuted. Her purpose within a particular fray. In a silent request for her forgiveness, I will smile and for the first time in some years, in her presence, laugh.

Meeting the brother of my sister’s friend who is visiting as well, I begin my j'accuse, I say, don’t you feel they are rather metallic here, at this school, as in, they’ve absconded with a portion of their souls and he nods in half-agreement. He says, yes, I know what you mean. This boy is a stranger in his own sense. His conversation, genial but brief, is not enough to keep me there; distressed by most of my sister's friends, I take a long walk to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and depart for home a day early. A year later the boy dies in a big incident, the stuff of national drama and communal anguish, and a year after that, war breaks out over similar events. Except, I tell my sister, war was always going to break out, just as this boy had needed to go away anyhow. 

Through my mother, I relay a message, received a few days after the boy’s death, looking at his photo, my sister’s Instagram memorial: don’t worry, he wanted you to know that he had to leave, in order to diffuse and become one with you all, he wanted to return to source, he couldn’t live like this anymore. But he needed a cover story, he needed a means of leaving—an explanation for it—that would be accessible to you but also seed forgiveness, something generative, an exit strategy that would bring your throng together rather than render it sundered, torn apart. You see, such things are, to an extent, a matter of choice. There is violence, abuse, devastation, genocide; and simultaneously, humans have contracts. Free will. He couldn’t do for you what he wants to do for you in physical incarnation. To which my sister says, oh yes, his sort-of girlfriend had thought so, as well.

We are at the Sarah Sze show on the top rung of the Guggenheim, walking down towards the cafe, when she asks me to elaborate. A few months have passed already since the boy had gone. And I, too, will be leaving—though not like that, at least not for a while, yet. My sister says, I hear you are going away again and I say, yes, I don’t say, leaving is how I diffuse, too, how I live as he would not, in oneness here on terra firma, where only a flap of wings of heart can lift a heavied head.