🌊The sky is blue, sunset long, blind spots eternal. It’s nice here, sitting on the shore, looking at artists paddling into position to catch the next wave. Individual artists catch them from time to time. Groups less so. We can look at this one of many ways: curators are suggestible; lazy; or the artist has somehow — against the odds — broken through the surface & productive flows of consumer-capitalist culture (what some name democracy & others equality), to emerge, wearing a Hawaiian jungle bird shirt for all to see. On my watch artists have caught, surfed, bailed & sometimes rode away from shore into the sunset. Waves, usually, are followed by withdrawals, sell-outs, hanger-ons, crashes. Why does curator consensus form around a given artist, at a given moment, for a given duration of time? Such consensus swells out of the blue, with unnatural heft. Every curator on board, knife at the ready, for a piece of the catch. Like the surfer, the artist either chooses to catch the wave with all their core being, or let it pass, to watch it crest & crash with someone else riding it. But how did that first wave come into being? What was the impetus, the motivation, the horsepower, what Bruno Latour calls the network or alliance, to put all that water in motion, all at once, in one big movement? Was it the surfer that willed it into existence, or something underneath? Waves come and go; artists too. Right now an artist is cresting a wave, while other artists look on from the paddling pool, enviously. Yet, within that wave of froth, salt, & spit, a barrel forms around the artist. We can’t see them from the shore; they can’t see us from within the wave. A braided wave, parted in the middle, to form pigtails on either side; & out there, beyond the waterfalls, a tunnel, a vision, white.

📸Raymond Pettibon (from the Royal Book Lodge archive); Magnum wearing Hawaiian jungle bird shirt