Category: art

perennial questions

in muddy waters

Everybody always asks me these questions, the writer was saying. Hah, like I know! For me, it’s all about the desperate questions, you know? Like, what’s the matter?

But then, he said, everything is like that, my whole life––you gotta stay close to hell, and also to joy. And somehow manage not to melt. Maybe that’s what it is for me, why I also stay so close to water. People are always asking me about the water, he said. I guess it’s the eternal quality about it, and that savage beauty, where everything is eating each other.

We were eating beer and catfish at a party in his honor. Someone asked him how he kept things fresh. He laughed and said, people don’t know how interesting they are! Then he invoked Beckett, who said nothing was funnier than unhappiness.

At this point, we were interrupted by a mutual friend, younger. How’s the work now? The friend was asking and the writer made a face. It’s going, he said, but who knows where?

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.

Bearings

Where assembly is required

Considering any set of assembled would-be actors in each scene, most of them go nameless. If the story is the frame, the names of those in this majority are a secret between the storyteller and those characters outside of it. Or between the storyteller and those too close to be named. The witness withholds so much of what is from the voice of the story. The process of getting anyone or anything born is so fraught there may be some wisdom in being cautious about who and when you name what parts. Which suggests something about wisdom, its necessary incompleteness.  Which suggests I have accessed some, though I have not. I am just trying to write this thing.

Spiral

Regarding the next breath

The artist did a series of spirals. I don’t know what she was thinking before she went down this road but begin somewhere is a familiar feeling. I am often haunted by this one. Anywhere will do, but where is still a pertinent question. You can start at the outside and dive in, in, in––follow the logic to the question of black holes and the possibility of the singularity and related questions about the connecting thread between dimensions, or universes, if you take as a fact the possibility of many in one. Or you could start at the center and spin yourself away, beyond the frame. 

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Inspired by the spirals of Louise Bourgeois.

Seaworthy

Sight fishing lessons

The first thing to learn was forgetting well enough to dream a boat to help with crossing the night, its busy port thick with interdimensional commerce. The next was how to watch the anchor, watch the ropes, keep a pen and a lighthouse nearby to allow for return and remembrance. 

The Consultants

Moonlit expertise

There was a group we would see at night by the river. We wanted to know what they did there. If it was nothing good, as everyone said, we still wanted to know, but how? One night we went to see for ourselves. With blue-shadowed feet they danced the shores to pieces, and we woke in our beds and went back the next night to see why? and they explained that they were seeking out the marrow of the river stone and to our question on for what? they said to talk. There was a precision to their foolishness. This, we recognized.  These were definitely not the ones you called if you had a question about calculations having to do with variable rates but could tell you in the space of a single breath the minutes until daybreak or the number of feathers needed to make a heart on the ground the size of your head, and whether when you are done it will even fit, and how to go about attaching it.