***

The stage is an anatomical theatre built in the late nineteenth century. It has been “authentically restored” to function as the auditorium of an academy of contemporary art.

The artist is already on stage.

part one

It goes on like this.
Another week of alarming incidents.
Behind strangling discretion, outbreaks of crime.

I go to sleep at three in the afternoon.
I wake up two hours later and feel uneasy.
A total lack of inspiration and interest.
I have nothing to contribute.

In order to speak from the position of an artist,
one must inhabit the role of the artist.
One must feel like an artist.
It’s not that deep.
It’s maybe not a deep calling,
just some angle to be perceived from.

But no one perceives me right now.
My life is ugly.
My life is not even ugly.
My life is not considered – no one sees it.

I do my chores.
There is dust all over my apartment.
Why am I speaking instead of vacuuming,
or doing the dishes,
or walking through the snow to the supermarket?

Life is unglamorous.
It’s uninteresting.
Speaking these words is like wringing water from a stone.
Why these words?
I don’t know.
I’m a tired image.

What if I pissed myself instead of continuing to speak?
What if I let go of control?
I should vacuum the floors.
It would help with my breathing.

I wish I felt a sense of joy and possibility.
I wish I could give that to you.

The other day someone emailed me and asked me if I needed an intern.
They had to do an internship somewhere in order to graduate from art school.
They said they anticipated my response hungrily.
Did they want to devour me, to consume me?
Did they want to digest me fully and be done with me?
Maybe that’s flattering.

I had to decline this possible internship,
because I didn’t have any work to delegate to an intern.
I don’t want to produce too much.
I don’t want to conceive of any art projects.

I’m trying to break my art practice down.
I want to see which parts I can do without.
I want what is left of my art practice to be luminous and weightless.
I hope the remainder is something I can manage.
Manage: a terrible word implying fantasies of control.
As if these impulses could be supervised.
But it is like that.

Contemporary art is too big.
Not big in the sense of being magnificent or grand.
Just big like a couch that takes all the space in a tiny studio apartment.
A couch that makes the space feel crowded and hopeless.
Big like a shiny, ugly sculpture at an art fair,
with an overabundance of every resource other than good taste.
Big like sixty hours of video art at some biennial.
You have to watch all the videos standing up,
or sitting on a hard bench with no back support.

Why did I compare contemporary art to a couch?
I wish I was sitting on a couch right now.
An image of me sitting on a couch.
An image that is depressing and comforting in equal measure.
I will not be a star.
My mediocrity protects me.

The artist stands in front of an audience.
Multiple cameras and microphones record the artist as the artist says:
I don’t want to be a star.

part two

A passage from nothing to nothing.
The journey of the word from nothing to nothing.
In between endless passages of nothing, I give a talk.
So, words.
There is no better moment.

To begin speaking about art,
one must articulate one’s own position.

Would you like to know mine?
Would you be interested in my autobiography?
Would you like me to position myself on stage in a different manner?

It shouldn’t matter what you want.
Art is about freedom.
I can be here in whatever way I please.
Or not be here at all.
Or whatever.

Is there any more to art than that?
This total, individual, expressive freedom.
Why does it feel unsatisfying?
Why does it ring false?

Art is a private joy,
saturated with public pressure.

The artist changes position.
The artist is focused.

I’m making marks that amount to the look of an apple.
People can recognise these marks as an apple.
The apple is so realistic.
A drawing becomes a real fruit.

An artist is giving a talk at an art academy.
Is the artist supposed to be an example of what an artist is?
Am I being turned into an example?
What could be exemplary here?

I could have exemplary ethics.
I could be making the world better through my art.
Why am I not doing that?
Insert a list of reasons.

There is this hunger.
The audience wants to consume identity,
to consume experience, to consume trauma.
There is no I here.
I wanted to relay the absence.

Why these words?
Why in English?
We had to speak to each other in this way in order to be understood.
The artist opens their mouth.
Why?

Some lecture last year where they said
that Blanchot said
that writing is
nothing
wanting to speak.

Words arrive out of nothing.
The artist tries to catch words from nothing.
The action is cat-like and can continue for a while.
The artist tries to catch the words.
To close their fists around the words.
Words escape.

Can I speak of ethics from a position of fear?
Nothing left but these fears.
Nothing left, except nothing.
I’m interested in nothing.
Proposal for state funding:
a project about nothing.

An interdisciplinary,
multi-species,
radical,
collaborative,
research-oriented
nothing.

part three

I imagine an artist.
They’re giving a talk.

I imagine someone who is in control.
The artist commands their audience.
The artist has the posture of a dancer.
The artist is confident like a bully.

A high school bully with endless confidence,
more grown up than you are now at 37.

When I think of the artist I think of a hot bully.
The bully’s victims have secret crushes on the bully.
What’s the attraction?
Why am I imagining an artist like that?

Are you in the room because you were bullied in school?
Are you in the art world because of what happened in school?
Are you in the art world?
I didn’t think so.

Why speak?
Why?
You cannot speak of art directly.
Words create more misunderstandings,
more shadows.
Words would not even exist if we could understand each other.
If there was perfect understanding between us, words would fall away.
Why the words?
Stop.
The artist has no need for them.

The artist has an attitude, a polo-neck sweater, a specific posture:
years of dance classes as a child.
The artist says they were not traumatised,
they just decided not to pursue ballet any further.

The artist trades in currencies you’ve never even heard of.
The artist prays to a God with no personal qualities.
A substance that forms everything,
animates everything,
oozes into everything.

They arrive on stage.
They are wearing a transparent plastic corset over a black polo-neck sweater.
They look like a horse that’s been priced at twenty million euros.
They are wearing straight black pants with shiny black shoes.
They open their mouth.
A spell is cast.

What does the work of art look like?
A monolith.
Something large and complex in a white cube.
Something sublime – a waterfall preserved as an object.
An object in the centre of the room.
A confident object.
No words.

The artist doesn’t dabble.
The artist doesn’t churn out status updates, poor images,
high-pitched nervous tweets.
There is just this big object.
The artist poses next to it.

Words are cheap.
What I really want to see is some action.
A transgressive gesture or two.

For some reason I keep thinking about the Crucifixion. †
There are fourteen pictures:

part four

After the exhibition was done
I was completely burned out.
There are irrational hopes attached to these exhibitions.
I always hope that the next show will reorient me.
That there will be some kind of revolution,
in terms of my perception of the world.

Like, something literally revolving on its axis
until it is upside down,
and you see it,
completely new
and full of possibilities.
That doesn’t happen.
I just get tired.

To make art because one can’t accept the world as it is.
If one could accept the world,
one wouldn’t need to do anything.
One could sit and wait while the world healed itself,
or whatever.

You enter your self-hatred like it’s some enigma.
A crime that could be solved in a fifty-minute episode of prestige television.
In the end the detectives would find your self-respect,
trapped in the bottom of a well – weeping.
Your inner child would be salvaged from a tank slowly filling with water,
and brought here,
on stage.

One that has been silent now speaks.

The artist enters the stage.
What are they like?
Hungover, experiencing jet lag, stammering.
Their MacBook and the auditorium projector are not compatible.

A rectangle of blue.
The artist coughs.
No signal.
The artist says:
Hey,
I’m a channel
I’m just channelling here.
Winter light in a silent room. I wait.

I’m a channel.
I don’t work.
This is not work.
If I had to be in the wasteland alone,
I would make more art.
God’s eye would see it.

At the art academy I learned that the myth of the artist had been deconstructed.
I wasn’t entirely sure what that myth was.
How do you deconstruct a myth?
Word by word?
An artist is a person who has become a project.
A project that lives to improve itself.

Why speak?
Why not?
Why didn’t I use this time to describe my artworks to you?
I could’ve talked about what I do.
Maybe I don’t find it so interesting –
what I do.

There’s a square of sunlight on the floor.
I go lie down in it.









then it happens