Month: September 2024

No return

In lieu of brand, a body of work

The artist denounced repetition. When asked why, said if repeating the winner was a principle of advertising, of branding, art should do the opposite. The artist, upon leaving one harbor, would not return. They folded each canvas as they painted, each fold rendering the form into something it had not been before. For this reason, the artist had to admit, no one would ever be able to describe what they were doing until the doing was done. 

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Inspired by and with borrowed phrases from an interview with French painter Noël Dolla by Gwenaël Kerlidou in the latest issue of BOMB.

Cyanobacteria

Innovating breath

Although they, too, would later be lumped––by clumsy taxonomies and antimicrobial prejudice––into a category of creature commonly jeered as pestilence, these tiny pioneers had the chutzpah to dare to take into themselves what all others knew as poison and we now call breath, and life, and living. At the arrival of the great oxidation event, one might imagine the others on the planet lamenting the end. Meanwhile, these guys were like, and now. . . here’s green!

Cymatics

Aural imagery

I saw a sound. It rattled the bones of the last days of a time. That time of frayed signposts. Or times. The time was current. The time moved past futures. The time was possible, and all of us at stake. Now I watch for it everywhere, in hope of hearing. It is everywhere, but my eyes are not so good, having been too thoroughly trained by all that would erase her appearance.

Transience

After space

First was displacement across a hollowing, echoing earth. Then came the longing of the rest of us, still here. The ache to know a place. Meanwhile, we remain tethered to one or another edge but mostly floating, trying to listen to the remaining birds. Who seem sometimes to suggest a song to somewhere.

Augury

No roosting here

The birds will tell you. Watch. Take this one, for example. This strident singer, pausing mid-trill to make the expression that translates loosely to never mind. This upon finding herself in the company of another kind of bird than she expected. The place to which instinct had led her had changed. The other bird is frightened by these strange notes. They belong in an elsewhere that used to be here. Now it may be nowhere. She makes sounds that translate loosely to it’s okay. Once calmed, the frightened bird returns to singing the familiar notes of the region. The now silent stranger waits, nodding, then flies again, wings sighing. It had been so long between landings. The next will be longer. 

Now she remembers. There is a way to stay in flight while sleeping. Hold the wings. Let the currents do the work, move only to pivot and slice between them when you must. Decide there is no other place but this flight. Forget wanting to land. Here is the song. She pulls it to her, full and close.

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