DAY 5

1. Here’s Gregor Schneider wearing an Aldi bag on an Aldi bag. 📸Date? title? location? probably his family home where he continues to build rooms within rooms (more on Gregor later). 

2. Sheila Rennick went with Lidl.

DAY 4

🏴Recently I read someone using your name to illustrate how wrong you were about Diane Arbus (who will also arrive some day, somewhere in this calendar). It grates the way you are used time and again to prove wrongness. If they read your introduction to the reprint of your 1960s collection of essays “Against Interpretation”, wherein you acknowledge you got it wrong from time to time, they’d realise that you got it wrong because you took critical risks, not like those yes-men that always get it right.

Every year I use your eponymous essay “Against Interpretation” as a perverse opening salvo in a module that fosters interpretation. Of course we could interpret your rallying cry against mining for content in the artwork as a wish, as a hope to escape your beautiful intellect for something bodily. Or we could go with Philippe Parenno’s advice in DAY 1 that “The idea is to read rather than to contemplate, to be active in front of the work.”🏴

📸Susan Sontag alone on a bed. N.Y.C. 1965. Photograph by Diane Arbus

DAY 3

🏴If you are not watching the world cup you may have noticed it watching you (as Jacques Lacan might say).

So for obvs reasons: 

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) 

TV was important to me as a kid for thinking and daydreaming. It was always on with nothing on, so you watched nothing without the control to choose what nothing to watch. So you daydreamed while watching. Sometimes something would come on. Sometimes you would watch nothing waiting for something to come. Sometimes you watched the noise or roll of an out of tune TV. Sometimes you would notice your reflection in the noise and roll and keep watching for what felt like forever.

Gordon and Philippe Parenno’s 90-minutes film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) elicits these nothing days from my childhood, when thinking and daydreaming, not just looking, was a thing.

Philippe Parenno: “The principle of reading can be important in looking at a work of art. The idea is to read rather than to contemplate, to be active in front of the work. The best stories are those that one has in the head, not those we are given to see. This film is an aid for this kind of daydreaming.”🏴

DAY 2

🏴The two black “cuts” in this Luc Tuymans painting are not “cuts”, but the painterly expression of a zip, a zip that allows access to the empty torso of the sackcloth doll to stuff & bring it back to substantial life from deflated death. I think death is executed in every part of this painting of Tuymans’ childhood stuffed doll, even though I can’t imagine Tuymans was ever a child. The decapitated porcelain head, the cropped genitalia at the V, the awkward elbows: “A supposed mutilation that is or is not there” has taken place through the act of painting. Entitled “Body”, death is inferred by the present & absent body parts, but also the death of childhood. 

Donald Winnicott has this theory about a healthy object that the child holds onto tightly in the first moments of separation from the mother’s embrace. The child goes out in the world, but needs something, some object, to make that transition from mother to social life bearable. For Elmo is was a blanket. Winnicott calls it the Transitional Object. 

This object, as portrayed by artist Mike Kelley too many times to list here, is usually a dirty, smelly, one-eyed teddy bear kinda object. Kelley laments & generalises that parents usually take this object from the child to clean & repair when it gets too grungy or gungy. 

I don’t know if this painting of the doll-object is Tuymans’ Transitional Object. It does mark the ‘1990’s moment when the artist would become “Luc Tuymans” as we know him in the artworld today. But more generally, I wonder if it is a Transitional Object at all. It doesn’t look that healthy. Mike Kelley, a committed & brilliant reader of psychoanalytic theory, said somewhere that it is hard to tell between the Transitional Object & the Fetish, which I don’t have room to think about now.🏴

📸 LUC TUYMANS, Body, 1990, oil on canvas

DAY 1

🏴The most efficient way I can describe “the uncanny” is to imagine that I am teaching, as I am now before you, and the classroom door opens and another version of me enters the room to look at me teaching. That is kinda uncanny, but what could make it uncannier is when I look at you, the students, looking at the other me looking at me teaching. Freud’s uncanny is not just intellectual uncertainty, it is more affect than effect. It’s like what Jacques Lacan says referring to the uncanny: “I see myself seeing myself.”🏴

📸KAI ALTHOFF, Häuptling Klapperndes Geschirr, October 24, 2018 - January 20, 2019, TRAMPS 75 East Broadway, Flr 2 New York, NY 10002.