Images are not transparent. Musicians and mathematicians are able to do things, sense things, through computation or sonics, that most can’t. People don’t have a problem accepting that kind of difference of ability, but as soon as it’s about art, about visual recognition, everybody’s mouthing the hackneyed equivalent of “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.” Given the demolition of all arts education in this country, there are going to be some angry, angry people, who’ve been short-changed an entire way of communicating.

I wonder if it is a new structure exactly, since post- and past structuralisms have too often allowed too many to balance on the crutches of someone else’s thinking instead of striding for themselves; the structures have too often become prisons or corporate headquarters rather than the liberating, libidinally radicalizing energies they started as. Should this duty be criticism’s, should it be a clearly, genre-stabilized problem of the “critical”? Shouldn’t art, shouldn’t writing, attain something beyond critique? I’m convinced that this new narrative would have to avail itself of the fictive and the poetic, the abstract and nonnarratological, as modes of intellection and to lycanthropize the critical with bites under the full moon of cross-genres. Such intellectual lycanthropization would start to mark a no-place, situate no place, except a moving address “in-between”—frm which to terrorize the system. A self-reflexive writing and writer attempting to allow meaning to drift or skid would have to question writing’s form and formalization as its producer attempted to confront something which has to find a way to syncopate the digital onslaught’ since instaneity is no longer immediate or fast enough (?), what should occur is a pause or nonplace, an untimely oasis—mirage?—for contemplation and from which we’re yet ricocheted back to the contextual spinning. Because of the permanent discontinuity or scrambling, this “something” may require a search “forward,” toward futurity, as much as it may require dusting off methods too long in the attic. Everything cannot be seen at once, but there should be more striving for fly-like observation, seeing many ways at once.

I strive to capture what am I thinking about now. Kenneth Koch has this great, great line about O’Hara. He notes that Frank would always say, “Rather the worst poem that I’ve written…,” wait, I’m botching the quotation, and Frank, I’m sure, delivered it with such panache…It’s something like, “I’d rather think the worst thought in my head and know it’s mine than think the greatest thought of anyone else.” I totally, totally embrace that. We’re here to do what only we can do. It may not even be very good, but it is you who are doing it. There’s obviously always going to be people who are smarter and quicker and whatever, but it’s your thing that you have to do.

The producer of an anonymous work must take full responsibility for it, but his relation to the work is totally different from the artist’s to his work of art. Firstly, he is no longer the owner of the work in the old sense; he takes it upon himself, he puts it out, he works on common ground, he transforms raw material. He carries on his activity within a particular milieu, known as the artistic milieu, but he does so not as an artist, but as an individual. (We find it necessary t omake this distinction because particularly at this time, the artist is increasingly hailed as art’s greatest glory; it is time for him to step down from this role he has been cast in or too willingly played, so that the “work” itself may become visible, no longer blurred by the myth of the “creator,” a man “Above the run of the mill.” This impersonal effort, without style, inevitably produces a result poor in, if not totally lacking form. Such form, as ineffective as it may be, is none the less essential, for it is the work simply being, and not the image of something or the negation of an object. The form is the object questioning its own disappearance as object. It is not the result of the reply to the question. It is the question, the question endlessly being asked.

Painting’s a designer drug. Has a disco beat. Is a painting of that. There are some who would want a different model. / Model of what?
Around the time I was born, a heavy-hitting style maven doted on the phrase, “Yah. It’s divine, no?” Someone noted that this expression could mean “Yes, it’s divine, I couldn’t agree more” or “Yes, it’s divine, but why bring it up? “No, I don’t think it’s divine” or “I wish you would go away.” In almost all circumstances it defied response and ended the conversation.
No history or too much history?
Guesstimate.
Guesstimate what a painting of that is.
This moment?
It rails, it riles, it roils. Foiled.
Yah. It’s divine, no?

I think part of what is shocking about Lozano’s withdrawal is the rigor with which she rejected two intimately connected systems: patriarchy and capitalism. By refusing to speak to women she exposed the systemic and ruthless division of the world into the categories of men and women. By refusing to speak to women she acknowledged the impossibility of a life lived outside the societal confines and projections of gender. By refusing to speak to women as an artwork she also refused the demand of capitalism for the constant production of private property. That she elided the fetishized art object and women was perhaps no mistake, as both share a similar fate.

INFORMATION IS CONTENT. CONTENT IS FICTION.

Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett 2000, is an example of:

a) The intensification of the blurring of entertainment and art

b) The delusions of love

c) The beauty of belief, sincerity and happiness

d) Folie à deux on a grand scale

e) The conservatism of so-called cutting-edge art (John Currin, Vanessa Beecroft, gregory Crewdson, et al.)

f) Post-Warholian exuberance and rule-breaking

The best place to see Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett 2000, to push its special je ne sai quoi to the limit, would be:

a) In Hollywood, near Grauman’s Chinese

b) In Fawcett’s or Edmier’s backyard

c) At Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas

d) At the Louvre

e) At the Vatican

f) On the moon

Farrah Fawcett had a rather strange opening night in Butterflies Are Free at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater in Jupiter, Florida, on 30 July 1980. An obese lady in the front row of tables began yelling insults at her and making bird calls during the performance. Later, this unidentified lady raised her dress and flashed the performers, causing co-star Dennis Christopher to take notice, although the character he was playing was a blind man. Nearby, a male patron began vomiting, and yet another patron fainted. Incredibly, the reviews for Farrah’s performance were positive.

a) Explain how one rises above adversity.

b) Perform a Kleinian reading (“bad breast,” etc.) of the opening-night performance.

Art, like love, can save any situation, no matter how debased, embarrassing or depressing. Discuss.

Fawcett’s Playboy pay-per-view special and home-video, Farrah Fawcett: All of Me, a soft-core fantasia and documentary including Farrah’s paintings and sculpture demonstration, some of it taught naked, as well as her notorious appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman are as much art as Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett 2000.

a) True

b) False

Which of the following is true:

a) Life is the art, love the critique

b) Love is the art, life the critique

c) Art is the love, critique the life

d) Critique is the love, art the life

e) All of the above

f) None of the above

Despite a history of gay men writing and thinking acutely about women (divas, ballerinas, movie stars, “swans”), from Edwin Denby to Truman Capote to Wayne Koestenbaum, the equivalent—gay men writing about men (such as Boyd McDonald)—is a much less vaunted genre. Lacking a history of complex theorization of male-to-male desire in relation to the photograph, specifically to its accumulative quality, I am interested in thinking about how, why and what it means for certain fags to collect and/or produce vast quantities of images, cataloguing visuality as if for their own magazine empire. Some might say such photomania sublimates desire and sex, but it is just as much the case that the photographs come as close as possible to proving some kind of erotic transaction occurred, no matter how momentary or anonymous. Magazines have an analogous and metaphorical relationship to such photo-cataloguing. Consider a synoptic trajectory from Wilhelm von Gloeden to Bob Mizer (of Athletic Model Guild: AMG) and Bruce of Los Angeles, from Gary Lee Boas and Alair Gomes, the Brazilian photographer who snapped shots of buff beach boys from his Ipanema apartment window and other somewhat less surreptitious locations for over 30 years, only to be murdered by one of his distractions in 1992. What does it mean that all of these men were discomfited by the category of artist? What might the discomfit have to do with the scope of their enterprise and the limits of art (if that is what it is)?

Can we imagine an oeuvre consisting of one work?

Where does my attempt to connect magazine reading, the proliferation of pages and photographs, and a particular type of desiring, leave me? In the realm fo Warhol, whose aesthetic project seems, at times, to be a complete derangement of the institution, by his collecting and saving and producing nonstop? beyond the realm of art?

The museum offers few solutions to the display of such scopophilic, size-queen pleasure and vastness, but magazines already circulate in quantity, endlessly, endlessly relishing the promiscuity of the photograph. Available at a newsstand, the magazine’s disposability, its antipathy towards art, certainly towards being art itself, may still hold a way to secure its promise.

“What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?” Sturtevant's project has been to pragmatically demonstrate what she knows, and how and why how what she knows operates.

In “Unwritten Histories of Conceptual Art,” the final essay of Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999), Thomas Crow examines the necessity of interrogating the “assumed primacy of visual illusion as central to the making and understanding of a work of art”, and focuses on how Sturtevant “acutely defined the limitations of any history of art wedded to the image.” Sturtevant's project questions the primacy of visual illusion—not by marking a point in the 60s when this became necessary, but by her repetitions demonstrating how aesthetics has, all along, been structured and determined by whatever is understood to be the non-visual, the non-retinal—the unseen and thought. Through her exploration of the underpinnings of what the encounter and/or physics nominated as “art” is, she dematerializes the primacy of the object and of the visual, but not by abandoning the object, the methods of its making, or even visuality itself; this is why her work is stranger and more promising than even Crow suggests. She provides immanence—and it's contrafactual. Sturtevant has written: “It is imperative that I see, know, and visually implant every work that I attempt. Photographs are not taken and catalogues [are] used only to check size and scale. The work is done predominantly from memory, using the same techniques, making the same errors and thus coming out in the same place. The dilemma is that technique is crucial but not important.” Crucial that she paints, makes, does—but not important, crucial “to find a way to use an object that would not present itself as an object, that would at the same time talk about the structure of aesthetics as the idea.” Not exactly jettisoning the history of art, she always illuminates the potential of art's contemporaneity—which partly explains, for example, why she repeated a Muybridge (a study of a woman—Sturtevant—walking with hands on hips) in 1966, as well as Warhol Flowers in 1964-65, 1969-70, 1990, and 1991. From Duchamp Fresh Window (1992), to Beuys Fat Chair (1974), Lichtenstein Happy Tears (1966-67), and Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (1997), Sturtevant repeats works for the necessity of a catalytic recognizability, sparking an investigation of what allows “art” to be, so that the entirety of the structure of art is reconsidered horizontally not linearly.

Miller invokes Wilde's aperçu—“it is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything”. He goes on to describe Sturtevant: “By raising the challenge of an artistry divorced from the production of new imagery, she calls closer attention to art as discourse than before, making it, rather than the art object per se, the subject of connoisseurship.”

She has written that it is Duchamp's “reluctant indifference [...] his repetitive indifference, lack of intention, non-commitment—a sort of throwing away; letting it all go” which has captivated her most, not his objects. Sturtevant's words beautifully repeating, yet not exactly repeating, continue: “What Duchamp did not do, not what he did, which is what he did, locates the dynamics of his work. [...] The grand contradiction is that giving up creativity made him a great creator.” She concludes that 'how Duchamp lived contains the functional totality of his work.”

On the back of a recent catalogues, over the image of a glorious fuschia field and a rising Batman figure, appear the words “Body, Objects, Image”. Sturtevant has said that the work concentrates on the “cybernetic overload, the danger of rejecting objects, about ‘having’ instead of ‘being’.” The announcement card for a concurrent show at Air de Paris had World Cup soccer players kicking the ball, and on the verso the Adidas logo; both recto and verso were diagonally crossed by the phrase: ça va aller (everything's going to be all right). She wrote to me about this card: “Simply put & it is simple: mass culture is art and not reverse.”

There’s a scene in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27) which gets at this much more elegantly than I can. Little Marcel is on the Méséglise way, a path of so many “humble discoveries,” and is overwhelmed by his own enthusiasm for wind-blown grass, a hen’s downy feathers, dappled pink reflections of a tiled roof on a pond’s surface – the real, that catch-all placeholder, excited to the point that he cries aloud while swinging his furled umbrella: “Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!.” He feels that he is “duty bound not to content [him]self with those unilluminating words, but to endeavor to see more clearly into the sources of [his] rapture.” It is the first time he’s struck by “this discordance between our impressions and their habitual expression.”

Proust called them chrysanthemums; Iván and Matt are just their humpy stand-ins. Proust wrote: they invite one, “those chrysanthemums, to put away all [one’s] sorrows and to taste with a greedy rapture [...] the all-too-fleeting pleasures of November, whose intimate and mysterious splendor they set ablaze all around.”

(Would November for Proust occur without chrysanthemums?) While trying to discover something, failing, and perhaps discovering something else entirely, I’ve rambled on and come to no conclusion. I want art to date-rape me—seduced and then violated, shattered out of my self or beside myself because too often there’s too much self in me and I want to get beyond it, to find safe harbor for that beyond. The drive of meaning, but the resistant desire for it all just to be. Words or things. Words and things. Things as words. Does language always come between it all or can made things hold something true for a moment or even longer? My message to you: gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh.

In language. Vince and certain other artists are able to demonstrate worlds without language and through vision, their seeing (thinking) given form rather than grammar, through the visual, which, of course, links it to the invisible, everything beyond recognition and mere rationality. The analogy really doesn’t work, but the visual is a way of communicating as complex, theoretical, and interrogative as language; it doesn’t “become” theoretical or need to be explained—which is not to say that pictures are easily understood. Images are not transparent. Musicians and mathematicians are able to do things, sense things, through computation or sonics, that most can’t. People don’t have a problem accepting that kind of difference of ability, but as soon as it’s about art, about visual recognition, everybody’s mouthing the hackneyed equivalent of “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.” Given the demolition of all arts education in this country, there are going to be some angry, angry people, who’ve been short-changed an entire way of communicating. I wonder if it is a new structure exactly, since post- and past structuralisms have too often allowed too many to balance on the crutches of someone else’s thinking instead of striding for themselves; the structures have too often become prisons or corporate headquarters rather than the liberating, libidinally radicalizing energies they started as. Should this duty be criticism’s, should it be a clearly, genre-stabilized problem of the “critical”? Shouldn’t art, shouldn’t writing, attain something beyond critique? I’m convinced that this new narrative would have to avail itself of the fictive and the poetic, the abstract and nonnarratological, as modes of intellection and to lycanthropize the critical with bites under the full moon of cross-genres. Such intellectual lycanthropization would start to mark a no-place, situate no place, except a moving address “in-between”—frm which to terrorize the system. A self-reflexive writing and writer attempting to allow meaning to drift or skid would have to question writing’s form and formalization as its producer attempted to confront something which has to find a way to syncopate the digital onslaught’ since instaneity is no longer immediate or fast enough (?), what should occur is a pause or nonplace, an untimely oasis—mirage?—for contemplation and from which we’re yet ricocheted back to the contextual spinning. Because of the permanent discontinuity or scrambling, this “something” may require a search “forward,” toward futurity, as much as it may require dusting off methods too long in the attic. Everything cannot be seen at once, but there should be more striving for fly-like observation, seeing many ways at once. I strive to capture what am I thinking about now. Kenneth Koch has this great, great line about O’Hara. He notes that Frank would always say, “Rather the worst poem that I’ve written…,” wait, I’m botching the quotation, and Frank, I’m sure, delivered it with such panache…It’s something like, “I’d rather think the worst thought in my head and know it’s mine than think the greatest thought of anyone else.” I totally, totally embrace that. We’re here to do what only we can do. It may not even be very good, but it is you who are doing it. There’s obviously always going to be people who are smarter and quicker and whatever, but it’s your thing that you have to do. The producer of an anonymous work must take full responsibility for it, but his relation to the work is totally different from the artist’s to his work of art. Firstly, he is no longer the owner of the work in the old sense; he takes it upon himself, he puts it out, he works on common ground, he transforms raw material. He carries on his activity within a particular milieu, known as the artistic milieu, but he does so not as an artist, but as an individual. (We find it necessary t omake this distinction because particularly at this time, the artist is increasingly hailed as art’s greatest glory; it is time for him to step down from this role he has been cast in or too willingly played, so that the “work” itself may become visible, no longer blurred by the myth of the “creator,” a man “Above the run of the mill.” This impersonal effort, without style, inevitably produces a result poor in, if not totally lacking form. Such form, as ineffective as it may be, is none the less essential, for it is the work simply being, and not the image of something or the negation of an object. The form is the object questioning its own disappearance as object. It is not the result of the reply to the question. It is the question, the question endlessly being asked. Painting’s a designer drug. Has a disco beat. Is a painting of that. There are some who would want a different model. / Model of what? Around the time I was born, a heavy-hitting style maven doted on the phrase, “Yah. It’s divine, no?” Someone noted that this expression could mean “Yes, it’s divine, I couldn’t agree more” or “Yes, it’s divine, but why bring it up? “No, I don’t think it’s divine” or “I wish you would go away.” In almost all circumstances it defied response and ended the conversation. No history or too much history? Guesstimate. Guesstimate what a painting of that is. This moment? It rails, it riles, it roils. Foiled. Yah. It’s divine, no? I think part of what is shocking about Lozano’s withdrawal is the rigor with which she rejected two intimately connected systems: patriarchy and capitalism. By refusing to speak to women she exposed the systemic and ruthless division of the world into the categories of men and women. By refusing to speak to women she acknowledged the impossibility of a life lived outside the societal confines and projections of gender. By refusing to speak to women as an artwork she also refused the demand of capitalism for the constant production of private property. That she elided the fetishized art object and women was perhaps no mistake, as both share a similar fate. INFORMATION IS CONTENT. CONTENT IS FICTION. Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett 2000, is an example of: a) The intensification of the blurring of entertainment and art b) The delusions of love c) The beauty of belief, sincerity and happiness d) Folie à deux on a grand scale e) The conservatism of so-called cutting-edge art (John Currin, Vanessa Beecroft, gregory Crewdson, et al.) f) Post-Warholian exuberance and rule-breaking The best place to see Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett 2000, to push its special je ne sai quoi to the limit, would be: a) In Hollywood, near Grauman’s Chinese b) In Fawcett’s or Edmier’s backyard c) At Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas d) At the Louvre e) At the Vatican f) On the moon Farrah Fawcett had a rather strange opening night in Butterflies Are Free at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater in Jupiter, Florida, on 30 July 1980. An obese lady in the front row of tables began yelling insults at her and making bird calls during the performance. Later, this unidentified lady raised her dress and flashed the performers, causing co-star Dennis Christopher to take notice, although the character he was playing was a blind man. Nearby, a male patron began vomiting, and yet another patron fainted. Incredibly, the reviews for Farrah’s performance were positive. a) Explain how one rises above adversity. b) Perform a Kleinian reading (“bad breast,” etc.) of the opening-night performance. Art, like love, can save any situation, no matter how debased, embarrassing or depressing. Discuss. Fawcett’s Playboy pay-per-view special and home-video, Farrah Fawcett: All of Me, a soft-core fantasia and documentary including Farrah’s paintings and sculpture demonstration, some of it taught naked, as well as her notorious appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman are as much art as Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett 2000. a) True b) False Which of the following is true: a) Life is the art, love the critique b) Love is the art, life the critique c) Art is the love, critique the life d) Critique is the love, art the life e) All of the above f) None of the above Despite a history of gay men writing and thinking acutely about women (divas, ballerinas, movie stars, “swans”), from Edwin Denby to Truman Capote to Wayne Koestenbaum, the equivalent—gay men writing about men (such as Boyd McDonald)—is a much less vaunted genre. Lacking a history of complex theorization of male-to-male desire in relation to the photograph, specifically to its accumulative quality, I am interested in thinking about how, why and what it means for certain fags to collect and/or produce vast quantities of images, cataloguing visuality as if for their own magazine empire. Some might say such photomania sublimates desire and sex, but it is just as much the case that the photographs come as close as possible to proving some kind of erotic transaction occurred, no matter how momentary or anonymous. Magazines have an analogous and metaphorical relationship to such photo-cataloguing. Consider a synoptic trajectory from Wilhelm von Gloeden to Bob Mizer (of Athletic Model Guild: AMG) and Bruce of Los Angeles, from Gary Lee Boas and Alair Gomes, the Brazilian photographer who snapped shots of buff beach boys from his Ipanema apartment window and other somewhat less surreptitious locations for over 30 years, only to be murdered by one of his distractions in 1992. What does it mean that all of these men were discomfited by the category of artist? What might the discomfit have to do with the scope of their enterprise and the limits of art (if that is what it is)? Can we imagine an oeuvre consisting of one work? Where does my attempt to connect magazine reading, the proliferation of pages and photographs, and a particular type of desiring, leave me? In the realm fo Warhol, whose aesthetic project seems, at times, to be a complete derangement of the institution, by his collecting and saving and producing nonstop? beyond the realm of art? The museum offers few solutions to the display of such scopophilic, size-queen pleasure and vastness, but magazines already circulate in quantity, endlessly, endlessly relishing the promiscuity of the photograph. Available at a newsstand, the magazine’s disposability, its antipathy towards art, certainly towards being art itself, may still hold a way to secure its promise. “What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?” Sturtevant's project has been to pragmatically demonstrate what she knows, and how and why how what she knows operates. In “Unwritten Histories of Conceptual Art,” the final essay of Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999), Thomas Crow examines the necessity of interrogating the “assumed primacy of visual illusion as central to the making and understanding of a work of art”, and focuses on how Sturtevant “acutely defined the limitations of any history of art wedded to the image.” Sturtevant's project questions the primacy of visual illusion—not by marking a point in the 60s when this became necessary, but by her repetitions demonstrating how aesthetics has, all along, been structured and determined by whatever is understood to be the non-visual, the non-retinal—the unseen and thought. Through her exploration of the underpinnings of what the encounter and/or physics nominated as “art” is, she dematerializes the primacy of the object and of the visual, but not by abandoning the object, the methods of its making, or even visuality itself; this is why her work is stranger and more promising than even Crow suggests. She provides immanence—and it's contrafactual. Sturtevant has written: “It is imperative that I see, know, and visually implant every work that I attempt. Photographs are not taken and catalogues [are] used only to check size and scale. The work is done predominantly from memory, using the same techniques, making the same errors and thus coming out in the same place. The dilemma is that technique is crucial but not important.” Crucial that she paints, makes, does—but not important, crucial “to find a way to use an object that would not present itself as an object, that would at the same time talk about the structure of aesthetics as the idea.” Not exactly jettisoning the history of art, she always illuminates the potential of art's contemporaneity—which partly explains, for example, why she repeated a Muybridge (a study of a woman—Sturtevant—walking with hands on hips) in 1966, as well as Warhol Flowers in 1964-65, 1969-70, 1990, and 1991. From Duchamp Fresh Window (1992), to Beuys Fat Chair (1974), Lichtenstein Happy Tears (1966-67), and Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (1997), Sturtevant repeats works for the necessity of a catalytic recognizability, sparking an investigation of what allows “art” to be, so that the entirety of the structure of art is reconsidered horizontally not linearly. Miller invokes Wilde's aperçu—“it is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything”. He goes on to describe Sturtevant: “By raising the challenge of an artistry divorced from the production of new imagery, she calls closer attention to art as discourse than before, making it, rather than the art object per se, the subject of connoisseurship.” She has written that it is Duchamp's “reluctant indifference [...] his repetitive indifference, lack of intention, non-commitment—a sort of throwing away; letting it all go” which has captivated her most, not his objects. Sturtevant's words beautifully repeating, yet not exactly repeating, continue: “What Duchamp did not do, not what he did, which is what he did, locates the dynamics of his work. [...] The grand contradiction is that giving up creativity made him a great creator.” She concludes that 'how Duchamp lived contains the functional totality of his work.” On the back of a recent catalogues, over the image of a glorious fuschia field and a rising Batman figure, appear the words “Body, Objects, Image”. Sturtevant has said that the work concentrates on the “cybernetic overload, the danger of rejecting objects, about ‘having’ instead of ‘being’.” The announcement card for a concurrent show at Air de Paris had World Cup soccer players kicking the ball, and on the verso the Adidas logo; both recto and verso were diagonally crossed by the phrase: ça va aller (everything's going to be all right). She wrote to me about this card: “Simply put & it is simple: mass culture is art and not reverse.” There’s a scene in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27) which gets at this much more elegantly than I can. Little Marcel is on the Méséglise way, a path of so many “humble discoveries,” and is overwhelmed by his own enthusiasm for wind-blown grass, a hen’s downy feathers, dappled pink reflections of a tiled roof on a pond’s surface – the real, that catch-all placeholder, excited to the point that he cries aloud while swinging his furled umbrella: “Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!.” He feels that he is “duty bound not to content [him]self with those unilluminating words, but to endeavor to see more clearly into the sources of [his] rapture.” It is the first time he’s struck by “this discordance between our impressions and their habitual expression.” Proust called them chrysanthemums; Iván and Matt are just their humpy stand-ins. Proust wrote: they invite one, “those chrysanthemums, to put away all [one’s] sorrows and to taste with a greedy rapture [...] the all-too-fleeting pleasures of November, whose intimate and mysterious splendor they set ablaze all around.” (Would November for Proust occur without chrysanthemums?) While trying to discover something, failing, and perhaps discovering something else entirely, I’ve rambled on and come to no conclusion. I want art to date-rape me—seduced and then violated, shattered out of my self or beside myself because too often there’s too much self in me and I want to get beyond it, to find safe harbor for that beyond. The drive of meaning, but the resistant desire for it all just to be. Words or things. Words and things. Things as words. Does language always come between it all or can made things hold something true for a moment or even longer? My message to you: gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh.