Bootleg (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
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Enveloped — it's a good place to begin again. I could have started with inundated but there is no paper there, there are no seams, no chemical glue to lick, no factory to produce inundation. It's an emptier image, perhaps there is more tumult in inundation, to be enveloped is a relatively clean process, surgical even, though envelopes can break, paper can stretch thin, and give way. Can pixels? Blanchot (via Lydia Davis) wrote of Mallarme questioning "What is literature?", how this question became literature, I watched Yuk Hui talk about War and Machines and thought about how I needed to reread Recursivity and Contingency and how there is always this infinitely growing list of things to read, to watch, to hear, it is impossible to accumulate it all into the self. This list can be inundating, but it never envelopes.

I was enveloped, I remain enveloped, but the paper is stretching thin — what will come out? Things will be different. I run around in so many different directions at once and I'm trying to simplify the routes. I make all of these Works, they accumulate from within and spill out. I understand when people don't have anything left to spill now, they're exhausted. I was exhausted.

The envelope gets filled, it gets sealed, and then it's shipped. Then someone receives it, they tear it open, sometimes at the seal, sometimes in it's entirety. The envelope can break in such a way that it can never be filled again. But it's easy to make new envelopes. And its this cycle between the postcard, with its public address, its inability to hide, and the envelope, which refuses to bear its words to the public, which has a layer of consent wrapped into the address, that one not break a seal that isn't meant for them.

This doesn't happen all the time. When I worked at the mail center I opened envelopes meant for James Franco and Meryl Streep. They no longer had boxes there, there was no way for the letters to reach their address. But it was always so boring. Louise Bourgeois's son had a mailbox but I never opened his mail. I could see that he was doing projects in Mali and I google him now and there's an obituary, he had a property in Djenne, where there's this incredible mosque I want to see, and I wonder when he last went, because the region has been controlled by Islamic militants for some time. The obituary says he wrote for Artforum in his 20s, and he was of that ilk. Things change so much, today S texted me about how there aren't really websites anymore, I replied with a Colby O'Donis track from the album S2 told me he was listening to, saying that there aren't really pop songs anymore.

On my walk I listened to Phreshboyswag - shinin like the sun on repeat. This wasn't today, this was the other day. I thought about how he idealizes an era of the Pacific Northwest I lived through via images and I idealize an era of London he's lived through via images. I sent the track to M - see me in my skinny jeans serving cunt. I play snow angel and think about how phreshboy's voice has changed. Ballin so hard could've played for Barcelona.