Foreclosure (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
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1 AM in Marseille:

In the airport I was texting J about writing and art writing but I was texting him from my phone and I was still tired from all the beers so I wasn't able to get all the words out of myself efficiently. I was telling him about how elegant his instagram handle sounds when said out loud in a british accent and then he said that M told him I'd been going in on Twitter which I was it's so easy to post words on the internet when you're drunk, they made it too easy to post and that's why I have to come here, where I could still post drunk but it's a much slower vehicle of dissemination, one that demands a greater degree of intentionality... maybe... I'm trying to decide if I agree with that last part, I'm not sure if "demand" is the right word, perhaps "creates" functions better, the way this writing machine is built in comparison to the other writing machines. He said he feels the same with IG stories and I said yea but I like how inane my IG stories usually are, in comparison text feels so naked and he agreed, then we texted more about writing practices and how they're developed and shaped, the role self-publication vs. self-promotion plays into it, and I thought of the public in publication which was in those Blanchot quotes that are somewhere above here from The Book to Come.

I'm back in France thinking Baudelaire's Salons and Mallarme's La Derniere Mode, of return to old forms, but also ways to make them new. I still like the idea of an e-reader that begins at first principles, to guide a certain type of Reading, and of course it can be translated from that, just as I've only encountered Baudelaire and Mallarme through translation, but that's where it has to begin. In a way that already happens here, where a certain type of reading happens by virtue of how one must come to these words. I feel as though I repeat myself, but that this repetition is good, that the looping of themes and ideas helps me hone in on certain things, specific directions, and other vague things just beyond the curtain of language. It is this sort of active process, where I don't know where this will lead, and that's part of the joy of it, letting the world come into it, to shape me.

In London I went to three shows — already I don't like that, I don't like how it sounds or frames what happens and I went to more than three shows, but there are three shows that I think function in relation to one another as it relates to my time in London in different kinds of arts spaces of different sizes, scopes, and ambitions, and then I come back to this idea of ekphrasis, the idea of communicating things that I saw without images, or rather communicating things that I saw around the deluge of images of them, and still this idea of seeing and looking as my words of choice as opposed to experiencing, or something of that sort. How am I engaging with art - every word around it, even engage, has this specific connotation of associations that I wrestle with, like fighter jets engaging one another in a dogfight, whether in real life or in the Top Gun GameCube game that faintly pops into my memory. There's a gallery with a similar name that J was texting me about - they want him to do a show and he just keeps avoiding it - and I wonder if that's the joke, another war thing happening in New York City.

I come back to where wars are happening and I come back to the deaths of the post colony and now I'm back in Arcadia Missa grafting HopOutBlick onto the Beyonce painting, while also more acutely aware of the optics of painting black people swimming, the stereotypes that accompany it, the slave ships crossing the Atlantic, Drexciya and mythologies and Daughters of the Dust all passing through my head. There's also Barthes - every image is an image of death, he was talking about the photograph and at one point I wrote about how this related to the sound-image, where you can open up a streaming service and listen to dead voices and they were always going to die but you didn't know when. I wonder if Frank Ocean can listen to Blonde or if his brother's voice on the outro is too much for him. My tweet about the weight of the world continues to circulate, people feel it, and I still feel it, but you feel the weight differently at different times, sometimes it's close to crushing you, and at other moments you can lift it above your head, even throw it into the air for a moment of rest before gravity drags it back down on top of you.

There's the matter of the Cavalli painting and the lawsuit, but my mind also drags in the constellation of The Clipse and Mr. Me Too, Pusha T saying "Pyrex stirs turned into Cavalli furs". This sort of intertextual leap from association to association probably stems from how you're trained to look at film, all shots existing in relation to the history of shots, and now I try to work out how French of an idea that is. I used my scribe app to record all the words said in Twilight City and at the end it looped the final sentence over and over and over again and when i was looking at the text file of it, it was an amazing image, I decided to tweet it, F replied that it was beautiful and I sent her a file of the film because I know she's into dean blunt and we'd talked about mekas so I figured she'd like it and then I send too many words, talking about how Mati Diop uses the Hype Williams track iceprincess in Atlantique and that there's this shot of the moon in Atlantique that mirrors this shot of the moon in Twilight City and that's probably the point that grounds my association of the two things together so strongly. I found the legs of Cavalli to be the most interesting part, there's this sort of shadow play going on that makes him look Black if one were to just focus on that section, which is easy to do with how the work is displayed, far too tall for the gallery's ceiling - there's an implicit message here too, a Black painter saying I'm making work of a certain scale and the institutions that could show it aren't doing so right now. Perhaps that's a little presumptuous, he's showing at Maxwell Graham in another week, where the ceilings are very tall. I met the gallerist with B in April, B goes back with him, it was a very funny interaction with one of those very certain types of art people who can act a certain way because they've carved out this sort of accepted reinforcement for those behaviors. Many such cases, many such cases.

In Twilight City, during one of the narrator's letters to her mother, she says "we'd fall into another silence — now we can't ever afford that luxury". It reopened the question of how does one afford anything? Right now I afford life through debt, I've made my peace with it, in time I'll work and I'll erase the debt. There are systems of debt, the one I'm in is not the worst. Yesterday I was googling about Derrida and the gift but there were too many words, it wasn't the time, I closed the tabs. I wrote some words, and then I deleted them. It's so easy to do that. The three different galleries of my time in London - Galerina, Arcadia Missa, White Cube - they can all afford such different things, and perhaps the interesting thing is how similar the Galerina and White Cube shows were on a certain level - working with time, place, and language at incredibly different scales. 24 plates turned into 24 clocks, a room where time is divided on the floor, there is no beginning or end, none of the plates had hands, and again the idea of a landmine of needing to step in a certain way to avoid breaking a plate, to shattering the delineation of time, or rather shattering its representation, all making me cognizant now of how fragile it all is. Meanwhile in White Cube, there were 3 paintings of massive scale in a room with a mass of rubble at it's center. Barbed wire wrapped around the rubble, stones and dust get kicked from time to time if you're not careful, but you're not going to trample into the piece. B was friends with one of the gallery girls there, she told us that it's not actually cement but styrafoam, at least the big pieces are, and then as we keep walking in circles around the piece, acting as the hands for this clock of rubble, you slowly become aware of this deceit, there's parts of the wreckage that would've collapsed under their own weight had they been different materials, but instead styrafoam won't erode at a natural pace - or rather it will but the natural pace of styrafoam's erosion is so much slower than that of a rock. At first I struggled with this piece, trying to make sense of the wreckage because it struck me as the wreckage of World War II, which happened after Finnegans Wake, and of course there's also the wreckage of modernity, which feels more explicit now given the links to chemistry, science, the enlightenment necessary for this styrafoam to come into being.

There's also the matter of density, the amount of texts and images on the board of hotel stickers in Galerina is probably equivalent in proportion to the amount of intertextual references going on at the Wake show. In that dark hallway of detritus, there was one glass case that had this aged dusty representation of a baguette inside, underneath it was a joke of a phrase, something along the lines of "pain the shem man", flipping "Shem the penman" into a French pun about bread, but also maybe about the pain that accompanies the transmission of letters. The whole deal w/ "Shem the penman" and "Shaun the post" can be butchered into Joyce dealing with the transmission of letters, the origins of the postal service, there's reference to von thurn und taxis, but beyond the histories of the past, it also points to the trajectories of the future, the increasing speed of the post, of this transmission of letters that we now grasp through the internet. At the same time, I think of the Ewa Poniatowska's uncle in Poland using the post, how the post is central to this work, and how The Post via instagram stories, via the Galerina website and documentation, via the internet as a whole then circulates images of her work after the show goes up. Posting, posting, posting - it's one of those words where it's become so common you forget to think about the origin, the etymology, but also because it's only used in relation to the public. You text or message someone, you don't post them, to post them is such a public gesture and again Derrida and the post card and that quote from above pop back up. When I was texting J, we were talking about the nudity of text, but we didn't get into its lack of dissipation. There's a range of Posts, some are like styrafoam, some like cement, and others like flowers, sheding their petals as the seasons turn. Now, I realize that a transformation occurred, alchemical, in which I went from texting J to posting J, as the private was rendered public, as he lead me into this. It's 1 am in Marseille. It could be the title of a Drake song.