At The End (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
♥ ♥ ♥

Shit really is the word for what I just waded through. A night of pure excrement. I didn't really do anything before heading to the opening. I had emailed S this week about meeting up, who I'd met last year at S2's opening and it was at the end of a long night, I knew he wouldn't really remember it. On my way to the opening I first stopped by an intermarche - grabbed a chicken sandwich and a juice - and then when I neared the gallery I passed a McDonald's and got sucked into its vortex - un petit beouf, a small coke, an oreo mcflurry, I only finished the sandwich. Later M would tell be about how there's a McDonald's here that revolted against corporate during the pandemic. They changed their name to "Apres M", changed the arrangement of the sign outside to signifiy that, and it was a sort of hub for mutual aid.

When I ran into S outside the opening it was awkward - he was very German gay artworld nonartist, I texted J about it almost immediately, and I struggled to click as I was still far too sober for the interaction at that point. I drank some wine there and met C, an Irish writer and painter who'd been living in the region for a while. We talked about Joyce and Cixous and life and practices. It was the first conversation I've had here that I truly enjoyed and it turned into getting dinner at a Syrian restaurant and more white wine. I saw him briefly in the blur after that and I had a moment of regret of not making my time with C the entirety of the night, but he encouraged me to do otherwise.

Part of being too forthcoming is me batting around the bush as to why I'm in Marseille, which is partially coincidental and has to do with the ~independent research~ I'm doing sure, but also was so that I'd be here at a time when things were "happening" here - capital of various sorts to be mined, accumulated, everyone knows it, and after this night I'm not necessarily turned away from it, but it feels truly far away, something that I've accepted as I talk about Baudelaire's writing practice and how his addiction to it constantly drove him into financial troubles. After dinner with C, I ran into M and A and A2 on the street and then ended up going to a different restaurant in Court Julien with them. I got grape leaves and I had a glass of arak. It was fine, they asked what I'd been up to, the dynamic was more clearly established now, A was wearing the lungi and I texted my sister about it again, but it was fine. At the end they said they were looking for drugs for the party, I wasn't really at that time, but I kept it in mind because some of the French people I was with the previous night were talking about 3M or trois-eme, a research chemical that has effects that are somewhere between molly and coke.

I arrive at the party with A and A2 and M and we hang out and talk and smoke cigarettes for a bit. People aren't really dancing at this point, just hanging around the courtyard, and I get more wine in my system. When I was talking to C and telling him about how it's hard for me to deal with people in these settings, his advice was more alcohol. I took it. I saw him briefly in the mix there, he cheers'd my glass, and then I didn't see him again. I did see S though, he was standing up on a ledge, lording over the space, and I started to chat with him again, much more fluidly this time. Before, when I ran into him at the gallery, he said something along the lines of "were there a lot of drugs involved that night", referring to the night I met him, and I made a relatively calculated decision to play the game on both ends. M and A and A2 were looking for drugs, maybe I could find some of this "trois eme" for them, but instead S offered me his coke and told me to take the baggie to the bathroom, cut a line, and then come back. I did as such and then returned and then we got to talking shit.

Cocaine activates people, it makes them talk, it makes them dance, I'm sure there's plenty of passages in Reena Spaulings or Chris Krauss or other art world literature about the function it provides. I returned to a long series of conversations from an old gay German man about his disillusionment with art, with social change, with the world. It was mildly overwhelming but I understood - the crux of the issue was that he thought his curation was "doing something" in these past decades. At X gallery, at Y museum, around all that, at these parties. When I met him last year he was talking about producing a H's book and also D's film and I found the two ends of those spectrums to be quite funny afterwards. It made sense. And now here he was, being quite honest with me, in an extremely harsh way.

The show that his gallery had just put on - he didn't believe in it. Little miniature houses, it's nice yes, but what does it do, he said, before then lamenting that 80% of the board at MOMA is MAGA, a thing to me that's just like "DUH", but he also used the phrase "The Obama Years" to describe his time in New York and then I understood completely that he lived in this sort of fantasy land that got shattered with the election of Trump. The Obama mask on Empire was enough for him to do curational work uplifting minority artists, things of that nature, so that he could feel good about the art industrial complex and his work within it. Now, that fantasy was wholly shattered and that's why he's in Marseille, a small city, running this space that still gets money from different places, and gets its artists some of that money, and has a semiotext(e) bookstore within it, full of books like "Hatred of Capitalism" and "The Coming Insurrection" - and I saw so many other familiar names: Reena, Kathy Acker, Etel Adnan, Tiqqun, The Invisible Committee, the list goes on and you get the idea. C was talking to me about how important these books are, that these books are for sale here, because they don't really exist in France the way that they do it the Anglosphere.

C and I talked a lot of shit at the gallery and at dinner - about India, about Ireland, about their relation to the UK, about what France provides and how it is here. He commented on my jacket at first - the Kiko piece that has this lace quality to it and it stands out, that's why I wear it. It's as much part as getting into character as taking the baggie from S and going to the bathroom. That phrase "getting into character" is entrenched into my mind from Pulp Fiction. In that opening scene where Jules and Vincent go to shoot those guys and get the briefcase back, one of them says "let's get into character". I can't remember if it's before or after the conversation about the Royale with Cheese, but when I was at McDonald's I sent E a picture of this display that said "Le Big Mac" and had the Samuel L. Jackson pronunciation running through my head. Getting into character has a decent amount to do with code-switching, you assume certain characters to talk with certain people, modulate those versions to talk to other people, so on so forth, obvious enough, nothing ground-breaking there. At first C thought I was the artist, because I was brown yes, and the artist was Persian, but moreso how I was dressed, the Kiko jacket, the brown loafers, and that was fine, it got us talking. I sent pictures of the show to Z - the works were these little 3-D printed houses, rendered in this gray that sapped away outside associations, and they all had these tiny LED screens that took real advertisements from the streets of Tehran and reintroduced them into this context. My impression of the work was these beautiful little objects, 10 of them in total, were like poems. Sure there is little shift in the world besides those who see them and engage with them in a certain way, but they're meaningful enough for the artist to commit themsleves to making and now, as the signs of Tehran are shown in this context, I'm reminded of Flusser and Groundlessness and Universal Homelessness. It's fine work for me, but at the courtyard of the former palace that is now a music conservatory that hosts this non-commerical art fair that is hosting this party, S is really questioning the purpose of these works, what they are doing in the world, what he is doing by extension, and lamenting that there isn't "change" coming from this kind of work being shown in that kind of space.

When I first met A he talked to me about how his bag got stolen. It had his computer and his passport, a significant amount of his life in it. At the second dinner of last night, he told me about seeing S at the police station as well. Apparently S's car and his apartment had been broken into while he was away (he told me was vacationing in Greece) and maybe there's a small extent to which these recent events, which S didn't tell me about (and had no reason to do so), where echoing through his mind, amplifying his disillusionment, but it's probably much more realizing that his life, his "wikipedia page" as he put it, was doing nothing but serving Empire. I don't think he would characterize it as such, but it's easy to group what he did into neoliberalism, corporations going gay/woke, and so on, it's easy to throw these big words about and to let them do the work of holding the complexities of the world. S talked so much, he talked about S2's work, he talked about it relation to the market and collectors and other artists in New York and London, and he compared the places of different artists in these spheres to that of scenes of German artists in the 20th century. He talked about criticsm in the 80's, when it would actually attack artists and cause questions to arise, and then it really clicked in my mind as to why boomers like Walter Robinson love The Manhattan Art Review. I thought about talking about these ~infrastructures~ with him. Earlier, he showed me a tiny pamphlet he had stuck in his iphone case that held a story about Staten Island, in both French and in English. But now wasn't the time, I was reacting, he was talking, it was nice, like I said I'd been doing too much talking.

I suppose S went on and on, this is what cocaine does, and I'm unsure if there was any new ground being broke besides the same recirculation of lamentations. Recirculation brings up howth and environs and that opening page of Finnegans Wake and when I was talking to C, he was telling me about the necessity of reading the work in a Dublin accent. He told me about where he grew up in Dublin, the history of it, the prostitutes that used to run its streets, and when I called it a cultural backwater, he vehemently disagreed. It was a backwater yes, but there was culture. That was a far more interesting conversation, he fed me gossip about Irish writers, the schemes they cooked up to avoid taxes, problems with writers and their estates and their families after their deaths, and he told me about going to bars in the west of Ireland, tiny places far from tourists, where there is no music, at times it gets so quiet that one can hear the clock ticking. He told me that one of the best things a young writer could do would be to spend time getting drunk in Ireland and listening to the language within the walls of the pub. We exchanged Instagrams and he told me that he'd let me know if he saw of any residencies.

At a certain point, S takes a selfie with me and then sends it to S2. I'm smoking a cigarette in it, my hand partially obscuring my face, which is good. It's an interesting thing to do, on one end, it's a fun "hey we linked up" type of picture, similar to me posting Z2 on Twitter to all of those mutuals, but it's also a validation check, to make sure I'm not lying to climb in some world. We talked about how everything in Art is work, the social end, it never ends, and I brought up SF tech culture and young VC's on Twitter as an analogous situation but I'm not sure he understood what I was saying. We went to the bathroom to do another line and he told me that he'd keep it a secret, which to me meant the complete opposite. It didn't upset me, I thought it was funny, the idea of creating this sort of a secret that's so banal, that's constant in this world. Going to the bathroom together to do drugs. There was a long line for the stalls while the urinals sat empty - because everyone else was doing it. That's how original it was.

At this point I decide my time of chatting with S has more or less come to a natural conclusion. I text J that I miss him and he sends me a picture of Z and N at the opening on Hancock Street and missing them and wishing I was there hits me. I bought a flight to India, I'll be there on Tuesday. It'll be good, to sit with everything there, but I want to get back to New York and see my friends sooner than later. I tweet some bullshit about Critical Melancholy and M2 replies. It's such a funny stand-in phrase for the feeling that early Yung Lean, Bladee, Black Kray produces. It's all white artists in that Buchholz show and now I'm thinking Kray's influence on Lean and Bladee and that affect, how there can't be a Critical Melancholy without roots in Blackness and Black Culture, but also how Kray could give a fuck about show happening on 82nd street, he's built his own world and system that lets him make art and his fans stream it, buy it, buy merch, he's done the thing of how to be a working artist in these times. S was talking about what Shayne Oliver does and how it reaches so much more stuff, yes it happens at the Shinkel Pavillion too, but clothes are worn out, nightlife is experienced, these things, in his mind, were greater than a painting in a gallery.

I'm in the bathroom again and some of this exotic "trois eme" finds its way to me. It's sharp, cutty on the nose, and I'm glad I only took a bump. I'm not sure that I felt anything in particular but it staves off the comedown off the coke and I'm back outside dancing and socializing as things are winding to a close and we're scheming for the next move. It doesn't end up being with them, but I end up in a back room of the palace with R and R2 and K, who all performed/DJ'd, people are doing lines off an iphone and drinking wine. At this point I'm ready to go home, there is more night to be lived yes, but my phone is dead and it's 45 minute walk back to my place that I don't want to embark on without it, so I'm stuck riding the rest of the night out. We get kicked out of the palace by the security guard and head to the apartment of this couple, M3 and T, who are in the group. It's only 8 or 9 of us. It's the best play for me, I know there'll be a phone charger at this apartment, but the trade off is that I'm stuck there until it's time to leave. It's fine, we drink, we talk, we gossip, there's more cocaine, the sun rises, and then it's time to go. The metro is running at this point and I take it back, feeling like a degenerate with the stimulants in my veins. I get back to my place and my airbnb hosts are starting their day as I walk in. So much nothing happened, especially for those last few hours, that's so much of "the art world", people hanging out and doing drugs and drinking until the sun rises. I understand why it happens but I think about how much nicer it would've been to have a night that extends past the sunrise with my friends. There will be plans to go out again tonight, but I feel spent. I've done enough. There's no more "Art Shit Diary" to be written, I've writhed around in the excrement of disillusionment, aspirations, chemicals, and desire for too long. I've been in the shit, I've been with the shits, and it really just is shit.

I'm looking for an ending of sorts, the night signaled an ending of sorts for me, in terms of certain possibilities that could have been, that I wasn't sure I wanted to begin with, and foreclosure is a sort of opening. Trench Town pops into my head: "Dirty money, pick it up throw it on her friend". Jackie Wang was talking about how poems are useless in that LA Times interview, and when I think about those little houses as poems, I also think about how terrible it would be to have to earn money by writing poems, to have to think about that in the process of making poetry, whether through words or walls or screens. I'm searching for an ending and maybe it's that all this Shit was necessary. What I want is much clearer now, how the world operates is much clearer now. In a sense that's the main thing I wanted when I decided to approach S - a level of demystification in how things work. And he gave that to me, it wasn't on the surface of what he said, but what was immediately underneath. I realize there isn't much of a point in searching for an ending because there will be more words underneath this soon.