33: Paris (Sophie), Gareth, Lani
and the undead

The jet lag gave a strange dreamlike quality to it.

I thought I beat it with a red eye and then slept 12 hours the following day waking up and thinking my clocks must have been off.

Contemporaneity?

One minute I was riding quickly backwards through a dark train tunnel reading Godard obituaries and the next I was in the Hotel Costes chatting with Sophie Calle and Chiara Mastroianni about her recent mole removal. Sophie chastised a young actor for saying Godard was an anti-semite. He was a genius she said, and just died, let's start there. 

Standing in the Jeu de Paume the next day I overheard the director and a photo curator from New York discussing Clement Cheroux leaving MoMA to take a job at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. He went on to say something about their being dedicated photo galleries, which I interpreted as his displeasure with the trend of folding image-making into everything. It felt like an interesting coincidence for me to arrive at just that moment and hear their conversation, as I had just applied for a job in the department he was formerly overseeing. I imagined, amusedly, my recent cover letter arriving to articulate and reinforce the epochal rift between Cheroux with his more modernist disciplinary preoccupations and the unfolding role of images in the throes of contemporary visual culture, transdisciplinary art practice, platform capitalism, surveillance, sensing, machine seeing and so on. More than anything, it was kind of wonderful to hear the discourse moving through the social body, arriving at my ocean’s door, in a room full of moving images related to Jean Painlevé. I wasn’t sure I heard correctly, but I also understood the director saying he had wanted to go to New York for the Tillmans opening but there was literally nothing else for him to see in New York and so it felt like too much. I think it was at this moment I laughed out loud and joined the conversation.   

The work of Painlevé is interesting to revisit from this moment, with its blend of committed, ecological, science-led art-making, culturally promiscuous and often filled with beauty. Without opening up a larger, socially-situated and economic critique of science, and its instrumentalisation, let's revel in his reverence for the (often staged and scored) natural world. Marine Huggonier had on view, upstairs, a collection of conceptual works and one, a Delacroix painting being restored publicly throughout the exhibition with an emphasis on the clouds, became the backdrop for a phone film of woman with an Agnes Varda Cleo 5-7 tote bag looking at the scene and a dumpster behind the Jeu de Paume where a magazine with Varda’s face seemed to be staring directly back at us.

Interlude

A few thoughts on collaborating with the dead: 

Gareth called me to offer tickets for a show he couldn’t attend. Opening night of a long run from a comedian called Stewart Lee. I had my phone charging behind the bar at a restaurant and so missed it, but when I called Gareth back we had a nice talk about a poem of his called Hold Everything Dear, that he wrote for John Berger and a few years later became the title of one of his books. I found it very beautiful, one of those moments where a life of meaning-making coalesces in a work of sublime beauty that exists almost outside of time. Perhaps bodhisattvas get touched with these on occasion.

Hold Everything Dear 
For John Berger

Gareth Evans

as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey 

as the rose buds a green room to breathe
and blossoms like the wind

as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent 
in the trucks 

as the leaves of the hedge store the light 
that the moment thought it had lost 

as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a wren turning in the air 

as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky 
and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark

hold everything dear

the calligraphy of birds across the morning 
the million hands of the axe, the soft hand of the earth 
one step ahead of time 
the broken teeth of tribes and their long place 

steppe-scattered and together 

clay’s small, surviving handle, near the ghost of a jug
carrying itself toward us through the soil

the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking 
the map of the palm held 
in a knot

but given as a torch

hold everything dear

the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them 

the justice of grass that unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching 
the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fill with days
as it sinks to become what it loves  

memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed 

the words 
the bread 

the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door 

the yearning to begin again together 
animals keen inside the parliament of the world 

the people in the room the people in the street the people 

hold everything dear 

Part of getting older, perhaps, is realizing the shimmering volume of unappreciated brilliance that flows through everything. You begin to feel a responsibility. Having a child also helps with this.

Steven says we have thrown charity from our knees. And gave me half his halloumi wrap after the De Sica screening at closeup, when I said I was hungry. He held my hand another like-evening as I was leaving. I felt warm in his warm curiosity, in the glow of Cecilia Vicuña’s rituals. And also cool and thoughtful.

After I missed the tickets and shared my appreciation for Hold Everything Dear, Gareth invited me to a reading on Brick Lane with a former invigilator at the British Museum who wrote a text about this period and was accompanied for a reading by Iain Sinclair. When Iain read, he dedicated his reading to Brian Cattling, and a Cattling wind blew through the room, almost knocking a Sinclair book off the shelf onto my lap. When I got home I picked up a book off the shelf that was edited by a scholar that was visiting Art & Ecology the following day and it featured a review of Cattling’s Stumbling Block, a fascinating work that feels related to this project. I include this here because I believe this kind of thing happens all the time.

Between the undead and the winds, thralls, intuitions, affinities, that shape our seasons. 

I saw Steven a few days later and shared that I lost focus during the rather performative reading and it was only when he stopped his reading, and started speaking about the time he spent as an invigilator that I became interested again. One thing in particular lodged in my mind. When he worked as a guard in the British museum, he spoke warmly with his colleagues every day and knew them and their families well. And when he became a middle class cultural worker, he lost this sense of warmth and familiality. A few days later though I found myself unconvinced with this simple class parable. I encountered this author a few weeks later where they had positioned themselves in the center of a stage in the old auditorium of the former ethical society surrounded by 50 of their small press books. I learned, and was unsurprised, that they were also a cage fighter. 

End of interlude.

I went to the pompidou because it was monday and most art institutions were closed. I had no big interest really in seeing Garoustes paintings. Walking through the streets slowly I was overcome with the quotidian moments of wonder in Paris—that more than any city I’ve ever been, knows how to appreciate its abundant beauty. It’s a city that lingers, and smiles, and loves to look at itself. Even with my meager french I feel I communicate more here, with eyes and physical humor. Gesturally and playfully. 

Outside of the pompidou was an improv dance group, reveling in courageous failure with moments of transcendent poetry. On Mondays I’m sometimes gripped with a deep existential anxiety and this group dancing in the plaza, inviting everyone to dance with them was balming. I laughed out loud when I overheard one of the group asking what day it was. This is a wish, to live in a world where people can feel so carefree on a monday. 

I move through the world with Sianne Ngai’s conception of the gimmick and see it everywhere in art and life. Garouste perhaps could be said to paint the libidinal undercurrents coursing through the gimmick. I once went to the Oakland Coliseum swap meet and saw an acquaintance called Lupe delivering a foreclosed storage unit to the market. As they unloaded the trucks, a small group began to sort through the contents, small containers filled with small disassembled mechanical devices and boxes and boxes of 90’s and aughts pornography. I slowly realized this was the abandoned storage unit of a magician pornographer—or so I thought of them. This magician pornographer has become all bound up in my mind with Ngai’s gimmick. As I wander through the cool white airy cubes of contemporary art I think to myself, there’s another gimmick and what a magician pornographer! I watched the tricks and pornography disappear into the market for a little while and then found a small unwanted box containing several decades of a freemasons journal called The New Age. I bought it from Lupe and scanned a few images thinking I might do an essay about it. 

In the pompidou bookstore I sat and read an issue of Artforum, almost cover to cover and thought it would be interesting to do a deconstructive, becoming-ergon of the parergonal discourse of evaluation style piece about it— maybe something conversational even with a friend or thoughtful interlocutor. There were several pieces about documenta, one by David Joselit that seemed to do a tonal 180 from beginning to end. It started with big reductive declarations and ended on a more modest note. There was an interview between HUO and what was described as an artist called PAK who made a fortune with NFT’s. The questions felt so incredibly ideological, acritical and mystifying, with an almost comical, translucent veneer of Glissant. An editor of a major art journal over lunch casually described him as the most corrupt person in the industry. HUO is such a fascinating character to me, this incredible articulation of emerging ideologies. He’s like our Warhol. And a master showman of the 24/7 marathon, experiential, spectacle-economy in an extraordinarily intelligent, slightly neuro-divergent, tech-enthusiast, capital-friendly, suisse-neutral register. The NFT phenomenon, in all its horror, is doubly interesting in its revealing approximation of art market dynamics as well as a case study of the way art is used to bolster the financialization of previously lesser-capitalized aspects of our shared lifeworld.

Back in California we watched the Amazon funded Lord of the Rings prequel franchise and I was partially seduced by the lushness of the CGI augmented new zealand production before eventually turning away from the boring and exhausting archetypal violent drama. Is an Amazon colosseum in your home and sugar-filled groceries and pharmaceuticals delivered to your door our epochs panem et circenses? I also realize that good sourdough and biennial-scale cultural offerings seems to be what I’m often most concerned with.

It strikes me that what we consider performance art, by and large, feels like the relentless pursuit of attention and self-spectacularization. I was reading an interview between Byung-Chul Han and Thomas Ostermeier, and they were lamenting the tone of contemporary theater saying that everyone was yelling as though they were angry with the audience. This is kind of how I feel in most performance art settings. Maybe less that they are angry, but more they are trying waay too hard, its like a cartoon register. Paris feels a bit like a circus on this trip. We went to an opening at 104 where they gave us tokens to stand in line for a coney island of unsatisfying art experiences. Between the last time I was there and now I’ve watched it really build up, with nice things to be sure, but the big open space where everyone gathers seems to be shrinking and becoming more organized and sanitized. We saw Pina Bausch’s kinetic Rite of Spring in what appeared to be a circus tent. I arrived early and finished the pocket edition of Byung-Chul Han’s Shanzhai text that colored my experience of this interpretation of Stravinsky. I had already mostly absorbed much of this text through its cultural reverberations but reveled retrospectively in its lucid precision. We saw an unsatisfying Magic Flute, Pippo Delbono’s Amore and piece on a boat moving down the canals. In each case it was an excess of affect that subtracted from the work for me. I wanted to turn everything down by half at least and my favorite moments were quiet, almost still, gestures of reprieve, I wish I could prolong.

I saw a work, on the recommendation of Sophie’s friend Eric, by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion at Lafayette Anticipations. It was two duets, Both Sitting and Rewriting, that elaborated a beautiful language-world of gesture and a retrospective and re-enlivening revisition of an old work, accompanied by casio keyboard. They are works of modest means, containing monumental depths, cosmological even, and the life-work of two brilliant artists who have grown together in the way only more-than-individuals can. I loved it so much. It overwhelmed me with its beauty, subtlety, intelligence and great humour. In my mind, throughout their performance, I awarded them the MacArthur, a Nobel, all the wreaths, leafs, circles, decorations and so on. 

I saw Fabian, one of my favorite photography curators at the Marche des enfants rouge, and we were very happy to see each other. I showed him a video of a performance from Jonathan and Matteo and he showed me a video of a group of geese that were trained by a premodern looking jester-like character that performed in a village 140km from Paris where he had moved. Fabian had bought a small boat and was fixing it up and now instead of pictures of people rowing he was collecting pictures of people fishing. I thought maybe some people collect images of the things they are missing and then stop when they begin living with them. Maybe he’ll start fishing now. Maybe that’s why I collect images of happy families. The geese were delightful en masse and so was Fabian’s obvious joy. His practice of collecting the most wonderful vernacular images, giving them a space for consideration and then letting them go is truly beautiful. I asked him before if it’s hard for him to give away the images he collects, and he replied no, simply, they help him see better. While I became deeply involved in going through his collection he put on some really over-the-top Wagnerian triumphalist music and stood at the door staring out with a fixed and somber expression that was soon betrayed by a bout of riotous laughter. He explained this came from the sight of two young men pushing prams together and recounted the moment as if to say you don’t need the pictures, it's all unfolding around you constantly. I bought some very beautiful images, ones that should be in museums or in the care of loving families. I showed them to Sophie and she was mostly unimpressed, though she did sit through the entirety—and I think mostly enjoyed—the second episode of How to with John Wilson.

I’ve been enjoying Stanley’s 10 part John Smith retrospective, portioned out over several months at the ICA and closeup. I think there are a lot of resonances between these artists. A thoughtful discomfort with the world and a clever, playful, observational humor. It's a very winning kind of creative and philosophical inquiry in my measure. My favorite works of John Smith’s are the short musical ones. 

John Wilson is really a fascinating case study of an artist influenced by experimental essay film and social media and has packaged it into something that can fit into HBO’s distribution model. It feels a bit too left field for popular culture and not serious and rarefied enough for commercial art. I love it though.

I took a short trip to visit Lani in Normandy. She hosted me graciously in her beautiful home and prepared a simple zen like sleeping quarters in a former house of pigs. She opened her library, towards my thesis on biennials, and shared meals and edifying stories. I wish I had recorded more of her voice.