Cora p.

exiting my building around four pm on Thursday I go with Emilia to drop off her resume at the Bode cafe and to see the Cora Pongracz exhibition at Essex St. gallery (which is on Hester). 

downstairs in the display room, we stop for a while beside one of Cora's less memorable photographs, of a pedestrian or an object, a window maybe. I recall it being installed near an interstice where two walls open into the gallery's back office. such that when I began to feel conscious of our conversation rising to graze the ceiling's audial springboard, I stepped sideways and peeked behind this gap to see if anyone was there to monitor us. 

in storytelling—say, in Borges—the sideways shuffle has a particular purpose: it propels a character out of mundane expectations, into a more tenuous, suspenseful domain entirely at the whim of the author. there, the writer can fully show his hand, introducing to the plotline a twang of the auspicious, peculiar, and even humorous—all deliberate. I was reminded of this technique of the potentiating lapsus yesterday evening as my mother recounted a favorite incident from her medical training. making her rounds in the old country's hospitals, she would pull back a curtain to find kaffeeklatsches of doctors whiling shift time shoveling melon and cottage cheese in their mouths. 

to my mother, the cottage cheese gatherings betrayed the old country's culture of indulgence and inefficiency. but she also understood them, in transpiring literally behind the veil of normalcy, to represent that society’s aura of magical dysfunction, dyspeptic surrealism. it never occurred to me to connect the fact of having listened to her relay this story frequently as a child with the good many lunch periods I dedicated after leaving home to mulling over ergonomic comestibles as an aesthetic genre. I spent my late teens studying the clerking classes of Central London as they converged on Pret and LEON and Itsu—and other stores seasoned soul-numbing "fast casual". I wondered if and how hurried shop patrons, myself included, might ever initiate a sideways step, or pull back a curtain, to subvert their scheduled pockets for refueling and embrace a more phantasmic narrative. (that was what I liked in the work of Mika Rottenberg—who was then having a survey at Goldsmiths CCA).

but at Essex on Thursday it was too late in the afternoon and my shuffle need not hasten an escape from the everyday, seeing as my everyday is, now, a point of passage for energies in culture, my artistic duty being to conduct and translate air-current sent through my studio’s wind tunnel. when, for a brief second, I met the eyes of the gallery back chamber's scrivener-occupant, he wasn't eating anything but concentrating on his computer. ("quiet quitting" has come to an abrupt conclusion; everyone is doing their best to avoid the catching cold of layoffs). we would have to leave the peculiar twang of excursive discovery to Cora's pictures. 

here is what Emilia and I talked about, standing before them:

in tacit comparison with the gallery's soundscape, Emilia describes my apartment and its balcony studio as an airport-like vortex, always carrying a low din, full of treehouse noises. I tell her I call it a wind tunnel, and as if to excuse the positive nature of something under my care but for which I cannot take credit, I say, I’ve never known another kind of living besides in urbanity, where there is always lots happening, or always lots for me to channel, like: may I put you through to…I conjure the woman phone-operator of yore. I ask her what it’s like in Indiana, if it's quiet where she comes from, and she says that in her hometown, instead of New York's imposed clamor, stimulation is something to actively seek out, that she was always seeking out things by which to be distracted in the outdoor environment, in whatever was local. (I think of how you see the pursuit of distraction-via-surfeit here in domestic ostentation, in elite enclosure, where stuff is not to see but to have; in the fridge-stocking sacramental equivalents to des Esseintes' encrusted turtle—another topic, altogether).

Emilia says that this search for stimulation in the Midwest, and everywhere, is all cope. that our existence is cope, that we run on cope cope cope, pumping the noiseless through empty stomachs with more noise. I imagine us filling our vase-vessels with filler flowers, and say, I think I wrote about this somewhere, only to see when I pulled up the document that I had made a slightly different point, both the converse of and complimentary to hers. I had swapped cope as a practice for "blip" as an experience, arguing for the blip's importance as something that acts upon, that happens to you, versus the cope's call to engagement, willed yet unfortunate. I show her the relevant excerpt: [discussing a painful experience...] suffering is so much blip—ultimately, everything blip. Life, for most, being a seesaw between blips you make it past and blips you carry somewhere on your person, blips you can’t let go of so they are subsumed into your mass…

then, readying to leave the gallery, we pause at the staircase’s threshold to jointly contemplate a perfect 1964 Untitled image by Cora, a compound of our twin theories. in it, a girl's elbows sit like pillars on her knee-pedestals, the remainder of her body cut off, a de-sexed Venus de Milo (another favorite of my mother's). her figure is a trunk, she has both sustained an encounter (blip) and responded to it (cope)—in her abstracted self, holding her own weight, but also outwardly, by facing us.