Here is my recent article that can be read in its entirety at The Rumpus:

It’s not often that you look at a line forming in history while it’s happening. Usually it’s from some vantage in the future—here’s how life used to be and now things are different. But over the past year I’ve had this feeling that things are changing and we all actively sense the stakes on some different level, drawing lines in sand every morning as we wake up, only to revise them again before tucking ourselves into bed. Art helps gauge our shared place in the world, but the environment of art changes, everyone proclaims that a bad economy is great for art, that it thins the herd and reinvigorates the impulse. But there’s panic in these affirmations—what happens to the art that we are moving away from—the art that comes from the time just before?

Several months ago I viewed British artist Carey Young’s “Counter Offer” in Toronto, and felt friction between the present and what had just been. Here meaning had shifted from the time when the exhibition was commissioned and the following year when it was installed. On the whole Young’s work deals with issues of corporate culture and the artist’s place in it, but the spaces they were cast in no longer seemed to exist culturally. Filmed in the bland corporate spaces of Dubai and the interiors of corporate banking offices, often populated with bankers, lawyers, and motivational coaches, but the context had changed in our economic times, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what that may mean.

Young’s “Counter Offer,” on display at Toronto’s Power Plant, was a cautiously slick show, clever, clean, but all the posturing for an overlay of art and corporate structure seem a little beside the point in the current economy—like somebody forgot to blow the candles out on this birthday cake. We’re in a recession. Corporations are cutting fat or going bust, but Young’s pre-bust work is still two stepping at corporate jingoism or flat institutional critique. Remember when every band wanted to be a robot or at least sound like one? Well, it’s a great premise, but those bands—despite their best attempts—were still made of people, and that’s what made them interesting; it’s the friction between these two ideas that’s exciting, not the hollow assimilation of corporate speak into art. “Counter Offer” draws from Young’s work over the past decade: video, photography, text, and performance, all of which explores themes of corporate culture, but the show may ultimately be a victim of the current economic downturn and a corporate identity that has stepped out to lunch.

Perhaps this has more to do with the times we live in than the work itself, but this friction shows best in the details. In the video piece “I am a Revolutionary,” the artist is coached through her delivery of the line: “My name is Carey Young and I am a revolutionary.” Through much of this work Young casts herself as a gorilla in the mist of corporate nature, blending in or interacting with a world of beiges, power suits, casual Fridays, and the conceptual space of legalese. Here a corporate trainer in a dark suit offers bland guidance; slower, louder, again—reminds her that she is something, what is that? She is a revolutionary. But the emphasis seems always in the wrong place—first on I, then am. He coaxes her through the syllables of rev-ol-lu-tion-ar-y. There’s something lovely about this word, implying somebody whose vocation is to be in a state of revolt, the way the v thrusts, but out of place in this wasteland of corporate culture-—it’s hollow. One doesn’t have to be revolutionary, just deliver the words convincingly. Behind them a glass wall opens onto offices across the way, but it’s not Young’s stagy corporate life but the details behind her corporate rehearsals that draw us in; here a man sits at a desk doing data entry, while nearby someone gathers files into a case then exits. Where does the artist or individual fit into these oversized corporate spaces—or is this the specter that haunts Young’s work in our current economy?

Across the gallery in a smallish nook was the installation “The Representative” consisting of a white chair, lamp and end table featuring a red phone and framed photos of a man and woman. The setup is simple: pick up the courtesy phone and interact with one of the call center agents pictured. The show invites us to converse with a call agent and ask questions about his or her life. Normally call centers are faceless—portals between the individual and corporate interests—so this is a snapshot into the unsung person entrusted with the soul of a corporation. But today when I pick up the receiver a prerecorded message simply states that the attendant has stepped away from her desk.

Upstairs was the video projection “Product Recall” in which the artist and her therapist conduct a session in a spare, but well-appointed office. Reenacting the classic tableau of psychoanalysis, the therapist rattles off corporate slogans, while Young—on a reclining couch no less—attempts to match them with the correct brand: “Passionate about creativity”—“Citibank.” The call and response drifts through a litany of mottos, but it’s unclear whether the goal is to recollect the proper responses or to map the ways that corporations colonize the popular mind; as the therapist notes: he’s looking for how many ad slogans the artist remembers and how many she’s managed to forget.

Before leaving I tried “The Representative” one last time, sat in the chair and picked up the phone, but again was greeted by the prerecorded message: “You’ve reached ‘The Representative’ sponsored by Charter Communications. I’ve stepped away from the desk. Please call back in a few minutes.” Maybe the person was out to lunch, or I got an off day, but I can’t help wondering if calls now simply routed to a callbox—the victim of golden parachutes and corporate downsizing.

“Bad Habits,” on display at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery through Oct. 4, is a far-reaching show and the first since the gallery’s recent re-commitment to highlighting works in its permanent collection.

While I’m not convinced that each piece in the exhibition is naughty enough to fit the theme, it does include a hodgepodge of works from some of the most important artists of the past few decades, showcasing the gallery’s Noah’s Ark approach to art collecting. Loosely organized around the premise of bad habits — taking its name from a series of prints by Lisa Yuskavage — the galleries house such art world heavyweights as Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Gilbert & George, Glenn Ligon, Tony Oursler and Jeff Wall.

Read the rest at Buffalo News:

So I’ve been caught up with submitting work and sending out a couple reviews—and that’s good, but it’s been a little too busy. Here are a couple of things I’ve been meaning to check out. (Feel free to send them my way if you’d like to help a poor post MFA student—with no money—out!) Oh and does anyone have recommendations for anything else? I’ve been so immersed in my thesis manuscript that it’s kind of a luxury to look at anything else now that I am done.

Notes on Conceptualisms—This came out in May and I’ve been seeing reference to it around including Dennis Cooper’s Best of 2009. Here’s a blurb from the publisher’s site:

“What is conceptual writing, how does it differ from Conceptual Art, what are some of the dominant forms of conceptualism, where does an impure or hybrid conceptualism fit in, what about the baroque, what about the prosody of procedure, what are the links between appropriation and conceptual writing, how does conceptual writing rely on a new way of reading, a “thinkership” that can shift the focus away from the text and onto the concept, what is the relationship between conceptual writing and technology or information culture, and why has this tendency taken hold in the poetry community now?”

Whew—-that’s a long sentence. Has anyone had a chance to look at it yet?

I’ve also wanted to read Dave Hickey’s revised and expanded The Invisible Dragon… The old version was on my reading list for a while, but I never got around to it. But now that it’s re-issued… I read Air Guitar a while back and enjoy Hickey’s writing style.

From University of Chicago Press:

The Invisible Dragon made a lot of noise for a little book When it was originally published in 1993 it was championed by artists for its forceful call for a reconsideration of beauty—and savaged by more theoretically oriented critics who dismissed the very concept of beauty as naive, igniting a debate that has shown no sign of flagging.

Painting can seem like such a loaded endeavor. So it’s nice to sit down with the more intimate immediacy of drawing — its focus on line and mark-making and casualness of materials — as an antidote to modernism’s impervious bigness.

Read the rest of my review in the Buffalo News

Louise Bourgeois is the rare artist whose orbit intersects with many big thinkers and personalities of the last century, while always remaining relevant and enduring. Not bad for ninety-seven. I love the way she hones her images and takes them into new psychological spaces, and even the way her voice sounds when she speaks. On June 25th, 1984 she wrote:

“Scheherazade talked to ward off castration (assassination). She talks as a last defense. It is a pretty miserable motive, useless and dangerous, silence is wonderful.”

Bourgeois invokes the futility of warding off death through words, telling stories to counteract mortality, to save our necks. Desperate. We spin yarns to exercise our virility, explain away the inevitable, filling up space to distance ourselves from demise. For Bourgeois, silence is wonderful; a place of centered truth, but art has the luxury of sitting back, composed and silent. It is defensible and a place of strength.

Can writers speak to this silence with image’s wordless authority? How does it translate—or is all writing a reactive ploy for immortality? Are words a battle, tricks to postpone verdict? Scheherazade attempts to stave off assassination, but writing also seeks to understand, not just persuade. How do we learn to speak to king Shahryar in our own thousand and one Arabian nights—in the face of mortality, where words transform into honed images, not desperate gestures shooing off the unavoidable for another day? Here: the silence of truth, where all silence hums-but so quiet the ear can’t always perceive it. Words are objects that poise before us like immense spiders, unlike the fearful clutter filling rooms and days, but spreading out, open, and true, unlocking new worlds.

Writing is most alive when directly engaged in the experience—as a cartography of an encounter or inner space. Recently I stumbled across an interview with photographer Uta Barth where she was asked why narrative annoyed her. Barth’s response captures a lot of what I’ve been thinking:

Narrative holds out for a certain inevitability, it places deep faith in cause and effect. Narrative is about reconstructing a chain of meaningful events based on a known outcome. I’m curious about visual art that’s about the visual. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees is the title of Robert Irwin’s biography. Originally, it was a line in a Zen text. Narrative in art makes us think about all sorts of interesting things, but it derails the engagement with a visual experience.

But how does this translate over to writing, which is essentially narrative? I am interested in this engagement as an enlivening experience that allows the text to break down this ordering of cause and effect, but what do other people think? Barth also gets points for bringing Robert Irwin into the discussion.

As a writer I’ve been obsessing about narrative, and how it can often feel stagy and forced, cutting away appendages for the sake of logic and stacking a synthetic sense of cause and effect. Plotting. Who does this really help? Of course this doesn’t go for all writing, but I recently submitted a thesis manuscript to my graduate advisor and second reader, so hey, I’m allowed to think about this kind of stuff. Over the last six months to a year of revisions (and rewrites), my thesis has become a lot more linear/narrative than I wanted. This is good, as it gives the work a thrust, but I am also interested in going back and re-developing the more non-linear feel of the work, like now that I ate my vegetables, it’s time for pie.

Dear XXXXX,

I trust you are well, ready to do this all over again? It’s been a (mostly) good three months since we last spoke—in LA, back from LA, sunny there, maybe snow here tonight… But the trip was good, and the news was optimistic, so that’s good.

You now hold in your hands my thesis draft entitled Stalking America. Hopefully it’s noticeably shorter. I cut over twenty-five pages from the total page count, mostly through cuts, tailoring, minor character deletions (and I have to confess, excessive white spaces), on top of the 50 or so pages I cut in the time surrounding residency and leading up to sending you my first draft. There was a lot of condensing. My main focus was integrating the stories (or as XXXXX1 calls it: cross-pollinating). I also changed the order around in a number of scenes. These should be obvious, but I didn’t track all of those changes in this document when they were too big, because Word’s notes made the manuscript virtually unreadable at that point. Those and everything else should be clear though. I’m new to ‘tracking changes.’ Does it always look like this? And then it prints out so tiny, new fangled technology.

Let me go back for a minute to your letter where you discuss your background as a poet and your resistance to some bestsellers. That is actually one of the reasons I was most excited to have you as a second reader. I am not a poet, but I wanted to get some feedback outside of the novel form. I come to the novel with a background in visual art, film/video, with an undergrad in critical theory, queer, semiotics, and post structuralism. The things that are interesting to me aren’t always the same as what other novelists might want or expect. The one thing I’ve noticed over the last six months to a year of revisions and rewrites is that my novel has become a lot more linear/narrative than I wanted. I think this is a good thing, because it is starting to give the work a thrust, but I am also interested (after graduating), in going back and re-developing the more non-linear feel of the work. I’ve been thinking lately about photographer Uta Barth’s response to a question in an interview about why narrative annoys her. Her response was:

Narrative holds out for a certain inevitability, it places deep faith in cause and effect. Narrative is about reconstructing a chain of meaningful events based on a known outcome. I’m curious about visual art that’s about the visual. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees is the title of Robert Irwin’s biography. Originally, it was a line in a Zen text. Narrative in art makes us think about all sorts of interesting things, but it derails the engagement with a visual experience.

It is the play between these two elements (the narrative and experience) that appeals to me most in this piece. The manuscript is above all: about the reverie of long trips, that thinking, engaged boredom, and the blending in of experiences and bleeding of elements. As I mentioned, I come at the novel through a background in visual art and experimental film and video. You asked me if I was interested in a structure like Linklater’s, and think that both Slacker and Waking Life influence what I am trying to do indirectly. Thanks for reminding me! I think that a filmic or experimental video approach informs what I’m doing as much as the classic novel. I’m interested in exploring this idea of creating work that is more tied to experience in a narrative structure.

So on to your concerns about the crisis of tenses in my manuscript:

The last six months or so with XXXXX1 have been spent pushing these chapters as much as possible into present tense. Some of the tense problems were simply artifacts from translating the older manuscript into a more present tense. I tried to be conscious of this over the last several months. In many places, as you note, it is actually a false or synthetic present tense.

Here are some notes I made to myself in response to your last letter where I try to figure it out for myself as I revised:

Let me try to explain my logic and why I attempt to do these things (it’s an experiment). A lot of this came from working closely with Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jealousy. I am more interested in stepping into the reverie and experience of a long journey where things, ideas, and overheard conversations start to bleed together. I was actually interested in a poor man’s John Cage where different elements collage together to form the story/composition (although here in a more conventional novel setting). Both of these approaches led to my dialogue being un-attributed. I wanted a certain floating quality, but tried to prep the exchanges when necessary to keep the reader connected. I tried to go back and fine hone that more in this version.

I was interested in how different pieces could come together to create meaning for my main character, which is also part of this trip and his interior journey. In a relational way, some things are just more present/immediate to him than others. It’s a lateral hierarchy. There’s an interesting structural conflict because everything being said can essentially be thought of as the kid re-saying it in whoever’s voice (the whole novel is a quote on some level, or a network of quotes merged together), or else they are collaged pieces of other people’s words inserted whole into his memory that he present for the reader. Part of what I’m playing with is Story Tense, where after I set up the frame for each fragment/story, the story shifts to the present tense now of the story or idea. The kid is almost mapping a cartography of his mind blended with the experience of being on the train. Once he maps out the location of his memory, he is basically stepping into it. I tried to clean it up in this version (pushing to the present when possible), and think it works better in some places, but I may have made it worse in other areas. I’m way over thinking this, and what it really needs is fallow time or a nice vacation!

Tense is broken in this manuscript, but breaking tense is something I am consciously doing and interested in, because through it I’m hoping to solve it in a satisfying way that answers my questions some point in the future. There is a solution; it just isn’t full formed yet. Or maybe it’s just this question that is interesting to me. I know this is a bunch of pseudo-mumbo-jumbo, but these really are the things I’m interested in.

So that is some of my thinking. I’m approaching this all as an experiment, keeping in mind that what this manuscript may look like after I graduate may be very different from how it is now as my completed thesis.

Here is a little more background:

The original premises I set for myself for this manuscript in the beginning were that nobody important had names (the kid doesn’t get one until the end), but I have played with this some for clarity sake. If someone is important here, they probably don’t have a name. Some people receive incidental names like Chris or Jen that are just thrown in there. Others earn names like Telepathic Babysitter or Bee Woman. The only real exception to this rule is the kid’s dad Abraham Matze, who the kid is questioning his importance.

I was also looking at Catcher in the Rye and wanted this piece to be an inverse of that. Holden Caulfield becomes disillusioned and comes apart over the course of the novel. I wanted mine to mimic the train journey segment, but for my character to instead come together over the course of the work. As I mentioned before I was also interested in a modified version of Robbe-Grillet’s forced present tense to explore the reverie and additive process of the experience to tell a story, and was interested in exploring space (internal/external) (public/shared). I was looking for something very static.

On to some specifics about the revisions in my manuscript:

I focused the most energy reworking the first two chapters, trying to condense and bring elements from other parts of the manuscript together in a more definite way. I really liked your idea about none of the stories ever having endings, because the main character always moved. I brought that in at the very beginning and think it is a very intriguing approach (that I probably wouldn’t have thought of). I’m looking at it as a frame for some of the other ideas. Also, this intro is all completely new and I tried to prep some of the tense exploration. Maybe this all needs to go away at some point in the future, but I’m interested in it now.

The second chapter also received some of the most attention, trying to rewrite, tighten, cut, and make it fit more with the rest of the story. Besides those chapters, the most attention was given to the two Claire chapters. I cut them quite a bit, so hopefully this is noticeable. I’m trying to get them to cohabitate more, while also letting them be their own thing. I cut rather extensively there. I also wrote a mini-scene that was inserted into each of these that featured some back story about the kid’s parents. I tried to conceptually link these Claire digressions with the parents, because his obsession with Claire reflects on his implied relationship with his parents (even though I definitely don’t want to explore this explicitly). I also think this gives some insight into the parents, although I’m trying to stay with the less is more. This isn’t the parent’s story, it’s the kids story divorced from them on the train, with context bleeding in. I’m aware that the story starts to lag somewhere around the second half of the second Claire chapter (about the trip to LA and going into the man’s house). I tried to cut this back and it helps the momentum some, but it could use an extensive re-imagining in the future. I tried, but it just started getting muddier instead of fresher and clean, so I reverted versions and reworked from there. I guess the moral is: Just because you shake the snow globe, doesn’t mean it will always snow.

Oh and I completely get your complaint about the character named XXXXX. Her name was originally ‘Claire’s Friend’ first semester when I worked with Micheline. She really liked that, but I thought it became too confusing when I started rewriting after last semester. For now I decided to keep it, because to me X is a variable (algebra) and XXXXX implies to me that there is a real name, but it’s been X-ed over (cover up like the visual equivalent of a bleep out). So I kept it at this time, but am definitely open to changing it at some point in the future!

You also mentioned that the final scene where the kid comes out of the bathroom (sacrificing children) comes out of left field. I pulled this back some, but part of the structure I wanted was that it does come out of left field. Even when the kid thinks they are sharing something, they are in very different headspaces and having very different experiences in the same space. I tried to add a number of context clues earlier on, especially in regards to the kid’s parents, so this story can be read as informing back story on some level… even if the main character doesn’t see it. This is a digression, but that guy on the train was conceptually an Elijah character in his earliest form. This is NOT in the manuscript and shouldn’t be, but that’s a bit of his structure for me. I was reading a lot of Chasidic tales around that time, and was playing with the idea that anytime a stranger shows up in a story (beggars, weirdos, unknown people) it could always be the prophet Elijah testing or sending the story in a new direction. So that character is definitely not supposed to be read or known as Elijah (part of why he doesn’t have a name), but he structurally comes out of left field and sends the kid in a new direction.

Besides those changes I have gone in and made a lot of small tailoring changes that hopefully cross-pollinate the story and bring it together more. I feel good about my manuscript, and am ready to just let it be for a while before coming back to it at some point in the future to re-see as you call it.

Writing a manuscript is such an odd experience. I’ve been reading a lot of artists’ writings lately and Agnes Martin in particular. Are you familiar with her (line paintings) and her writings as an artist are really great and helped me a lot in my finishing. Her book is way out of print, but you can get it through the Goddard loan system if you are interested. In Martin’s collection Writings, she explores the themes of failure and perfection.

When we first begin art work we usually have a lot of ideas that we have to try. But nothing that we do really satisfies us. Finally we are absolutely defeated. We do not know what to do. I want to try to explain to you that defeat is the beginning, not the end of all positive action. (116)

For my Process Paper I focused on a sense of crisis of faith in the work I create (not in the sense of is this valid, but is the work true?), and how this is essentially a healthy thing, allowing us to make room for what the work can become. Again Martin says:

We must surrender the idea that this perfection that we see in the mind or before our eyes is obtainable or attainable. It is really far from us. We are no more capable of having it than the infant that tries to eat it. But our happiness lies in our moments of awareness of it. (69)

That being said, my biggest influences throughout this program have come through artists’ writings such as Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, David Batchelor, Sol LeWit, John Cage and writers who share a close affinity to visual work like Dennis Cooper and Alain Robbe-Grillet. I also have a sympathy towards classic novels ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to J.D. Salinger. I’m drawn to work that explores a soul-sense and highlights a journey of the inner life such as folktales, teaching stories, and Chasidic tales. I’m interested in a blending of something very old with work that is contemporary and conceptually inventive. Through this I am interested in a dialogue between these forms that resulted in my novel taking the structure of a physical journey, because all journeys are a metaphor for an intellectual or emotional journey. My main character is on a train, but it’s not about the train ride.

And here I’ll quote from the conclusion of that paper:

And now I’m back at this crisis of work with my novel. Is it a novel? The question is not is it valid, but is it a novel or something else more akin to art or an installation? Steeped in my practice of art history and studio work, is it even truly possible for me to create work in a novel or is it more truly conceptual art wrapped in the clothes of a novel or using novel as a tool. I find myself least pleased with the work when it behaves most like a novel. And in that, I’m in crisis again, which after all may be the truest place to be in my work, for in crisis the work is most engaged and always questioning what is the truest path from which to proceed.

That being said, it’s been great working with you this semester. Your insight and suggestions have been very useful and I look forward to your ideas. Sorry about the overly verbose nature of this letter, but I guess that’s just where I’m at, thinking about things and tying ideas together. Hopefully you will find my manuscript tighter, sharper, and much improved. Thank you for all your help and have a great rest of semester.

Thomas Hirschhorn’s work parallels elements of a project I worked on and developed for a number of years called the Tollbooth Gallery. The Tollbooth was a reclaimed hunk of concrete in a public space that housed a twenty-four hour outdoor video galley and paper-based installations (video, audio, and paper) in an urban setting. The exhibitions changed every six weeks and featured work from artists from around the world. One of the most exciting aspects of the project was the precariousness of the materials and equipment that were left in public spaces even in the most extreme weather. The project was always in danger of vandalism, theft, or weather failure, but that became part of the work and how it was received. In order to succeed the project had to create a relationship where it trusted in the casual passerby and chance encounters. Like the Tollbooth, Hirschhorn’s work often consists of hewn together spaces in public locations that house an idea or event.

I have a mixed response to Hirschhorn’s work, but Phaidon’s monograph Thomas Hirschhorn gives a provocative view of the artist through a collection of his writings, interviews, and critical writing on his work. For me Hirschhorn’s words and ideas don’t always line up with the reality of the work. Often the work is better on its own without all his dialectic posturing. I appreciate his use of materials and the democratized thrust, but it feels like he tries to prop-up the pieces under the rhetoric of his intellectualized approach. I’m drawn in by the junk mail shantytown aesthetic, his bundled and taped together stand-ins and displays, and his use of public space. There’s something hand-hewn and homely about his objects, like kids scrawling “Prada” or “Gucci” on tee shirts with Sharpie. It’s a critique and DIY approach to creating with what’s at hand. In Hirschhorn’s interview with Alison M. Gingeras he discusses this choice in materials.

What I’ve got around me is some packing material; there’s some aluminum foil in the kitchen and there are cardboard boxes and wood panels downstairs on the street. That makes sense to me: I use the materials around me. These materials have no energetic or spiritual power. They’re materials that everyone in the world is familiar with; they’re ordinary materials. (15)

Last Fall I encountered Hirschhorn’s Cavemanman, as part of the Carnegie International Life on Mars. I remember reading a review when it was installed at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 2002, probably in ArtForum. I have a soft spot for caves and work a lot with Plato’s allegory of the cave, but here it seems more a place of hiding out, a site to hole up during some apocalypse, as opposed to Plato’s idea of escaping the cave as metaphor for enlightenment. Hirschhorn’s cave is hewn out of cardboard and packing tape, poor materials littered with constructed rocks, soda cans, Bob Marley Posters, philosophy textbooks, manifestos, and mannequins wrapped in foil. It feels like something the group of longhaired boys that played in bands and went to my high school might create. They called themselves reefer-nation, and this cave is something they’d concoct in basements while worshipping the immense bong they called Thor.

Hirschhorn’s installations create a space for something to happen, cobbled from humble materials, with that half-baked earnestness. They are one part zealot and one part movie set or display. They are dioramic props for the viewer to step into and initiate through their obsessive construction.

The works only provide the possibility of activation. It wasn’t necessary that it should be activated-neither for the work nor for the spectator. Yet there was this possibility. (31)

It’s this possibility of activation and his any-materials-necessary approach that makes Hirschhorn’s work most exciting.

Dear XXXXX,

How’s life? So I’ve been back in New York for a couple days, and on the first night it actually snowed! Can you believe it? In the morning it was around 80 degrees in Louisiana and by the time we drove up north it was snowing… So anyway I am home. Buffalo. The return drive cross-country is never as much fun as the initial drive out. We planned on spending a day in New Orleans this time (never been), but by Sonora, Texas we were both sick and had to be resigned to bed rest at the La Quinta in Baton Rouge. There’s nothing worse (okay I’m sure there are many things) than being sick in a roadside motel on a road trip, so at that point we loaded up on vitamin c and took marathon shifts driving back up the coast. It’s kind of a blur of small towns after that point, but we’re back (and missing the sun we had in LA).

So for this packet I’ll keep it fairly short, as it seems a little redundant to write much of a process letter on top of a lengthy process paper. In this packet I am including an annotation on Thomas Hirschhorn’s monograph and tried to draw parallels between some stuff I’ve done and his ideas. I also completed and included my process paper and tried to construct a cohesive narrative of my Goddard experience, while keeping an eye on the bigger themes and questions involved. The main theme here is a recurrence of a crisis of faith in ideas and how that figures into the ways I create. In a lot of ways I am still concerned with being able to pull my manuscript together. There is a pull between wanting to structurally pull it apart a lot more and “finishing it up”. Finishing it feels like a closing up process whereas if it wasn’t on an academic timeline, I’d be more interested in opening it up and exploring on a level that isn’t really feasible on this timeline. That’s not necessarily bad. Stalking America is still baking, and that’s part of the process. If I focus on some restructuring and pulling it together (after all it is almost due… crap, is that true?), while thinking of it as a version or workshopped version (in the film or theater sense of the word)… while keeping in mind what it may be in a “finished” form may be different from my thesis… then it seems good and healthy. Is that true? Let me know what you think!

Also, I’m including a copy of Agnes Martin. My boyfriend already copied it for his use as well, so I’ll send you his and make another one. I hope spring finds you well; after all, it’s a comin’, right?

M and I were talking about this, so he sent me a copy of it. I thought I’d put it here, because it’s good advice:

Dear Eva,

It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say “Fuck You” to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itchin, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO!

From your description, and from what I know of your previous work and you [sic] ability; the work you are doing sounds very good “Drawing-clean-clear but crazy like machines, larger and bolder… real nonsense.” That sounds fine, wonderful – real nonsense. Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever – make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you – draw & paint your fear and anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as “to decide on a purpose and way of life, a consistant [sic] approach to even some impossible end or even an imagined end” You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO!

I have much confidence in you and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work – the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell – you are not responsible for the world – you are only responsible for your work – so DO IT. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be. But if life would be easier for you if you stopped working – then stop. Don’t punish yourself. However, I think that it is so deeply engrained in you that it would be easier to DO!

It seems I do understand your attitude somewhat, anyway, because I go through a similar process every so often. I have an “Agonizing Reappraisal” of my work and change everything as much as possible = and hate everything I’ve done, and try to do something entirely different and better. Maybe that kind of process is necessary to me, pushing me on and on. The feeling that I can do better than that shit I just did. Maybe you need your agony to accomplish what you do. And maybe it goads you on to do better. But it is very painful I know. It would be better if you had the confidence just to do the stuff and not even think about it. Can’t you leave the “world” and “ART” alone and also quit fondling your ego. I know that you (or anyone) can only work so much and the rest of the time you are left with your thoughts. But when you work or before your work you have to empty you [sic] mind and concentrate on what you are doing. After you do something it is done and that’s that. After a while you can see some are better than others but also you can see what direction you are going. I’m sure you know all that. You also must know that you don’t have to justify your work – not even to yourself. Well, you know I admire your work greatly and can’t understand why you are so bothered by it. But you can see the next ones and I can’t. You also must believe in your ability. I think you do. So try the most outrageous things you can – shock yourself. You have at your power the ability to do anything.

I would like to see your work and will have to be content to wait until Aug or Sept. I have seen photos of some of Tom’s new things at Lucy’s. They are impressive – especially the ones with the more rigorous form: the simpler ones. I guess he’ll send some more later on. Let me know how the shows are going and that kind of stuff.

My work had changed since you left and it is much better. I will be having a show May 4 -9 at the Daniels Gallery 17 E 64yh St (where Emmerich was), I wish you could be there. Much love to you both.

Sol