On the Poetic Life.

From screenprinted zine Summer 2019

From screenprinted zine Summer 2019

The poetic life? There’s two ways of looking at this: one, I believe most artists end up living the poetic life; two, most artists want more than the poetic life can ever promise--desire and conflict is a means to continuity, to living, to a life. What does the poetic life offer anyway? It is my contention that the poetic life is the life we ought to be living as artists, no matter how threadbare that life might be. And the ‘more’ beyond the poetic life will never live up to its billing. Let me tell you why. In recent years I’ve had several conversations with artists who have retreated from the art scene proper: Dublin. Some feel betrayed by the art scene as if it didn’t live up to its promise, a promise of the artist’s ideological making; others just got fed up of what they grew to perceive as the smell of bullshit. The art scene is something you come to understand and know over a period of time. If exposed to the centre for long enough you get to know its players and its patterns, its synaptic connections like a big fat tender brain. Overexposure stitches you into this fat tender brain. Tenderised, the studio life of an artist is crossed with the social life of the artist, so work and play become indivisible in an instrumental way of thinking and desiring about becoming an artist. In an environment lacking in resources and opportunities, it’s only common Darwinian, Marxist, Freudian sense that the same environment will not be lacking in opportunists. Artists will dismiss their networking capabilities offhand, but they have no real choice or insight into the hydraulics of their own desires and ambitions in an environment that is machined by professional sociability. The question is what is the alternative to the ice white casino at the centre with its redwoods and weeping willows and perennial weeds? Let me answer by telling you a story about a story. Last week I watched Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson, wherein the poetic life is portrayed as symbiotic and synergistic with the workaday life. Paterson’s protagonist is a young bus driver named Paterson living in the city of Paterson. Duality plays out like a Superhero movie here as our poet/ bus driver heroically performs (without cape or spectacles) what David Foster Wallace calls the “day in/ day out” of ordinary life against the backdrop of what Adam Phillips calls the fantasy of the “unlived life”. His stay-at-home wife paints her house and clothes. She is a black and white reincarnation of another poet, Hilda Doolittle, who inspired William Carlos Williams, yet another poet, who wrote an epic poem titled, you guessed it, Paterson. She dreams about having kids (twins!), being a famous country and western singer, and seeing Paterson’s poetry read by the world. She’s more the mother figure of a slow-cooked son who never left home, or the retrograde portrait of the good wife. I find the scenario comforting, like back in the womb of home sweet home—I’m a mama’s boy it seems. Their world seems smothered as I write it down here, but it’s not. A temporal whole opens up in their world when we are proffered a glimpse of a photograph of Paterson as a Marine on the couple’s bedside table in uniform in the opening sequence, which nudges us to speculate on or melodramatize a history just out of frame. The poet/ bus driver combo could never have come fully formed into this world. Something must have made Paterson the way he is to notice and pen down the minutiae of life and memory in such precious throwaway detail. PTSD from being a Marine is as good a reason as any. Poetry comes from trauma that shakes words loose from their regimental purpose. The fact is, the photograph of the Marine sits pride of place beside the couple’s love and intimacy every morning and night for the seven days of the film. Their life is normal: bad dinners, good cupcakes, walking the dog, having a pint, waking up together, dreaming of the future, the silent solitude of being a bus driver surrounded by people but not obliged to perform, against the loose ends of domesticity—there’s a feminist critique in there <<both ways>> but I’m not going there. Through a neoliberal lens you would call their life stair-less, contributing nothing outside their own bungalow’d ambition. Thing is, the lovely couple seem contented happy: her with a smartphone and projects that stave off the vertigo of freetime in the home; him with his secret notebook and simple lunchbox. They are artists: one reaching out, the other in retreat—a balancing act: equilibrium. The repeated references to William Carlos Williams in Paterson is important here; a poet (according to Linda Welshimer) “willing to live the kind of rushed existence that would be necessary, crowding two full lifetimes into one... learning from the first and then understanding through the second”. William Carlos Williams was a doctor for 40-odd years. What’s poetic about being a doctor or a bus driver if (in your secret journal) you are a poet/ doctor or poet/ bus driver? It is the dual life that is poetic, one “rushing” into the other, one public, one under-the-arm private, both in plain sight if you are willing to acknowledge the possibility of normalcy being the seedbed of something poetic, something more, as the curious and empathetic Chinese man (and poet) does in the penultimate scene of the film, where we find Paterson wallowing in the trauma of her dog eating his journal with all that poetry that has infused the seven days of the film. It’s poetic to this fellow poet that this young man sits here, on this bench, kindred souls, lost in thought monitoring the mundane for something extra. This is poetic: taking silent stock of last night, this morning, this life, so a line can be bled from the day. It’s as if poetry—New York School poetry á la Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery—is nobler than the everyday, even though contingent on the everyday. The poet’s job is to stroke the knot that is the present. I like Howard Nemerov’s definition of poetry: “Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival.” The language we speak today is not art speak, it’s institutionalised speak, something that Derrida’s Deconstruction was hoping to undermine down to the molecular paradoxes and frailties of language. I summon up the Texan painter Forrest Bess when I think about the poetic life. A fisherman by day, a painter of visions by night. But unlike Paterson—who is a unique case for some unique reason—Bess wanted more than the poetic life could give as he simultaneously dropped the hand on the New York art scene. Bess was conflicted for a purpose beyond painting, beyond professionalism, beyond the good life. Today you are an enigma if you retreat from the artworld—Martin Herbert wrote a book, Tell Them I said No, on enigmatic artists who withdrew from the artworld. On the ground the poetic life is about just getting by, threadbare, once removed from the world, although touching it, bringing us a little closer to it at the same time. Everything promises more. The artistic life is designated as an alternative life to the mainstream life. The poetic life, as portrayed in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, reinforces the values inherent in fostering the alternative life of the artist, free from the constraints, conditioning, and self-censorship of instrumental professionalism. Does the artist go underground (or embrace a poetic life above ground) as Marcel Duchamp called on the future artist to go in the 1960s, or does the artist keep on knock-knock knocking on the joke door of the art institution? Retreat! 

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On Jessie Homer French.

On Maggie & Roland & Me.

From screenprinted zine Summer 2019.

From screenprinted zine Summer 2019.

I love real artists. I love how they assert themselves very early on to dream and then brave the economic and psychological shortfalls of forever becoming an artist. I love how, undeterred by systemic obstacles and cruel responses to that dream, they continue on in education, in life, in love, in family, in frustration, in rage, in their unfurling to a defenseless openness where senses and memories, theirs and culture’s, leave them petalless to assaults that wound and scar from the inside out. Not unlike the closet of sexuality—with the addition of an ironical winking light bulb—artists come out in their assertion of life, of A life, as something to be lived not denied. The real artist’s destructive capacity equals that of the workaday accumulation of everyone else, and that, if you think about it, in terms of numbers of artists vs. everyone else, is superhuman-destructive. I came out as an artist—that is, came out of childhood finding myself clinging to the artistic affirmation I’d received as a child from friends and family, to find myself stranded between the naive dream of being an artist and the workaday reality that my father represented to me as a coal miner, a forester, a security guard, followed by his forced early retirement due to a DUI that ploughed grill-first into his unfurled car and body at 5.55pm—five minutes from home. From that dinner time on, that GBH borrowed holes in the workaday ethic of my father—cats have nine lives but don’t live on with eight traumas; humans carry on with carry-on. For the last week I have been reading three memoirs: Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’ Love of Beginnings, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. The good difference between eyes meeting across a crowded bar and ‘I’s’ meeting on the written page is the the possibly lack of performativity and the psychic excess in the latter. Here I am riding passenger to these drivers in boxer shorts and T-shirt in bed beside my wife. The Word can give all-access to the private you. Reading you—Jean and Maggie (my mother’s name which I have learnt to repeat here without sadness) and Roland—I am the most unflinching and attentive and assertive me without being conscious of the fact. Reading—like Proust wrote and is read—coldly attends to life and intimately denies it. Last night, in my boxer shorts, it was Maggie Nelson’s turn. I came across this passage—this ‘fragment’ in Barthes’ terminology—where Barthes is referenced in one of those embedded quotations of Maggie’s wherein she somehow manages to ventriloquize with a megaphone whilst still keeping her voice. The Argonauts is a novel, a memoir, an essay spilling out on the page with Maggie’s family looking on and Maggie looking in, wielding assertive language behind her back with a gaping hole in her chest. Here she writes and thinks and shares as if her parents will never read it, even though, in so many words, they wrote it, or, at the very least proffered the experiences that activate the white space between Maggie’s words. Here Maggie is breaking the rules laid down by her parents—and all the other mothers and fathers we appoint and anoint over a lifetime. Here Maggie is putting her body on the line en route to putting her relationship, family, privacy and other writers on the line. Her quotation-dropping is not a case of ‘Look what I’ve read!’ but ‘Look how I have read you, them, me!’ Excerpt: [Afraid of assertion. Always trying to get out of “totalizing” language, i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity; realising this is another form of paranoia. Barthes found the exit of this merry-go-round by reminding himself that “it is language that is assertive, not he.” It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language’s assertive nature by add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.” ] Reading this I start to think about the unassertive languages of the art scene, not just the press releases and art writing but the body language of the artist as s/he retreats back to the closet where the light bulb is full of want not need—need being the ingredient for action. I realise what I’m missing when reading Maggie. Her invocation of Barthes is not a theory extinguished in some ideology of want to leave the grey plume of the poetic; she is not fleeing “language’s assertive nature”, she is letting language fold through her in her contracted and bold prose that, without arrogance or closet-sightedness, just is. Be assertive, but not too assertive! The artist finds herself in a environment lacking in resources, just the bare minimum. And that’s okay—to want more is to need less, act less. Questions at professional skills seminars go something like this: Should I contact a curator? What should I say? How long should I give them to respond? Should I attach my CV? Should I ask them to meet for a coffee, dinner, desert? And so on. As I read Maggie I notice no ‘perhaps’ or ‘maybes’, no apologies for thinking or opining or repurposing in a certain way. Maggie opens up with the exclamatory joy of anal sex and anticipatory pleasure of dildos in the shower. This is not to say her prose is arrogant, vulgar, there is vulnerability here in the boldness, wounded, and not the castrated wounded woman—what my son at four years after catching my wife naked in the shower severed with “You have no willy! Poor you.” The male ego is not assertive, it is established by an external riptide that carries it along without the choice of getting drowned in it. Poor him! Maggie’s ego is a wounded one, whether that wound is inflicted by society or her mother, who knows but Maggie, but woman, for whom putting her body on the line is nature, not nurture. “I nodded, shyly lifting my breast out of my bra. In one stunning gesture, she took my breast into her hand-beak and clamped down hard. A bloom of custard-coloured drops rose in a ring, indifferent to my doubts.” Just now I received an email from mother’s tankstation Dublin. My feelings about it are fizzing so I thought this the best time to be assertive in my feelings about what I think is an assertive verbal gesture on the part of Mothers’ writer that, in this current press release for the solo exhibition ‘Jessie Homer French: Paintings 1978 - 2018’ comes part way out of the closet with the light bulb winking again: “The Dublin gallery of mother’s tankstation has a sort of hallway or cuboid antichamber from which one enters directly from Watling Street, positioned pretty immediately below the desk from where most of these writings magically appear…” Alchemy? Assertive? Assertive Alchemy? I’ve always enjoyed MT's press releases even if I thought I didn’t (like a lot of people) in the very act of reading them, sometimes re-reading them. They create consternation, and are always assertive in their support for their artists, obvs, wielding a manifesto (that was rewritten recently) but in its first edition proclaimed what “Mothers” did not mean, which probably meant just that, or that and more. As the weight and lightness of images topple the physical art scene online, MT’s assertive language here gives me hope that I am in the right game, writing for art. That writing, that language, can be assertive where artists cannot, and it shouldn’t be tamed because, as Barthes reminds us (and Maggie performs), language doesn’t tremble, we do. 

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Featured
a_flash_in_the_small_night writings (2019)
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On Berlin Opticians.
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On the Poetic Life.
On the Poetic Life.
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For Generosity; Against Speed Curating
The New Collectivism (2011)
The New Collectivism (2011)
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On Paul Hallahan & Lee Welch.
On Maggie &amp; Roland &amp; Me.
On Maggie & Roland & Me.
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On Eva O'Leary.
On a Model Art Scene
On a Model Art Scene
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On Jessie Homer French.
On The Image
On The Image

On a Model Art Scene

S &amp; L, from screenprinted zine Summer 2019.

S & L, from screenprinted zine Summer 2019.

Playing Snakes & Ladders the other day with my wife and kids I realise in split moment I’m having fun, before returning to having fun again. Flatness of the board game and crab-like race to the top—full of oxymoron and irony—made me think of Jacques Derrida and his deconstructive freeplay in terms of language, competition, centres and agents of influence, and artistic freedom in the art scene. I love Derrida, almost irrationally, somewhere between head and heart and head. I have read and reread him for 20-odd years, from the purity of Of Grammatology to its opposite—biography, and never really caught the tail never mind the body and head of his thought. He haunts with his ontology; ladders always lead to snakes to ladders, excessive signifiers reproducing like rabbits, cotton and cruel. It’s always Spring in Derrida. Birth, family, wild abandon of language both reproductive and pleasurable, but always surgical, forever suspicious. Lambs give birth here too; to more lambs. Language never grows up; establishes itself, institutes itself. Meaning and understanding and truth, those things we are most committed to, suspicious of and insecure about, in art, in life, are always elusive (or illusive) in Derrida because the excess of meaning in language—inside and outside the text, as much as written as spoken—and the mannerist spine of signifiers—never signified, sidewinding with arabesque patterns blurring with helical and horizontal movement and turns in time towards a tail (stay with me) weaving side-to-side in the blue-haze future of space and time, farther and further, leaving textural traces in the sand. I love the dance of Derrida because concrete meaning is oversubscribed to. We want meaning from life the same way we want careers from art. Not gonna happen! Derrida’s difficult language was invented to intervene and exploit and draw out the insecurities of language, the thing we place too much stress on to find the presence of meaning and measurement of value to fill the absence of understanding and function in art. On the night of the birth of my son—the most visceral of dreams—I was reading Derrida. The other night—5-years on—I posed a question to some Dublin-based artists (with Derrida in mind) when I attended the exhibition opening and pub-afters of Periodical Review #8, which I was invited to co-curate this year by Pallas Projects Dublin directors and artists Mark Cullen and Gavin Murphy. “A new model for the art scene?” I said. The question was not altogether rhetorical, and did not come out of the experience of curating Periodical Review, although being named in the mission statement an “agent within the field” like every Periodical Review curator for the last 8 years did get me thinking about power and agency and how artists, more often than not, are not named agents themselves. We are in a moment, it seems, that power is not equated with artist; when artists speed curate. Ugh. I'd been thinking for some time about the model of being an artist, and the toy model of the art scene in which the model artist moves and shakes, from art school to rented studio to exhibition to bare-faced whiteness of the gallery. Lie? It seems to me to be a toy model beset by corners and angles of influence; L-shaped without the Knight’s move. Art, for the most part, becomes art when it is seen by others, the long-haired process trimmed square leaving the buzz-cut results exhibited squarely against a clean white wall in front of eyes that know or are in the know. Art with a capital A is not a hobby shoehorned into a bedroom, a windowless garage, a domestic or rural life... underground. Art is an urbanite, a socialite, a careerist, a sacrifice. Art is all these things until it becomes bound by a certain shape that loses its malleability and mobility to become, inevitably, over the grind of time and cumulative responsibilities, self-imitation. When artists achieve something they have something to lose. Vladimir Nabokov, the exquisite writer of Lolita, said somewhere that his favourite chess piece was the Knight with its L-shaped movement. Vladimir’s love and respect for the Knight’s unusual attack and defense wasn’t exclusive to chess, but to literature too, Lolita being a house of sharp left and right turns, from past to present to future to bedroom to bathroom to love to abuse. We have lots of movers and shakers in our art scene but most choose the same narrow and vertical path, online and off—the only paths at their disposal? I don’t know… Year on year more and more artists emerge from the college woodwork to first wriggle and crawl, left and right, their flesh visible beneath the loose articulation of their newly formed shells, until they secure homes a little more solid, sturdy, architectonic, established, institutional (you see where I am going) with studs and struts that lead this way and that, that way and this—upwardly mobile—to form a house with L-shapes that become more □, more structural, as if the uncanny corner of freeplay were nailed shut. This is the model of the artist, to first make L-shape movements and then build a house with them. With Snakes & Ladders spread out before me and the Derridean trace of childhood and now fatherhood drawing out a curvature of time that bites its own tail, I wonder about the possibility of flatness, that gorgeous Snakes & Ladders flatness spanning 100 squares and games over a lifetime. Is it all a game? and if so, why did our art game become so vertical. Vertiginous social media has made its own high-rise institutions and reputations and flat-pack artists. But I have to trust the integrity of the artist who has chosen this impossible life with an impossible vernacular that buckles and bends our view of the world. Artists that make the Knight’s move. 3 snakes await my son on this board on the top row; 180 applications for a 10-slot annual programme await the artist-directors of Pallas Projects Dublin where the shadow of capitalism makes its encroaching presence felt in the faceless hotels and matchbox student accommodation that looms large over the future of our art scene. We move on, move on up. But we ought to aspire to a horizontal art scene where tables are turned and artists are doing the turning, not just in their work, but on the art scene, turning tables that tilt and flip the pieces, the players, the curators, flattening expectation and fostering a horizontal growth outwards, expanding, thinning, balding, prostrate, looking up at the sun where clouds make temporary shapes against the blue, where possibility is wispy, upward, not built of blocks, of reputations, but of vision. See how far I can see, not how far I can piss gold. Come the day when every agent-artist, with their own relative agency, contributes their time and energy and power outside of their own concentrated circle to other circles and other circles and other circles until the sky is teeming and the liquid field is flat and unified by recessed centres—lots and lots and lots of centres of influence and the artist’s tide is the thing that comes to shore and inevitably razes what has gone before and what is to come. A reproductive community. Lambs lambing. Unity.

Podcast.

Others.

Featured
a_flash_in_the_small_night writings (2019)
a_flash_in_the_small_night writings (2019)
On Berlin Opticians.
On Berlin Opticians.
On the Poetic Life.
On the Poetic Life.
1.jpg
For Generosity; Against Speed Curating
The New Collectivism (2011)
The New Collectivism (2011)
processed_20191208_120033.jpg
On Paul Hallahan & Lee Welch.
On Maggie &amp; Roland &amp; Me.
On Maggie & Roland & Me.
processed_20191212_154521.jpg
On Eva O'Leary.
On a Model Art Scene
On a Model Art Scene
processed_20191208_120144.jpg
On Jessie Homer French.
On The Image
On The Image

On The Image

Renata Adler, from screenprinted zine Summer 2019.

Renata Adler, from screenprinted zine Summer 2019.

It’s 1969. The brilliant intellect, writer and infamous critic, Renata Adler, writes how over the course of “two and a half years... five days out of seven”, she’s watched soap operas “nearly always when I thought I should be doing other things”. She admits almost shamefully, almost—before qualifying that soap operas were a critical reflection of a new mediated America—that “I saw the characters in them more often than my friends, I knew their relationships, the towns.” We have all succumbed to addictions that were too comforting for criticality. Mine was a depressive lull in any ambition whatsoever in my early 20s when I would sleep in till 11am and awake to find myself downstairs slouched in front of Days of our Lives which, interestingly enough, was one of Renata Adler’s soap addictions in the late 60s. Christmas week 2018 I found myself reflecting on why Netflix serial dramas, a timely replacement for Days of our Lives, are so much closer to the intimacy we experience in real life. Maybe more so. The all-access serial drama, where life unfolds and doubles over on a flat screen that compresses the gaze so tight that diamonds grow in our eyes make the people we see walking and driving parallel on the commute home into pulp, with no existence outside of our narrow searchlight gaze. My latest Netflix binge is the German drama, Dark (2018), with its Heideggerian temporal simultaneity of past, present and future against the heavy palette and textures of an Anselm Kiefer. In other words, it’s German to the primordial bone. In the first few episodes we get to know the characters generationally as children, as adults, as parents, and as grandparents, as they travel back and forth through time from 2019 to 1986—the most ’80s of years—via flashback and time travel, meeting themselves and relevant others in the then and now of a small town in the middle of nowhere, where and when nobody in this temporal and geographic enclave seemingly leaves home because they have bonded in this “festering wound” of a place where relationships become traumas because of the incestuous nature of time travel. The best writers and critics are time travellers. In ’69 Renata Adler observed while ‘couching’ her potato actuality that “Perhaps they [soap operas] are what personal life was like, before the violent, flash discontinuities of media news and personal air travel came along.” 50 years on our mediated lives are more mediated than ever as we try desperately to make flesh and sense of our digital lives through our continuous and persistent presence on social media where we double down on our identity. But we know this and have accepted this virtual and violently narcissistic fate. What I am interested in here is not what social media is doing to our real lives but what the image, shared on social media, is doing to our art lives, as artists, writers or just lovers of art. Appetite for the real is my real question against this mirror reality that we proliferate all to generously in how we are engaging with art exclusively in the virtual field. Photogenic art, that’s where we’re at; we judge and experience everything now through the one mediated filter, the mobile phone. I am near the end of my commute and the audiobook On Photography (1977) by that other giant intellect, Susan Sontag. As I listen and dodgem Sontag hits home on something time and again in her time-travelling theories that reiterate the contemporary sensibility and relationship to images in their proliferation, their dissemination, and how images are becoming more and more less and less as the image field becomes increasingly homogeneous and flat and there is neither the feel of a ripple or splash in the real world of art. There’s a flattening of cultural experience but not of cultural capital. Whatever criticisms are lobbed at social media it seems we are in it for the long haul as artists, especially artists. When you bring up the Instagram experience of art most artists smile and admit it’s an unavoidable means to an end… but to what end? There is a serious yearning and want in artists’ participation on social media. Looking from the outside-in as a writer on art, an activity that necessitates a deeper engagement and criticality than other observers of art, including artists, I see social media having wide-ranging effects on the mentality of the artist and the physical nature of the art scene, which we do not give near the same attention or energy to as we do to composing the building blocks of our promotional hashtags on Instagram. The art scene has transitioned online. We do not have the appetite for going to galleries anymore, and when we do we manage our experiences with a phone and a photograph. Images are posted on the night or next day following the forced sociability of the opening. Why bother, eh! Install shots manage art better than in person, where and when we conceptually and emotionally stagger between thing and thought and time. We do not re-experience art as shock or new when the clinking wine glasses have long staggered home and we return to the gallery for a “proper look”. “Art is a self-consciousness act” Sontag claims across the sound and time waves. How self-conscious is Instagram? Is this the new consciousness? A digital consciousness? An art consciousness? Cigars drawn, Yosemite Sam shoots Sigmund Freud. If the art gallery isn’t a place we experience art in the flesh anymore, then what has the art gallery become, a showroom, a stage that facilitates the proliferation of more images? Galleries are not the end all of art, far from it. As witnesses to the shift from offline to online, from DIY to FYI, Instagram cannot be waived off as a harmless supplement to real art in the gallery. It’s way too pervasive, too convincing, too manipulative, too easy. Instagram does not excite physical appetite, it diminishes it. (I still want the fragmented experience of art where we confront art askew; or to use a word from Dostoyevsky, catercorner.) Contemporary art is difficult to manage in person. It’s not sociable, even when it tries in theory and practice. We always miss something in art in person. We are bad witnesses on the move in physical space. Art spread eagles itself across our vision to evade and elude our conviction to unify. We want metaphor, we get metonymy. We are intellectually agasp in front of art. We cannot hold art in our eyes’ grasp. Our blind spots dilate in our capacity to take everything in but not in any great detail. Art is bigger than the breadth of our eyes, grander than the small stories we shape the world with. We fill in where memory fails us; we gossip-in the details. We leave the gallery with traces of our experience; ontology is hauntology as Bennington said of Derrida’s deconstruction. We bring those images that we tried and failed to grasp in the physical setting into the real world; images that break down as new senses, new sentences form reflective facets on real experience. Diamonds in our eyes again. Images are starry in our memory, never still. The photograph, the image, the pic, is deconstructing our art scene in its stillness; we don’t live in the world (Dasein in Heideggerian). Instagram is just another institution of self, with its protective propaganda, distant and distracted and without instinct: “man has no instincts, he makes institutions” (Deleuze). From the dashboard Sontag’s says something about the lack of participation in the act of photography. It begs the question what does participation mean right now in the art scene if the art scene has migrated online to leave the physical setting of art to breathe in the fresh air of non-participation in this institution of self where no physical community can mingle, shoulder to shoulder in the accidents and errors of physical sociability. Are we participating when we go to a gallery to feel the air between art, us, and its context? Are we participating when we post an image or validate other images online? Are we participating when we divulge something personal about our other lives as artists? Are we participating when we theorise about participation in practice? What are we contributing? What are we sacrificing? Meaning of words change as the world turns on its vertical axis. It always goes back to the vertical: hierarchy, inequality, envy. Is the physical setting just an institution of display that has had its time and we are prolonging its execution, as new ways of experiencing art, claimed as secondary, are in virtuality, primary? The gallery is a Procrustean bed for the artist to lie in and get waterboarded by the ebb and flow of the economy? I know from talking and listening to artists that the pure experience of the studio and the desire and want dreamt up in the space of art-making never lives up to its display in the gallery. The paradox is, without the gallery, without the physical setting and the gaze of the public sphere, no matter how small that gaze is, the artist has no real desire to exist in process in perpetuity. Does an image posted of our work on social media at least momentarily pause the destructive force of process without end? Sontag says “porn”. Innocence is defined here on the basis of what we are exposed to through images rather than experience, and how that first shock image can never be re-experienced. Art that shocks only shocks once. Not cheap shocks, but shock in terms of a shockingly new physical perspective on the world, askew, catercorner, us and it. I remember an art history lecturer who filled his teaching time by inserting a clunky VHS tape of Robert Hughes’ art series The Shock of the New and sitting back while Hughes did his thing. It worked, it really did, because we had to sit through Hughes week after week, and some of those that did would go on to be artists and all of those that slept, well. The memory that stayed with me is Hughes’ verbal musculature overlaid on the image of a vertiginous Eiffel Tower, his symbol for burgeoning modernism against his believable narrative of Parisians climbing up the Tower for the first time in the late 1800s and seeing the city for the first time as a patchwork, what Jacques Lacan would call a quilt, something metaphoric and manageable. Life and art has become about distance rather than integration and participation; no more nudging opinions in the public sphere. We can look at Instagram as a platform for the artist to play or propagandise, a tool to expand the singularity of their vision or to distract from their black hole style. Susan Sontag wrote On Photography in 1977. As I arrive home to people who are not cardboard cut-outs, her words from the car stereo speak volumes, then and now:

Today everything exists to end in a photograph. 

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a_flash_in_the_small_night writings (2019)
a_flash_in_the_small_night writings (2019)
On Berlin Opticians.
On Berlin Opticians.
On the Poetic Life.
On the Poetic Life.
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For Generosity; Against Speed Curating
The New Collectivism (2011)
The New Collectivism (2011)
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On Paul Hallahan & Lee Welch.
On Maggie &amp; Roland &amp; Me.
On Maggie & Roland & Me.
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On Eva O'Leary.
On a Model Art Scene
On a Model Art Scene
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On Jessie Homer French.
On The Image
On The Image