Luncheon on the Grass (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
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How many paintings can you look at it a day? Not glancing but looking. I started at Arcadia Missa, there were 3 paintings by Hamishi Farah and a contract framed on the wall and the gallerina talked to me quite a bit, she gave me a tour of the show, explained all the context, and I went along with it, being friendly because I wanted to hear how she'd say it, even though I went into the show having seen images of it for weeks and understanding the context of Farah's work. I thought about the 'White ppl think I'm radical show' he did with Aria and how those burned wife beaters are one of my favorite pieces of hers, and I went into this show knowing that I wanted to take a picture of the Beyonce painting and post it on my Instagram story with HopOutBlick's PTSD overlaid because they're both sampling Beyonce.

“Clouds filled with stars cover your skies / And I hope it rains, you're the perfect lullaby / What kind of dream is this?”

“Bro said I gotta chill off the perks cuz I’m wildin / But he don’t know it’s too much on my mind, I feel like dying”

What's different about PTSD than most drill sample flips is that it isn't just a section of Beyonce's Sweet Dreams that is interpolated, but rather the entire vocal track runs the length of the song, and HopOutBlick writes over, on top of it. It is minor literature, it needs the landscape of Philadelphia, the other rappers, and how that fits into regional rap in America of industrail cities in decline. There aren't really any crazy bars, or incredible wordplay, but what the track is is testimony - he tells you why he can't stop rapping ("I won't stop rapping, you the reason I keep trying"), there's a moment of vulnerability, an admission of being-towards-death, before the infliction of death returns: we hit a nigga with the flame, he went potty. In the gallery, the girl, C, brings up the Dana Schutz Emmett Till painting, which emerged in two conversations I had yesterday. First I was talking about the sort of totalizing whiteness that exists in soundcloud rap as the moment at which innovation dies. What Nettspend is to Xaviersobased type music, what Lil Shine is to pluggnb, what Matt Ox is to tread, and the fetishization of this type of white artistry. T brought up Bill Evans in relation to Duke Ellington, and how he feels that all 21st century American Art is about Black Death, and that's what the Dana Schutz painting is about.

I brought this up with N and Z while we talked and AI transcribed the words without separation of who said what but the conversation last night was largely directed towards me, the recent images I made, my process in making images, and the Cixous quotes I sent into the chat. I said a lot of words and we talked past 4am and as the night wore on I noticed my pace of speech slowing along with my mind, and in this process I think a new version of honestly emerged. Not so much in the sense of telling lies vs. the truth, but a relaxation of how I approach probing questions into my practice, given my comfort with who's asking them, and also being forced to be more instinctual with my responses, which leads into series of rambles that I spread out in so many different directions. And as this tiredness grew, I suppose I was forced to pick between branches for the sake of time and energy, there were things I wanted to write in here after, but after sleep and this day of gazing I'm struggling to come back to precisely what they were. Z started the conversation with a quote about Romanticism and I wished I engaged with it more, but it was the type of thing where you're trying to assign words to impulses. There remains an autobiographical element to the images made, but I suppose it's less immediately discursive, or rather the discourse occurring isn't happening through text-based language (Twombly's Nine ~Discourses~ on Commodus comes to mind as I type this).

"if this new type of book illustration was so apt and definitive an expression of romanticism it was not only because the close association of text and image satisfy the desire to unite different forms of art the vignette by its general appearance presents itself both as a global metaphor for the world and as a fragment dense at its center tenuous on the periphery it seems to disappear into the page this makes it a naive powerful metaphor of the infinite a symbol of the universe at the same time the vignette is fragmentary sometimes even minute in scale incomplete mostly dependent upon the text for its meaning with the regular and ill-defined edges not unlike Schlegel's hedgehog it is the perfect romantic formula" is how the AI transcribed Z reading the quote from "Charles Rosen and Henry Zerner's romanticism and realism" and it's quite a different thing to engage with a quote while hearing it read, as the sound of the words disappears vs. engaging with it in written form. I've thought about how I haven't felt any urge to inscribe text onto these images, I talked about that with them after the series of so many collages with text on them from the last two years and this desire to reach a form of speech through emptiness / absence. I talked a lot, I said so many words, I need to go back through the transcription to locate things I said and figure out what points to continue to probe, to question deeper. There were good bits, about the role Joyce plays for me, about langauge and reality, about the studio process, where the event of art is, how it is recorded, inscribed, transmuted from form to form. N said I'm able to speak fluidly about my practice which is true, I do it often I suppose, I've talked about it with multiple people this week already, and I've talked to other people, not about art, but I'm more conscious of how I appear to others, how I present, following this latest isolation stint. There's a self-posession I've grasped hold of again, it feels good to have, I think it comes and goes but I'm back in Go Mode, I've been Go-ing, on many different levels, and it's a different sort of mental state than when I'm in my own universe and withdrawn.

I went back to the Courtald, mainly to look at this Tiepolo sketch of The Immaculate Conception that hypnotized me when I saw it last year. I sat with it again for about 30 minutes, thinking about seeing the "real" one at El Prado about a month ago, and there was a very strong line of questioning that it provoked about which I preferred, and it was this sketch, much smaller, rougher on the edges, but I liked that it was smaller, I could've lifted it off the walls and carried it out with me, and both works have been displaced from their original sites, or rather The Immaculate Conception has been displaced from its site whereas a sketch has no site, it was a byproduct of the workshop process that later became viewed as art as people desired to own art of various types. Much of the Rubens in the Courtauld are sketches, his sketches were very free, very different than the final works, and some Count collected them, and how they're there to be seen. They keep a sketch of The Conversion of St. Paul next to the actual painting, it's a very interesting thing to see side-by-side, the stage of the process, and the final version. There's the matter of conservation and restoration with all of these works, which I really don't know too much about, and I think about it in the same way I think about translation, there's a mediation of the work from a time and place occurring. Besides these three works, and the two other Tiepolo sketches on the sides of the Immaculate Conception sketch, I spent some time with this Cecily Brown installed above the staircase. Otherwise, I walked past many works, giving them glances - Degas dancers, Cezanne landscapes, Modigliani Nude, there is only so much space to look and to think.