Category: art

Unstill Life

With Tara Geer.

Here are studies in unknown shapes. The first bloom? In service of spontaneity, a perpetual reorientation. How useful in a landscape of discontinuity. How lumpy this world feels. I can only build by stumbling, my clumsy hands fitting one incongruity into another, and these into the rising wind.

In the center of a city, one draws a garden, vast and wild with unnamed fruits, a forbidden abundance. Who does she think she is? Vines twining around her calves, half an open orb cupped in each hand, juice running between fingers, in rivulets down forearms, to her weeping elbows. She lowers her face into the flesh. It clings to her chin, and she dares to look back with a wild grin, breathing.

***

Notes while reading this interview with Tara Geer, discussing her current installation, Unstill World. I am grateful to find her work, which aims “to translate unknowing into the work and not just more and more kinds of knowing.”

The New You

An ongoing installation project.

There was no title for the New You, a liminal masterpiece of clay and accumulated objects. It morphed in size: now handheld, now too big to fit through a doorway. Scale is an attitude, you explained. You had a similar view of materials. Now you are an unassuming carboard box, full of surprises, now the breathtaking choreography of of bright colors on canvas. You repurposed materials from earlier works. One day, you surprised us with a large floor installation we had to rotate around to take in. This One is For You, you called it.

Given a long enough silence in a large enough group,  someone will eventually ask the question. When someone did, wondering What’s it mean? you laughed, but gently. I don’t think about the meaning in my work, you said. I only find it in working.

***

Inspired by Ethan Greenbaum’s delightful interview with his wife, the artist Sun You, which I found this morning in BOMB magazine.

Nadir

Where a voice.

Once, certain attentions were considered advancement, conditioned as we were to equate the sense of nascent excitement with progress, and to make of this a god, and we did not recognize the beginning of a fall, into an agony long as life. Neither anguish nor inertia could resist its pressure.

Only by taking absence back from silence can anyone be protected. 

Here, a voice. It says, Come, says Now.

You are not condemned. Rise. It is time for another birth. You can scratch a way into life again, from memories still unlearned.

Singing the Abyss

In defiance of capture.

Rhythms of earth tongues, come out. I give these primitive liberties forms to evade surveillance of that principle bent on separation of bodies from themselves and one another, that enacts bars of murderous purity masquerading as sensible grammars.

The nocturnal creatures know me. They sit in my lap, lap from my hands, and laugh at the extent of your fears. We only eat prey, love, announce the joyful birds.

Separate us all you like. Each solitude only offers another rebirth. With each, we widen the net of our bodies. We become the looming canopies connecting at altitudes and depths, above and beneath the walls you drive yourself mad with the effort of erecting in your endless quest to extract Resource from Source. You make a god to coddle your greed, and the dragon laughs.

Will you look at this face? No, you can’t bear it, finding in its gaze the endless points of no return, each now a star in the night you claimed to conquer. Our skins fallen from us, we move from their weight and your ability to trace.

When the last wall is built, the last stone in place and the weight of its prowess inverts and you find yourself entombed in a solitary well, calling, who will hear you but the lowest, who come and go among these depths, and the dead?

Between Falls

Field notes from the ground.

Once I ached to mature into a kind of effervescent grace of quiet luminosity, but it is something else to recognize that I am still the child on the floor, stacking pieces from a pile of scattered blocks like some aftermath. My hands have traded their dimples for veins, having somehow passed straight through elegance without so much as a pause, in their haste to build some appeal, but to what?

Perhaps to a continuance of the possibility of making anything, especially when it has become so obvious to go without saying (but, clumsy as I am, I’ll note it here): so much ends with falling. Or perhaps to this insistence: because it always falls in the end, I will build. 

It will not last. It is a double-edged marvel, the not lasting and the way it sometimes holds just long enough to find a witness. Once, I felt the brush of the toddler’s eyelash at my cheek. One day, before the next fall, it still seems possible to climb some crumbling arrangement of dream fragments––and leap.

Lumen

Into being.

What comes when the search ends

and every purposeful intent, busily

attentive toward some known,

to crack the ice of time, when

being itself seems to reach

a hand?

*

Denial, so smitten by the rough

hand of progress, will insist 

that this is the axis of a turn,

but nothing has changed.

*

In this sunlit absence, here

is a space again, and it––

or I, or both, sighs

an audible breath,

the hush of shoreline,

a lapping this, and it

glimmers at the edge

of language.

The Wait

Art etiquette.

To look long and listen to the stone before making any alteration, so that the sculpture that follows may be a collaboration. To follow paint over surface and sense its wants. Above all, to hear an eloquent silence before it moves to speak, and resist the impulse to offer the first word, even in greeting, for the customs of this world are something else, and care nothing for any pilgrim’s feeble attempts at making pleasant forays toward the familiar.

Soils

Of intentions and nourishment.

Born carried away, of a desire that will neither die nor introduce itself by name to a stranger, it becomes obvious that I am that, too. So taken––from every place and the self, too––I cannot arrive.

At the end of everything, when the flow continues, so does this singular insistence. Bleed.

Hand opens soil to hide these delicate hopes, even at the end and especially then. Flower? Maybe. Of course, they will be trampled, as lives are. And yet. They will live, too. There is no certainty in this, but there it goes, happening.

Another Invitation

To a dear poet.

To inscribe passion, make of it a history, burning with love and regret, holding posture ever toward the mortal crowd at the gates, immersed in time’s noise, still listening, long after Eden, for the miracle, knowing any journey can be a stand-in for all journeys, ever, the constant flight to another life: the dying, recalling; the oblivion, searching.

But what is this moving at the bottom of loss? It won’t be sold another scandal when it’s time to gather signs. I will lose myself and go again.

One day, when the barbed-wire walls are down, I hope you will come and see me in this bird-painted room. We will sit here together, watching the light move with the cat.