Surface. Signal. Structure.
The expressive model of art did not disappear because artists abandoned it. It disappeared because the conditions that made it plausible quietly dissolved. For roughly two centuries Western culture believed that artworks emerged from the interior life of individuals. The artist experienced something—emotion, revelation, memory—and the work carried that experience outward into the world. Paintings… Continue reading After the Artist
For some time now the dominant myth surrounding contemporary art has been that it is becoming more personal, more expressive, more authentic. Artists are encouraged to foreground their voices, to turn inward, to treat the work as a record of experience, identity, confession, or testimony. Authenticity, we are told, is the final measure. The story… Continue reading The Machine That Replaced Expression
“What we call reason is often nothing but custom.” Michel de Montaigne, Essays I – Keeping an Eye – Easter – Allegro When the Morans decided to install the cameras it was not because of anything that had happened so much as because of the sense that things might begin happening if they did not.… Continue reading The Gentle Collapsing
The Ninth Iteration “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science The Cell No one remembered being brought in. This was not discovered all at once, nor announced, nor confirmed by any authority. It emerged… Continue reading The Burdens of Ordinary Kindness
Butcher “Are you still to learn that the end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue?" Plutarch, Parallel Lives I EVERY MORNING AT ELEVEN the butcher tossed the expired and discolored meats into the bone-can. When the can filled to the brim, he wheeled… Continue reading Hard Labour for Hard Men
I The light had not yet decided what it was going to be. The room held. He lay still without listening for anything in particular, until the faint ache in his calves reached coherence, and the body took that as permission. The floor was cool. The air carried prior use. He dressed without sequence because… Continue reading Fathers and Sons
“Each of us is responsible for everyone else, in everything.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov I Caleb heard the sirens before he thought of them as sirens. They entered his apartment by pressure rather than by sound, finding the seams of the building and worrying them open. At first he did not move. The sound… Continue reading The Soft Machines
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus I DIDN’T WAKE UP. I came back on. Heat first. Then the noise. Then Denisha made a sound that wasn’t shaped yet. It came out of her throat wrong, like the air didn’t know what to do with it.… Continue reading Still Two-Thirty-One
“I went on.” Samuel Beckett, Molloy I WALK MOST DAYS because the days allow it. I wake early, not with urgency but with the sense that the body has already begun without consulting me. The room is pale. Quiet enough to hold. I lie still until the ache in my calves makes itself known. When… Continue reading New Grass
The New Poetics 