artinthesymbiocene

  (This essay was originally published in Interalia Magazine, October 2020) What good is art in a time of crisis? Save perhaps for our cave-dwelling forefolk, for whom art may have been invoked as a protection against mortal danger, the question has probably been around for as long as there have been human calamities. My first deep descent into it came after 911, when images of the towers falling rearranged the architecture of the collective psyche. It was as if reality itself had been stretched to new capacity, and in this warped and wounded new real art seemed utterly superfluous. Over time I recovered my sense of purpose as an artist, but the sting of its absence never fully left me. For the deeper question that that crisis laid bare is one that vexes even in normal times: with so much of practical value one can do in a suffering world, can art – does art –  really matter ? I can’t say I arrived at an entirely satisfying answer back then, but if I had it would have been dif...

  (This essay was originally published in Battery Journal, December 2019)  Across the road at the bottom of my driveway, half sunken behind a small slope and a thicket of weeds, there is a dead tree. No taller than two men and naked and spindly, there ought to be nothing remarkable about it. Indeed, there  would  be nothing remarkable about it were it not for one thing: by some conspiracy of forces that strains the imagination, one of its branches, wrested from the trunk by some celestial hand, hangs precariously from the fork of another, its overturned arm cutting diagonally across the vertical thrust of its neighbors. A quiet paean to gravity and matter’s protest against it, it has stood thus for sixteen years. While there are people for whom such things go unnoticed, this odd little corpse has commanded my gaze every time I have passed it. Drawing me to it as if by some strange magnetism, it holds my eye until it can’t anymore, and each time, without fail, I am ut...

(This essay was originally published in Iteralia Magazine, March 2020)     What does the body know that the conscious mind doesn’t? Considering that we are the product of millions of years of evolution, animals descended from other animals born of the earth, the earth itself birthed in some remote cosmic furnace made of particles forged in the very cradle of time, the answer is: probably a lot.   Over the last decade, this question has been the generative force behind both my studio work and my writing. In the former, drawing has been my primary mode of exploration, for drawing is essentially a language of the body. A kind of somatic or motoric thinking unmediated by the conscious mind, drawing registers ideas and impulses we cannot know by other means – and ones that often belie the mind’s explicit discursive content. Scientists call this the cognitive unconscious: that 98% percent of our thought we don’t know we are thinking but that nonetheless shapes much of who and w...

 (This review was previously published in The Brooklyn Rail, April 2021, and Interalia Magazine, May 2021 ) Rounding the dimly lit corner, you approach the entrance. It's a formidable entrance, a wall of unornamented concrete. You reach for the door handle and are met with cold steel; it's an angular affair, less knob than knot. Straining against the massive weight of the pivot, you make your way inside into the cavernous lobby, an opulence of mirrors furnished only with a tall, lifeless desk. Accompanied by the distinct scent of an aggressive sterility, you work your way through the maze of marginally navigable corridors, finally, after a few hours, accomplishing what you set out to. Before making your exit, you stop to use the restroom, where the hypermodern faucet leaves you grateful no one's witnessed your struggle to engage it. But no matter; the day has been a success. Why is it, then, that you leave feeling diminished – physically and emotionally drained, even ...

(This essay was originally published in The Brooklyn Rail, June 2019)   The words in my title belong to Robert Irwin. I came across them years ago in Lawrence Weschler’s much-loved book of dialogues with the artist, and since then they’ve become something of a personal shibboleth. Referring to his technique for placing bets at the track (a second vocation in which he enjoyed great success), Irwin relayed that, after carefully studying the statistics for each horse, he would forget all the facts, close his eyes, and “run his hand over the race.” I don’t think I’ve encountered a better metaphor for tacit thinking: the kind of thinking we do unconsciously, without language, with and through our bodies. Nor can I think of better words to describe what I do, both in my work as an artist and in my art writing. For in both – and indeed in looking at art, itself a kind of art – my body is my primary instrument and most trusted informant. Hands and the haptic ...

One morning many years ago, when I was a young artist fresh out of grad school, new enough to New York to still be smitten with the city but seasoned enough to wear a cool detachment about it, I gathered up all the loose bills I could find stuffed into the pockets of various jeans, walked twenty-six blocks down to Barnes and Noble -- caffeineless, as I recall, having nothing to spare for the coffee -- and bought a 360-page book on electricity and electronics. It was called Electricity and Electronics . This book still sits on my bookshelf today, its pages just as clean as they were twenty-five years ago. I don’t know why I’ve held on to it, really. Perhaps I’ve kept it as a reminder. Perhaps exactly so that I would write this essay. While singular, perhaps, in the extremity it represents, in truth the book is not such an anomaly. Perusing its nearest shelf neighbors, we find, also from that era, a history of the microprocessor, a book on code breaking, something called Patterns of Soft...