The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. - Dorothy Parker
Conceptually Oriented, Practically Confused
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. - Dorothy Parker
Finally. After five long months of frigid, often painfully cold temperatures and people, the first hints of spring are starting to tease Minneapolis. Like a cheap hooker that only shows you she’s a tranny after you’ve paid your $50, the cityscape is beginning to reveal all of its dirty little secrets. These include the usual list of suspects that testify to survival strategies in what I can only call “The City Goes To Bed at a Reasonable Hour”. Bottles of cheap Skol or Aristocrat vodka, lost photographs, a few stilettos that couldn’t pass through our record snowfall — these are all the flotsam and jetsam of the life of a contemporary Minneapolitan.
One of the many perks of my job is getting to go on random treks through the two buildings that make up the college. Yesterday I had the pleasure of traversing through the underground vaults of our building on Hennepin Avenue in MPLS. It was a very creepy and smelly place… but the abandoned bank vaults were too good to turn down. Take a looksy.
A Snippet of (Now) Edited Reality in My Kitchen
White Flower, 1960. Oil on canvas, 71 7/8 x 72 inches (182.6 x 182.9 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Anonymous gift 63.1653. © 2007 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
As the slide into full-blown winter solidifies, the concepts of failure and reduction have taken over my thoughts. When one thinks of improvement, of being a “better person”, the tendency is to look at what we lack and emphasize what we can acquire. I feel like I have been caught in this quagmire of acquisition for way too long (perhaps roughly 27 years).
Reduction.
Simplification.
These are my new goals.
By all intensive logic, I want less.
I want to fail.
What does it mean to fail? According to Agnes Martin, failure is a state which exists only when one has exhausted all means and possible courses of action. Failure is a terminal condition–an end of possibilities.
Can one consider it a victory to stop doing something? To cease to acquire? To cease to care? Is that really failure? Or is the act of losing all choice, movement, and flexibility that elusive apex of liberation I have been searing for?
Just a bit more Agnes and then I am going to call it a night, crawl into bed, and be blissfully unconscious.
“To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.”
I really cannot think of anything I would like more.
TPTP
AH! Finally some exceptionally good news comes my way. I have been selected to participate in an exhibition at TPTP in Paris. It looks like an amazing, energetic, and fun gallery space and I am thrilled to break the spell of exhibition drought with this show. Thank you Phillip Tonda, for selecting my work!
I will have further details on the exhibition as it begins to take shape…
20 Rue Muller - 75018 Paris