Get Weird Or Go Home

Nicole de Ayora and Carina Johnson have put together this fine edition of Get Weird Or Go Home! A piece I wrote entitled "This Was Meant To Be The Summer Of Our Contrition" will be featured in the zine. For five dollars a copy, there's no reason you shouldn't get at them!

Email getweirdorgohome@gmail.com for a copy.

Miguel Covarrubias' Missing Mural

This article was written for the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco blog about a recent acquisition.

You never know what you have until it’s gone. This axiom rings true for even some of the most impressive art works. Although making impacts in many aspects of art and culture, Mexican “Renaissance man” José Miguel Covarrubias—while celebrated widely in his own country—remains virtually unknown to the general American public. Perhaps because of this failure, on the part of American officials, to recognize Covarrubias as one of the great artists of Mexico, one of his anthropological murals has been missing for almost fifty years.

Covarrubias began his career in New York City speaking very little English, but soon his caricatures and paintings were frequently featured in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker magazines. He designed costumes for various theatrical shows including La Revue Negre starring Josephine Baker. Then, having made a name for himself in the art world and in celebrity circles alike, Covarrubias returned to his home country and settled down on the edge of Mexico City. His home came to be known as a nest for intellectuals, celebrities, artists and business magnates including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Amelia Earhart, Georgia O’Keefe and Nelson Rockefeller. Covarrubias also found time to cultivate his passion for the culture of the Olmecs, a pre-Columbian people living in south-central Mexico. He even developed theories about their culture that preceded professional archaeologists’ discoveries.

Having gained a significant place in the art world, Covarrubias was asked to produce six large murals for the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island—meant to celebrate the completion of the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge—depicting natural history, art history, culture, economy and means of transportation. Each mural would serve as a kind of introduction piece highlighting each concept of the fair’s “Pacific” theme. After the close of the fair, the murals were packed up and shipped to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. However, when it was decided that the murals would occupy the newly built Ferry Building eighteen years later, one of the six maps was reported missing upon their return to San Francisco.

Since the reported loss of the mural, the five remaining murals have similarly received little to no attention. Covarrubias-enthusiasts have accused the Bay Area public and San Francisco officials of neglecting and showing a general apathy for the murals. In 2001, for instance, the, by then, grimy murals were removed from the Ferry Building and put into storage. Part of the problem is the sheer size of the murals. Art critics have raised the theory that perhaps a board of nonprofit citizens furtively disposed of the sixth mural merely because the Ferry Building could only house five; but it has generally been thought unlikely that anyone would so carelessly throw away a work of art that has been appraised as worth over $1 million.

Fortunately, the murals have been restored in Mexico City under supervision of conservators of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The de Young has recently acquired one of the murals, entitled “The Fauna and Flora of the Pacific,” which currently hangs in the Art of the Americas gallery. The mural’s huge size only gives a taste of what the complete set must have looked like all together, yet the whereabouts of the missing sixth to this day remains a mystery.

Excerpt from "Net Art and the Agency of Things"

This is an excerpt from a paper entitled “Net Art and the Agency of Things.” It was written for a class at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. I presented the paper in April at the 2011 Critical Themes In Media Studies conference at the New School. Feel free to contact me if you would like to read the whole paper.


When we approach the face of the desktop [of a computer], as Shulgin has labeled it, the shifting perspectives wrap us up in cyberspace. As we traverse the internet, we move around a space constructed for our engagement, and this space mediates all that we come into contact with, just as the wood and color of [an] icon mediate the spiritual experience of engaging with the icon. As Slavoj Žižek explains, these mediations occur while inevitably eluding our consciousness: “I ‘browse,’ I err around in this infinite space… while the whole of it—this immense circuitry of ‘murmurs’—remains forever beyond the scope of my comprehension.” Jordan Tate’s work New Work #30 brings this mediation to the forefront. The piece refers to the internet directly, but does not rely on the characteristics of the internet as do the other works we have looked at so far, but rather the process that happens once we incorporate the oscillation of perspectives into our interactivity. Tate uses the Graphics Interchange Format (gif) to create a repeating animation of a Mac desktop with a Safari browser window continuously loading what looks like an image of a sunset. The picture never fully loads; as soon as the blue sky starts to show the pink hue of the sunset, it restarts. The frustration at never being fully aware at what we are looking frames the time we spend in front of our computer. And yet, the image that never loads is only the centerpiece of the art work—we must remind ourselves at a certain point that there are other windows presented to us. Because of the ordinariness of the Safari browser, and behind that, the Mac desktop, we initially forget that it is not our own desktop and browser, but the desktop and browser of the art work. We could remind ourselves of this if we tried to click the close button on the browser, as though a “Do Not Touch” force field surrounds the piece as it would in a museum, stopping us from engaging with the operating system as we normally do. Instead, Tate’s work reminds us that the iconography of the computer constantly mediate our experience of clicking around cyberspace. It dislodges the image from the frame of the browser, and finally, forces us to visually step back from the piece: the GIF is of course framed by our own browser, which is in turn framed by our own desktop, and finally, the final frame of our computer.

A similar engagement of the viewer appears on the first page of a version of the Book of Hours by the Master of Mary of Burgundy. The Book of Hours was a popular illuminated manuscript in the Middle Ages, constructing a daily schedule of devotion consisting of prayers, psalms, texts framed by religious icons and décor. The medieval viewer would have seen the first page in a similar way: his eyes would jump immediately to the central image which shows the Christ Child on the lap of Mother Mary in a Gothic church setting. Various figures kneel at her side, led by a female figure, possibly Mary of Burgundy herself, who genuflects toward the divine couple. The viewer would have recognized this image as one that deserves our own admiration and devotion—of course, this is in a Book of Hours, so this is its designated purpose. And yet, like the sunset image that never fully loads, Mary and Christ are locked into a position of always expecting admiration and devotion. They are never fully “loaded” because their deserving of our attention is unending.

The Master of Mary of Burgundy makes a surprising move by framing this scene within another: the church setting is merely a window through which Mary of Burgundy, sitting at her desk with an opened Book of Hours, looks out upon. Or rather, she does not look out the window, but at the manuscript in front of her. In fact, we are led to believe that these two acts of looking are one in the same. Reading the manuscript, she imagines the scene upon which her window looks: in effect, constructing a daily routine according to the Book of Hours is just as good as paying homage to the Virgin and Christ as though they were there in front of us. And of course the Book of Hours in the miniature refers to the Book of Hours in our hands. As the first image that greets us as we open the book, this one serves as a kind of users-manual about how to treat the following images and texts: we are to allow them to help us construct a virtual world, which we should see ourselves entering. Because these manuscripts exist at a time when they were rare and new, tricks like the one used by this artist would have been important in educating an audience not used to juxtaposing the act of reading flat words to the act of seeing three-dimensional images. Just as Tate’s work takes us out of the virtual world in which we have engrossed ourselves in, the Master of Mary of Burgundy leads us in.

The Spire, The Spike

On a clear day, the spire of the Empire State Building casts a dull sheen against the crisp blue sky. It calls attention to itself, asks that it be considered over and over again as views are offered and just as quickly withdrawn. The metallic feature reminds me, on a day like this, of something from the cold-war: like a massive vestige of an era that has for the most part been effaced from this city. It could be the handle of a Jedi light saber. Its elements are many and their uses uncertain, as though the signals it transmits are frequencies from the distant past, nothing tangible to the many human consciousnesses that see it every day.

Suddenly, examining the spire from West 20th, I see a white speck of a plane passing behind it, much farther in the distance. Like looking over a massive cliff and seeing thousands of feet below a river, I am momentarily overwhelmed by the space between me, the spire, and the plane. I want to throw myself into this space, and yet I am aware that there is no space there to jump into, no abyss to speak of. Although we can perceive space in three-dimensions, something like the distance between the subject and the top of a skyscraper must inevitably be projected upon the world from the mind. It is impossible to fully comprehend whatever fills the space, and a mind that attempts to grab distances and quantities such as this is overwhelmed and perhaps seeks a quick end to its functions, then, shedding the responsibilities of such a

Hand in hand, we scattered our leftovers all over the city

Pieces of places we had been together

Noodles and Chicago style pizza

And slowly, shedding bits of our past

Settled down into the city

As dust settles down after a catastrophe

Willful and silent, the occasional honk of a car

That says something, something indefinite

Heat Waves, Tidal Waves

Stepping outside after a fresh rain, I am taken back to numerous occasions in other towns where I have done the same. I recall playing video games during the fall in Davis while it rained, smelling the wet pavement and the damp trees in the cluster of dormitories we lived in, feeling that still new, fresh feeling of living on my own, of sharing a room with a someone. I recall taking the bus in Bordeaux down the boulevards to the tram stop which I would take to Pessac to school; walking across the deteriorated campus; the reflection between the cobblestones. I recall similar mornings on the way to the train station in Nancy. All those places seem so far off and unreachable that I currently doubt I will now ever go back. What’s the use of letting the rain send me into a nostalgic state when I am in such a beautiful neighborhood myself. I am sure, somewhere down the line, be it in France or California, I will recall a similar morning when I stepped outside after a fresh rain, smelled something like celery, wet bark and pavement and walked to the coffeeshop down the street. The walk has become, by now, iconic. There are usually people on the corner where I turn on Cumberland, by the two adjacent bodegas. I walk past the French Quarter styled building with its white columns and never-used porch, past the brownstones. I look down Lafayette to see a wave of cars behind the stoplight one block away, and as I scurry across the street, they are just behind me as I step onto the curb. Then the park comes into view. On a day like today, it is empty, or, maybe a few joggers brave the chance of a second morning’s rain. During hot days, the bespectacled bald man—who occasionally is seen talking Spanish to neighborhood friends, but usually sits there silently—sits shirtless on his stoop. His pug dog, leashed, yet sleeping sits on the lowest step. But today it’s too early and not warm enough. Is all this good enough not to take my mind off the prospect of far off countries? Why can I never enjoy the neighborhood I am living in as I can enjoy the ones I once lived in?

It makes me wonder whether I need to move to France again. For what though? I could see myself studying there again. It would have to be some southerly township, if not Paris. Do I need to burrow into foreign cities, further repel myself from the familiarity of California and that which I’ve developed here? It’s as though my mind is propelled toward a foreign country during times of hardship, like the farther I am from the source of my sadness, the less apparent it will become. 3,000 miles is still not enough.

In the mornings I tend to wake up listless. I imagine when school starts, I will feel better about the mornings as I was when I first moved here. I need projects first and foremost, then I will start cleaning more thoroughly, maintain an orderly desk and kitchen. I will probably start waking up earlier when school starts. But as of late, these mornings I wake up with little reason to do so. Why not keep sleeping in, I think? Job applications will be there when I wake up. But I’m no longer tired. I had been dreaming of Oliver (the cat) and perhaps pigeons—I remembered this just before stepping out as I spied a white pigeon from my window: I decided to take this as a sign of luck, or of good things to come. I live closely with the pigeons, for they commune on the roof outside of my window, and in the early morning, I can hear them through gauzy dreams and they enter my consciousness without my seeing them.

The cicadas: I have been aware of them ever since seeing the Japanese play at the Lincoln center with mom. To set a scene, the first sound heard is cicadas, but then they quickly fade away. The implication is that it is a summer month, and that it is hot. I was fascinated with something I hadn’t thought of before: that a sound indicates a temperature. What’s more, you literally felt the heat hearing the hum of those insects. Well, every now and then a cicada can be heard from my window, or on my walks down to the coffeeshop, and I will think similarly of all the hot climates I have been to in addition to this one, not to mention the heat waves.

A Shea Away

All I know is certain things will happen and certain things will come of it. Certain memories will fade, never materialize, others will pop up much later. And this is what the summer consists of. The summer consists of the constant drone of the air conditioning. Truly, I’ve forgotten what silence is. Silence now is the hum and buzzes of the air conditioning unit. If it’s not cooling it’s fanning, and if it’s not on and the window is open, consequently all I can hear is the larger air conditioning unit outside the window to the building next to mine. The summer consists of the buzz of the humidity, white clouds making developments into the air within the patch of sky I can see from my room, beset upon a varied sky the color blue. Blue is a color which is constantly in flux. There are various blues, but at its root they all are blue, the blue of the skies above. And today the blue is the absence of blue, there is no such thing as the opposite of blue there is just the absence of blue. Today the clouds are heavy and enceinte with some foreboding materials. They carry the blue of the rains that empty into the streets, where the blue of the self is reflected into the heavy puddle, especially the one just outside the church where a three-dimensional triangular slope in the sidewalk collects enough rain so quickly that as soon as it rains people are having to step around the sidewalk, sometimes are even briefly forced into the street so as to not completely submerge their shoes in the rainwater.

Upon my tongue I taste the hamburgers of the summer. The people feed off it, are fed on it, and enough burgers and you can put together some semblance of what a summer is supposed to taste like. Last night we journeyed far into Queens, farther than I have ever gone before, where the subway no longer is sub, but becomes within one fell, sweeping motion, a superway. On either side the city and the graffiti that decorates it. Below the superway deals are being made, rhymes are shouted, cadences observed quickly and then shifted from two-fourths to fifteen-sixteenths quickly like that back and forth between standard tempos and exotic tempos that you only hear in Middle Eastern or gypsy tunes. In the superway, here too glances are exchanged, and conversations follow a certain tempo, and words spoken upon quarter, eight and sixteenth notes. There is the beat of the track that is felt through the pulse which echoes through the bars where you put your hand, among other hands and the backs of people lying against them. Looking at the people I was conversing with who were sitting before me, something else was going through my head: the feeling of the very few strands of black hair of the girl standing next to me, looking out the window forlornly (she seemed so severe and unhappy that I was sure she was European), and occasionally her green long-sleeved shirt and imagined briefly the effect of those same slight exchanges of touch laying in bed with her on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Temporarily looking up from the faces of the people I was talking to, I saw her reflection in the scuffed chrome of the frame of the window and wanted to know if my hand touching her back now and then affected her in a way too, I sought some minor confirmation in a glance exchanged in the scuffed up chrome, although the metal was almost too dull to allow me any access to her blue eyes. I could never be sure if we made eye contact, but I could tell that her eyes were blue.

The superway gates opened up and we briefly walked in step but soon we were swallowed by the crowd. We were led through a series of backways and tunnels and elevators, having to produce a ticket now and then to be sure we were allowed access to these secret passages. The Shea stadium seemed smaller than most stadiums, but then it’s difficult to tell when you are led almost blindfolded through its intestines. It seemed fit that in a subterranean tunnel within the belly of the Shea we were given a brief history of the Mets institution, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the newly minted stadium. A man wearing a beige suit the color of peanut-butter taffy, a light blue shirt, and thick-rimmed prescription Ray Bans assured us that this was not only a baseball diamond, but, he was proud to say, a place where guys came to pick up girls and girls came to pick up guys on a Friday night, which made me think two things to myself: could guys pick up guys, and secondly, where could I pick up these girls? Finally we were led to our skybox suite, just behind homeplate, probably the best seat in the house as far as I could tell. There was food of all sorts and all kinds of drinks. As we went on a more thorough tour of the stadium while the game progressed slowly, we were offered various perspectives of the field. The green of the field called out to the eyes every time it popped up, whether from behind left field or on the screen of the thousands of TVs throughout the building. And then there I could see the hamburgers that made up the summer, the way the people at the Friday night baseball game carried them proudly to their seats. The food which churned a nation, gave it happiness and a feeling of success. I saw a girl lead her boyfriend to their seats and both their hands were filled with food, pretzels, drinks, a Mets-colored item of paraphernalia. And I saw on their faces the same glib sense of accomplishment that a cat wears as he carries a dead gopher that hangs limply from his mouth. It was the same dead thing that lingered in my mouth the next morning, today, when I woke up underneath the nonblue summer sky rainclouds.

June 4, 2009

A violent sky drifting over a white moon that seems to have some dominant power despite it’s diminutive status lately. As though I’ve never seen the moon to begin with. The weather must be privy to its own mythologies, but not to our own: the horror movies associated, for instance, with the windy evenings, the balmy nights, the cloudy and clear dark skies—to the sky they mean nothing, but somehow they mean something to us. Half my vision is orange, just below the powerlines of the buses, and above, just above the man leaning ominously against the wall there is a purplish blue a bluish black that permeates all other thought.

Sous La Plage, Le Mort

The beach is a kind of gloomy graveyard for various flora and fauna. On the beach hundreds of thousands of horseshell carapaces come to rest, unburied, empty, rotting. Seaweed washes up on the shore, sagging jellyfish carcasses. There is hardly any room to step. And as we sit there, the gentle waves caressing the shore, I look down the beach and see this massive graveyard which seems to extend forever. How fascinating that we can ignore such a clash between the idyllic and death sitting silently, contentedly, reading our books and sunbathing.

I wanted to write a short story out here. I would ease a complicated plot into the setting that I am in. It would be easy, and if I ever ran out of things to say about the setting, I would just have to go on a walk to get some ideas. So, when I came here, I attempted to cast a writer’s eye about me. I explained in my head what I was seeing. I searched for words for the stillness of the land, for the death that lingers on the shore. On the first few days I noticed a theme: how one’s body is not one’s own when ravaged by flies and heat, unnerved by the animals that brush up against a leg or foot standing in the murky ocean. Rather than think of a murder mystery or an investigation of the nature of time (I told Afro that during a walk along the beach, Xha-xhi and I were catapulted back to 1915, we saw the houses disappear, but as soon as we turned around, we were back in the present time) I started thinking of her and Sihanoukville. I thought about writing about that, but it was nothing in particular that captured me. Finally, this morning I woke up with some lyrics in my head and thought I’d start with that. Before writing, it all seemed to envelop me, and as soon as I begun the task, it didn’t necessarily disappear, but rather revealed itself to be folly. When set to stone, it seemed to crumple.

Two Mistresses Meet

"Not long before the delivery of [Guernica] [his mistress] Marie-Thérèse walked into the studio to find Picasso up on his ladder and [another mistress] Dora at his feet. For Picasso, it remained 'one of his choicest memories'...

"'I have a child by this man. It's my place to be here with him,' said Marie-Thérèse. 'You can leave right now.' Dor said, 'I have as much reason as you have to be here. I haven't borne him a child but I don't see what difference that makes.'

"Picasso refused to intervene, preferring to watch the two women fight it out.

"Finally, Marie-Thérèse turned to me and said, 'Make up your mind. Which one of us goes?' It was a hard decision to make. I liked them both, for different reasons: Marie-Thérèse because she was sweet and gentle and did whatever I wanted her to, and Dora because she was intelligent... I told them they'd have to fight it out themselves. So they began to wrestle."

-Guernica

Gijs van Hensbergen

The Parable of the Coryphaena Hippurus

A fish--a mahimahi--is swimming in the ocean one day, enjoying life, thinking to himself, "Life is good, the ocean is endless, and everyday my only obligations are to myself and my own well-being." Suddenly he spies two small anchovies shining brilliantly in the afternoon sunlight. They drift statically: two precious gifts offering themselves unto the mahimahi, who, at the moment, is so content with life and the ease with which he will be able to eat the anchovies that he can't help but think, "Lo! here god has proffered two veritable confirmations that indeed I am blessed. Life is wonderful." He swims up to the anchovies and swallows one of them whole, betraying an assuredness. In doing so, a sensation instantaneously spreads over his person , a sensation that can be summed up in a single word: "food." However, something stymies this feeling from blossoming fully, from completing its essence. The fish feels a hook pierce his mouth and burst through his lower lip and right cheek. The hook, already pulling the fish to his imminent doom, produces such a sharp pain that the fish contemplates: what began as an unassuming fulfillment of a desire proved to be avarice. As he wildly resists the hook, oscillating back and forth, he thinks to himself: "God damn it! Truly, this is the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life."

Meanwhile, the fisherman, or the doomsayer, feeling the tug on his fishing pole rejoices: "Then I am blessed after all!"

when you get a chance, so i have your number

your numb hands all in my face

full fronting forward steering, rear-view mirror

the sweat of leather, closer than a feather

or a fortnight of foreskins

within foresight of Appalachians

the bare ridge reveals a glimpse

and then at once

conceals

thought i knew air as sweet as this

thought i knew the sweet river bliss

but one who claims to know a man

knows not the design of his hand

the wrapping paper sentimentality

torn off to reveal the gift

the gift which is one-sided

which pierces the skin and spouts blood

i had no premonition of this moment

strange that i had none

and yet the unspeakable is spoken

the stagnant moment broken

a piece from the sky

got on your shirt by the bottom button

staining it forever, i thought

until i realized you never washed

never washed jeans

three years in and inside out

they wear the stories of your early adulthood

in third world sidewalk cafes

or the pepsi for which you didn't pay

let's look at the menu first

i dunt wanna get sucked in head-first

oh that place?

i heard they have forty dollars worth of it

and i had some yesterday

Letter to the Artist

Dear Marina,

In those first moments, like the rest, I admit to being unsure how to approach you. Where to glance first, how to take it in: there in the atrium there was not one way to do it. At first I reasoned that there was no point in looking at you, for there was you and there was the idea of the piece, which I could reflect on without looking at you. So I drank up the atmosphere and listened to the crowd, thinking about the borders of the piece and the technology that also made itself present. But I noticed that I was looking more at the cameras looking at you then I was looking at you myself. I realized that my first momentary reasoning betrayed the kind of shame at perceiving the artist so directly that perhaps you wished to conjure. Was I supposed to look at you looking at the other person, or the two of you together? Or the two of you looking at each other with the backdrop of the audience looking at the two of you? I knew that if I was to understand this piece, I would have to look at that which embarrassed me most: you.

It did not scare me to look at those who sat down opposite you, in fact, I could look at them for a very long time and not feel a thing. Finally I stood on the other side of the person you were staring at, as close as possible to you as I could get. You were still looking at the person opposite you, but behind him was me, as though, if you lifted your eyes just slightly, you would be able to see me. I feared momentarily—professional though I knew you were—that my presence would shock you out of your mission to stare at the person sitting in the other chair, as though my gaze carried so much weight (doesn’t it?) as to force you to notice it. The feeling was fear because: A. I didn’t want you to notice me since you were the artist and your presence carried a mythic proportion, kind of like the feeling someone feels in the presence of a celebrity; instead I wanted to remain anonymous, while still pushing toward the boundaries that my embarrassment constructed; and B. I feared that if my presence, as I assumed in an instant, was as compelling as to force you to stop staring at the person in front of you, then I shouldn’t be there, for if your job as artist was to stare at the person in the other chair, and you did look at me, then the spell would be broken, then I would have been the sole cause of the ruin of the piece. In a way, it was a bit like fearing that I would trip and tip over a Faberge egg, which would then fall to the ground and break.

All around me I could hear children shouting to their mothers, “Look mama! She blinked! Did you see?” And suddenly I realized how simple a piece as this broke down the boundaries of art, so that peoples’ conception of it, their immediate reactions were obvious. Some of them would wonder aloud what was going on: “Are they trying not to blink?” and they realized that their theories were disproved once they saw one or both of you blink. Others discussed which one was the artist in the piece: was it you or the person opposite you or both? A father of a family that passed through the atrium, without stopping to examine you, explained to his children with the kind of fatherly wisdom one seeks to wants his children to believe him to possess, “Look how still he is,” referring to the man sitting opposite you at the time. And this simple misunderstanding made me want to yell at the father, say, no, idiot! The one who deserves the attention is Marina! The simple misinterpretation hurt me personally because whereas normally, standing in front of art works, the artist isn’t present, here you were, and they were speaking of you ignorantly in the same room as you! And what’s more, I had been there with you for a long time by now, had started to wonder what kind of emotions, or lack thereof, were going through your head. I wanted to tell this father how he had passed down a lie to his children: the one who deserves the attention is not the man; it’s the woman in the blue robe. She is still, even stiller than him and she has been here all day and will be here all day for the next two months!

Others did not linger as I did in front of you, and they would shrug their shoulders, dismiss it as a “staring contest,” or say simply, “It’s art.” As though they were resigned to the fact that art encompassed all that they did not understand. As though there was nothing to be said of examining art and pinpointing what one didn’t understand about it, how it made one feel, perceiving what made one not want to stay too long looking at it. As though “art” had one meaning that could be summarized in a few sentences, and, lacking an education in the subject, one did not have access to those kinds of sentences.

Suddenly, hearing all these quick hypotheses, explanations, musings, I felt that I was protective of you. I wanted to present myself to the audience as a docent, to put on a red frock coat, something that would distinguish me as “Explainer,” “Interpreter,” “Educator,” one who had answers, not all of them, but at least some, that would shed some light on this troubling piece of art. It was suddenly important to me that they at least somewhat understand what was going on here. And that was when I realized that I was falling in love with you.

Maybe in the way that a brother looks over a younger sister, explains her nuances, interprets her idiosyncrasies to a public that would otherwise mock her because of them. And my position in all of this was woeful, yet necessary. For in an ideal world, I myself admit, the public would accept you with open arms and let yourself be the artist. But in this world, there is you: the artist, silent, acting your art without a means of speaking to the public (even though there you were in the same room as us); there is the public: who can understand or not understand your work in any way they choose; and there is the mediator: me, who knows at the very least histories, if not an acceptable method for examining the art work, explaining its purpose to the viewer, to the artist and within the context of everyday life. However, a mediator generally sees his duty necessary for reasons having to do with the general education of a public, whereas in this case, it was my burgeoning love for you that made me to want to explain.

Still, I kept quiet and fixed my eyes on you, your body, your flowing robes, watched as you bowed your head when one person decided she or he had had enough, and noticed how you stretched ever so slightly, perhaps still trying to hide something from the public: a discomfort, a fatigue. I wanted to understand this, as one perhaps wants to understand the puzzling forms in a Dali or Braque painting. This yearning for information in one way could be linked to the quest for knowledge that an art historian seeks—a problematic element of a painting through which one can enter into a discourse—but in another way, now that it had to do with you and your body, it suddenly linked itself to the kind of knowledge I yearn for when I admire a girl in class. In my younger days, for instance, graduating from a boys-only high school and moving on to a college with girls, I would spend quiet moments in class when I had drifted from the lectures thinking about the girls with their backs to me. I would see the outline their bras made and marvel at how their undergarments were so present that I could see them and think about them, and I would wonder what these girls’ histories were, what their parents were like, what worried them when they woke up late at night, what strange figments pierced their dreams.

For the long periods of time that you would stare at the person opposite you, there were blinks, there was a tilted head and there were your hands folded neatly in your lap. But in those moments that the person had had enough and left, when you bowed your head as though genuflecting, these were the moments that my interest was piqued because now finally I could see some strands of an emotion, something that might be akin to fatigue, or stress. Certainly, you had done such a fine job so far of maintaining your disposition for about a month now, and you were testing the limits of the body: the limits to stay still, to look without displaying emotion, the limits to control hunger and restlessness and bodily functions. But if there was some place where I was to enter a discourse with myself about how you were a real person and not just an art object, then it was these moments when you shifted slightly in your seat and it made me wonder what else required shifting, what else wanted to stretch a little? How did you start your mornings then? With a cup of coffee? But the caffeine would certainly wane and make you tired not far into the morning, still with hours to go. Also, the coffee would make you want to pee maybe a few hours later.

In fact, was there anything that you ingested in the morning? Were there any routines at all? Or did you keep your preparation as devoid as the performance that followed? That seemed to me the best method of all, at least for me. When, after I left the museum a few hours later, sitting in a café reading a book before me, I remarked my posture in the wooden seat. I straightened up and glanced down at the book and thought how soon I would certainly, without noticing it at first, slouch, and eventually I might be almost slumped over the book. Then I thought of you and how in the same way that a painting stays with a spectator hours, days, years after one has seen it, you were there in my thoughts. At the same time that you were still sitting straight—no, slightly, almost imperceptibly to the right, with a head tilted just a bit like a shaman’s—I was here miles away rereperforming, imitating, copying, reinterpreting, reassessing, reembodying your plight as an endurance artist. The few minutes that it would take me to, without noticing at first, slouch, let my mind wander, glance around me, sniff, feel restless, want to leave, abandon my work, shift my legs, listen, scratch myself made me realize how much of an artist you were.

And in this I perceived my, dare I say, “contempt” for the others that sat across from you, because, respectful though they were, none were going through what you were going through. Of course, I understood and appreciated the boundaries that had been broken down by allowing the audience to participate in the art work, but still I felt, as a jealous ex-lover might, that none were worthy of your gaze, of sharing the act with you. Here was a piece that seemed to cast aside so mockingly any presumptuous spectator’s claim who dared say about a modern work of art, “I could do that!” Perhaps by seeking to breakdown the delineations between artist and viewer, you have done the reverse (or did you do this on purpose?). Art is viewed in passing, on the way to work, in newspapers and magazines, on the walls of peoples’ homes, in museums, and there is an idea of spectator and art, but here you were displaying it in a full, vibrant light: in one chair is the artist, who has been sitting there for hours without budging, and in the other chair is the spectator, who is welcome to share the act with the artist, but only for so long, as long as his or her body can withstand. Certainly, it won’t be as long as the artist, has not been yet, and will not be, for in the end she is the artist and you are merely spectator!

And sitting in the café, miles away from you, where you were not present, you still were, because, as one learns to fully love a significant other only when she has gone missing, I learned of your stature, the power of your presence, while there with you in the room you looked sad, submissive, tired. Away from you, when you were not present, you took on this mightiness that I had not fully perceived in the museum. Suddenly I wanted to share this with you—for a second I thought of going every day to the museum from opening to close, and if I did not fix my gaze on you all this time, at least I would be there with you, experiencing your experience and allowing myself to love it, attentively, acceptingly, calmly, like a good lover would do, even if you did not notice. In fact, your ignorance of my presence would strengthen my resolve to be there with you, to share your duress! In the same way that a secret admirer lavishes anonymous attention on the cause of his desire, I would be there all day! But then I reflected my momentary disdain for the “spectator” upon myself. What made me think that I was, conversely, worthy of your love? For I, too, was spectator.

If all this makes me sound like a bumbling fifth grader proclaiming my love for a girl, perhaps in some way it is akin to that. Seeing you, there, in the museum, I suddenly recalled the vague, inchoate love I felt as a young boy for the girl squirrel in the animation The Sorcerer’s Stone, whose desires are eventually unrequited once she realizes that her dreamboat squirrel is actually young King Arthur. I pitied her and empathized with her woes, cast aside by the main narrative, she drew me into the movie and made me want to explore its characters more fully than it allowed. I felt a love for her that was all the more real because, in the end, like her love, I knew it could never be acted upon. In the same way, seeing you, separated from me by only bounds of tape, my love grew, turned from a boyish love to protectiveness to jealousy to agape to erotic and back to boyish love. This was all so new to me, this art.

Yours,
Alex

The Night Mrs. Washington Died

The night Mrs. Washington died I had two end-of-the-year parties to go to. There was an appointment with my favorite professor of the semester, then, I thought, maybe I'd wander the village looking for something to eat. Then, maybe I'd go to the first party by myself, strike up a conversation with the first person who looked at me, or maybe munch on some humus and pita bread awkwardly in the corner, careful to wear a smile so as to not appear aloof, or rather pleased with my aloofness. These are the bodily expressions I have adopted since moving to New York City.

Mrs. Washington wasn't married, but perhaps by the sheer nature of her aura she gained the honorific. Perhaps no one knew what else to call her. "Ms." seemed inappropriate for a woman her age--what was she: 80 or 90? No one called her Betty. Betty Washington. Betty: a name from the middle of the previous century. A name that knew black and white television sets and civil rights movements. If you met a Betty today you would think, oh, that's quaint, your parents are nostalgic. Something like Edith or Peggy. When I got to the village I received a message from Arthur. "Could you, uh, knock on Mrs. Washington's door," he said in a somber tone, "I think she's dead."

It was a clear but windy day, and when I called Arthur back to tell him I wouldn't be back at the apartment until late that night, I had to duck into a doorway to protect the phone from the noise of the errant gusts. How does he know she's dead? If I was home, what would I do? Break down the door? Would I have been the first to see her dead body? How does a person who lives alone die? Does an old lady who rarely leaves her house, who's television can be heard at all times of the day die sitting on a couch, or does she collapse on the way to the sink to get a glass of water? Is it a slow process, does she know she's going to die, and sit on the sofa, listening to CNN ("She's a CNN junkie," Stephen told me once), awaiting the final breaths? Or is sudden, like she didn't know what hit her?

Each breath comes in pairs, except for the last and the first. In this way, the first inhale of a newborn pushed freshly from the womb is finally completed upon the last exhale of a dying body. At least, one assumes. The somber mood of the possible death of my next door neighbor put me in no mood to go to the first party. What good making conversation with people I didn't know when death was at hand? Not just death, but the smells of a corpse finding their way through the floorboards and under the cracks of doors. It was the night Mrs. Washington died, but since she was alone, it's quite possible she died a few days ago, maybe even a week ago. Someone reported strange smells.

When asked if I had smelled it, I said that I did smell something. However, this building is so often filled with smells. Even my own apartment greets me with a new smell every time I enter it, as though it's not my own. From the entrance of the building to my doorway, on the staircase, especially, smells are constantly shifting. The first level of the building is a restaurant, and depending on what they are cooking that day, the smells will change. Sometimes I smell a combination of old banana peels and the way the last sip of a glass of lager beer smells. Once I was sure that they were cooking salmon all day. Sometimes I smell damp wood planks. Other times it just smells like garbage. Sara said it smelled like a European apartment--that made me smile. To be honest, I don't know what a putrid corpse smells like, and I don't know if I'd know it if I did smell it. I smelled something when I got home that night, but I wasn't sure if I was smelling what I thought I smelled.

I didn't know Mrs. Washington well. The first time I met her, I ran into her at the doorway of the apartment. I always made a point of telling her to have a nice day, and from her voice she seemed to respect that. It made me feel good, but in a way it was probably empty. Stephen always was very generous to her. Sometimes I could hear him talking to her in the hallway. He would get her groceries when we went out shopping. Once, I helped her bring her cart of groceries up the stairs. Another time I found her struggling on the staircase and I didn't know what to do. She was out of breath, and she hadn't even left the building yet. Should I lift her? Carry her downstairs? What good would that do. I didn't bother that time to tell her to have a nice day. It would seem like a mockery in that situation. I asked her if she needed help and she said no.

I didn't go to the first end-of-the-year party, but I went to the second one. I had to wander the village for an hour before I felt comfortable showing up. I talked to people I didn't know well, about our projects, about school, about professors that we had academic crushes on. Most of it was meaningless. I didn't say anything about Mrs. Washington, and thinking back on that night, I had forgotten that she may be dead. It's funny how something that I know to be grave--namely, a corpse in the room next to mine--seems to slip my mind in the time of socializing. I almost want to rebuke myself for forgetting that she was dead, but maybe the mind purposefully let's go of a thought, depending on a situation, maybe it was best that I had forgotten about her, at least just for the moment. This wasn't the time to think of deaths; rather, it was the time of thinking of a different valence of an ending.

Arthur was there when I got home, coming down the staircase. I knew that Mrs. Washington was dead. He said they were removing the body. It was still in the room. The cops were there, otherwise, Arthur said, he would have taken down a whole army of joints, because he was loaded.

A Sidewalk Story

I was on my bike somewhere in a residential part of Lower East Side and in the middle of the street was a fire engine and two ambulances. There were people standing around on the sidewalks watching the rescue workers do their business. One man was being hoisted on to a stretcher. I couldn't tell what had happened, but it looked as though he had a black eye. On the sidewalk someone was taking photographs with a telescopic lens. I thought to myself that that was rude, that someone was taking photos of this man at his lowest point. Where were the photographers when he was, you know, conscious? Perhaps it was a celebrity. Or, would someone take photographs of me when I was passed out in a stretcher?

To get around the commotion, I had to take my bike on to the sidewalk. There were people there, so I couldn't pedal, but I took one leg out of the strap and pushed my way slowly along so as to not hit bystanders. I weaved through people and suddenly ran into one old staunch lady in a blue t-shirt walking her dog. "Get out of the street, damn you!" she yelled at me. The interaction was quick. I raised my hand, gesturing toward the fire engine, "What am I supposed to do?" I said. I went past her and deeply pondered the moment.

I realized that at first, by her tone I assumed she was yelling at the photographer for taking photos of a man at his lowest. The interesting thing was that before I consciously took into account that she was yelling at me, my hand had already begun gesturing toward the fire engine. Essentially, my body took into account the old lady's intention before my mind could process the words.

I would have liked to say, "Chill the fuck out, old lady. There's a god damn fire engine in the road." I would have liked to say, "We're all human beings, old lady. We can share the sidewalk once in a while, can't we? For, if we can't share a sidewalk, what can we share? There are neighborhoods, apartment buildings, countries, a whole god damn world to share. One would like to assume that we have the right to do what we want, but in fact we have to take into account others' rights as much as we have to take into account our own. The idea of sharing a sidewalk seems inane, but in fact, it's practice for sharing the globe. Once in a while, you'll see something upsetting as a biker, and instinctively you'll think, 'Why the hell?' But take a step back, think about the idea of cohabitation, think about how you shouldn't kill others, even though it's really easy and might ensure your safety, you're actually taking precarious advantage of the fact that your life can just as easily be taken from you. In the same way, your place on the sidewalk is just as precarious as mine. I could just as easily yell at you go get off the sidewalk, damn you! Instead, let's agree to disagree. So, shut the fuck up."