art Archives

Atmospheric Struggle

A sky-watcher listens.

In the year of quiet, you noticed what got louder. Listening, you transcribed a diary of what was happening just beyond the nearest clouds. It was not a new invasion, only the old one you had long been living with, adjusting to, learning to accommodate––until you noticed, or almost did not notice, how well you had learned not to look at the edge where you lived. One day, you decided to look.

Why? Some asked you, and you explained that you took it personally.

What, exactly? The skies, and what happened in them, for one. But also, this other thing, more diffuse and insidious, precisely because it is lethally easy to ignore.

***

Inspired by Finn Blythe’s BOMB interview with Lawrence Abu Hamadan, on his work Air Pressure: A Diary of the Sky, on view at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, until February 26.

To the Next Attempt

Experiments in style.

Reconstruct. The world is shaped by art. Also, by protest. Challenge the world, the art, the protest. One artist, revealing her best kept secret, confessed I have none. When it comes to the crisis of creating anything, style attempts to negotiate some resolution. Even so, the thing is perpetually unsolved. One devises systems based in numbers, another according to stars, another traces bodily systems, weather patterns. Others make their own instruments, new forms; move the frame, alter the angle, change the lens. Apply the medium upside-down. Apply the medium while suspended from the ceiling. Apply the feet to handheld instruments, lend the ear to color, taste the next note.

Yes, but to what end?

To not ending.

The Science of Keeping

What holds, what resists.

Anyone can be an expert, when keeping is the point. All it takes is rejection of a sense of the disaster of being full up, and a guiding hand to fear how the space of its reach might indicate some lack––of anything but the capacity to Figure it Out.

By the science of keeping, one can make lists and keep intentions. Retention’s methods always have some Master eager to Proclaim the next Solution to loss. To capture a place, there are itineraries, photos, souvenirs, but none so lasting as a scar.

The body, in the end, can only hold a record of its wounds. It returns the bones and teeth to the earth or the next collector. In the end, it can only offer what flies from it, which is a concept the experts have yet to explain.

***

Inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art. Playing with the negative image.

Ways to Hold

Instruments for holding.

The body, de Beauvoir observes, is an instrument for holding onto the world. Same for a body of work. In this light, it’s truly an odd (modern, western) impulse that insists on classifying literary works into camps of fiction and nonfiction. We are supposed to be used to this by now but try asking a painter or sculptor to make the same distinction. Anything we make––or are, for that matter, is always an alchemy of observation, response, and dream.

What the Poem Taught

How not to lose the life of life.

It is autumn, she said. And we are going to die. And we have all this choosing to do, with great stakes. And yet, simultaneously: this beloved, ill; this new child, this sudden bird, this love. How often we keep our thinking separate from what we know. For a simple reason: simultaneous submersion within all sensibilities is unbearable.

So, how to know anything? How to keep the life of life in life? Try not knowing. Try reading below the threshold of interpretation. Try burying the head, leaving only the ear. It is possible to transcend personality and arrive. At a shared physical understanding. These songs were always here to pull us into them and we.

***

The italicized phrase comes from Jorie Graham, whose work inspires this piece.

Every Lifted Voice

Why the singing.

Now a manifesto, now jazz, now a love lyric; through these voiceprints of language now the witness takes a stand. Another stirs the mischief of the multitudes within each vibrating body of this vast and trembling We.

The point? Only this. Create a landscape wide enough to hold the simultaneous becoming dance of each and all, from the last beginning to the next. Any tent will tear against the strain.

But what do you need? Only to feel tended to and left well enough alone. You might try taking scissors to these pages, and then make a world to hold.

To hold us? That too.

What are you doing? This art is simply a protest. Against the dying off.

***

“Voiceprints of language” is a phrase June Jordan once used to describe poetry.

In Defiance of Taste

For the wild uglies.

What crawls and flies far from clean in its joy is often the subject of revulsion, but some forms of rage are raw enough to keep a crawling body painted with mud, and ripe enough with love to offer flight. One held nothing back of substance and much of detail and familiar story lines, to keep each mouthful tasting fully of itself. Eat, she said, there is enough for everyone, but cautioned that some would find at first bite, something raw enough to break the heart. It broke mine, she said, but then came a challenging joy. This angered some, but creatures of the earth are often hated for not making themselves more pleasing, more beautiful, for living just as they are.

The Staying Power

A conversation on creating.

She explained that none of this will offer any useful defenses against death, health, or inclement weather. That it has nothing to do with a feeling of faith, that the time to stay often happened when faith was shaken. On the task at hand, she said hold. She said, create.

By way of encouragement, she said no, you will not get over it and no, you will not decide that you can go on.

Why, then? one of us asked. She laughed. I invite you and now you need a reason?

Shaking her head, she turned and walked out, leaving the door open.

Space to Dance

After the sorting.

The mirror world seems dangerous, you observed. You went in anyway. Some creatures are carried by feeling. Later you made decisions. Such as, breathe when needed. Later, you thought, something needs to be done. About these masks and their attendant griefs. You began to sort through them. It became clear in the sorting, which of these you could leave behind.

Someone asked what you were doing. You said, making room. To see something new, you would need more space. To dance fully inside it, you would need to put down what you carried. Of the dance, you said, it feels a lot like falling.

***

Inspired by the art of Pace Taylor. Italicized phrases are adapted from titles of the artist’s work.

Encounter

A meeting with the art.

There is the event, what occurs after, and what will be remembered; what is in the frame and what beyond it, who stands beholding, and what presents itself, as composition. The artist tries presenting Time as concrete. For example, here’s a calendar and it can repeat endlessly without naming the century. Following these questions out, and out, and out, she creates a dizzying array of images, depicting a history. The effect is a sense of overwhelm, a sense of being tiny by comparison, crushed by the scope and depth of it all. Some will retreat immediately. For those that remain, there are other effects to come, and one of these is a certain euphoria of spirit, suddenly released from certain presumptions about its individual weight.

***

Inspired by the work of Hanne Darboven.