23: On Beauty, Dear July

Dear July, 

It was good to talk on the phone and hear about your experiences at school. I received your text messages with pictures of paintings you’ve been working on. I wanted to respond to you in a longer form and try to preserve some of these moments in a way that could mark this time for later reflection.

The meeting went well enough, as I understand it. They will likely deny the petition for Mirta’s citizenship, as expected, for overstaying a visa in the past. We can submit a new petition along with a letter and psychological report that demonstrates that I would suffer hardship without her, and our lawyer assures us this will be accepted, along with more fees. I trust their experience, and I’m looking forward to a time when the three of us can travel together. 

Your new paintings are beautiful. It's fascinating to see what inspires you and receives your attention. I could imagine that among some of your peers and the critical theorists of RISD, there might not always be the highest regard for the traditions you're practicing in. I hope this experience only broadens your horizons and deepens your insights. I wish you the strength to stay with the practices that fulfill you and the openness and space to try new ones as well. I find the attention to beauty and place in your practice moving and skillful, and not without its political and ecological dimensions. In many of your scenes I find a personal resonance, as well as calm, respite, joy and a sense of responsibility towards a place we love.

There is also the simple question of what does one want to be around? And I guess there’s no accounting for these kinds of tastes. I couldn’t really explain why I love Cate White or Joan Brown, to use two examples close to home. Ranunculus, smooth stones and leafy lemons on the counter make me happy and so I live with them. I went to see a painting show in London last week, by an artist named Mahesh Baliga. He paints curious and personal scenes at intimate scales. There was one painting of a flowering tree and another of himself in place of the flowering tree that made me linger for a while with them. I appreciated their very particular attentions and ambiguous moods. And in the thrum of London’s gallery weekend, with its luminous rush of fleeting and competing surfaces, they were like small monuments to contemplative depths, quietly sharing their slow and considered formation. 

Your painting of a big cat in a tree reminds me of an artist named Dylan Solomon Kraus, specifically the animals they paint, which in turn remind me of the great Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani and his wonderful consideration of animals and the exalted moments of his experience. I saw an exhibition by a curious British artist named Mark Leckey who made an installation with a voice memo they recorded when they became overcome with emotion as the covid lock down was loosening and people were returning to the streets. It was such a beautiful way to monumentalize and share a moment of significance. The internet can also be truly wonderful in this regard. I believe he used the word exaltation to describe this experience and his art making, which is perhaps what brought it to mind when I chose the same word to describe these different painters. For those of us who don’t have your gifted and practiced abilities with rendering our exalted moments, we can try by other means, like mechanical reproduction and telling stories.

At Mark Leckey’s opening, he arranged food for everyone and it was clear that generous sociality was important to his art-making. It reminded me a little of the openings that Francisco Toledo would do at IAGO in Oaxaca. This is surely one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been and should be one of our first stops in Mexico. It is a large library, archive, community center, courtyard, classroom, art studio and exhibition space. The openings are beautiful celebrations of creation and togetherness with lots of food and conviviality, under a canopy of bougainvillea and birdsong in the balmy courtyard. I was about to embark here on a longer consideration of Oaxaca; its protection of heritage, rejection of forms of colonization and selective embrace of cultural affinities from around the world—perhaps in the spirit of what Édouard Glissant calls mondialité, but I’ll leave that for another time, or we can address it together when we visit.

To circle back for a moment, if you have time and interest, there is a beautiful film about Pirosmani by Giorgi Shengelaia that I recommend. It reminds me of The Idiot by Dostoevsky (also adapted poignantly by Kurosawa), which I think of often. The way the world is wont to project its traumas. In these times, I’m thankful for ways to determine what is meaningful and beautiful and for ways that help us describe what we won’t accept and what must be mutually created otherwise.

I recently read a text called On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry. You can find her lectures around easily, though I recommend reading it beforehand. She offers that our capacity for appreciating beauty is not in opposition to commitments of justice. It's a generous and additive disposition that I find compelling and may feel companionable and accommodating to you in this period of artistic reflection and growth.

I’ve just begun James Bridle’s Ways of Being, which promises, like the previous work I’ve encountered of theirs, to be full of broad insights from the extreme present, as understood from a critical consideration of the historical forces that precede it. James’ talks online are also great, though the book gives space for the thinking to develop in a way that our visual culture seems indisposed towards. And even as I write this I wonder if their rhythms haven’t been somewhat conditioned by memetic internet writing, which I understand to be a general trend, and also coterminous with a different function of writing and its use in visual culture that I have mixed feelings towards. I imagine though, reading and writing plays a large role in James’ thinking and ability to speak so eloquently. This is my wish for Agnes, to find the pleasures and sustenance of reading and writing, and add them to the other ways of understanding and sharing her experiences of the world. I think I'm concerned with a general erosion and diffusion of attention, perhaps symptomatic of the of the way attention has been weaponized in spectacular arenas of violent competition.
 
Agnes and I went to the Berkeley Art Museum when I was in California this spring to look at some Chinese landscape paintings they were exhibiting. They made me think of you and also an article I read recently about two artists with a project called Shanzhai Lyric. They collect and archive unusual bootleg clothing that they affiliate with a theory of shanzhai, a Chinese neologism that describes counterfeit goods in ambivalent terms. It's a nice project that finds different forms of expression. The magazine review culminates in the idea that ‘We also think of different modes of discourse where the commentary is the work. For instance, a Talmudic relationship to text bears some similarity to the relationship that Byung-Chul Han is drawing to Chinese landscape painting, where a central image becomes increasingly surrounded by comments over time. The commentary becomes the work.’ This sounds like what Sianne Ngai describes as the ‘becoming-ergon of the parergonal discourse of evaluation.’ a notion that has been guiding my practice. 

Here are links for their archive and the article:
https://shanzhailyric.info
https://032c.com/magazine/bootlegging-nonsense-an-interview-with-shanzhai-lyric

I enjoyed listening to your experience of the noise music concert you went to in Rhode Island. This is such a fascinating musical tradition to me, and also inextricably linked to critical theory. I’ve been going in and out of a several-day-long symposium convened by an artist named Mattin at the beloved Cafe Oto. It was conceived thoughtfully, with lectures and horizontal learning during the day and participatory performances in the evening. In one group, organized with the Noise Research Unit ( n-r-u.xyz ) there was a session on diagrammatically recording processes of collective thinking. I offered the prompt of ‘deanthropocentricizing noise’ that resulted in a multigenerational cohort—including an artist working on rendering the waveforms produced by nuclear fusion—arriving at the formulation noise is an unbounded concept that is provisionally co-determined through more-than-human sonic affinities and we left our diagram mostly blank as an open question and invitation, along with some misgivings about the difficulty for non-humans to be represented through these kinds of apparatuses, heuristics and epistemes. 

Later on in the evening after a long and rangy discussion, largely about neurobiology and platform capitalism, it occurred to me that the impulse to negate the hegemonic ‘signals’ that guide this tradition, is likely found more in ASMR than in the conceivably overdetermined and antagonistic (atonal, dissonant, punk) legacies that get more readily associated with the now firmly established and institutionalized noise genre. With the rise of what Inigo Wilkins calls PAINRS or predictive artificially intelligent noise resilient systems (and what some other people call Twitter), the idea of disrupting an already deafening hegemony of attention capturing antisocial cacophony with abrasive machinic noise feels increasingly aesthetically esoteric and questionable in the efficacy of its political commitments and relation to sonic hegemony at the cultural and platform levels. The eruption of a youth culture insistent on giving attention to the most minute and subtle registers of the quotidian, feels more in the tradition of polarized negation that noise (with a new music valence) finds itself in. And to take it a step further, perhaps the greater negation of this deafening emergent cultural hegemony would be having kind and uninstrumental conversations with someone who doesn’t necessarily share the same views. Or even just sitting quietly. Or walking with a friend anywhere away from traffic. John Cage may be helpful here. I have considerable misgivings about some of the strategies of polemical negation, which can find itself affirmative and expedient to the platforms so corrosive to sociality today. 

One of the things I found interesting, in the context of this durational approach to hybrid and performative learning, is an almost therapeutic element that emerged. There was a recourse to candid sharing of mental health concerns and the social endeavor of naming the conditions that produce them—if also perhaps reproducing the dynamics at times. By and large, the moderation encouraged participation and was hospitable to vulnerability and uncertainty. I think this model of para institutional learning and its conveners dispositions are instructive and it would be beneficial if this model of collective and open inquiry was emulated more widely. 

In between the sessions at Cafe Oto, I went to a release for a publication called Migrations in New Cinema. The project was born of a film class taught by Ektoras Arkomanis at the Metropolitan University. It was assembled over many years of showing films to students and inviting their authors to lecture and write about their process. The resulting publication was released in an event that shared excerpts of films and readings and the book provided access to an online space where the included films could be watched in their entirety. It was beautiful to gather and celebrate this ecology of learning. Giving attention and presence to the marginalized voices addressing the manifold crises in the contentious contexts of Kabul, Kobane, Cairo, Moscow, Jerusalem, Athens and London. These are stories of structural violence, exile and subjugation that ask us to bear witness and ally our concerns. It is beautiful art, through and through, to find ways to share these stories. Perhaps also an activity that begets other activities, towards a broader sense of empathy, responsibility, and other forms of solidarity and emancipation.

This letter is taking its time, and each time I return to it, I want to revise and add more. And add other addressees and connect it with other letters. With this ongoing condition I’ve decided to make this practice open and essayistic. And it occurs to me that it could be interesting to revisit these writings at another place in time and make annotations. 

I was talking with Shao in Bolinas and mentioned I was somewhat obsessed with this idea of the becoming-ergon of the parergonal discourse of evaluation. He replied, without missing a beat, yes, we live in the margins. Or maybe the comments, in today's parlance. The other day I went to a talk at a symposium at the Courtauld on the idea of Iconoclasm (or the destruction of images and icons) by a scholar called Stacy Boldrick. The focus of the talk was the long history that led up to the present contention around what to do with all these hateful monuments of oppressive bigotry. It was an interesting talk that invited my mind in many directions. Imagining ways iconoclasm happens with time and geological forces, an entropic conception and a concession that opens up so many questions around both icons and authorship. A quarry as iconoclasm. A deepfake as iconoclasm. A flagged image or snapchat filter as iconoclasm. An algorithm or botox injection as iconoclasm. I’m thinking back to a conversation I had with Ellie Ga where she suggested that the light pollution that obscures the stars, for certain cultures, erases their cosmology. An excess of brightness and progress as iconoclasm. 

With kindness and uncertainty, 
Perry

Hey Gareth,

Thanks for last night. I so appreciate your generous insights and gracious hospitality; the breadth of knowledge and the critical histories you hold; your attention to detail and sensitivity to character; your dazzling wit. I feel very privileged in your company.

I know it's a bit corny to say it, but here we are... at least it's on the record.

Just wanted to note a few things from our conversation yesterday to share and explore

Urbanomic https://www.urbanomic.com/

Robin's site http://readthis.wtf/

zer0 podcast w some background https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgUkQTRtagc

and the intersection with steve goodman and hyperdub https://hyperdub.net/

Robin also translated Francois Bonnet's recent the music to come which is a thoughtful text in the perhaps ill-advised manifesto genre that actually reminds me a lot of Ben Lerners the hatred of poetry, both kind of clearing a space, or perhaps suggesting a disposition towards something like a secular transcendent attuning...

i'm fascinated by this milieu, with its moments of brilliance, mutations, para academic interdisciplinary experimentalism, romantic and tragic excesses, and so on

the mattin residency at oto over the last few days seems related. i'm interested in these kind of alternative and accessible pedagogical models.

James Bridle's ways of being and their ecological turn is promising so far, great opening, walking in the relatively unspoiled beauty of Epirus and chancing upon the tooth and claw marks of an artificial intelligence...

looking forward to seeing you soon,

p

Dear J,

It was a pleasure participating in the NRU session together. Apologies for the delayed response. It has been taking me a little while to think about how to reply to the work you’ve shared regarding nuclear fusion. I’ve been educating myself a little bit, reading positions papers and trying to understand the implications and stakes of pursuing this tract generally, and your aesthetic engagement with the subject specifically. In the lecture you sent, you’ve framed this work as a utopian promise of ‘unlimited power for an indefinite future.’ I’m concerned this is an orientation or continuation of a fantasy that is precisely the engine of this anthropogenic mass extinction event we’re suffering. I’m deeply skeptical of this kind of technological hubris, and wary of the ways it consolidates itself with a rhetoric of utopian legitimation and thin green veneer of ecopoetics. I would defer on this matter to the measured, qualified and almost endearingly understated and colloquially-titled article recently published by the former principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab Daniel Jassby, on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/ . Without getting too lost in the (radioactive) woods of tritium production and tokamak efficiency, we can see clearly this is a call for the continued expansion of the nuclear complex with all of its compounding safety problems and threat of nuclear proliferation. I don’t think this is a responsible course and I would kindly caution you against lending your compelling and skillful abilities to the project.

Sincerely,
Perry

Dear J,

My apologies for the careless misapprehension of your work.
In revisiting the lecture, I see we share similar concerns.

I approached it with a distracted mind and mistook the framing of the discourse for an impartial position. And perhaps I took your soft spoken and even-keeled disposition as somehow affirmative. When in likelihood, your calm and measured resolve is an ideal to aspire towards. I'm thankful you have focused your energies on this difficult subject.

The sounds of the audified reactor data are indeed haunting.
Like an animal dying in a hailstorm.

Kindly,
Perry