With Selected by.... we offer you a selection of books that our exhibiting artists have picked out. We are delighted to present Vijay Masharani’s selection and his thoughts about these works:
The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge, Thomas E. Crow
The exhibition posted some remarkable firsts on any art-historical scorecard. Years before Michael Asher, the premises were open to visitors around the clock; years before Chris Burden, the artist inhabited the installation, putting himself on display as an exhibit; years before Joseph Kosuth, texts in mechanical type applied to uniformly pristine monochrome canvases hung on the walls. But little injustice is actually entailed in these oversights, in that the arena of competitive avant-garde feats was not one in which Conner had the slightest investment.
Nested in Crow’s history of California artists and their relationships with countercultural movements and New Left formations is a polemical argument against a rigid, formalistic narration of postwar American conceptual art that effaces artists’ orientations towards consciousness and radical politics. It’s an argument that he summarizes by shifting the reader’s attention from the second half of the title of Szeeman’s famous exhibition to the first: the book is more “Live in Your Head” than “When Attitudes Become Form.” It’s a text that affirmed something that has nagged me for some time, especially when I work with students inspired by the legacy of institutional critique, which Crow unsettles in his reappraisal of Michael Asher. I’m sympathetic to the notion that through a set of spatial interventions or an arrangement of charged readymades, an artist can provoke experiences of estrangement in which the real material arrangements producing and sustaining art production come into focus through procedures like defamiliarization, the redistribution of the sensible, or more straightforward pedagogy in long captions, exhibition texts, and workshops. At the same time, on some level this sounds kind of like consciousness raising to me, but artists working in that idiom today seem to fancy themselves as sober researchers doing something closer to a social science, as a fix to anxieties around the perceived frivolousness or lack of efficacy of art to meet the awful moment. To me, this is perhaps an overcorrection to the problem identified by Constantina Zavitsanos in our recent conversation, that a previous generation of conceptual artists were insufficiently attentive to the social frame within which they were making their interventions.
It’s a good thing for artists not just to diagram a barbaric structure, but to relocate the subject within it, since ultimately we’re concerned with forms of consciousness as they are to some degree delimited and determined by historical structures, but not totally, as Hannah Black glosses from CLR James: “the individual is what introduces contingency into history, for better or worse.” There are as many starting points as cells in your body. Crow’s book showcases many more formal avenues for artists eager to reconcile their studio practice with their aspiration to help reduce the amount of suffering in the world, so that they don’t have to choose between either uncritically affirmative practices, or the weighty demand of becoming an interdisciplinary scholar before putting graphite to paper. One evocative example from Crow: attending an anti-police brutality protest in 1960, Bruce Conner hoisted his sculpture CHILD on his shoulders. The seated emaciated wax figure, mouth open in agony, restrained by a cloth strap and cobwebs of nylon, originally depicted a prisoner, Caryl Chessman, who was executed at San Quentin Prison a couple months prior. It became a more generic figure of victimhood and abjection when Conner augmented it with a sign reading “Stop Police Brutality.” Conner was a singular artist. But I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if others followed his lead, and brought talismanic figures of humanity reduced to some final moments of bare life before oblivion into scenes of public assembly. Would it make these events feel less fruitless? Maybe not, but what a sight!
Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt ed. Barbara Rose
Artists who write that art is ‘voyaging into the night, one knows not where, on an unknown vessel…’ etc. should be put in irons and chained to gallery oars.
Bent at the waist, Ad Reinhardt looks like he’s either submitting or attending to the canvas lying flat about knee height. Leeching the oil from the paint made the black paintings hypersensitive, infamously, one got damaged by tiny droplets of floor cleaner used to mop the gallery floor in the museum. In addition to its resemblance to a supine figure, there is something about deliberately making a painting so vulnerable to disintegration that it makes it feel even more like a body, and the rolling workbench a sickbed.
I feel challenged by Reinhardt’s claim that “there is nothing less significant in art, nothing more exhausting and immediately exhausted, than endless variety.” It rang in my ear as I made the large untitled grey drawing in the show, in part inspired by his effacement of his own hand. I knew almost nothing about Reinhardt when I came across his 1964 Smithsonian oral history interview, recorded when he was 49. I was drawn in by his signature prohibitive thrust—against the artist as a “free wild man,” against “painting as a profession of pleasing and selling,” against the “disgraceful gimmick” of “putting eyes on a shape,” against the spurious category of geometric abstraction, against artists titling their work after wars to remain relevant, against surrealist irrationalism, and so on. This structure is reflected in multiple texts like “On Negation” and “Twelve Rules for a New Academy,” both of which include series of “no’s.”
These comments, delivered acerbically, reflect his conviction that there are stakes to artistic form. Even as his practice resembled something like a devotional commitment to an apophatic theology, he was steadfast that it was an absolutely rational process start-to-finish, a tension that he embraced and didn’t really seek to resolve. His sardonic humor is related to his pedagogical and even populist commitments to demystify, in line with Adorno’s Weberian maxim that art is “part and parcel of the disenchantment of the world.” And like Adorno, as he got older, in 1960, Reinhardt felt the temptation of making statesmanlike, vaguely Stalinist, disciplinary proclamations in a comedic register: “It is not right for artists to palm off their brushstroke marks for grass as ‘a feeling for nature’ or keep alive the idiotic idea that they see some ‘structure underlying the surface appearances of reality.’ Artists who think that art is not a hothouse product but an outhouse by-product, and who participate in ‘new nature’ or ‘nature in abstraction’ ideas should be sentenced to a term of hard labor in the fields.”
Like virtually all American artists of the postwar period, Reinhardt drew inspiration from a constellation of Western and non-Western philosophies: he lectured on Chinese and Islamic art, mined Zen Buddhism and Hinduism for concepts, and drew his idea of “imagelessness” from “Islamic art, Byzantine iconoclasm, and the Puritanism and … the ancient Hebraic and Islamic distrust of images.” Since then, some have written on his orientalism. However, we should be quick not to dismiss his novel syncretism of ideas and its to-date unresolved relationship to his paintings under the charges of appropriation, fetishism, or misapprehension. There is a latent cosmopolitanism to Reinhardt, indelible not just in his capacious enthusiasm to concatenate these various citations, or his thousands of travel photographs, or his concrete social-democratic political commitments. As Holland Cotter noted a little over decade ago, Reinhardt’s posing of the question “why is there no world history of modern art?” has barely been addressed. Daniel Spaulding’s 2023 October article, “A Scheme Transfer for Global Modernism*” marks an important contribution, and his footnotes map others. We too hastily did away with the idea of the grand narrative, and our conviction that we’re still in one causes dissatisfaction and a pervasive sense of cultural arrest. This sense of stuckism becomes a fertile substrate for right-wing advantage-seeking in art: right-wing critics scapegoat cultural pluralism, depicting it not just as mutually exclusive with, but actively detrimental to, aesthetic dynamism. (My gut tells me they are simply uncorrelated, but we should still try to yoke them together.) In any case, it’s not just that we’ve barely begun to answer Reinhardt’s call for a single, global, syncretic art history, but that we’re in danger of ceasing to even try.
Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno, Rei Terada
The conflict over appearance and reality is a second-order social conflict about what conflicts it is sociable to have.
Looking Away attends to something so subtle that it normally goes unelucidated: dissatisfaction with the brute facticity of the world, and the tendency to turn away from it into various forms of “phenomenophilia.” Although they are implicated, this is not a text about escapism or distraction, attention or disinterestedness. Rather, it is about what arises from the various small surface disturbances and illusions that register the constitutive instability of the given, and draw us in. It is not about art, but about art-adjacent experiences of discomfort and intrigue: Terada writes, “in its ability to vary the terms of experience, looking away, like dreams, resembles art production. Whether one wants to say it is art depends on how one feels about the peripheral artlikeness of tiny private performances.”
We normally associate a rejection of the given with a critical impulse, relating progress to our capacity for social criticism. After all, if the world were totally just-so, would the capacity for critique even be possible? What would it register, or direct us toward? Reason would be pathological and indistinguishable from madness. What is conjured up in the negative when we criticize certain social arrangements, if not the possibility of doing things differently? The category of experience Terada dilates shows that dissatisfaction can lead many other places, all politically ambivalent, raising the stakes of various responses to the experience of dissatisfaction, such as affirmation, denial, immersion, trepidation, exaltation, and denigration. In doing so, Terada connects peripheral experiences of affective and perceptual flight to broader questions about freedom, reality, and utopia.
Before I read this text, I would compare my videos to the experience of looking at a speck of dirt on the window in the backseat of a car driving on the highway, such that when set against the sky, it looks dark, but against trees, it looks light, so it has the illusion of toggling on and off as the landscape changes. Evocative images of phenomenophilia dot Terada’s philosophical engagement: “phenomenophilia is looking away at the colored shadow on the wall, or keeping the head turned to the angle at which the sunspot stays in view.” Terada also brings up sociologist Erving Goffman’s observation of a hospitalized mental patient who, “would suddenly stoop and take delight in examining a small fleck of color in the concrete.” Slightly different is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s answer to his son Hartley’s inquiry about the permanence of the landscape. When asked “Will yon Mountains always be?” Coleridge responds by having Hartley view the landscape through a looking glass, which distorts the landscape into a “Canopy or Ceiling over his head,” a “Zen-like response” that Terada says “respects the impetus of Hartley’s question by refraining from closing it off as either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would do.” A third example of phenomenophilia disrupts a psychoanalytic process in which analyst and analysand, under controlled conditions, are supposed to adjudicate their relationship and through that, iron out distortions in reality. However, one analysand was able to sabotage this process, and therefore opt-out of this dyadic process by angling a tissue box so that “he can see the reflection of the analyst, hence breaking the analytic frame and replacing it with one of his own.”
Terada’s comment that “the idea of ‘accepting’ givens or not—especially on the largest scale, that of the Kantian enabling conditions of space, time, and consciousness—can seem fantastic from the outset” may have been ringing in my head when I commented on the experience of manipulating time in the editing bay. After I got diagnosed with a second blood cancer, I immediately went back to animating Grazers: this dialectic of awareness and denial about the ruthless, absolute, untranscendable forward march of time has been intensified by the prospect of a radically shortened, or at least very uncertain, timeline now. Video editing feels different too, my proclivity for the loop, and having absolute control over time, appears as a sort of negative image of the truth, which is you can’t pause, slow down, loop, or repeat lived time—this is a highly artificial quality of video art.
The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, Anne Boyer
I do not want to die, I tell him. I still have a lot left to do. It is precisely because I still need time, I plead, that I will do anything to live.
I have less to say about this book, in part because, as Roberto Bolaño wrote, “writing about illness, especially if one is gravely ill, can be torture.” My brevity is not an under-endorsement, Boyer’s book is an amazing book for anyone but me, right now. It’s too much to return to, as I’m quite upset that the circumstances in which it made its way to my life are once again, the circumstances in which I’m writing this. The first time around, Boyer’s book provided a narrative scaffold and expanded the scope of what I considered to be a viable experience for literary consideration, contributing to a broader trajectory in my practice in which what was once peripheral becomes central, and vice versa. Visits to Sephora, dealing with last-ditch advances by opportunistic exes, tracing the digital footprint of YouTubers and reddit commenters with the same diagnosis—all worthy of poetic consideration. It is easier to write first cancer. Each recurrence has an obliterative effect on narrativity and all sense-making faculties. So far, second cancer is unrepresentable, groundless terror. Boyer’s epilogue begins, “I didn’t die, or at least not of this”—an exhale like the sigh of compassion that birthed existence.
2666, Roberto Bolaño
‘So,’ concluded Rosa Amalfitano, ‘if a policeman fucks you it's like being fucked by a mountain inside the mountain itself, and if a narco fucks you it's like being fucked by the desert air.’
Even before I was sick, I was interested in the relationship between Bolaño’s diagnosis of terminal liver disease and his writing. My vulgar reading was that the barrelling forward motion of his prose has an exhaustive, “leave it all out on the court” feeling related to his heightened awareness of his own mortality—in other words, his work is prematurely “late,” in the Adornian sense. In a 2011 interview, the translator of the book, Natasha Wimmer affirms this: “I think that the whole book is about his fear of death, and dread of death, and about his legacy. He writes a lot about lost writers and writers in dire straits … He knew he was sick for the last 10 years of his life, and you can see it building up in his fiction.” Through its epigraph from Baudelaire’s “Les Voyages,” “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom,” 2666 is connected to Bolaños only (to my knowledge) essay in which he directly discusses his diagnosis, “Literature + Illness = Illness” in the collection The Insufferable Gaucho. Of the poem, Bolaño writes, echoing Kierkegaard, “To break out of ennui, to escape from boredom, all we have at our disposal —and it's not even automatically at our disposal, again we have to make an effort—is horror, in other words, evil. Either we live like zombies, like slaves fed on soma, or we become slave drivers, malignant individuals,” his example being a man who killed his wife and children and confessed that he felt free afterwards, before backtracking and pleading insanity.
So the two texts are also connected through murder: which we encounter throughout, and especially concentrated in a relentless, exhausting fourth section, which contains page after page after page of police reports of unsolved gruesome femicides in and around Santa Teresa, the fictional city that takes Ciudad Juarez as its referent. This part of the novel has a punishing quality, like harsh noise, as we are treated to a bloody drone of forensic descriptions of maimed corpses. I wonder if it had some sort of palliative effect on Bolaño to write them, similar to how I feel an increased kinship with the dead now that I’m more proximate to them than ever before. I am comforted by the fact that people die that don’t deserve it, not because it’s a good thing, but because it simply happens, and everything that happens is—once the brief interval in which judgment can be conferred and acted upon passes—definitionally, okay. We may not like it, but that’s what okay means: things are permitted because they happen, and happen because they are permitted.
Benjamin Kunkel notes that Bolaño excels at writing characters who are—I’m paraphrasing very slightly here—“simply people, who instead of having stories, have lives. Their lives are just a mess, and then they end.” The rumor that Bolaño’s liver disease was exacerbated by heroin use has been debunked. From 2017–2021 I spent countless late nights in a studio right by an auto body shop that lies on the site of a Cold War-era laboratory where they experimented with radioactive thorium, leaving behind irradiated dust that is still traceable nowadays, when walking near the adjacent nightclub, Nowadays. Maybe I am, indirectly, a victim of the American military industrial complex. Just kidding, the doctors already told me my leukemia was caused by negative thinking.
“Late Style in Beethoven” in Essays on Music, Theodor Adorno
The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself.
Adorno developed the concept of late style to correct an “abdication” on the part of theorists to defer to the “dignity of death,” psychologize rather than analyze, and relegate late works to the status of a “document” of the artist’s biography. Adorno seeks to transcend “psychological interpretation” that would declare “mortal subjectivity to be the substance of the late work,”—in other words, to make all late works “about” dying—and instead identify lateness as a set of formal attributes: fragmented, cipher-like, furrowed, unabashedly primitive at times, mysterious, discordant, ravaged, bipolar, and catastrophic. Yet, as Ben Hutchinson has noted, Adorno cannot expunge the subject and his/her station in life from late style, as proximity to death remains fundamental to the concept. Adorno’s conceit here is making subjectivity approaching death register in the absence of authorial subjectivity itself, with the material bearing the scars of its author’s evacuation.
Philip Guston: Collected Writings ed. Clark Coolidge
I should like the image in my painting to be as puzzling and mysterious to me as if a figure walked into this room and we stopped talking and wondered: Who is he? What is this appearance? We can’t fathom why he’s here, who he is, what he does, and why he looks the way he looks.
A motif of flight recurs in Philip Guston’s collected writings. In a transcribed 1960 conversation with other New York School painters moderated by Harold Rosenberg, Guston quotes a conversation between him and John Cage, “when you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” So here is the idea of total evacuation as a desirable horizon for an artistic practice, perhaps related, or coincident with “a moment … when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.” So, with the author also exits a sense of arbitrariness. The next obvious question is, “who’s driving the bus? Who painted the paintings?” Guston answers, in 1965, “It sounds cryptic, I know. Of course, you’re doing it. The hand is doing it. The Other is doing it.” Here, as in the italicized quotation above, the painter sets his sights on alterity—he wants it to feel like a stranger, a foreigner, an alien. Authorial evacuation, fate, and alterity, are all yoked together as desirable horizons for the painter, who reaches them through a juridical process. Guston sees “the studio as a court—I mean a court of law, not Versailles.” In other words, it’s not smooth sailing to get to the promised land of alterity, destiny, and absence—there are countervailing forces, and the process is contested throughout.
This is a rare instance in which what’s true in the studio transposes quite nicely into the social world. Today, Guston would sound radical in his endorsement of alterity. In America, everyone outside of some marginal pockets of the social-democratic left, has given up making a positive case for cultural pluralism as an unreserved, unalloyed good. Almost nobody makes the positive case for becoming-other. In France, Jean-Luc Melenchon has introduced a version of a Glissantian notion of créolization into French political discourse: “Whatever one's gender, colour or religion, we are called upon to love one another, and so we pool together our tastes and our cultures. That's créolisation. Créolisation is the future of humanity.” Like painting, alterity, destiny, and loss are yoked together into an image of utopia.
This also happens to be true in my individual case. In exactly two weeks from writing this, I will become a medical chimera, a composite human animal with two sets of genetic material. The degree of chimerism is prognostic: you live by becoming more other.
The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985 eds. Maurice Tuchman; Judi Freedman
No doubt the perception of a link between alternative belief systems and fascism made critics and historians in these decades reluctant to confront the spiritual associations of abstract art.
In “Theses Against Occultism,” published in 1947, Adorno suggests that everyday mystical practices that flowered during the interwar period presaged or laid the groundwork for full-blown fascist irrationalism: “The bent little fortune tellers, terrorizing their clients with crystal balls, are toy models of the great ones who hold the fate of mankind in their hands. Just as hostile and conspiratorial as the obscurantists of psychic research is society itself. The hypnotic power exerted by things occult resembles totalitarian terror: in present-day processes the two are merged.” I’ve always taken these comments seriously, so when the topic of spirituality started coming up in studio visits, I was concerned mostly that I was getting misrecognized as an uncritical booster of a sort of irrational obscurantism at a moment in which all kinds of irrationalisms are surging in the United States: vaccine skepticism, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s eugenicist ideas, new executive orders describing “race” as a biological reality, the mainstreaming of Christian Nationalism, bizarre techno-mysticisms popular here in the Bay Area, and so on. Now seems to be possibly the worst time ever to explore spirituality. Although I admit, I’m maybe being uncharitable, as I have not had the time to look at for instance, the forms of messianism surveyed here by Anson Rabinach, or other forms of political spirituality.
I learned about others who shared my trepidation—in the introduction to this exhibition catalogue, Tuchman himself describes having to overcome a taboo to produce an exhibition about the relationship between spirituality and modernism, not just for its perceived unseriousness, but because of its associations with Nazi esotericism. Frank Stella, too, quoted by Carel Blotkamp in this catalogue, remarked in 1984 that “theoretical underpinnings of theosophy and anti-materialism have done abstract painting a kind of disservice which has contributed to its present-day plight.” In a review of this exhibition, Thomas Lawson excoriated it as the curatorial corollary to Reaganism, undermining the radicality of modernism by reducing it to illustrations of kooky ideas, an act of revenge against abstraction by curators who seek to advance a “simply understood lie that the meaning of abstract art can be understood as a bogus little puzzle involving a relatively small number of arcane symbols.” In a way, Lawson’s offense stems from him seeing Tuchman as provincializing the West by taking a more anthropological lens to European and American art that originally sorted artworks from fetishes—the former being autonomous and universal, the latter particularized as expressions of animistic faith and “culture.” Lawson correctly identifies Tuchman’s project as related to another revisionist gesture, to consider the “Primitive Unconscious of Modern Art,” which Hal Foster published the year before Tuchman’s exhibition opened. Today, modernism’s debt to its constitutive outside remains surprisingly contentious, reflecting the instability of what Tapji Garba calls the “aporetic foundations” of modernity itself. I don’t experience this revisionism as loss.
I don’t know how to tie this explicitly back to Big Casino, other than to note that I spent a fair amount of time with this catalogue as I was making the show. There is a slight autobiographical dimension to this interest, having grown up in a secular household with religious objects still scattered around, I was interested in spiritual form but not content, hence an affinity for symmetry and abstraction. Where for Krauss, the grid is a structure “that allows a contradiction between the values of science and those of spiritualism to maintain themselves within the consciousness of modernism, or rather its unconscious, as something repressed,” for me, the serial, durational sequence of drawings is a structure that allows me to rehearse a dialectic of ambivalence and conviction towards these questions about aesthetics and politics viz. abstraction, during a protracted crisis in which I am too sick to intervene. There’s a gambit that by risking total irrelevance and mystification, that something might give, and art might land back in the center of things, and, in remaining stubbornly mysterious, clear up everything else.
Snow, Lutz Bacher
I visited Lutz Bacher: AYE! at Raven’s Row in London with the artist Will Thompson when I was visiting for a few days in 2023. Empire in particular stood out to me as an amazing work with a brilliant economy of gesture. I downloaded Snow a year later, and learned more about Bacher’s “ambient videos,” very simple videos which reminded me of other works that might fit into the category, such as Nikola Đurić’s 1973 Raven (Gavran) and the short looped 16mm films in João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s 2018 exhibition WHERE THE SORCERER DOESN’T DARE TO STICK HIS NOSE and Another B&W Ghost Show. It seems like institutions don’t exactly know what to do with works like these, as for the most part, they seem focused on moving image practices more in the idiom of experimental documentary or blockbuster installation. I offer this criticism out of concern for a viewing public that is being deprived of an understanding of the breadth of the medium.
The World and Africa, W. E. B. Du Bois
I remember once offering to an editor an article which began with a reference to the experience of last century. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘leave out the history and come to the present.’ I felt like going to him over a thousand miles and taking him by the lapels and saying, ‘Dear, dear jackass! Don't you understand that the past is the present; that without what was, nothing is? That, of the infinite dead, the living are but unimportant bits?’
The first earth drawing happened when I had a star form with a cut in the center, and I couldn’t figure out what to put in the cut, and then I thought back to when Paul Gilroy emphasized how W. E. B. Du Bois’ decision to put the Earth on the cover of The World and Africa in 1947, a time when Du Bois was committing himself fully to the peace movement, was a radical gesture. At this time, I was also interested in Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth, in which he discusses a “new global image” of a spherical earth, latticed with rayas and amity lines to delineate legal zones in which jungle law or common law applied. I wrote my dissertation on late style in Du Bois, focusing on the Black Flame trilogy, three novels that he completed when he was in his early 90s. I was struck by the visionary, hallucinatory sequences that punctuate these novels; in Worlds of Color, for instance, the protagonist Mansart sees a spider from hell spinning a web of American gold that covers the Earth, producing a sort of schematic diagram of imperialism.
This visionary impulse runs throughout Du Bois, hence his nickname, the “Sage of Great Barrington.” And in many of his books, there is a common structure in which he writes with an absolute fidelity to detail when writing in a historical or sociological register, but will bookend this material with a poetic or prophetic voice. This is the case in The World and Africa. Chapter IV begins with a cosmic animation of the forming of the continent:
Seers say that for full two thousand million years this world out of fiery mist has whirled about the sun in molten metal and viscous crusted ball. That crust, congealing and separating the solids from the liquids, rose and fell in bulging ridges above the boiling sea. Five times the mass of land called Africa emerged and disappeared beneath the oceans. At last, at least a thousand million years ago, a mass of rigid rock lifted its crystal back above the waters and remained.
I’m fascinated by Du Bois’ polyvocality, and the relationship between this cosmogonic voice, his polemical argument against White supremacy, and his scientific study of history. Together, they reflect his aspiration towards totality, his view of the three approaches as necessary, and his conviction that there would be some sort of syncretism between them. It also implies a theory of the subject as structured by literary narrative, material reality, and an adolescent capacity for reason. He continued to pursue all three trajectories through the end of his life, publishing fiction, campaigning as a peace activist and publicly aligning himself with the CPUSA, and working on the Encyclopaedia Africana until his death.
Selected Writings, Agnes Martin
To discover the conscious mind in a world where intellect is held to be valuable requires solitude - quite a lot of solitude.
We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. To be alone is considered to be a grievous and dangerous condition.
I started reading artist’s writings because I wanted to demystify the artistic process for myself and my students. Martin’s advice to let go of trying to affect the world because it’s impossible, to work in solitude, to trust your own inspiration and your own path, has a troubling resonance with a sort of TINA-ism that disavows social relations in favor of a spurious atomized individualism. It doesn’t matter. Perhaps more than any other text on this list, Martin’s insights simply produce results.
