prix garantie

Old sorrows her current ones even as the inner renovations bore deeper dug under the grass between stones exposed, etc. 

the shards

Above all, I think, my work is to be (become?) lucent. And to model a ‘how to’. Bringing that state out in. I need to spend more time in listener mode for that but with speech often bottlenecked or in solitude, choked, in the rush of opportunity I go for flow. Who wouldn’t. My mother: you are very impatient about certain things and still you have infinite patience for others. She didn’t say “infinite,” maybe endless. She wouldn’t really say “still.” “Infinite” is mine, and “still” is a convention, like somehow, that everyone says here, that I thought was a European English colloquialism until I saw Ian Penman using it in the Fassbinder book. So everyone needs a middle word. Yes a waiting for is part of all this. And what of those “certain things,” anyway? To forget and be easy. When a friend told me she wished she could live in perma-stupefaction, what would that be like, I was stupefied. It’s been a long time since I tried to only be numbed out (back on that again now). As if knowing meanwhile that the Saturn that should someday, somehow leave one shining like a diamond requires a point where tail meets mouth, a place to mark in her being the path of revolution. 

Class dismissed

With certain possibilities for artmaking as 'downloading' taken less seriously in my current context, or at least strained at the tip of exposure, I feel lost in painterly practice, or in its total integration...lost in the things I can do with it, where to go, too many directions, unwilling to push further, unsure of how. To venture deep, to sustain physicality when not only taxed in time but concept, the principles of creation, where it comes from, for me, specifically, undermined at every turn by new flashes of ideation, and their ultimate fizzle into grave stolid anxious churning. Though this is quite common. One issue, the notion of producing something of consequence. Drop that, produce something for oneself. But the self of such a one demands consequence be a part of its formula, demands in the sense of emerging from a knowledge of, a baseline cognizance of what is entailed by introducing x or y variable, etc. The associative properties, imaging the associative mechanism without its content. Not wanting to image, at all. How to be smart (or smart enough) in my artwork. Is my artwork the place where I even want to be ‘smart’? Rather, the intelligence encases. The body instead conducts. I am missing streets, real, vivid streets, to walk through and take from.

about time

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, Sargent, 1885-6, needs no intro really, my favorite artwork about 'time'. Shooting for this strain of devotional. 

Continuing the thought

It would be braver of me to try to underdo it.

the mood

My trouble of too-much-ness or the feeling of too-much-ness; and in equal measure, a not enough: 

This perceived quality as yet, in art, writing—across all work/output, serves as convex mirror for the issue I have in my personal life which is the struggle to make an imprint at all, the struggle, either to incise self upon world-page, and in what vein, with which stories and faculties made operative, over-thinking—and/or to be okay with just being. Too many questions at once and a narrowing to one would cause…

There is an implication of short-circuiting. Of intentional self-sabotage, traps, but not trap-doors. And my teacher says, you are very good at these sleights-of-hand whereas I in turn say, but short-circuiting…isn’t that the condition of the world, and the need to imprint, isn’t that an obligation of those systems in which we partake, or as what we desist from, by choosing not to, confirmed via negation.

Moving out from the immediate and the private will. So fast. Too fast. Another sleight yet.  

To focus:

The work is not conveying all the things. To convey all the things is considered too much. Yet the work is not enough “too much,” it is too much not enough it is not doing what I want it to nor are others discerning what I want to do so in the end it is as irresolute as ever. 

My subject: 

My subject is the connections we make between things. This happens first as a trace layer. It is the implication of the incisive mark upon…Pentimenti, that signpost I have employed elsewhere in my writing and returns again and again, is useful here as an indication of anticipated interconnectedness: expectations of building upon. 

I really do believe that the very personal, very intimate practice of producing a mark, of making a gesture, of imagining within a field of space-time-production then induces outer effects, emanating and so the mark comes to play some larger role as trace of what culminated in…

Legibility or the capacity to understand this relational matrix, this movement between, becomes a subject due to the human preference for attachment (and in detachment, possible substitutes).

This is neither a new nor an old phenomenon, what is perhaps new or situationally trenchant is the need to contend with all, representationally, at once. Rather than gradually, in steps. A balance between strategy and unknowing. Gamification. A meet-the-world aspect was engaged with far greater aplomb by Mantegna, or miniaturists like Nainsukh. Incredulity and necessity in carving out for oneself the court painter position. Blah. My teacher saying I have too many questions, too many things I am attempting to address at once. Thus, always boxed into the register of the attempt. The "research".

Threefold. Why I do something for myself, what the historical or contextual implications are, and then what others receive or experience. I do believe that all these questions or trajectories are necessary to pursue and that they can elegantly align, in syncopation. Only it takes means, form, time.

Every painter thinks they are doing something more than what is there. Once over the hurdle of objecthood, thought becomes reality, not only through narration but by facilitating a site of alchemical encounter. Trite, and also a kernel:

For, such is the extent of, if not my ambition, at least a kind of purview. Or at least a thing to try.

I do feel behind. But not necessarily or only because of others. It is because I am always just behind myself.

It's not that we need more examples of Zoomer art stars. Or that I wish to be an art star.

What I wish is to have better, more expansive and sophisticated conversations on a consistent basis, which is what I assume are being had among those who are more adept at readily signifying their desire to be present in not this particular, but the, world. Dogwhistling in a melodic tune. Whereas I'm forever at fourteen percent opacity and fifty percent fill image, and does this have to change, or can this be understood as its own, special kind of dogwhistle. As another colleague puts it, accurately but in language I would not otherwise look to, I struggle with the ideological or identitarian commitments—i.e. the concentrated thematics—that are needed to, not only attain visibility in these efforts but to convey anything at all. Because to convey comes with dissatisfactions. The dissatisfaction with the suggestion of a wholeness. Aren't we schooled past an awareness of lacunae by now. The lacunae becoming applique, becoming print; it's an anniversary year for Marimekko.

(That line delivered as a sincere cross-metaphor. To be read adamantly not as a showing off but as a rare orchid technique. I've edited out subsequent orchid-related reflections).

What I know how to convey, and what I want to convey: 1 — Process (cliche). Rather, more so, its dissembling within assembly, my version prettier than that, for instance, of Barry Le Va. Using Le Va as a crutch, then Trockel, then someone weirder albeit the shade of weird that is Lynne Cooke's repertoire. 2 — Communication around the depth of and rigor with which, I do so. But at the same time, elegance, and modesty. And profundity in acumen, and beauty in the tied-bow sails. On the waters of...The Six of Swords. The always and beyond.

Therein, again, an aspect of too muchness, a wanting and a waiting without waiting around, but also without being found and finding for myself. 

I make these notes as a forest trail (in advanced of a next stage, a next stage being always teased and within it, you never hear from me, though that, too, I am reevaluating. Hopefully not so dark but with the correct gradation of feeling, yet surrendering a pre-conception of correctness). And as a precursor to future confessionals (accepting the confessional as a form).

Contesting the illustrative terms of "painting" or in their acceptance, deciding how to produce other resonances. Accepting not the inevitability of failure, for failure as a gimmick, or only as a gimmick (a utopian strategy), might be understood as conceited, too. A signature among a set of variables, cryptic and otherwise. That balance is the pursuit. Equilibrium and then some is the conversion of too-muchness into something temporarily, halfway, decent.

Halfway as medium. Or when they say, same pose, but with only 70 percent effort. Raising opacity, lessening strain. Surrender in one framework, "thinking without banisters" in others. Or, at minimum, a motion towards.

twint

I have not written in what feels like ages...or made anything substantive, either. Minor advances, certainly in a relational realm, but otherwise a numbing quiet, amid need to address item after item on the ever growing list. Homesick. Naturally a sense of loss that comes more so from disconnection with oneself. Forgetting the external. Setting strong boundaries again. Letting go of anger. Lane staying. Paying no mind.